Gilmore Girls Thoughts, Part 1

Hello!

We'll just ignore the fact that I missed the second day of BEDA. I suppose I started as I mean to go on? Oh well, onto day 3!

Julia asked for my thoughts on Gilmore Girls and the revival! That seems like something I can do because I have a lot of thoughts! I will say that they have changed a lot overtime and continue to do so. This will obviously be VERY FULL OF SPOILERS. So warning in that regard!

First, in relation to the revival: I hated it. I should just get that out of the way now. I've only watched it once, despite my numerous rewatches of the first five and a half seasons of the show, because I hated it so much. I loved getting back to Stars Hollow, and maybe my expectations were just too high. The over-hype strikes again.

I think the main thing I disliked is that supposedly all these years had passed, yet the characters had somehow had no growth in between. In fact, they seemed to have gone backwards in some regards? I understand that it would be weird to have a bunch of off-screen plot and character development, but I just found it a bit strange that supposedly Luke and Lorelai had been together all this time and had never talked about marriage or children. Plus, Lorelai's relationship with Emily was worse than ever. And don't even get me started on the insane visit to Paris' surrogacy agency.

At the time of viewing, I hated how Rory's character seemed to have imploded, but I actually have less of a problem with it now. She'd had some success in her field as a freelancer, and I think she was going through a pretty common thing for people around her age: the quarter-life crisis. I think she realized that she didn't have the passion she'd once had for journalism anymore, and she was feeling a bit lost as to what to do next since that had always been her driving force. Thus the blowing of the interviews, the unprofessional behavior with the wookie, and the general aimlessness. I don't like how she treated her boyfriend though (repeatedly forgetting he existed...this attempt at a joke completely missed the mark for me) or a few things about how she and Lorelai behaved, such as the fat-shaming at the pool. There was stuff like this in the original series, but I give it more of a pass because it was a different time back then. However, those type jokes don't hold up well rewatching the series, and they REALLY don't hold up well in a revival that was made so recently. It just felt like cheap shots/attempts at humor by the writers to me. They were trying too hard to bring back the quippy dialogue with that, I think.

Oh, and the final words. As an infertile person, I have a strong bias against accidental pregnancy plots. They can be really triggering to people in the trenches of treatment. But I'll try to separate myself from that bias to discuss this plot point. What is with Gilmore Girls and freaking accidental pregnancies? The entire show is based on one. I get that, and I accept it. But Lorelai and Chris were teenagers, probably with really poor sex education and little to no access to birth control options. Okay, I get it. But Sherry's pregnancy in the original series? Obviously a plot device to break up Lorelai and Christopher, but seriously, they are grown people. They know how reproduction is supposed to work. They have access to birth control. And Christopher has experienced an accidental pregnancy before! Surely he'd be hyper-paranoid. I feel similarly about Rory's accidental pregnancy at the end of the revival. HOW?! How does a girl who was the product of an accidental pregnancy and whose life was indelibly shaped by it somehow get pregnant by accident?? Surely she would have been doubling up on birth control, with an IUD AND a condom or something similar. And if she'd somehow missed a dose of birth control or something, you know she would have been taking the morning after pill. I get the whole coming full circle thing, but really. This would have made some sense at the end of the original series, but not while Rory is a fully grown adult rather than a freshly graduated college kid.

This has ended up longer than expected. I'll save my thoughts on Rory's character in general for a later post.
.
Oh, and to answer Bridgette's question, the Terry Pratchett book I'm reading is Guards! Guards!. My husband suggested it'd be a good next step into the Discworld world for me. So far I've read Color of Magic and Monstrous Regiment.

-Leah