Fifteen years ago, Tina Fey’s Mean Girls debuted in theaters, featuring a cast led by now-infamous Disney star, Lindsay Lohan. In the decade-and-a-half since its release, it’s become a staple of coming of age films. While it yielded a litany of quotable lines, its most memorable contribution to pop culture is Regina George—the most insanely demented high school villain in recent memory. And yet, with its widespread reach, the true champion of Mean Girls hardly gets her due. I’m not interested in Cady or Regina or Karen’s stories. Fifteen years after the fact, I want to know more about the warrior of the story. I want to know about Janis Ian.

Janis, played by Lizzy Caplan, is the goth-laden treasure who intercepts Cady on her first day of high school. She and Damian (Daniel Franzese) show Cady—the sheltered homeschooled girl unfamiliar with a public school—the ropes. Her peers routinely call her a freak, a weirdo, and a lesbian (even though she's not), but the one thing they don't realize is that she's the linchpin to the high school structure and this story. While everyone else is haphazardly trying to establish social footing, Janis and Damian survey the lunchroom, noting how the whole system works. As the supreme caste system strategist, the whole plot of Mean Girls hinges on Janis’ existence. No one understands how fragile the high school hierarchy works better than her. That's the advantage you get by taking stock of it from the fringe.

That fringe position is how she orchestrates the takedown of Regina George. While the film would you have believe it's a group effort, it's all Janis. Janis has no shits to give. She’s a high school vigilante with nothing to lose, and so she gambles with her pawns, leveraging her part-time mall job and her friendship with Cady to tear down a system from within. Before Daenerys Targaryen decided to break the wheel, there was Janis Ian—a woman ostracized from the norm, set on turning her disadvantage into an unstoppable weapon.

But Janis' main message, intended or not, is that all that garbage from high school is fleeting. She might be the unwelcome recipient of mean-girl-ire from the Plastics and the butt of every tired lesbian joke that Tina Fey could muster, but Lizzy Caplan plays her in a way that allows Janis to exist above it all. She's the version of your freak-high-school-self that you'd like to imagine you could be if you went back and did it all again. What makes her dismantling of Regina George's reign so acceptable is that she was above it all to begin with. Mean Girls is about exposing the façades that fuel a Queen Bee's power trip, and only someone as authentic as Janis is able to do that.

Janis Ian is the true hero of Mean Girls—the outsider who wants to break the wheel of the High School hierarchy.

In the canon of high school classic characters, I hope the reverence for Janis Ian continues to grow. Named after a lesbian folk singer (again, Fey loves a stereotype) and jaded by the social trivialities of high school, Janis somehow represents the perfected high school experience: being brave enough to be a badass even when you’re told otherwise. I like to imagine that Janis is out there in the fictional world, running a start up or penning a book about sexual exploration.

I don’t need to hear about Cady and Regina’s trajectory after high school. Those girls work in PR and own purses that look like folded up quilts. That narrative writes itself. But Janis? She has a story worth telling. People like Janis have been crushing it all along.

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