Gossip Girl was never really a gossip. The malevolent blogger at the centre of Gossip Girl, the beloved teen drama that followed the glamorous, chaotic lives of a group of Upper East Side teenagers at a fictional private school, was more like the original (or, at least, an early) apportioner of cancel culture. Gossip Girl was always listening, watching and stirring. Somehow everywhere at once, she would catch the objects of her surveillance up to all sorts: cheating on each other and on tests; having dramatic family disputes in their penthouses made entirely of windows; going on holiday; being threatened with disinheritance in sombre restaurants full of shiny black furniture; (erroneously) thinking themselves guilty of murder; and so on. Whatever she found, she would make sure everyone knew about it.
Sometimes the antics of these beautiful young heirs and heiresses were moral transgressions. Sometimes they were not. But all were documented in spidery, salacious blog posts that the entire school (indeed, it was often suggested, all of Manhattan) gleefully pored over. Friendships, relationships, carefully hatched plans to attend Ivy League universities – all were detonated by Gossip Girl’s big reveals; the social fabric of the school (or at least of the popular clique) regularly torn to shreds.
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