Rory Gilmore: The Price of Perfection

In this video, we explore the life of Rory Gilmore, the protagonist of the popular TV series Gilmore Girls. We explore her struggles, her triumphs, and her ultimate burnout.

timestamps-
00:00 intro
00:50 Season One
07:05 Season Two -Three
13:47 Season Four -Five
23:45 Season Six- Seven
29:58 Is Rory that bad?

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of Logan Huntzberger (a Gilmore Girls analysis), deep dive, video essay, reaction, the vampire diaries, pretty little liars, gossip girl, chuck bass, Emily in paris, rory gilmore, Lorelai and luke, dean, Amy Sherman-Palladino, Lauren Graham, Alexis Bledel, Melissa McCarthy, Jared Padalecki, Milo Ventimiglia, jess Mariano, dean forester, why logan is perfect for rory, character analysis, Emily and Richard. Stars hollow. Season 7 finale. A year in the life Netflix revival. Maddy Perez euphoria, Lily Collins Emily Cooper, carrie bradshaw, Riverdale, Serena Van Der Woodsen, Twilight, Lili Reinhart, Aria Montgomery. Wednesday with jenna Ortega, penn badgley. Luke danes, lane kim. Rory- the OG annoying millenial by the take. in defence of rory. why everyone hates rory. Rory's downfall by trinity tay. the exact moment rory's downfall begins. character analysis.

[katevenhorst]

Rory should have gone into a career in Academia. I think she would have been genuinely happy as a professor or a literary research assistant.

[alyzu]

Many, many, MANY years ago I was applying to colleges and auditioning for theater programs. I remember going to the NYU audition and the woman who spoke to us said something so important: "Each of you is probably the star of your high school 's drama program. But now you're going up against other stars. The playing field is different in college." It wasn't said in a mean way, and I think it was an eye-opener for most of us.
Rory was told that once, by Paris. And she panicked for a few hours, until she got back home and everyone reassured her she was all things great and wonderful and not to worry.
So, no, it wasn't a surprise that she turned out the way she did.

[roter]

Rory is what happens when you are always told how great you are when you're young and then when you get into the real world, criticism hits you like a truck. She reminds of kids in "gifted" programs at schools. None of the ones I went to school with have done much even though they were the "best and brightest".

[michaelpeter]

‘Rory is still following a plan for her life that she made when she was a teenager, that no longer serves her’ I just got read for filth!

[trinaq]

Mitchum actually made a really astute point over Rory not being cut out for journalism, since she does really unprofessional things, such as fail to prepare for an interview, and fall asleep while interviewing a subject.

[icemanljk]

I think the best way to put it is: as she got older, Rory became the exact person that Lorelai didn't want her to become: An entitled little brat who thinks she can use Richard and Emily to get away with anything.

Everything lorelai was worried about when the show started ended up coming true by Season 5

God's, she's insufferable in season 6 🤦‍♂️

[lbwnova]

Tbh, I sometimes can’t help but think that Mitchum’s “you don’t got it” speech is a test for a lot of his interns. If his interns don’t meet the criteria he holds them up to, he tells them this little speech to either motivate them to do better or find a field better suited for them. To me, Mitchum seems like a down to earth asshole. He knows he’s privileged, he acknowledges it and even admits when he uses it to his advantage (like offering Rory an internship to apologize for his family’s behaviour) so he seems like an honest man. He’s not an asshole for the sake of it. Which is why I believe the above

[bethr.]

I’ve started to see the whole series as a cautionary tale about privilege. As much as Lorelei rejected her own privilege, she still held onto the idea that the “best” for your kid was an elite education. She says in the first or second episode of the series that it was her dream for Rory to go to Harvard because she didn’t get that chance. That idea, spawned from her own privileged upbringing, forced Rory into a world of entitlement (her grandparents’ world). She was never allowed to be content in her small town, middle class life because “it wasn’t enough”. She always had that expectation to be more than her mother looming over her. And when she couldn’t reach those goals, she’d self destructed.

[lindseybellamy]

I always felt Richard and Emily pampered Rory a lot and did those things partly out of fear that she would cut them off the same as Lorelai did and they where desperate for that not to happen.
I like that Rory made mistakes because that's part of life but I hated that she never seemed to learn from them or take responsibility and everyone around her like her mom did the same and blamed everyone but Rory for every mistake.

[stephjovi]

As rude as Logans dad was, he had a point. She's not tough enough to be the investigative journalist that she dreamed of being. She was in college she still had time to change her major

[foreverpumpkin]

When you mentioned how you thought Rory's downfall started with her knowing her grandparents I was shook, because I've seen this show numerous times over the years and always tried to pinpoint moments where Rory "started to go wrong" and it never occurred to me that her grandparents were that bad of an influence, but it's true. I think it's possible Rory could have grown up to be a very different person had she never met her grandparents and to an extent I think the entire lifestyle revolving around Ivy League schools and wealth did more harm than good. When you look at a character like Jess and how he turned out without all of that, I think it puts it into perspective a little more.
It's tough because Lorelai was trying to do right by Rory getting her into Chilton and asking her parents for help but maybe it would have been better for her if she had had to work harder to achieve her dreams like Lorelai had to do, instead of basically having things handed to her.

