Possibly the most iconic “mean girl” in recent memory is the original: Regina George, the quick-witted, blonde-bombshell monster who was the antagonist in the beloved movie Mean Girls. Regina and Blair Waldorf from Gossip Girl, Sharpay Evans from High School Musical, and even Lizzie McGuire’s Kate Sanders define a generation of popular, headstrong, and sharp-tongued antagonists. They also all happen to be white.

Over the past couple of years, the mean-girl archetype has expanded. And so has the conventional image of the mean girl.

There was Chelsea Barnes, played by Jamie Chung, in Disney Channel’s Princess Protection Program, an example of the unrelatable high school villain who is driven by shallow motivations such as popularity, good looks, and wealth and in the end is ultimately defeated by the “good guys.” In the Broadway adaptation of Mean Girls, actor Ashley Park has taken on the very fetch role of Gretchen Wieners without any major storyline modifications and blown audiences away, nabbing herself a Tony nomination. And the YouTube Red original series Youth & Consequences shows that not all manipulative queen bees have to be blonde and blue-eyed. Anna Akana plays Farrah Cutney, the mean girl with a heart who rules Central Rochester High.

It's the rise of the Asian mean girl.

“I really do feel incredibly grateful that I got to make this show,” Anna tells Teen Vogue. “Because if you were auditioning for this as an actor, there’s just no way they would cast an Asian. That’s just way too against type, you know?”

For what seems like ages, Asian-American girls have regularly seen themselves on TV or in the movies as meek, nerdy, goody-two-shoes high school overachievers. And while that trope is evolving, with Asian actors being allowed to play characters that have normally been reserved for white performers, those who have been in the industry for a while have continually faced an uphill battle in finding roles that go behind this flat typecasting.

Yin Chang, who played Nelly Yuki on Gossip Girl, looked forward to playing a three-dimensional Asian-American character that wasn’t a caricature. When she first got the casting breakdown for the Upper East Sider, she says according to the breakdown that was emailed to her for the audition, the character was described as such: beautiful and sexy without much effort, supremely confident, and carries around a stack of books as tall as the Rockies, again without effort. The ultimate over-achiever: a double Merit/Peabody scholar, plays four instruments, etc. Blair's only real competition in the SAT wars. Taken under the wing of Isabel and joins the Gossip Girls.

The actor envisioned embodying Nelly as a “blend of Blair and Serena’s essences,” taking a break from the stereotypical characters that actors of Asian descent often find themselves in.

“I remember having a discussion with my mom and sisters right after that call,” she tells Teen Vogue. “It seemed like the industry was changing and how ecstatic we were that Asians were finally having more opportunities to play whole characters and being a part of a world that would usually never feature storylines with POC."