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I think the part that bugs me the most about the revival is Rory’s characterization. Nevermind her personality or the life she is living, but just the writing for her & Alexis’s acting. I could practically see the vibe she was giving off – the “I don’t know this character anymore” vibe. & it wasn’t entirely Alexis’ fault either because even her script felt weird ( i.e. since when does Rory Gilmore wake up saying “more pizza??” ). It’s like they were recreating Rory with the Rory and Lorelai solutions, but they accidentally combined it as 25% Rory, 50% Lorelai, but then accidentally dumped 25% Miscellaneous in the coffee pot. 

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iconic

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Y’ALL KNOW WHAT DAY IT IS

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I think it’s safe to say the general consensus is that Jess deserved better in the revival. I agree to that of course; Jess has deserved better for a long time and I’m glad it’s being so widely recognized. However, I also think we’ve been ignoring the character who was done the most disservice, Rory Gilmore. I just want to say that Rory Gilmore deserved better. 

She deserved better than to be portrayed as someone who would continuously cheat on her boyfriend, and participate in an affair with an engaged man. I am well aware that Rory doesn’t have the best track record in the cheating department, but despite her mistakes she has always owned up to them, felt guilty, and apologized. She’s never cheated simply for the sake of cheating; there have always been other factors involved. She deserves better than being seen as someone who would reduce her relationship with a person she once loved to an affair, soiling and dirtying their very real, very important connection.  

She deserves better than to be portrayed as someone who hasn’t emotionally developed since her 20s, someone who, despite living on her own in the real world, outside her coddling town (which induced the entitlement in the first place wyi) is still self-important and naïve. She deserves better than to be written as irresponsible, careless, and apathetic to her effect on other people. Rory deserves better than to be barely shown mourning her grandfather, one of the most important people in her life, as if his death barely affected her, despite the amount of time devoted to Emily and Lorelai’s grieving. She deserves better than being shown as misogynistic in the year 2016, despite her feminist values, that were once weighed down only by their place in time. 

Rory Gilmore deserves better than having little to no attention dedicated to her friendship with Jess Mariano, who has been one of the most important people in her life since she meet him at 16 years old. She deserves better than being shown to, seemingly, care little about his achievements and growth, despite being his first, and one of his biggest, cheerleaders. She deserves better than to have not seen him in over 4 years, than to seem unconcerned with loosing such a substantial person, and not attempt more communication once she does she him again. 

She deserves better than to have virtually nothing to show for the past 10 years of her life career-wise. I understand the realism of Rory’s situation, but at the same time there’s no way driven, ambitious, workaholic, Rory Gilmore’s only career advancement in the past 10 years is a handful of freelance articles. She deserves better than being shown as so snobby she considers teaching a “failure” and snubbing higher education, despite being a lover of academia. She deserves better than being left with an autobiography (a good idea and certainly a potential success, but also extremely insubstantial and quite possible to fail) as her only given opportunity for success. 

Most of all she deserves so much better than to be victim to a flimsy and unsatisfying ‘full circle’ ending. She deserves better than having to give birth to a baby from an affair, without any idea of how present Logan will be in it’s life (not to say he’ll be absent but he’s also not likely to be a full time caregiver). She deserves better than to have all progress in her career, the most important thing in her life, halted by a pregnancy she didn’t plan or want. She deserves better than to become her mother, seemly incapable of learning from her own or other’s mistakes. She deserves better than to fall into the life her family tried so desperately to protect her from. 

She deserves better than to become someone who would, honestly, make her past self cringe. I have never said Rory was an angel. She had a great deal of flaws but a large sum of those flaws were based in immaturity and circumstance, and I think that she deserved better than to be denied the opportunity to grow and evolve into somebody better. Rory Gilmore deserved better than this revival, and honestly she deserves better than having her character get shit on by all of you as if this is any accurate portrayal of her personality whatsoever.

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I don't think we're ever supposed to interpret it as Jess trying to force Rory into anything, but it very easily comes across as him pressuring her. I don't think that this is worth hating him over (and I certainly don't hate him at all!!!) but I also am always a little ick to see people defend his actions because he was upset. It's fine to say "he did this because he was upset" but less fine to say "it is okay that he did this because he was upset" because I think in the long run he did make Rory uncomfortable and she did have to tell him to wait multiple times and he did act very poorly and it should be recognized. I honestly just really wish that scene had never been included because it really doesn't offer any character development, all we learn is that Rory and Jess are shit at communicating which we already knew...

