SuppliedWhen I started watching Gilmore Girls I was 16 and Asian (I still am), and immediately I thought this meant I was destined to become Lane Kim. Except the thing is, I know next to nothing about music, my mom’s atheist, and I also feel like I should at least be the protagonist in my own life story. That’s when my quest to become Rory Gilmore began.
Rory’s a fictional character, but could a teenage girl ask for a better coming-of-age role model? I watched as Lorelai Gilmore III made mistake after mistake, still knowing that even though she was banging her married ex-boyfriend, she was still a good person inside. That’s a lot more slack than I’d learned to cut myself.
Not that it was all bad, Rory is admirable in a lot of ways. For one, she reads a lot. In my quest to become her though, I have to admit, I haven’t been able to get through all 339 book references in the series… yet. She’s also extremely academically motivated, from Chilton to Yale she kept up with her homework while simultaneously spending a suspicious amount of time at Luke’s eating chili cheese fries. Rory was never a perfect robot, she ate junk food and watched movies, reminding me along the way that I could succeed in high school and at the U of A (Canada’s Yale?) without sacrificing fun.
Can we also talk about how great of a friend Rory is? I mean, she stayed friends with Paris — for the whole series! Let that sink in. Rory put up with pining-after-Tristan Paris, craft-corner Paris, dating-a-professor-who-could-be-her-grandfather Paris, and even Krav-Maga Paris. It’s not that Rory didn’t want to kill her sometimes (don’t we all have friends that we want to sometimes), but she was loyal and loving to her nonetheless.
Lane is substantially easier to love and and is a great best friend to Rory, their friendship is inspiring. They didn’t grow apart despite their different ambitions and places in life. Throughout the series we watch Rory struggle to figure out which world she belongs to — the ritzy life of Richard and Emily or the working class, small town life of her mom. Rory ends up balancing them pretty well and ability to do so can be pretty well be summed up by looking at her relationship with Lane.
Finally, my quest to become Rory Gilmore would not be complete without becoming a student journalist, so here I am. I’m not going to lie, I didn’t consider writing for The Gateway until I saw Rory writing features for the Yale Daily News and thought, ‘Wow that looks fun, and I could have my own desk!’ While I have yet to infiltrate any of the U of A’s (definitely existent) secret societies, I did go to a “sexpo“ on the weekend — I feel like Rory would be proud.
This Friday, with the release of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life on Netflix, I’ll be finding out what’s next on my quest to become Rory Gilmore. Oh, a freelance journalist with no job prospects? Sign me up.
