Sam McPherson/Brooke McQueen

Sam/Brooke is a femslash pairing in the Popular fandom. In canon, they are students at the same school and have a considerable amount of animosity between them that only gets worse when their parents get engaged to each other. In fandom, the enemies-to-friends arc of the series is often replaced with an enemies-to-lovers or rivals-to-lovers arc. 
Fan fiction and digital fan art, especially manipulations of scenes and shots from the show were relatively popular in some femslash circles when the show was airing and shortly afterwards.
== Canon ==
Brooke and Sam both attend Kennedy High. While Brooke is the most popular student in school, Sam is unpopular in the school hierarchy. They are both raised by single parents — Brooke by her father, Sam by her mother — and they (and their social groups) find themselves forced to socialise when Brooke's father and Sam's mother announce they have been seeing each other and are engaged.
Throughout the first season, the animosity between the two increases as both try to find ways to split their parents up. These efforts eventually come to fruition when Sam locates Brooke's biological mother and convinces her to come back, leading to the engagement being called off. The second season follows the fall-out of this, as Sam and Brooke realise that their parents were in love, and are unhappy without each other, so begin to work together to reunite their parents. This eventually leads to a friendship forming between the two and both girls developing more understanding of who the other is, dispelling assumptions and preconceptions about one another.
The show ended on a cliff-hanger, with Brooke being hit by a car driven by one of her friends, as it was cancelled after season two.
==Fandom==
Given the in-canon enemies-to-friends arc, it wasn't a huge jump for femslash fans to start exploring the relationship from an enemies-to-lovers angle instead. While the fandom for Popular was never a huge one, the Sam/Brooke pairing was a relatively well-known femslash pairing during the early 2000s and is still discussed alongside other pairings from a similar time on Tumblr and other social media spaces.
There was a dedicated Yahoo Group, Popular Slash, for the pairing, and outside of that Realm of the Shadow had one of the largest collections of both Popular fics and specifically Sam/Brooke fics. The pairing also appeared on other femslash sites such as The Pink Rabbit Consortium and as requests or submissions during challenges or events such as the FemSlash Advent Calendar.
Fanfiction.net also has a number of Sam/Brooke works which did not get put into other archives or moved across to Archive of Our Own, while AO3 has 69 Sam/Brooke works as of October 2023. 
===Fan Commentary===
(overview of fans' reactions to the ship, including relevant quotes from both within and outside the fandom)
===Common Tropes and Fanon===
* Enemies-to-lovers - Given the existing platonic version of this relationship arc in the show, this was a popular trope to explore in works.
* Forced proximity - There was an episode in-canon where Brooke and two of her friends and Sam and two of her friends were stuck in a room together, leading them to make some tentative steps towards resolving their inter-group conflicts. Exploring the forced proximity with just Sam and Brooke was sometimes a variation of this canonical event.
* Post-canon/post-car accident - The show ended on a cliff-hanger, with Brooke's friend, Nicole, hitting her with a car
===Controversies===
A small number of fans were vocal about their opposition to the pairing because when Brooke's father and Sam's mother got married, the two girls would become step-sisters making the pairing incest. Generally, this opposition was brushed off by fans of the pairing who pointed out that the two were be in their late teens by the time their parents married and so it wasn't as though the two had grown up together.
==Example Fanworks==
===Fanfic===
* Ruminations on Accidents by harper_m - A post-canon long-fic. "After the accident, it should have been Brooke who went off the rails. Instead, she's in med school and Sam's the one with all the problems."
* Strange Road to Salvation by Aeryn Sun - A canon-divergent/post-canon long-fic where Sam pushes Brooke out of the way and Nicole hits Sam instead.
===Fanart===
===Fanvids===
*Over My Head by buffyfan357. 
*Just The Girl by lifesuxn21c
===Other Fanworks===
==Archives and Communities==
*Sam McPherson/Brooke McQueen tag at Archive of Our Own
*Works identified as Brooke/Sam at FanFiction.Net
*List of authors with Popular fanworks (predominantly Brooke/Sam) at Realm of the Shadow
==Other Fannish Resources==
(Rec Lists, Big Bangs, Thing-a-thons, Holiday Exchanges, wiki links, etc.)
*Brooke/Sam Rec List by redlance at Tumblr
*Girlie Stuff - Personal fan site with a number of Sam/Brooke works and an examination of the subtext in Popular.
==References==
Category:Popular
Category:Femslash Pairings