Kaia

How to Make an All-Girls Spy School Offensive but Otherwise Banal:

Step 1: Include loads and loads of stereotypes: The "plain-looking" heroine from some form of broken family who immediately attracts the notice of a super-hot boy; the geeky girl with a photographic memory who still takes notes, never cares about her appearance, and is incapable of being anything but clumsy and unatheletic despite her years of elite training; the token "exotically beautiful" PoC (for extra points, make her a Brit who despite going to school in America for years has yet to figure out which side of the road Americans drive on); the stuck up bratty but beautiful rich heiress girl.

Step 2: Never let anything stop you from including loads of offensive gender essentialism: Who cares that the concept of an all-girls spy school could be inherently feminist? Gender essentialism, people, that's where the money's at! Make sure your entire sophomore class of highly educated girls is loaded with heterosexuals who skip breakfast to take an hour to primp for their first class with the super-hot new male teacher (except the geek girl, because of course she doesn't care about her appearance)! Make sure they're as stereotypically "girlie" as possible, right down to dressing in designer clothes for their first field practice because Professor Hunko is going to be there. That's just how all teenage girls act, you know. Unless they're geeky, then they're losers.

Step 3: Have your "plain Jane" main character and her token geek and token black best friends use their elite spy skills to stalk the aforementioned super-hot boy, using the flimsy excuse that he saw plain Jane while on a mission and *gasp* no one ever sees her (right, because most people are too oblivious to notice someone picking through the trash). Because as we all know, what teenage girls really want from their literature these days is romance with a thin genre coating on it.

Step 4: Profit.

Bonus Offeniveness Points: Include a joke about sex change operations, because transphobia is hilarious.