Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy - TV Tropes

Bring it on, life. March girls can handle anything you throw at us.

Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy is a graphic novel and Comic-Book Adaptation of the 1868 novel Little Women (originally by Louisa May Alcott), written by Rey Terciero and illustrated by Bre Indigo. It was first released in February 2019 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the original book. This adaptation shifts the location to The Present Day in Brooklyn, NY, where the Marches are portrayed as an interracial and blended family.

The story centers on the four March sisters: the fashion-conscious eldest daughter Meg, the snarky aspiring author Jo, the shy musician Beth, and the rambunctious wild child Amy. The girls are having a rather rough year, with their father Robert being overseas with the military and their mother Madison working long, grueling shifts to make ends meet. Besides that, each girl is navigating her own struggles, from school woes to job hunting, and from health issues to simply feeling lost in life. But by coming together — and sharing lots of laughs and tears — the March sisters discover themselves along the way, and become closer than ever.

Compare Jo An Adaptation for another modern retelling, and Little Witches: Magic in Concord for a retelling that casts the March family as witches in a Fantasy Americana. Also compare the other two books considered part of the Classic Graphic Remix by Little, Brown and Company (modern, Race Lifted retellings of classic children's literature): Anne of West Philly and The Secret Garden On81st Street.

---

Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy provides examples of:

