From The TV IV

Gwen is a character on Total Drama Island. She is voiced by Megan Fahlenblock.

Contents 1 Basic Information 2 Character History 2.1 Season One 2.2 Season Two 3 Trivia 4 Quotes

[edit] Basic Information

Gwen is the original captain of the Screaming Gaffers team on Total Drama Action, the second season of TDI. She first appears as a member of the Screaming Gophers team in the show's first season. By her own admission, she is a loner at the school she attends and prefers to be so because she finds the cliques that make up high school society to be phony and shallow. For that same reason (and because she finds some of them irritating), she, at least initially, prefers to avoid most of her fellow contestants on TDI. Artistic by nature, she is sometimes seen sketching in her diary or on a sketch pad when she is off by herself.

Gwen's appearance and fashion style lean toward the Goth subculture. She has pale skin, wears green lipstick and has her hair dyed in shades of green, and her outfit consists of a corset-like black top with blue and green sleeves, a black and green skirt, black nylons and knee-high black boots. She first auditioned for TDI on a dare from her brothers, although she was not sure that she would be chosen. As she goes further into the competition, Gwen decides during a session in front of the Confessional Can camera that she'd like to use the $100,000 grand prize to help out her mother.

Personality-wise, Gwen is often sarcastic and cynical toward those of the contestants she can't stand. She is this way in general at the start of TDI, but she does begin to open up and show a softer side with those that she befriends over the course of the competition. She first connects with Trent early in the game after both end up as part of the Gophers team, and the connection soon turns romantic. She also forms friendships with Leshawna and later with Duncan, Geoff and Bridgette. Although she finds Lindsay, Owen and Cody annoying at first, she becomes more tolerant and cordial to them with time.

The one person on TDI whom Gwen truly hates is Heather, with whom she began feuding after Heather stole her diary and then read passages from it on stage (which exposed Gwen's crush on Trent in the process) during a talent competition in retaliation for Gwen standing up to her earlier. Gwen becomes a target for the jealous and vindictive Heather, who regards the Goth girl as a threat to her in the game, but for each of the cruel pranks Heather pulls on her, Gwen usually gives back as good as she gets, such as when she borrows Harold's red ant farm and empties its contents into Heather's bed as payback for the diary incident. Gwen's vulnerable side is soon exposed as the result of a particularly cruel scheme by Heather when the snobby girl plots to break up the Gwen-Trent relationship by lying to Trent about Gwen and then kissing him as Gwen arrives to see him, which causes a brief rift between the couple. Gwen is emotionally dashed by the incident, but when she and Trent (who was voted out of the game as a result after Heather, the original intended target for elimination because of her evil plot, wins immunity in another challenge) find out about Heather's duplicity, the couple quickly makes up. From that point on, Gwen vows to make Heather pay for her actions.

Gwen, along with Owen, makes it to the Season One championship final when they team up in a Triple Dog Dare challenge to get Heather eliminated, satisfying Gwen's vendetta (and giving all the other eliminated contestants, many of whom had previously been victimized by Heather, a vicarious thrill) when the vain Heather refuses a dare to have her head shaved but ends up partially bald anyway and gets knocked out of the game for her refusal. Despite her best efforts and Trent's support, combined with Heather's attempts at cheating for Owen against her (which earns Heather the wrath of Leshawna afterward) and Owen being placed at a disadvantage by his weight and stamina, Gwen ends up the runner-up in the final showdown when Izzy, who returns with the other eliminated campers to witness the event, uses fresh-baked brownies to give Owen his second wind and enable him to bypass Gwen in the last part of the final challenge and win the game. In the end, Gwen and Trent get back together and get an invitation from Owen to be among his guests at the party he plans to throw with his newly-won $100,000.

Later at the post-show party, Gwen, Trent and Leshawna team up in pursuit of the $1,000,000 suitcase Chris Maclean puts into play as a prelude to his announcement of a second season for the show. Despite captaining opposing teams on TDA, she and Trent manage to maintain their romantic relationship, although it once again comes under fire from jealousy (this time from within the relationship) when Gwen chooses Duncan to be on the Screaming Gaffers while Trent picks Lindsay for his team, the Killer Grips. Unfortunately for both of them, the relationship soon crumbles when Gwen finds out that Trent had been throwing challenges for the Grips to enable her to win. This, combined with Trent's obsession with the number 9 and his increasing obsession with her, force a reluctant Gwen, who wants to win under her own merits, to break up with him. When Justin finds this out and he and the rest of the Grips accuse her and Trent of colluding to cheat in the game (along with expressing doubts about whether the breakup is genuine), Gwen proves her word to the Grips by convincing them to vote Trent out of the game.