I am absolutely fed up at people who think that Jess tried to rape/force sex on Rory. That is not what happened at all. You might hate Jess, but misinterpreting what is happening to make an excuse to hate him just annoys the shit out of me. I don’t want to start dramas with anybody, but Jess never did that. He was disappointed that he couldn’t graduate, he wanted to reassure Rory that he loved her, and wanted to express that. He thought sex would show that. He was wrong, and when Rory was uncomfortable he stopped completely. He was not angry at her. He was angry at himself because part of him believed that he ruined everything between them in that exact moment. Watch the scene after reading this, focus on Jess, focus on how he is portrayed. He is not some malicious sex obsessed teenage boy. He loves her, and he’s not going to be able to take her to prom, or make her happy in that way. He misunderstood the situation, but he never forced her, he respected that she wanted to stop, and then got upset with HIMSELF. I have ranted about this over and over. But I am sick to death of people using this against Jess for the wrong reasons.

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I think the biggest thing is the lack of malicious intent, and that's an excellent point!! but I can see why people would interpret it differently, because Rory did have to tell him to stop multiple times before he listened. Like, I think it's kind of a poorly handled scene bc it is really easy to read it as rape-y and I get why it makes people uncomfortable, even though I don't think they meant for it to be viewed like that at all. It's one of those scenes that I wish wasn't there at all, because they could've fought without it and not had it be this questionable thing

I am absolutely fed up at people who think that Jess tried to rape/force sex on Rory. That is not what happened at all. You might hate Jess, but misinterpreting what is happening to make an excuse to hate him just annoys the shit out of me. I don’t want to start dramas with anybody, but Jess never did that. He was disappointed that he couldn’t graduate, he wanted to reassure Rory that he loved her, and wanted to express that. He thought sex would show that. He was wrong, and when Rory was uncomfortable he stopped completely. He was not angry at her. He was angry at himself because part of him believed that he ruined everything between them in that exact moment. Watch the scene after reading this, focus on Jess, focus on how he is portrayed. He is not some malicious sex obsessed teenage boy. He loves her, and he’s not going to be able to take her to prom, or make her happy in that way. He misunderstood the situation, but he never forced her, he respected that she wanted to stop, and then got upset with HIMSELF. I have ranted about this over and over. But I am sick to death of people using this against Jess for the wrong reasons.

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Sometimes I think that I'm over the shitty revival ending

but then I check and nope, I'm still bitter

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So I just watched a new interview with Lauren Graham and in it she said there was a ‘dummy’ ending scene that was passed around to throw people off the actual ending/final four words, and 95% of people thought it was the actual ending. She said it involved Rory on a train, and she looks up and sees someone that the audience doesn’t (I think she says something too, but Lauren didn’t remember what) and then it cuts to black.

But honestly, I’m so salty because that is a WAY better ending than what we got. Dare I say it might even have been the perfect ending? Because it has just the right amount of ambiguity…presumably the person Rory sees would be her endgame (though maybe it could’ve been someone else, like career-related, depending on how it was set up) and it allows people to feel like there’s some sense of closure (Rory does end up with someone, or chooses her career, etc.) but it doesn’t step on anyone else’s idea of what exactly that should be. It also wouldn’t have been contingent on actor availability.

Like I’m kind of floored by how genius of an ending that would’ve been, and baffled that at no point did Amy think this might’ve been so much better and more satisfying (while still leaving it open-ended) than the bullshit she gave us. How much fun would we have had coming up with theories over who she saw? Some people who wanted it all tied up in a bow might’ve been disappointed, but I think for the most part people would have loved it, and it would’ve done a great job of keeping the fandom alive with speculation, going back and rewatching to find clues (seriously, that would have been so much more fun to discuss than “who’s the baby daddy”).

Anyone else just want to pretend this is what actually happened? lol.

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I actually think about this a lot because it's already a known thing that people compare Jess and Lorelai...but I don't know!!!

it’s literally in the same episode so it’s a fairly obvious parallel and like I don’t think I’m discovering anything new and exciting but I’ve never seen anyone point out or gif or anything the scenes in s3e2 where Lorelai asks Chris is he’s still with Sheri and Jess asks Rory if she’s still with Dean….

probably because nobody wants to compare jess and rory with lorelai and christopher, right….well me either but here we are

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We need to have a serious talk about this Gilmore Girls fic.

As Will Smith once said, OK. Here’s the situation. 

Someone is writing The Subsect. Jess’s novel. I’m frankly amazed that in all the years of online Gilmore Girls fandom that no one has attempted to do this before, and it’s entirely possible that someone has. But I’m too new to this fandom to know, and if someone tried to write The Subsect before, it probably wasn’t like this story. 

