Gilmore Girls has never really been a major hit as a series, but during its original run on both The WB and The CW, and because of its long running success on Netflix, the little show that could has developed something of a cult audience. Following the lives of mother-daughter duo and best friends Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, the series is a slice of life dramedy, filled with bizarre pop culture references, far too much caffeine, and soapy love triangles and romances that inspire passionate debates and side taking.
In the wake of the revival series, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, which premiered on Netflix over the Thanksgiving holiday in 2016, viewers have become increasingly critical of the series. The rose-colored glasses have come off, and with time, devoted fans have begun to realize that the sleepy little town of Stars Hollow is nowhere near as perfect as they once perceived it to be. One of the main subjects of discussion has been the fact that Rory Gilmore, once every young nerdy girl’s hero, isn’t really all that she’s been made out to be. Regardless of what romantic partner you prefer, or whether you were more interested in her unconventional relationship with her mother, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Rory just really isn’t a good person, or at the very least, one that makes any remote semblance of sense.
With that being said, here are 20 Things That Make No Sense About Rory In Gilmore Girls.
Her Hypocrisy About Faithfulness In Relationships
It’s one of the points of contention during Rory and Logan’s relationship: Logan has a bit of a reputation as a Lothario, and so, when he and Rory are briefly on a break, you know what happened. He also lets Rory attend his sister’s wedding, which results in her being in a room full of bridesmaids, all of whom he has been involved with at one point or another. This leads to a massive fight between the couple around the subject of fidelity in relationships.
As it turns out, Rory is hardly the model of faithfulness herself. She gets close to Jess when she’s with Dean in season 2 and again in season 6 while seeing Logan, she gets even closer with a married Dean in seasons 4 and 5, and of course, she carries on a lengthy involvement with an engaged Logan in the revival.
She Cancels Her Dreams Of Harvard Because Of Her Grandparents
One of the most defining traits of Rory’s character from the beginning of the series is her desire to attend Harvard. Her room is filled with Harvard memorabilia from the start. In an early season 2 episode, she and Lorelai sneak away from Stars Hollow and visit Harvard’s campus, with Rory sitting in on classes and proving that she can hold her own against the professors and students. When it comes time for Rory to apply to the colleges on her list, it’s beyond clear that Harvard is the one for her.
Yet, somehow, Harvard suddenly goes out the window at the drop of her hat when her grandparents, both proud Yale alums, shoehorn a surprise Yale interview into her schedule one day. Because of their influence, Rory re-configures her entire world view, much to her mother’s chagrin, and ultimately decides that Yale is the school for her.
She dates a man who’s a carbon copy of her father
Given Christopher Hayden’s almost total absence from the first fifteen or so years of his daughter’s life, it stands to reason that Rory would have her fair share of “daddy issues.” What makes this subject all the more uncomfortable is the revelation that the writers played with the notion of these psychological scars to the extent that they designed Rory’s longest relationship to feature a man based entirely on her absentee father, according to Entertainment Weekly.
Christopher and Logan have far too much in common: they both come from worlds of outrageous privilege, they both refuse to accept blame or accountability for much of anything, they’re both womanizers who think they can do no wrong, and they both fell from grace with their families. They do, however, work their way back into their families’ good graces because names and money are what mean the most to them.
She consumes nothing but junk food and coffee, but never has to exercise
Try and come up with a time when, outside of the occasional lighter Friday night dinner with her grandparents, Rory eats something other than junk food or drinks something other than coffee that is way too strong. When she’s at home with Lorelai, there’s never anything remotely resembling healthy food in the house, since most of their food comes from Luke’s, Al’s Pancake World, or some other unhealthy restaurant in town.
Even when she moves on to Yale, Rory seems to gravitate towards the quick and easy foods in the dining hall, and her study food of choice appears to be late night macaroni and cheese (don’t even get us started on the high level of caffeine consumption she displays), and yet, despite all of her increasingly unhealthy habits, Rory is never once shown exercising, unrealistically maintaining her shape for the entire series.
She uses most of the men in her life for her own gain
After living her entire life constantly being told that she’s the best there is, it’s only natural that Rory would wind up believing it, too. As a result, she often places her own needs and desires above those of others, even if it means using people for her own gains and ignoring the validity of their feelings along the way. Over the course of her time at Yale, she takes advantage of Marty’s friendship, knowing the whole time that he has romantic feelings for her and using that to her benefit.
Similarly, she accepts a date from Life and Death Brigade member Robert in order to get close to her real intended target, Logan. In the revival, she carries on a relationship with Paul, for no apparent reason other than because it’s convenient to have a boyfriend whose niceness she can count on.
Her entire career path in the revival
Rory’s dream for the entire series is to become a successful journalist. When the original series ends, she’s already heading in that direction. When the revival picks up ten years later, it’s clear that Rory never really learned how to function as an adult with a career. After having a single editorial published in The New Yorker, Rory is aimless, and, supposedly, broke.