Even though she is not at fault for Trent's actions, Gwen is later blackmailed by Justin, under threat of revealing her perceived part in the scandalous incident to her Gaffers teammates, into throwing a challenge to benefit Justin and the Grips. As a result, she becomes the fifth player to be voted off of TDA when Heather figures out that Gwen is taking a dive (under coercion from Justin, unknown to her and the other Gaffers at the time), which gives the opportunistic Heather the excuse she needs to get rid of her longtime hated rival by convincing fellow Gaffers Leshawna and Harold to join her in voting her off. Even more surprisingly, Gwen reveals after the Gilded Chris ceremony that she voted herself off as well, which she regards as karmic payback for being forced to convince the Grips to eliminate Trent following their breakup. With Gwen's elimination, her teammate Duncan takes over as the Gaffers captain.

[edit] Character History

[edit] Season One

A reluctant Gwen arrives at Camp Wawanakwa and has no intention of staying after seeing how the camp looks ("Not So Happy Campers (1)"), but she changes her mind after Trent arrives and their eyes meet as he walks by. She takes part in the cliff-jumping challenge and helps the Gophers to victory later by helping in the construction of their hot tub, the second part of the challenge ("Not So Happy Campers (2)"). She becomes the last camper still awake as she leads her team to another win in an "Awake-a-thon" challenge ("The Big Sleep"). Gwen, along with several other Gophers, gets annoyed with Noah for refusing to help the team in the dodgeball challenge while he also criticizes his teammates for their eventual loss to the Killer Bass ("Dodgebrawl"). When she stands up to Heather, who has coerced Lindsay and Beth into voting for her in a talent contest challenge, the vindictive Heather gets revenge by stealing Gwen's diary while Gwen is off swimming, then reads the diary on stage to humiliate her and expose her crush on Trent ("Not Quite Famous"), but Gwen gets back at Heather later by dumping red ants from Harold's ant farm into Heather's bed and gets a kick from watching her run, screaming with the ants swarming over her body, out of the Gophers cabin. She is forced to face her fear of being buried alive during a Fear Factor-style challenge when she steps into a glass coffin which is then buried beneath the sand on the beach ("Phobia Factor"), and with Trent's help, she succeeds despite spending longer than the required time in the coffin when Trent, who is supposed to dig her out afterward, gets chased off by his own fear (a mime), which puts a dent in their relationship.

Gwen is paired up with Cody for a trip to nearby Boney Island for a canoe race and has to fend Cody off several times when he makes passes at her ("Up the Creek"), but she makes the return trip with Trent after Cody realizes that Gwen is into Trent and decides to let them pair up instead. Frustrated with Heather appointing herself the Gophers' head chef and then doing no work of her own while bossing her teammates around during a cooking challenge, Gwen watches with enjoyment when Heather gets locked inside a walk-in freezer during a prank pulled by Leshawna and Lindsay ("If You Can't Take the Heat"). She is partnered with Heather during the rock-climbing portion of a trust challenge, giving Heather, acting as Gwen's belayer, the chance to embarrass Gwen by using a trick belay to rip off Gwen's skirt, exposing the pair of purple panties she is wearing underneath ("Who Can You Trust?"), but Gwen gets up to the top of the rock face anyway, then teams with Leshawna to take on an explosives-filled blind toboggan ride in the final leg of the challenge and they win the race for the Gophers when the Killer Bass' Geoff-DJ team is disqualified for DJ taking off his blindfold during the race. Gwen and Bridgette try to figure out who a haiku love letter deposited on a mess hall table is addressed to and who wrote it, with the two girls each assuming that their respective crushes, Trent and Geoff, may be the author ("X-Treme Torture"), but they soon find out that the letter was written for Leshawna, who is also surprised (as are Gwen and Bridgette) that Harold wrote the note to her.

