Lauren is a class-A bitch. Fortunately for her, she is also the most vulnerable character on the show, hence she is impossible to hate entirely. She is capable of random acts of extreme cruelty, including sleeping with her former best friend Kaylie's boyfriend Carter while the two are still together. She then lies about having had sex with him, right up until Carter decides to tell Kaylie. Kaylie decides that she and Lauren will no longer be friends. After Kaylie breaks up with Carter, he moves in with Lauren until he hopefully save up enough money to afford a place of his own. Although he continues to try to woo Kaylie back to him during the first part of the time he is living with Lauren, he eventually falls for Lauren. Even when Kaylie tells him that she wants to get back together with him, he chooses Lauren over Kaylie, for Lauren has been kind while Kaylie ignored him out of spite. Lauren wants what she wants, and she is determined to get it at all costs. Although she is not always the most focused of the elite gymnasts at the Rock, she is among the most passionate. At times, the intensity of her pure drive to win rivals even Payson's, the other competitor for 'most passionate' at The Rock. Unlike Payson, however, Lauren's passion comes out in every other area of her life. Whereas Payson has made a hobby of following the rules at the gym and outside it, Lauren seems determined to break every one. Lauren has several drinks at a party she attends early on in season one, the same party at which she eventually hooks up with Kaylie's boyfriend. She goes to a party in season two and quickly makes the most of her gathering crowd of admirers, in hopes of making the same guy--now her on-again, off-again boyfriend--jealous. Lauren is the first of the young women to become sexually involved with anyone, and she continues this relationship in all its physicality. She eventually demands that Emily's mother Chloe--now dating her father, and the first witness to her indiscretion--help her to cover up what she is doing. Chloe, guileless, agrees. Lauren eventually uses even Chloe's kindness to her own advantage, crying to her father that she's been with Carter, Kaylie's ex, for months and that Chloe has not only known, but been giving her sex advice! As a result, Steve Tanner, Lauren's father, breaks up with Chloe. He also begins courting Summer again, or seems on the verge of it at the mid-season two point, to Lauren's utter delight. Although Summer began as the bane of Lauren's existence, her clear moral compass and solid foundation of values--in addition to her generous heart--won Lauren over. By the time Summer broke up with Steve, Lauren had grown quite attached to her. Lauren's devastation over the loss of this mother-figure dominates much of her character in season two. The other half of her character seems purely driven by her jealousy of Kaylie. Kaylie wins National Champion during season one, a fact which she never fails to rub in Lauren's face. Lauren is an eerie combination of entirely too mature outlook on life, clear-eyed observation of human behavior, and sociopathic disregard for anyone's feelings but her own. She tends to rationalize even the most cruel of actions, such as sending photographs of Payson kissing Sasha to the National Committee. She knows perfectly well might result in his disbarrment from ever coaching gymnastics again and Payson's inability to so much as compete at the elite level she has worked so hard to regain entrance into. However, although Payson is one of Lauren's oldest friends, she simply does not care what happens to Payson as a result of her actions. Sasha, because he is dating Summer, is in her mind now Lauren's enemy. She wants Summer to date her father, so that she can have the experience of being mothered. Lauren is a compelling character because she is moved by passion alone. Unlike Kaylie and Payson, who are both astonishingly controlled and at times robotic in their ability to mask and shield and repress any and all emotions which flit across their radar, Lauren never silences herself when something hurts her. Lauren is a character for which the term 'misplaced rage' was invented. Her mother became a drug addict and dropped off the face of the planet when Lauren was just a little girl; hence, Lauren perceives all female authority figures as intrusions into her idealized image of the 'happy life' she lives with her father. Her father and she are 'enmeshed', as a psychologist might say; because he was the only person she had to cling to growing up, any threat to his goals, vision of the world, or to his intimacy with her seems to her a threat against her very existence. She would fight to the death to protect him and to protect herself from failing or seeming weak. Even Lauren's discovery that her mother in fact tried to see her numerous times and was forced away by her father does not allow Lauren to at last turn her rage towards the father who refused to instill a healthy sense of values or a moral compass into his daugther. He not only allowed, but encouraged her to become a machine of a person whose only obsession is with winning any competition she feels herself to be in. Instead of raging at the fact that she is the unhappy, miserable daughter of a rich man that she is, Lauren rages at anyone who tries to help her by taking away the things she thinks she needs to feel in control of her life. Show less «