Because here’s the thing. This version of The Subsect, in its current online metafictional form, is fucking amazing. It’s so good that I thought, after a first pass, that it might actually be very good, very well-placed guerrilla marketing for the revival. But I don’t think it is. I think it’s just a fic. Written by some wicked smart person somewhere out there. 

If you want to read it, it’s here. The single most devastating thing about it, so far, is that it’s only two chapters long. 

I have many thoughts about this story, but let’s start at the beginning, in the first chapter. 

And as a note, the following contains many spoilers, so if you want to remain unspoiled in regards to this story – however filthy and corrupted your mind may already be – stop reading now, go read the damn first chapter of The Subsect, and then come back and read this. 

I’ll wait. 

Thoughts on the first chapter of the fanfictional Subsect, in no particular order. Here come some bullet points…

The first chapter is set in New York City, where we find Jess growing up as a youthful hoodlum and accomplished card shark, as you would expect. The level of accurate, ultra-specific detail about NYC in this story, though, is mind-boggling. Subway stops. The names of businesses. Geography. Every word of it – with a couple of fascinating exceptions, which I’ll talk about – is real. And it’s not just accurate in general. It’s accurate to the period of the story. An example: At some point, the narrator – called J., but I’ll presume it’s Jess – mentions a bookstore near Columbia University named Labyrinth. It’s real, but it’s now under new ownership and has a new name. You’d never know this, ever, unless you went to that bookstore before it was renamed. So whoever’s writing this is a New Yorker and has been for a while, or they’re a research freak of truly epic and admirable proportions. 

The story contains a freakishly contextual reference to Italian opera, and an ominous quote from Julius Caesar in Latin that both foreshadows the conflict later in the chapter and harkens back to Jess’s growing affinity for gambling. This is not garden-variety fanfic, friends.

The story invents a completely genius plot device that has Jess leaving NYC for Stars Hollow not just because he’s bad and is doing bad things — although he is and does, per cannon and the details of this story — but he also leaves the city in the wake of 9/11. The craziest thing about this? It totally works. The episode where Jess steps off the bus in Stars Hollow aired on October 20, 2001.

There are two references in this story that are clearly fictionalized. (And there may be more. I just haven’t spotted them yet.) The first one is about Liz working at Shrafft’s as a waitress. Newsflash: There is no Schrafft’s anywhere in NYC, and there hasn’t been since maybe the 1970s. So why the fictional reference amidst all this hard, cold, New York-y reality? Well, here’s the deal. As the story mentions, the Scrafft’s where Liz works is on 79th Street, and there was indeed a Schrafft’s restaurant on East 79th Street, though it was closed long before the action of this story takes place, and has now been torn down. But this particular Schrafft’s is notable because it was mentioned in a J.D. Salinger novella called Raise High the Roofbeam. Who would write that kind of obscure reference into a novel that’s otherwise positioned as a thinly veiled memoir? Why, your favorite pretentious literature nerd and mine: Jess Fucking Mariano. In fact this reference breaks the otherwise factual fabric of the story. It fucks up everything that’s been so meticulously plotted before and after it — including the piece’s careful attention to geography. As Liz gets off her shift at the fictional Schrafft’s, she beelines it for the 2 train to head uptown to her next job in the Bronx. Well, the Salinger Scrafft’s was on the East Side of Manhattan, where there is certainly no 2 train. The point of all this? To make you, dear reader, believe in your soul of souls that Jess Mariano wrote this story. If he wasn’t a fictional character on TV show, I might think that he actually did. The other fictional reference is when J. describes being robbed and beat up in a park in Bensonhurst by the Jones Street Boys, who are a fictional gang in the video game The Warriors.

It’s also worth mentioning that the chapter’s opening language is so very, very true to Jess’ character. The sense of poetic surreality. The ten-cent words. The thin veil of fiction over what’s clearly a memoir. It is the kind of stuff that first-time dude novelists do when they’ve spent too much time reading the beats. The result? It’s all weirdly convincing. I don’t just believe that Jess wrote this story. I believe that there is, in fact, a Jess. So how did we get here? Where the best piece of metafiction I’ve read all year is a Gilmore Girls fanfic? Tell me that.

I have more to say about this story. But I need to re-read the second chapter first and this post is really long and annoying, so I’ll stop. 

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it’s literally in the same episode so it’s a fairly obvious parallel and like I don’t think I’m discovering anything new and exciting but I’ve never seen anyone point out or gif or anything the scenes in s3e2 where Lorelai asks Chris is he’s still with Sheri and Jess asks Rory if she’s still with Dean....

probably because nobody wants to compare jess and rory with lorelai and christopher, right....well me either but here we are

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Jess’s hair: an ongoing discussion

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