After the Gophers and Bass teams are disbanded and the teams realigned by gender, Gwen joins the girls in a losing effort in a Battle of the Sexes challenge against the guys' team ("Brunch of Disgustingness"), who win a weekend stay at a five-star resort for their victory. Gwen's relationship with Trent is seriously strained by the interference of Heather, who resorts to tricking Trent into falling for her lies about Gwen and then kisses him right as Gwen arrives to see him at the dock ("Search and Do Not Destroy"), but when they find out that the jealous Heather cooked up the scheme solely to try to break them up and get Trent voted off to get back at Gwen, she and Trent make up and he encourages Gwen to continue in the game and win the grand prize while he watches and roots for her from back home. After seeing Heather cheat her way to immunity yet again, Gwen watches with pleasure when Lindsay, who was betrayed by Heather and eliminated from the game after being the last to finish in a bike-racing challenge, tells Heather off and adds that she hopes the snobby girl gets what she has coming to her ("That's Off the Chain!"). She faces down and gets the better of an escaped psycho killer with a hook for a hand when she kicks the hockey-masked killer in the face several times and he calls it quits, making her the winner of a horror movie-themed challenge ("Hook, Line, and Screamer").

Gwen is assigned to trap a duck as part of a challenge where the campers become Game Wardens for a day ("Wawanakwa Gone Wild!") and in spite of the duck being on the wily side, she still succeeds in trapping the fowl in a cage and is rewarded with a dinner for being the first camper to catch their assigned animal. On a return trip to Boney Island, she and Geoff team up in a three-armed triathalon challenge and Geoff gets Gwen to loosen up a bit and be more easygoing ("Trial by Tri-Armed Triathalon"). Gwen, Duncan, Owen and Heather get stranded on another part of the island after a torrential rainstorm washes away the camp cabins, and they are forced to work together to make their way back to Camp Wawanakwa ("Camp Castaways"). Gwen is forced into a reluctant alliance with Heather against Duncan and Owen when Chef Hatchet takes charge of a challenge and drops the final four into the woods ("Are We There, Yeti?"), with the girls using their wits to take the guys down for the win and leading to Duncan's elimination. Gwen endures several dares during a Triple Dog Dare challenge, then makes Owen an offer and teams up with him to get Heather eliminated ("I Triple Dog Dare You!") when Heather's vanity becomes her downfall after she refuses a dare to have her head shaved, but accidentally gets the clip job anyway after kicking the electric hair clippers, which come back down on her, out of Chef's hands. Gwen gets support from Trent during the final showdown against Owen, but finishes in second place thanks to the interference of Heather ("The Very Last Episode, Really!"); despite this, Gwen and Trent renew their romantic relationship and get invited to Owen's victory party the next week. When Chris introduces the $1,000,000 prize for the contestants to chase after at the post-show bash, Gwen, Trent and Leshawna join forces to chase after the suitcase the prize money is in ("Total Drama, Drama, Drama, Drama Island"), then end up as part of a 14-way tie which puts them into the mix for the show's second season.

[edit] Season Two

Gwen and the other 13 contestants arrive at the abandoned film studio in suburban Toronto to begin Season Two ("Monster Cash!"), and they all get chased and captured by an animatronic monster being remote controlled by Chef. She and Trent finish as the only two players to capture alien eggs and successfully avoid being blasted by a slimeball gun-armed Chef, disguised as an alien ("Alien Resurr-eggtion"); while their win gives them the power to choose teams, Gwen and Trent discover, to their shock, that this also makes them the captains of opposing teams. The Gwen-Trent relationship undergoes some strain again when Gwen makes Duncan her first pick for the Screaming Gaffers, and a jealous Trent retaliates by drafting Lindsay first for the Killer Grips ("Riot on Set"). Gwen becomes weirded out by her discovery of Trent's superstitious obsession with the number 9 ("Beach Blanket Bogus"), especially after Duncan tells her the root of the obsession—the combined number of the letters in her and Trent's names adding up to 9.