She bemoans Condé Nast for not dropping everything to have an interview with her, then waltzes into an interview with a lesser known online publication expecting the job to be thrown at her feet. When she secures a piece on people who wait in line for hot new items and events, she falls asleep mid-interview with her subject. In the end, she winds up back at home in Stars Hollow, reviving the local paper with no budget.
She never respects her mother’s wishes
It’s typical for teenagers to act out against their parents, but when a teenager and her mother are written to be as close as Rory and Lorelai are, it’s jarring to see that teen in question act out in the ways that Rory does. Rory is always used to getting what she wants, so when her mother denies her the few things that she does, Rory immediately goes to seek the answer she wants elsewhere.
For the most part, these solutions are found via her grandparents, who can never say no to their perfect little golden granddaughter. Most of the time, these inquiries involve money, things that Lorelai had been too ashamed to ask her parents for, but Rory doesn’t have that same problem. In other cases, Rory seeks out Luke’s or Max’s advice in areas where Lorelai has already told her no.
She gets involved in her mother’s romances
It’s always an awkward storyline when single parents decide to start dating again. Parents are left to figure out when and how to introduce their children to their new significant others and it almost never happens at the right time, even when the kids are as old as Rory is during the original series. Without fail, Rory becomes far too emotionally invested in her mother’s relationship. In Lorelai’s relationship with Rory’s own English teacher, Max Medina, her investment begins to cross over into her daily life at Chilton.
When it comes to her mother’s on again, off again connections with her biological father, Christopher, Rory is almost childlike in her investment, hoping for a day when her parents get their acts together and get together. It’s her investment in her mom’s relationship with Luke that crosses the most lines, seeing as Rory has already had her own quasi-parental bond with Luke long before he and her mother became an item.
She drops out of college because her boyfriend’s father is mean to her
Nothing says “ah yes, this kid has what it takes to make it in the big leagues” quite like dropping out of Yale because your boyfriend’s unpleasant father was mean to you. Yet, that’s exactly the narrative Gilmore Girls tries to sell its viewers when, following Mitchum’s comment that Rory doesn’t have what it takes to become a big league reporter, Rory summarily drops out of Yale and goes on a downward spiral of privilege that involves stealing a boat and getting arrested.
What makes this all the more laughable in retrospect is that, as it turns out, Mitchum was entirely right. The revival merely proves that Rory really doesn’t have the commitment and responsibility it takes to become a reporter, especially in this day and age of highly competitive journalism. The joke’s on you, Rory Gilmore. You really can’t handle the truth.
Every man who lays eyes on her falls in love with her
We get it, Rory has a waif-like innocence and cuteness to her that many would find irresistible. But does literally almost every man that Rory interacts with, whether in the original series or the revival, have to fall head over heels in love with her on the spot? From first boyfriend Dean, to Chilton rival Tristan, to bad boy with a heart of gold Jess, to college pal Marty, to rich kid Logan, to Finn and Colin and Robert, to Paul in the revival, even the guy in the Wookiee suit, Rory’s list is impressive, and totally unrealistic.
That’s even without including a few one-off dates here and there, most of which are set up by her meddling grandparents. There’s no way that she’s possibly able to juggle all this male attention, considering how unbearable she can be when you actually get to know her.
She causes chaos in people’s lives and never cares unless she’s publicly affected
In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes a certain class of rich people as “careless people” who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together.” Nothing describes Rory’s character better during her college years, as her privilege begins to show itself when she ruins other people’s lives and never cares about the consequences.
After she gets involved with a married Dean and claims that he is hers, Rory doesn’t care at all when Dean and Lindsay have a very public, humiliating split, only showing a shred of emotion when Lindsay’s mother publicly calls her out for her selfishness. Similarly, she ruins Marty’s relationship with his new girlfriend by, for no real reason, claiming that she and Marty had never known each other, which of course, blows up in her face and costs her her friendships with both Marty and Lucy for some time.
She runs away to Europe instead of dealing with the consequences
Rory Gilmore and conflict avoidance: now there’s a relationship we could get invested in, seeing how often she’s running away from responsibility and consequences of her actions at all costs. One of the worst examples of her lack of willingness to accept responsibility comes at the start of season 5 when, after getting involved with Dean and contributing to the gradual dissolution of his relationship, Rory has a big fight with her mother and quickly leaps at the opportunity to run away to Europe with her grandmother for the summer.
It’s a way out that only the most privileged members of society have, and it’s one of her most selfish actions in the entire show. After basically pulling the pin in the grenade and throwing it into Dean and Lindsay’s relationship, she flees the scene of the crime and leaves Lorelai behind to act as the messenger on her behalf.
She never makes time for Lane, who’s supposed to be her best friend
Friendship is supposed to be a two-way street, with best friendships even more so. In the early days of Gilmore Girls, it’s clear that Rory and Lane are almost like sisters to one another, privy to their innermost thoughts, always willing to listen, and lending a hand when they can. But what becomes quickly apparent is that the friendship scale is anything but balanced between them.
