Rory Gilmore: A Character Analysis
"He's not a married guy. He's Dean - My Dean." This line will never stop giving me the ick. Rory Gilmore said this line in the last episode of season 4 of the beloved show Gilmore Girls. Even though I didn't like Rory from the beginning, everything went downhill for her after this season.
The show revolved around the lives of Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, a mother-daughter duo from a small town called Stars Hollow. Lorelai had her when she was only 16 and had no support from Christopher, Rory's father. How Rory was raised played the biggest role in shaping her personality and can be attributed to her many mistakes as she stepped into the real world. Lorelai had a permissive parenting style which meant that she was more like a friend than a mother to Rory. While I loved their relationship, this style was the reason Rory always expected to get everything she wanted and whenever that didn't happen, she'd end up doing the most extreme things as a way to cope. After all, she did steal a yacht, ended up in jail, and dropped out of Yale because her boyfriend's father, a renowned journalist, told her she didn't have what it takes to be a journalist. Dropping out of college because one person says you don't have the "it factor" just shows that Rory had no idea how to handle rejection and didn't have enough self-confidence to continue.
Some people are of the view that Rory's downfall was an influence of her third boyfriend, Logan, but she would have still done all these things had she not been dating him. Rory was a mix of an id (the pleasure-seeking part of our personality) and an ego (the rational part of our personality) dominated person. Her id side made her seek whatever made her happy even if it was at the cost of others...which is exactly what she did when she slept with her married ex-boyfriend, Dean. Since her father was absent in her upbringing, she also developed a lot of daddy issues which is why she was probably the red flag in all her relationships.
Rory Gilmore has become a part of many teenage girls' lives for generations but I would never tell anyone to strive to be like Rory. She had her good parts, like everyone and she made many mistakes, like everyone, but we see in many instances that Rory always put herself first and didn't care enough about people, even her best friend Lane. This made her more dislikeable and was the reason people didn't pity her enough to forgive her mistakes.