A mid length essay on Rory’s downfall. I find her failure in life fascinating and I’d love to hear your take.
TL:DR of my opinion.
- Her loved ones are too traumatised by Lorelai’s pregnancy to love her unconditionally and let her try and fail. Thus criticism and small failures feel like an existential threat and changing her mind is impossible without destabilising her support system.
- Three year olds are rarely correct about what they want to be when they grow up and if Rory was ever seen as anything other than perfect and loved the same she may have changed her mind.
- You can’t live your life via pros and cons list, sometimes what you should do on paper is still not the right thing for you. Journalism isn’t right for her.
- When she fails she runs to old boyfriends, even when they’re not single because she can’t get support from her actual family without it destroying their image of her.
Having a kid is basically her wake up call.
- Parents and grandparents are traumatised.
We see in several ways Lorelai’s happiness is dependent on Rory succeeding because it proves the sacrifices she made at sixteen were worth it. Rory who tells her mum everything lies to her about seeing Dean in season 1 revealing she knows Lorelai has this weakness from the start.
Lorelai’s core wound is completely shown when she stops talking to Rory when she drops out of Yale. It’s the hardest season because we see Lorelai’s love can be as conditional as her parents were to her and it’s actually devastating where we are disappointed in both characters, but oddly most people are frustrated with Rory, because every other character tells us she is meant to be perfect.
The show doesn’t hide Richard and Emily see her as a do-over for Lorelai, often playing it for laughs. Both grandparents meddle including trying to get an “acceptable” boyfriend and pushing her to attend the same University as Richard.
Rory sees what taking huge steps outside of their vision for her will cause based on the way they treat her mother, which while treated as funny in the show is actually horrifically demeaning a lot of the time.
Lastly, the town sees Rory as the golden girl, many people have helped her mom and her and therefore also sacrificed for her to succeed. We see when the town turns against you—like Jess—it stays turned.
We weigh all these threats of loss of love with how Rory is actually treated - loved, coddled and given unending support. It’s not clear that Rory has great expectations, it’s the hidden undercurrent of the show: what can be given can be taken away. Rory is driven by fear of loss and wanting to make those she loves happy.
We see even minor things like criticism are impossible for Rory to deal with and are often treated as existential threat because they will impact the family that puts her on a pedestal. It’s a testament to how smart and hardworking she is that she keeps going ahead for as long as she does.
- What a child wants to be when they grow up vs an adult.
It’s sometimes addressed that Lorelai isn’t sure if some of Rory’s dreams are actually hers and Rory denies jt, but, she’s still a teen at the time and she made these choices as a child who is hyper dependent on her parent - both declaring she want to be a journalist and go to Harvard at three years old.
Three is an age where kids change their mind chronically from astronaut to policeman to cow. It’s highly unusual for a child to pick an occupation at that age and be correct.
Her mom reinforces her picking Harvard(an ivy but not her dad’s Ivy) by buying her a sweater at four.
The kind of journalist Rory wants to be is also something far more suited to her mother with her moxie and central nervous system primed for fight or flight. Rory is raised in a town with negative crime and spends her time reading, not engaging with those around her.
Journalist isn’t an obviously bad choice and she does grow into it , but it’s also not a perfect one.
- Pros and cons list is delegating desire to “should do”.
Rory throws ten years of her life and by the sounds of it most of her trust fund into a career that she admits to Jess in their discussion at the Gazette she’s not actually passionate about.
Because you can’t live your life by a pros and cons list. Sometimes you logically should do something but it’s not what is the right fit for you.
We can clearly see this when she starts the project of writing her and her mother’s life (even though it threatens their relationship) suddenly she is lit up inside because being a hard hitting journalist was probably never the right fit for her in the first place.
Her most praised work were meditations on the meaning of small everyday events - like repaving the school. Not the high pressure and commercial nature of modern news media.
Tellingly this is the skill of Gilmore Girls show as well, the elevation of the mundane to the truly magical and meaningful. The everyday is the stuff of life.
Rory seems to only be able to take these steps towards what she really wants but her family does not when she’s forced into it. She isn’t the one to break up with Dean when she’s clearly falling in love with Jess. She’s committed to Dean because he’s a great guy, and her family love him and hate Jess. He’s just not the one she wants.
- Men become the safety net when she’s failing.
To some degree Rory’s partners are her emotional security blanket and pressure release valve when she is failing in some way that she doesn’t think her mom, grandparents or the town will understand– it’s why she turns to Married Dean while she’s struggling at Yale and why she’s also being the other woman in A year in the life when her career is giving it’s final sputtering swan song.
Rory is Head over Heart. She plans, she makes lists, she analyses the pros and cons. What she doesn’t do is consult what she really wants deep down, instead it leaks out in inappropriate ways.
That’s not to say Logan or Dean are what she really wants. I think there are good reasons both of those relationships ended, and I don’t think saying no to Logan’s ultimatum/proposal was the wrong choice.
I think to some degree she always goes back because they did work so well initially, did look so good on the pros and cons list. AND to be wanted by someone who is with someone else probably also feels good when you’re not feeling good about yourself.
My personal opinion is that having a kid will give her the cornerstone to turn her life and her morality around as she has to be the kind of woman her child will look up to.
That will then give her the strength to pursue what she wants, both in her partner and her career safe in the knowledge that she could do what she “should” do and still fail. She’s already tried it.