• Adaptational Context Change: Jo cutting her hair short. In the original book, she sells her hair to buy the train ticket Mrs. March needs to travel to her sick husband in Washington. In this version, when Beth's chemotherapy treatments make her lose her hair, all three of her sisters shave their own heads (with Jo taking the initiative) to make her feel less alone, and donate their hair to Locks of Love. Even as their hair eventually grows back, Jo keeps hers cut boyishly short, which coincides with her coming out as a Butch Lesbian.
• Adaptation Name Change:
  • Meg's full name is changed to "Megan" in this version, as compared to her original name of "Margaret".
  • Similarly, Mrs. March - who was also named Margaret in the original book - is renamed "Madison" here.
  • Aunt March goes from being named Josephine to Cath in the comic, presumably to differentiate her from the protagonist Jo.
  • Laurie's full name is changed from Theodore Laurence to "Laurence Alejandro Marquez" to go along with his Race Lift.
  • John Brooke become Geoff Brooks.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Jo to an extent, in the incident where Amy destroys her manuscript. In the original book, not only does Jo attack her and then refuse to speak to her, but Amy's near-fatal accident soon afterward is directly Jo's fault: she sees Amy skating toward ice she knows is thin, but out of anger she doesn't bother to warn her, and Amy falls through. Here, Amy almost gets hit by a bus instead, which Jo doesn't see coming either. It still makes Jo feel guilty for the grudge she held, though, and still leads her to reconcile with Amy and learn a lesson about forgiveness.
• Adaptational Romance Downgrade: For Meg and Brooks in the end. In Little Women, Meg and John Brooke end up Happily Married with children, but here, Meg breaks up with Brooks after he laughs at her when she decides to give up fashion and become a lawyer.
• Adaptational Sexuality: While Jo in the original 1868 novel was presumably heterosexual and marries a man in the end, this version of Jo March is a closeted lesbian, and eventually comes out to her family.
• Alpha Bitch: Amy's classmate Tara Connor, a relentless bully who frequently targets Amy with racially-charged taunts.
• Awkward Kiss: Laurie kisses Jo at a Fourth of July fireworks show in a bold demonstration of his feelings for her. However Jo is left mortified by the incident and immediately leaves, her embarrassment being explained by her only seeing Laurie as a friend. Turns out there are other reasons for Jo's discomfort.
• Baldness Means Sickness: Beth's hair starts falling out as a side effect of her cancer treatments, eventually leaving her completely bald. It grows back after she goes into remission.
• Big Sister Instinct:
  • When Amy comes home from school with a black eye caused by Tara Connor, Meg and Jo waste no time in exacting revenge on the brat who hurt their baby sister. They immediately take the information to the principal and Tara's mother, the latter of whom is furious at her daughter's behavior and pulls her out of school entirely.
  • In an earlier incident, Meg's big sister instincts kick into overdrive when Amy absentmindedly steps into the path of an oncoming bus, and immediately pulls her sister to safety.
  • As Beth's cancer treatments continue and her condition slowly worsens, Jo adamantly refuses to leave her sister's bedside.
• Bookworm: Jo is an avid reader and an aspiring author.
• Butch Lesbian: Jo in the novel as well as this adaptation is shown as the most traditionally masculine of her sisters (although this is of less importance than it was in the novel), she also says things about not having gender norms pushed on her. She, of course, is revealed to be a lesbian.
• Closet Gay: Jo turns out to be a closeted lesbian, a fact she kept hidden for fear of being rejected by her family. And as it turns out, Aunt Cath is also revealed to be a deeply closeted, self-hating lesbian.
• Coming-Out Story: After spending the majority of the book being quietly cryptic about her "secret", Jo finally comes clean and announces to her family that she's gay during Thanksgiving dinner. And despite all her fears, her family is immensely supportive and accepting of her.
• Disabled in the Adaptation: Robert March loses a leg in the war. In the original book, he isn't even injured, but just contracts pneumonia, from which he fully recovers.
• Disney Death: As Jo, Meg, and Amy are watching over a sleeping, very ill Beth, Jo catches a glimpse of her sister looking pale, gaunt, and a shell of her former self, and begins to quietly fear that her little sister is dying. The next morning, the girls wake up to find Beth's hospital bed empty, and they assume the worst has happened. Beth is wheeled in moments later revealing that not only did she survive, but she's now in remission and is on the road to recovery.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Amy rips up Jo's story journal and uses it in a craft in retaliation for Jo not taking her along on a hangout with Laurie.
• Foreshadowing: Throughout the book, Jo makes various comments in her journals about having to keep a secret out of fear, expresses jealousy that Meg is able to be public with her relationship with Brooks, and repeatedly shows disinterest and discomfort whenever romance with guys is brought up. Her coming out as a lesbian is a no-brainer in that respect.
• Fourth-Date Marriage: Jo and Laurie spot Meg and her new beau Brooks hanging out in the park, and spot Brooks getting down on one knee in front of her. Jo starts freaking out and assumes that they just got engaged, despite only being together for a few months. Turns out it wasn't a proposal at all; Brooks had just knelt down to tie his shoe, and Meg's excited reaction was about Brooks telling her that his mom got her an interview at Vogue.
• Gold Digger: Downplayed with Meg, who has a fixation on marrying someone rich but not for the materialistic reasons that Jo accuses her of. Instead, Meg wants to make sure that her family is taken care of so they won't have to struggle like her mother did.
• Kids Are Cruel: Tara Connor, the bully from Amy's school. She's a racist, spoiled rotten egotist who thinks everyone is beneath her, and takes a cruel pleasure in taunting Amy for being black and having an unusual fashion sense. And when Amy finally has enough and stands up for herself, Tara punches her in the face hard enough to give Amy a black eye, and cows her into silence by threatening to do worse.
• Last-Name Basis: Brooks. His first name is actually Geoff, but everyone just refers to him by his last name.
• Littlest Cancer Patient: Beth is diagnosed with leukemia partway through the story, leaving her extremely weak and bed-ridden for the duration.
• Lonely Rich Kid:
  • Laurie, which is why he's so eager to spend time with the March girls.
  • Meg's rich friend Kennedy, who privately admits to Meg that she's jealous of her friend's closeness to her family, since Kennedy's parents are fully absent and barely acknowledge her existence.
• Love at First Sight: Meg is immediately smitten with Brooks from the moment she meets him.
• Nepotism: Brooks' mother is able to land Meg her dream interview with Vogue's editor-in-chief by virtue of being friends. While Meg is initially ecstatic at this opportunity, she quickly grows uncomfortable with the idea of getting a job just because someone made some calls rather than earning it through her own skills. She ultimately decides against the interview and starts considering other career paths, and later ends her relationship with Brooks.
• Paper Destruction of Anger: Amy rips up Jo's story journal in anger to punish her for not taking her along on a hangout with Laurie, and uses it to make papier-mache. Jo is enraged and attacks Amy, and is only stopped by her mother intervening. Jo's anger is understandable, since she'd been working on that particular story for months and it was near completion before Amy destroyed it.
• Parental Abandonment: Meg's birth mother died, Jo's birth father walked out, and Laurie's parents both died.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Tara Connor, the bully from Amy's school. She regularly taunts Amy for her appearance and clothes, often resorting to racially-charged insults to get Amy's blood up.
• Race Lift:
  • The Marches in the original novel were all Caucasian; here they become a blended, interracial family. Robert and Meg are fully African-American, while Beth and Amy are mixed-race.
  • Laurie and his grandfather are of Hispanic descent in this version.
• Raised by Grandparents: Laurie's parents died when he was young, so he's now being raised by his grandfather.
• Related Differently in the Adaptation: The March family were a standard nuclear family in the original book; here they are a blended family, with Meg and Jo being Robert and Madison's daughters respectively from previous relationships and Beth and Amy being born after the couple were married; Meg and Jo are stepsisters while Beth and Amy are their half-sisters.
• Related in the Adaptation: The Marches' housekeeper Hannah is replaced by the girls' paternal grandmother, Gammy Esther.
• Rich Bitch: Casey and Brie, two of Kennedy's rich friends, are catty and mean towards anyone they consider poor or beneath them. Allison is an exception, being much nicer and actually applauds Meg's decision to stand up for herself.
• Ship Tease: Jo suspects that Mr. Marquez has a crush on Gammy Esther. The two are occasionally seen making flirtatious looks at each other, which could lend some credibility to this suspicion.
• Shown Their Work: When Gammy first arrives and checks on a feverish Beth, one of the first things she does is feel her neck, presumably her lymph nodes. Swollen lymph nodes are often a sign that the human body is fighting an infection, and in some cases, can be an early warning sign for cancer. Beth is later diagnosed with leukemia.
• Shrinking Violet: Beth, who prefers the company of her sisters to that of strangers, and spends most of her time in her room practicing the guitar.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Jo and Kennedy have this dynamic with each other. The two are prone to exchanging petty barbs with each other and fighting over what they think is best for Meg.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Beth survives her life-threatening leukemia diagnosis in this adaptation, whereas her 1868 counterpart eventually succumbs to the effects of scarlet fever.
• Spoiled Brat: Amy starts off as one, often resorting to pitching fits if she doesn't get her way. She grows out of it.
• What the Hell, Hero?: At Kennedy's charity ball, Laurie overhears Meg joining in with the snobby rich girls' mocking of Jenny Humphrey and quickly calls her out on it, scolding her for stooping to their level in order to fit in.
• Wingding Eyes: Meg is depicted with hearts in her eyes when she first gets a good look a Brooks.

---