[bethanymears]

Here is why I actually like Rory (Character-wise, not necessarily as a person):

I think the downfall that everyone talks about was inevitable, not necessarily only for the reason most people give (that she was spoiled as a child and never had any consequences), but also based on a writing perspective. The character of Rory in the beginning was perfect, she literally could do no wrong to everyone around her, I remember Luke even telling Lorelai once that Rory was like the angel on top of the Christmas Tree, she was put on a pedestal not only for the townsfolk, but also for the audience. The problem with this is, it was impossible for her to have any sort of character growth because she was already the "happy-ever-after-type person" that most characters become at the end of a show. There was no way for her to go but down. So the mistakes she made, which yes were a little over the top but still human, made her seem like this terrible person. But with a character like Paris for example, she started off as someone you were meant to hate and grow to love. If Paris would have done any of the things that makes Rory a 'bad person', no one would bat an eye or mention it, because we look for the way she has experienced growth over the course of the series, which was impossible for Rory to do.

[RilianSharp]

rory ignored the fact that emily and richard abused lorelai, just like how lorelai ignored that richard's mom abused emily.

[spaceninja]

I disagree with something that feels like no one talks about. Rory is far from perfect from the beggining, and I don't know how so many people have missed it.
If you pay attention you'll see. She always had a sense of entitlement, like when she got the first D of her life at Chilton, and flipped out that time they didn't let her take some other test because she was late after studying all night. Even her friendship with Lane is more about Rory than anything else.
The way she had almost a sense of superiority on academic life, and people who deviated from that were not ambicious enough. She mostly disrespected any authority figure that challenged her views, ever since season one. The way Rory talks to her family, her mother especially, as if she's the family's standard of maturity and they should learn from her.
All of Rory's boyfriends have always been on stand-by too. She thought of them as HER options; she flirted with/kissed Jess while dating Dean, slept with Dean even though he was married, went out with Jess and only told him she was dating when Logan showed up. Not to mention how much she cheated on poor Paul...
I love her character, but she needs some tough love.

[trinaq]

Thank you for covering Rory, Serena! As Rory got older, she just became more entitled and spoilt. In the revival, she kept forgetting about her boyfriend Paul, using him as a crutch after she was floundering in her journalism career. It makes sense, as she was used to being coddled in her small town, and she just couldn't handle that other people were just as smart as she was. Plus, the "joke" about Paul was just mean spirited, not funny.

[stefanygomez]

As an former journalism major I can tell from experience that Logan's dad was right, she was just didn't have what it takes to be a journalist nor she did have the intention to develop the necessary skills to become one. I loved Rory because my personality was similar to hers (overachiever, quiet, booklover kinda of girl) and I also was studying journalism in college and wanted to be an investigative journalist. Seeing her was like seeing myself in the mirror.
Around the same time I was watching season 5 I also experimented a crisis because I just didn't feel like journalism was made for me, I lacked the necessary skills to succed in the media world and I recogniced some of these flaws in Rory too. In my case I was not an extrovert, I was not "metida" (in spanish is the person who finds a way to be involved in anything they want and even be part of it easily), my interview skills were bland and I was not ready to confront (or even argue) someone with questions. Being a journalist is more than just be good at writing and it's essential to know how to handle criticism, specially when all your work will be published to everyone to see if you are not already on tv exposing your skills as a journalist to the world. I think that Rory was lacking a lot of these essential skills and really didn't put a lot effort to develop them. If she really wanted to be a journalist, she would've work hard to prove Logan's dad how wrong he was. At the end of the series I saw her a little bit more motivated to change and follow that path, but that though was destroyed when I saw how she ended up in the reebot.

PS: I changed my major to social communication (that focuses on social projects) and I couldn't be happier. What I love is not interviewing but helping people through creative campaigns and activities. I think that if Rory woul've try other subjects and majors, she would've find her true passion.

[hrpt]

I always empathize with Rory. I went to a nice high school just because I got a scholarship. Everyone always told me I was "the perfect daughter". Then in uni, everything came crashing down. I went to a nice uni through a scholarship and it was the moment I realized I'm not the only person with a high IQ. And the paradox is that I acted as 20-something years old my whole life but in that moment of my life, I started acting like an emotional teenager. The fact that that happened to Rori too, and the fact that I couldn't pass exams as easily as in high school hit me. I had "the luck" of not having anyone rich in my family who could sustain not doing anything for months, so I had to get over it and my life ended up better than hers in the finale

[katemccrea]

The fact that Rory was obsessed with Harvard but never even knew the bare minimum requirements to get in was always puzzling, especially considering that she went to all those fairs. It was weird that Paris freaked out that episode where the college admissions officers came in because she always seemed five steps ahead. For a school like Chilton, wouldn't they have had more recourses and college days dedicated to things like that? As for Mitchum, he wasn't wrong, but he had questionable motives about why he gave her that feedback in the first place, but Rory should've kept that in mind since she was certainly aware of that fact going INTO the internship.

[annamelanie]

Rory is a great example of "gifted kid syndrome" wherein she was very much so praised and put up on a pedestal in her childhood and teenage years, only to realize that things were not going to be the same in college. Seeing her become noticeably more entitled as the seasons progress only shows that she wasn't very prepared for "adult life" and that nothing will come as easily as it had before. It was realistic portrayal of everything concerning growing up and realizing you do have to work as hard as everyone else.

[simslovealot]

I dislike Rory for a whole host of reasons, but strangely enough the one time I feel she is the most relatable and I feel the most sorry for her is when she wants to drop out of Yale. In the scene where she's discussing it with Lorelai, she is clearly very lost and is starting to realise that her dream might not be her own, but one that her mother, grandparents and people around her have put on her. She's trying to work out what to do and wants to take a step back and see what else is out there. But instead of trying to listen to her and understand where she's coming from, Lorelai s angry and responds with criticism and "NO". This I think is maybe really Rory's downfall, the part where no one tries to help her out of a rut and a crisis of who she wants to be (which we've all been through) and instead continues to push her and doesn't give her space to think and find out who she really is.