“It’s often said that, no matter the truth, people see what they want to see. Some people might take a step back and find out they were looking at the same big picture all along. Some people might see that their lies have almost caught up to them. Some people may see what was there all along. And then there are those other people. The ones that run as far as they can so they don’t have to look at themselves. And as for me, I can see clearly now. XOXO —Gossip Girl”
Watching Gossip Girl in my teens was an experience. Though my life in no way mirrored the school in the show, which took place in a private school in the Upper East Side of Manhattan with “Manhattan’s elite”, I found quite a bit of overlap between my high school experience and the high school experience in the show. When I binge-watched the show on Netflix in high school, I was hooked for so many reasons (the plot twists, weird love triangles, lies, and just general craziness the show most definitely served), I can by far say that my favorite character has to be Blair Waldorf.
Blair is the literal opposite of me in so many aspects, but she was no doubt the most dynamic character on Gossip Girl, and she was almost like an anti-hero. Analyzing her character would put you in a very grey area because although anyone who has watched the show has undeniably learned at least one lesson from Blair Waldorf, she has moments where she is more villainous than anything. She was manipulative and stopped at nothing to get her way, to the point where she blackmailed and sabotaged every other character in the show in a scheme for either more power or payback.
Yet, she still was my favorite character on the show. All of the manipulation, the drive for power, and these negative qualities were the result of Blair’s insatiable appetite for success. She knew that she needed to be assertive to achieve the goals that she manifested for herself, one of which was to have the perfect grades and extracurricular activities to get into Yale. She took her life and her future so seriously that she went through any hoop to try to make that happen, and although Yale didn’t work out, she was still able to achieve her dream of going to an ivy league college by maintaining her grades and transferring to Columbia. She wanted to be a model, a princess, a CEO, the HBIC, and at the end of the show, you could see that her ambition and drive lead her to be exactly all of those things.
Under her hard-shelled exterior, Blair did have a heart of gold, and her relationships with Chuck, Serena, Nate, etc. demonstrate how hard she would go for the people she loved, even if helping them caused her to have a downfall herself. Her relationships with her friends aided greatly in her character development throughout the show. At the beginning of the show especially, she came off very blunt, unbothered, and devious, reciprocating any trouble that came her way, but it was all a front to hide her emotional vulnerability, sensitivity, and compassion. Blair did the same thing many of us still do in real life, which is to hide our insecurities and our hurt with a mask, to hide the vulnerable side of ourselves to the world. Why show that you’re scared, alone, and confused when you can walk in with confidence and prove to everyone that you will embody greatness?
I never would have thought that a teen drama, which doesn’t usually tend to be realistic or at all reflective of the average teenager’s life, could have taught me so much about myself through a character, but it did. The Gossip Girl creators did an amazing job creating a character that didn’t fit into one group or type of person, and that is completely relatable even though the actions within the show aren’t. Blair exhibits all of the insecurities and the frustrations that most of us have to experience at one point in our lives and shows us that there isn’t just one stereotypical way to handle our problems or to live life. Her character perfectly reflects the grey area that we exist in and shows us that even the best character can have many character flaws. Through both positive and negative aspects, Blair Waldorf taught me so much about how to work even harder to achieve my goals (in the right way), reinforced that loyalty, intelligence, and self-confidence can go a long way, that style is everything and that I shouldn’t settle for anything other than the absolute best. Blair is and will always be the perfectly imperfect character on Gossip Girl because crazily, we all have an inner Blair.