Gwen is reluctantly forced to dump Trent due to his increasing obsession and because she finds out that Trent took dives in past challenges to sabotage his own team and help her win ("3:10 to Crazytown"), and she convinces the less-than-impressed Killer Grips to vote out their own captain in order to set things right. She then gets forced by Justin, under threat of blackmail, to throw a prison movie-themed challenge for the Screaming Gaffers ("The Chefshank Redemption"), and when a suspicious Heather catches on after the Grips loudly drop some not-so-subtle hints during the challenge, she eagerly seizes the chance to get rid of Gwen by voting off her archrival at the Gilded Chris ceremony (with additional votes against Gwen coming from Harold, Leshawna and, surprisingly, Gwen herself). She returns as a guest on the second edition of TDA Aftermath to attempt to clear her name ("The Aftermath: For 2?"), but Aftermath co-host Geoff, who has seemingly allowed fame on the show to go to his head and is now uncharacteristically acting more like Chris and Justin due to taking advice from Chris' dietist and Justin's dermatologist, tries to turn public opinion against Gwen, gives her a hard time and manipulatively tries to make her look bad in the spotlight until Trent comes to Gwen's aid by confessing that he alone, not Gwen, was responsible for throwing challenges earlier in the show.

[edit] Trivia

• Gwen's name in the show's French-language version, L'île des Défis Extrêmes, is Joelle
• In the original demo reel and early promotional material for TDI, Gwen's appearance, while mostly physically similar to how she appears on the show, differs greatly in that she has red hair and green eyes, wears a brown top and blue jeans, has a normal skin color and has smaller, pointier breasts [1] [2]
• Gwen is the only one of the TDI characters whose audition tape does not appear on the show or on its related website
• Gwen is one of just three characters (along with Heather and Owen) who appear in all 26 episodes of TDI's first season
• As voiced by Megan Fahlenblock, Gwen's voice sounds exactly the same as that of 6teen character Jen Masterson, right down to becoming squeaky when excited or angry
• Gwen wins over Owen in the final showdown in the Norwegian-dubbed version of TDI. In that version, Izzy's attempt to lure Owen across the finish line with brownies backfires when Owen plows into Izzy before reaching the finish line, enabling Gwen (with motivation from Trent) to bypass Owen, cross the finish line and claim the $100,000 grand prize. [3] This alternate ending, in its original English version, is expected to be included as a bonus feature in the upcoming release of TDI's first season on DVD

[edit] Quotes

• Gwen (to Chris Maclean, as she arrives at the dock): You mean, we're staying here?!
  Chris (grinning): No, you're staying here! My crib is an airstream with AC–thataway!
  Gwen (getting in Chris' face): I did not sign up for this!
  Chris (pulling out legal documents): Actually, you did. (Gwen then seizes the legal papers and tears them up)
  Chris (getting out a second set of papers): The great thing about lawyers is, they make lots of copies!
  Gwen (grabbing her luggage and turning around): I am not staying here!
  Chris: Cool. I hope you can swim though, because your ride...(motioning to the departing boat that brought Gwen to the camp)...just left.
  Gwen (to Chris, frustrated): Jerk!

• Gwen (inside the Confessional Can early on in the show): Um, okay...so far this sucks.

• Geoff (while paddling his and Gwen's canoe to Boney Island): We put a cup and flag on it and actually putted a few rounds before getting caught! The principal gave us the longest detention in school history.
  Gwen (getting fed up): Will you please SHUT UP!
  Geoff (taken aback): Whoa, harshness!
  Gwen (sarcastically): Oh, I know! I'm the harsh, weird, scary Goth girl who's being all mean and snappish as usual!

• Geoff (after Gwen throws his camera into the water): What's going on with you? Are you okay?
  Gwen: Look, you don't have to pretend to be friends with me, okay? I'm fine, so just leave me alone!
  Geoff: I wasn't pretending—I really like you.
  Gwen (seeming skeptical): Riiight—and if we went to the same high school, you'd probably invite me to all your wild parties, too.
  Geoff (matter-of-factly): I totally would! But...I didn't think you'd wanna go.
  Gwen: Why not? I'm not cool enough?
  Geoff: No, you just seem like...I don't know, it's not your thing, you know? You probably think parties are pretty stupid anyway.
  Gwen: Well, I wouldn't know...I've never been to one.
  Geoff (taken by surprise): Oh, snap! You've never been to a party?
  Gwen: No, okay? Sometimes I wish I had been—then for one day, I could be one of those happy vapid girls who gets along with everyone, and is all excited to eat massive amounts of sugar, and do karaoke and cheerleading and ponytails! I just don't think it's in my DNA.

• Gwen (while sketching in the Confessional Can): So I actually made it to the final three...just goes to show you how far a bad attitude can get you!