I'm watching Zoey 101. Never mind why, call it research. As I'm watching I'm thinking about how teen / adolescent pop culture seeks to maintain a gender balance. Witness these examples:
Buffy -- Zander and Willow balance. Buffy can be a stand alone to rotate in 'outside characters' like Spike or Angel, but you can also view her as balanced by Giles, as they are the two seriously-involved-in-the-Slaying characters. Obviously as the show developed and seasons went on, new characters were introduced, affecting this... Oz and Cordelia (counterpoint to Zander and Willow) for instance...
Scooby Doo-- Fred & Daphne, and Velma and Shaggy. The two pretty popular kids who obviously belonged together and the two confirmed singleton types.
(Amazing that it is still natural to go from Buffy to Scooby like that)
Archie -- the quintessential classic. Sure, it looked like it was an Archie - Betty - Veronica triangle, but the characters were in obvious parallel pairs. Archie - Betty, Ronnie - Reggie, Jughead - Big Ethel, Moose - Midge. Can anyone remember if they ever introduced an alternate for Dilton Doilie? In my mind, he was like Scooby, a comic relief character introduced for plot development.
I suspect that these parallels existed to satisfy some desire, real or imagined, of the reader to picture a potential happy ending, which of course would end with all the characters married off. But who's to say that Jughead shouldn't have ended up with Betty? Or Reggie wouldn't wind up married to Big Ethel, a woman that would turn a blind eye to all his philandering and still worship him as he demanded to be worshipped? Archie and Midge? Why not?
Life doesn't work in neat parallels, or the population would be exactly 50/50.
Does anyone else remember the issue when it was revealed that Jughead's real first name was Forsythe? And all the girls went wild?
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