In this op-ed, Alice Lesperance explains how Barbie Ferreira’s character on Euphoria, Kat Hernandez, is a much-needed anomaly in the narrative of fat teenage girls onscreen.

The opening scene of Jennifer’s Body, Karyn Kusama and Diablo Cody’s 2009 horror-comedy about a teenage succubus, proclaims, “Hell is a teenage girl.” That film, with all of its negative reviews and bad press, understood 10 years ago what HBO’s Euphoria illustrates perfectly: Pushing and fighting your way through the world as a teenage girl is just that — a fight. Few know better than girls what it’s like to exist when every person in the world has something to say about your body, your clothes, your sex life.

Reviews of Euphoria, though by and large positive, have also been unforgiving in many ways. The show is too raunchy and shocking — definitely too mature for the teenagers who might be watching it. But that’s where the show succeeds most: in its depiction of teenagers at their absolute worst and messiest, especially the teenage girls. Rue (Zendaya) is our unreliable narrator and bipolar drug addict. Her overarching storyline is one of the best depictions of a teenager living with mental health issues that TV has seen in a while. Maddy (Alexa Demie) starts out as the train wreck we all knew with the on-and-off jerk boyfriend, but her story turns into a complicated portrait of a teen caught up in a toxic, abusive relationship. Hunter Schafer absolutely shines as Jules, a trans girl who moves into town and quickly finds herself at the center of drama between Maddy’s abusive love interest and his father.

And then there’s Kat Hernandez (Barbie Ferreira), the quirky goth turned cam girl who is at once at the center of the friend group and outside of it, set apart on her own path of sexual discovery. Best of all, she’s a fat teenage girl who is very different from other “fat friend” tropes we’ve seen before.

Some of the best teen films and TV shows, like Jennifer’s Body, show teenage girls who don’t care what friends or boys think of them, even when they know they should. Euphoria succeeds here as well; it’s not that the girls don’t care what people think of them (unrealistic), but that their characters contain multitudes that are entirely separate from the boys they’re dating. This isn’t totally unique to Euphoria, as shows about teenagers are much better in their treatment of teenage girls than most TV has been in the past. But there are virtually no teenage fat characters onscreen that have the complexity that Kat Hernandez has.

When conjuring images of fat girls onscreen, a few examples come to mind. There’s Terri MacGregor, from Degrassi: The Next Generation, Euphoria’s soft-core predecessor from the early aughts. Terri had such low self-esteem and felt so inadequate next to her skinny friends that she was convinced no boy could possibly like her. So, she started dating a shy but cruel boy named Rick, who brought a gun to school and put a boy in a wheelchair (that boy was played by Aubrey Graham, who grew up to become Drake, one of Euphoria’s producers). More recently, Quinn Fabray, the requisite mean girl from Glee, was revealed to have an embarrassing past that included being bullied for being overweight, which of course led to her bullying others in return. The other fat character on Glee, Lauren Zizes, serves as one big walking fat joke, including the time a love interest serenades her with Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls.”