Gilmore Girls came back into the spotlight last November with its four-part Netflix reboot. The reboot, which left me highly disappointed, made me reflect further on my feelings towards Gilmore Girls, the characters, and some of the narrative decisions.
I realized I had a few inner demons about the unrealistic expectations the show sets, and some of the characters.
Let’s start with my biggest problem: Rory.
Rory, quite frankly, pisses me off. She pissed me off from the first episode forward. While her charming wit and quietness is cute and all, her perfect little character is just too…perfect. Her “I’ll talk down to you if you haven’t read Moby Dick or listen to The Smiths” attitude just never cut it for me.
But I persevered. My friends brushed off my doubts about the character, and I was too busy loving Lorelai and Luke’s grumpiness, Miss Patty, the coffee and the coziness to give up. So I kept on going to the end. And I kept my hate quiet because I loved most things about the show, and because it was a show that made me feel good.
But after watching a 30-something year-old Rory moan and groan her self-entitled way through the show’s reboot, I was fed up. I felt it was time to break the silence and spread some shade.
Throughout the show’s seven seasons, the porcelain skin, big-eyed darling is nothing but coddled and applauded for her intelligence and work ethic. While Rory is in fact a kind and well-read young woman, the coddling not only gets to her head as the seasons move on, but it also isn’t all that justified.
Firstly, she never really has or has to have a job. Her grandparents are millionaires, paying for both her snooty high school education, as well as her university education at the Ivy League Yale University. Her mother seems to be an endless pit of money: owning a mansion in small-town Connecticut, living off take-out and coffee 24/7, while simultaneously being the manager, not the owner until the last few seasons, of a quaint inn. Money just falls from the sky for Rory.
So Rory backpacks through Europe, spends her summers shopping and eating, and during the school year, buckles down. Good for her! Right? I mean, I’m jealous. But the show normalizes Rory’s path; a path that is all but normal.
The show also normalizes a student work load that simply is not normal or sustainable. Gilmore Girls paints Rory as some Brainiac superwoman, and it’s annoying. Having worked as an editor for one of Concordia’s weekly student papers, I am further convinced that Rory’s path is complete B.S. I’m sorry, but it is impossible to simultaneously be Editor-in-Chief of a daily newspaper, be a full-time student, and work for the Stamford Eagle Gazette.
While to be fair, the show does show some normal student breakdowns and mess-ups. I think Gilmore Girls overwhelmingly paints Rory as an example to follow, when Rory is a smart, but mostly lucky exception.
Some students have bills to pay. Some have to have a job. Some have to sleep, and cannot run on ten coffees a day. Rory isn’t relatable at all. Rory is the exception to the daunting, hard but awesomely real rule of being an adult, and being a student.
So I don’t believe Rory is a superstar student and journalist to look up to, but rather a smart, highly privileged human being with overwhelming luck.