Soon, most of their scenes tilt heavily toward Rory’s side of the scale, with her glorified rich people problems and insufferable relationship disagreements taking up the bulk of their conversations. Lane is forced to deal with most of her problems alone, or with the help of her Hep Alien bandmates, while Rory is off gallivanting with rich kids and spending time with her sudden best friend Paris.
She gets close too her source
As we’ve already seen, Rory Gilmore is hardly a paradigm of professionalism. Her journalistic attempts are routinely unsuccessful once she’s left the safety nets of Chilton and Yale. But you would think, given all the time she put into learning the ins and outs of the journalism world, she would have learned one of the founding principles of good journalism: never, ever compromise your source, and, for that matter, never, ever get involved with your source, either.
Rory goes right ahead and does just that in the revival, getting involved with a mystery man known only as the guy in the Wookiee suit during her attempt at writing about people who wait in line for events and goods. No wonder the story never goes anywhere.
She thinks her Gilmore family name will solve all her problems
The very fact that there’s an episode of the series called “But I’m A Gilmore!” should give you a sense of the entitlement that Rory displays when it comes to her family’s breeding. Although she was raised by a single mother of moderate means, Rory somehow always much more closely identifies with the prestige and arrogance of her grandparents’ family line, choosing to seek shortcuts whenever possible based on the perks of social name networking and Gilmore connections.
Not all of her problems can be solved by her family name. Being a Gilmore doesn’t help her during difficult times at Chilton, nor does it really help her that much at Yale, either. It doesn’t help make her acceptable to the unpleasant Huntzberger clan, nor does it win her any favors, except in the inner circle of her grandparents’ world.
She doesn’t want her exes to move on
Rory has never been a particularly reasonable person when it comes to romantic relationships. While she has no problem moving from one man to the next, she gets personally offended whenever any of the men she’s been with have the audacity to move on from her. When she rejects Jess at the end of the second season, she becomes catty and petulant when he moves on to Shane in season 3.
She breaks up with Dean in the third season, then throws a fit and demeans Lindsay when it’s revealed that they’re together and intending to get married. At the end of the seventh season, she breaks it off with Logan, only to later get involved with him again and she becomes entirely indignant when he reveals that he wants to marry the woman he’s engaged to.
She’s already a hardcore caffeine devotee at 15 years old
We’ve already talked about the fact that Rory’s diet is entirely unrealistic and how she never has to exercise or show any restraint in her meal choices. One of the most unrealistic parts of the whole thing is the fact that, when the series begins, Rory is only a sophomore in high school and all of fifteen years old, and by that point, she’s already a seasoned caffeine devotee.
Luke even tries to convince her to give up coffee early on in the series, playfully noting that she doesn’t want to grow up to be just like her mother in the caffeine department. Rory shows no signs of slowing down in her consumption, only growing worse over the course of the series.
Her relationship with Luke in the revival
Luke and Rory had a very close bond from the beginning of the series, with the curmudgeonly diner owner showing a real soft side and protective nature around the young girl. Over time, that relationship only grows closer, especially when Luke begins dating Lorelai after years of longing her from afar. Even after Luke and Lorelai break up, Rory continues to remain on personable terms with Luke.
Yet, when the revival picks up ten years later, it’s clear that Luke and Lorelai have been together for the entire time, and as such, are basically married under common law and, by the end of the revival, actually married. Not once does Rory seem to think of Luke as anything other than a guy her mom is dating, and certainly not as the stand-in father he’s been for her all this time.
She always runs to her grandparents when she needs help or money
It’s the basic premise of Gilmore Girls as a series: Lorelai rejected the world of her parents’ wealth in order to forge a life on her own, becoming independent and hard working. She likewise raised Rory to grow up with these morals, working tirelessly to get her into the best schools and give her access to everything she needed in life by working hard. Somewhere along the way, wires seem to have gotten crossed because Rory never works hard for a single thing in her life.
Instead, she runs to her grandparents whenever she needs something, whether it’s a place to live or support in dropping out of school or, for the most part, money for something she knows she and her mother will be unable to afford. Rory relies on the safety net of her grandparents’ considerable wealth, rather than trying to do anything for herself.
She never grows up over the course of the series
It should be abundantly clear by now, but just in case it isn’t, we’re going to go right ahead and state it outright: after seven long seasons, and a four-part revival series that takes place ten years later, Rory Gilmore has never really matured. When the revival series ends, she is every bit spoiled as she was when the series began. Her future is still aimless and unclear, and even more precarious now that she reveals, in the series’ final words, that she is with child.
It’s entirely possible that we’re meant to believe that Rory will merely retread her mother’s footsteps after this, finding her way through trial and error. However, Rory has none of her mother’s independent drive and hard-working ethic. How can we believe that the girl who’s never been able to mature at any point in her life will suddenly become a competent parent and successful professional overnight?
What do you think makes the least sense about Rory’s character in Gilmore Girls? Let us know in the comments!
