By Kelly Kim
Correspondent
It was the summer of 2022, and I was scrolling through Netflix, eager to watch something new. As I looked aimlessly at all of Netflix’s curated selections, I stumbled across a TV show, depicting a mother and her daughter, standing side by side and dressed in their 90s fashion and welcoming bright smiles. Intrigued by how both actresses looked so similar to each other, I decided to try out the pilot, the first episode out of seven seasons.
“There’s no way I am going to commit to such a long show; I don’t even have the attention span for that,” I thought. Two years after watching the first episode, I have now watched “Gilmore Girls” twice in its entirety and watched repeats of different episodes more times than I can count.
If you are unfamiliar with the show, “Gilmore Girls” is an American comedy drama about the lives of Lorelai Gilmore, played by Lauren Graham, and Rory Gilmore, portrayed by Alexis Bledel. It follows the energetic and comedic life of a mother and the daughter she had as a teenager. The show follows the duo’s attempt at navigating life through love and loss, relationships and dramatic changes, making life both exciting and challenging for the Gilmore girls.
Despite all the drama and eccentricities of the show, one of the main aspects that cannot be ignored is the character development and shift of Rory Gilmore. It is one that is both disappointing, but expected, to say the least.
For her entire life, Rory was praised and told she could do anything she set her mind to. While that mindset was intended to encourage her, it only set her up for failure in her adulthood. Because she was constantly praised and always did as she was told as a teenager, it meant that she rarely encountered situations in which she was told “no.”
When you have a brainiac bookworm daughter who would rather stay in her room reading “Kafka” than going out to parties, it gives a parent little reason to worry.
However, because she was constantly praised, uplifted and rarely rejected, it meant that she had no concept of failure and fear in her life.
By growing up in a small town with a tight-knit community, where everyone knows everyone, and everyone knows Rory, she had the privilege of always feeling welcomed, comfortable and liked, things that not everyone has the luxury of.
Her inability to see the amount of privilege she has is what makes her character development both humbling and pitiful to see. Not only did she have a town that loved her, she had a mother as a built-in best friend, an actual best friend in her hometown who never failed to support her, and grandparents who were both Yale alumni and supported her college education at the same Ivy League institution.
Despite all that she was given, both within and above her control, Rory became entitled and spoiled as she grew into an adult in the later seasons. Although she did get humbled as she got older, the issue was that someone with every resource and opportunity remained completely oblivious to this fact.
One of the vital moments for Rory is when she gets told by Mitchum Huntzburger, head of the Stamford Gazette, that she is not good enough to be a journalist. This interaction sends her into a mental frenzy, marking the beginning of her downfall. Shortly afterward, she resigns from her education at Yale, becomes estranged from her mother and has an affair with her married ex-boyfriend, Dean.
Despite Rory’s broken relationship with her mom following a disagreement about her temporary halt from college, Rory did not have to worry about finding a place to stay or working a job to sustain her means.
Because she had the privilege of having supportive and well-off grandparents who provided her with lodging and secured her a job at a prestigious organization, Rory didn’t struggle like someone in her position would have thanks to having all these resources.
The reason for Rory Gilmore being such a topic of conversation is because there is much discourse about how her character became slowly unlikeable and frustratingly annoying through the later seasons.
Maybe the show’s writing lost fervor and didn’t have the same passion as the earlier seasons. Perhaps the original plot that was initially established got lost through the years.
While some fans might be disappointed about the way Rory turned out, seeing as she was so successful and had so much potential in the first and second seasons, her character development seems incredibly realistic and natural.
The only way for someone who has never gone through rejection, failure and disappointment to understand them is to actually experience it themselves–an extremely unfortunate but necessary aspect to life that everyone must deal with and manage at some point, including Rory Gilmore.
