I Am Now Actively Rooting Against Rory
I Am Now Actively Rooting Against Rory
Megan Watches Episode 123: "You've Been Gilmored"
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What’s Wrong With Episode 123: “You’ve Been Gilmored”? Rory Undercuts Her Own Ambition
By Megan
“You’ve Been Gilmored” is one of those late-seasons Gilmore Girls episodes that recycles a storyline we’ve seen many times before: A man attends a Friday Night Dinner and has an unpleasant time. We’ve seen this with Dean. We’ve seen it with Jess. And now we’re seeing it with Luke, as if added tension between Luke and Lorelai is doing anything but making it increasingly clear these two should already be broken up.
I fully do not care about their storyline, because, as Maggie and I discussed last week, the characters we witness making odd choices and being cruel to each other in season 6 seem utterly disconnected with the ones who brought on our obsession with this show in its early seasons.
We’ve talked a lot about Luke’s devolution, but this episode, for me, marks the moment where I really no longer understand Rory, and I find myself in the depressing position of actively rooting against a character I loved as a young person for her intellect and relatable weirdo behaviors.
While the new Rory isn’t living rent-free with the Elder Gilmores anymore and seems to have gotten over her brief foray into grand larceny, I still find her incomprehensible. Just one episode ago, Logan was stalking her after she rejected him, and in this episode, they’re back together and she’s moving in with him?
Whatever happened to the fiercely independent Rory of seasons past? In season 6, she is oddly subsumed by Logan. In the last episode, he blunted her triumph of getting out the Yale Daily News after Paris fell apart, and in this one, when she needs a place to stay, he immediately jumps in to rescue her from the horror of… what, exactly? We know this show has Next Door dot com energy when it comes to talking about communities like New Haven, but wasn’t Rory JUST insisting after her return to Yale that not having everything handed to her and having to live on a budget is part of the experience of being a young person?
I guess not!
This new Rory seems utterly disconnected from the Rory of even a few episodes ago. She is totally remote, a cipher who no longer reads or has a social life outside of her odious boyfriend, who doesn’t bother to ask if Paris is OK in the midst of a full-on menty B. This Rory is completely boring to me, and shallow. In this episode, when Lorelai asks what she’s doing in the bathroom, Rory responds by saying “Facial exercises! The younger I look the younger you look,” which is a yikes line coming from a 21-year-old. This Rory feels really self-involved, and affirms so many criticisms of the character that emerged in the wake of the show’s 2016 revival season on Netflix.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the scene in which Rory becomes the new editor of the Yale Daily News. While the Rory who strong-armed her way into a part-time job at the Stamford Eagle-Gazette and who battled Paris at the Franklin might have advocated for herself, Rory is essentially an object in the voting scene. She only sees herself as leadership material because other people do. And that feels wrong to me. Journalism is a competitive field, and you don’t become the editor of even a college newspaper by accident. Why shouldn’t Rory advocate for herself? Even if her triumph was ultimately hijacked by the paper’s laziest and worst staffer (Logan) last week, she did save the day.
But instead of advocating for herself, she just kind of stands around and waits to be chosen. I’ve seen Bachelor contestants take more initiative than this and standing around waiting to be chosen is their job! Rory is ultimately selected for the role, but it’s a moment that doesn’t really feel celebratory. Rory’s response is to say she’s “flattered” and to undercut her own experience by reminding everyone of her wilderness semester. It’s an interesting scene, because the way it’s framed suggests that Rory only deserves this position because she doesn’t actively want it. While Paris is punished for her ambition, Rory is celebrated for her passivity. And yet we’re still supposed to think she’s an excellent editor and leader. Welcome to a particularly tragic nexus between Gilmore Exceptionalism and patriarchal norms at work!
That’s not to say that a quieter kind of leadership rooted in nurturance isn’t possible—in some ways I’d argue that it’s the only kind that really works—but that’s not what we’re seeing. In the most recent episode, Rory didn’t even seem to know the names of everyone on staff, nor did she really seem all that concerned about Paris’ wellbeing. So why not be ambitious? Maybe because, as Jessica Grose puts it at The New York Times, “Women are often viewed as either competent or likable but rarely both. As a result, women have to spend more time overcoming these biased impressions.”
In my own career, I’ve often found myself navigating this tension. In media, young women especially get a lot of shitty messages at work: You have to be good at what you do, but not so good that it makes someone else feel threatened, and if you don’t undercut your dedication to your job and deadlines with a constant grin and availability for vapid chitchat, you’re perceived not as focused but unfriendly. As a young person in media, I often navigated this trap, thinking it wasn’t one. But well into my thirties, I can tell you that it is. And until the same is expected of your male colleagues, there’s no need to nod and grin like an idiot while you’re on deadline unless you have a continuously winsome personality and in that case, I love that for you. Never change.
The problem with Rory in this episode is that she spends most of it denying her own agency and power. She’s competent, but she leads with timidity and concern about how her semester off affects her seniority, and the show wants us to think this is a good thing. That she’s humble. But there’s a fine line between being humble and being self-effacing, and it can be a dangerous one to walk in journalism, where the labor of young women is often what motors entire newspapers with very little official recognition, and it’s depressing to see someone I think of as a Patron Saint of Smart Girls acting like the only way into leadership isn’t to decide that it’s what you want and fight for it but to wait and make sure other people think it’s OK first. Maybe that’s true to the character, diminished as she is, but it’s a betrayal of the show’s audience. Remember, Gilmore Girls was a family-friendly show targeted toward young girls. I’ve never been a fan of telling actual humans to be better role models, but Rory Gilmore is fictional, and she could have set a different example.
12 Other Things Wrong With This Episode
Rory accuses the starving student movers she contracted of eating—Baked Lay’s specifically. This feels rude coming from anyone, but especially Rory Gilmore, for whom being a Cool Girl Who Eats is a defining personality trait.
“I trust my gut,” says Luke about Anna. Any time Luke Danes trusts his gut, trouble is coming.
Lorelai makes a joke about Seventh Heaven, a show I forget existed and liked better that way.
Sorry, this is very technical, and I guess you could theoretically harm someone with one at close range, but starter pistols use blanks BECAUSE THEY ARE USED AT TRACK MEETS TO START RACES.
In his conversation with Christopher, we learn Logan has been kicked out of numerous boarding schools, so I can only assume that he got into Yale on nepotism alone. Cool and normal!
Related: Christopher and Logan are like twins, which reminds me of how much Christopher vibed with Dean. Christopher liking a Rory boyfriend is a red flag of the highest order.
Richard says “Stars Hollow real estate is skyrocketing. It’s gone up 43% in the last 4 years.” I need to know more about Stars Hollow real estate.
Luke and Michel have a huge spat at the inn, and I think we’re supposed to side with Luke but I am firmly Team Michel. Those cake hangouts with Lorelai sound fun and honestly Lorelai’s relationship with Michel is much healthier than the one she has with Luke at this point. Why not prioritize bitchy little cake chats among friends?
Rory wears a busy necklace with a v-neck sweater and I hate it.
In her resignation speech, Paris makes a joke about Judith Miller, who really made some messy choices when it came to the Iraq War. Are we sure we want to bring back Y2K?
With the exception of Mean Bill, the Yale students in this episode do not seem very smart.
Excuse me but Paris’ academic plan makes no sense. If she’s pre-med and pre-law, how does she have time to also be a college newspaper tyrant?
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