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Gilmore Girls: From Hero to Zero

Updated: Feb 9, 2023


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Stars Hollow, Connecticut: the story of the Gilmores, mother and daughter who talk too much, eat junk food and fall in love. Always.

Sometimes they also fight and act like drama queens, but they are still lovely. When they don't whine too much.


Many years ago I used to daydream I was Rory Gilmore.

Well, a lot of girls my age did.

Gilmore girls was a show which aired between 2000 and 2007, and it followed the life of Lorelai (Lauren Graham), a 32 year-old single mother, and her 16-year old daughter Rory, whose full name is also Lorelai (Alexis Bledel).

The portrait of these two women stands out as the main characteristics of this show, but the two Lorelais are linked to grandma Emily, Lorelai's mom, too.

Mother and grandma do no not get along well at all, but they have one thing in common: they love Rory. She was terribly pretty, determined, ambitious, well educated and an avid reader with the perfect boyfriend, Dean, who loved her at the point of building her a car for her sixteenth birthday.

The daughter and granddaughter everyone would like to have.

But being perfect is easy, when you have no bad temptations.


Since the arrival of Jess Mariano (Milo Ventimiglia) in Stars Hollow, we get to know another side of the cute and innocent blue-eyed girl.

The soon-to-be couple is united by their love for literature and writing, but is kept apart by Jess's difficult personality, which seems to push Rory to cheat on her boyfriend, skip school, escape in New York and having car accidents during the night.

But let's be honest: Mariano was a typical bad boy of the early 2000s, but he wouldn't be so, nowadays. He was just a guy with a difficult childhood and a bad temper, who wasn't able to be as nice as Dean. His role, though, is that of the boy who pushes the perfect girl out of the right path, and that's why he vanished as fast as he had come, during season 4. Meanwhile, Lory left for Yale (and what a shame for Lorelai! She chose the same university as her grandpa Richard, Lorelai's dad, after being accepted by three Ivy League colleges, and Mother Gilmore had to make a big deal about that. As Shakespeare would have said: much ado for nothing. the Ivy League is the Ivy League, come on!) where she met Logan Huntzberger, a rich and handsome boy who proposed to her at the end of season 7, the day before her graduation. She refused, though, because she chose her career as a journalist, which was just about to start with a long trip following barack Obama's campaign.

So, season 7 closes with the promise of a brilliant future for Rory, but the 2016 revival made us discover that this expectation hadn't been fulfilled at all.


Rory is 32 and works between London and New York. She has written a successful article on the very famous magazine The New Yorker, and she works as a biographer of a crazy famous woman who treats her like hell and who eventually fires her out of the blue.

The young Gilmore Girl has nothing to do but going back to Stars Hollow, live with her mom and stepfather Luke and refuse a teaching job at her old high school. Just in case someone didn't notice how spoiled she was in the prevous seasons, when she wasn't even able to accept criticisms on her skills as a journalist, and at 22 years old she refused a job at the Stanford Eagle Gazette because she was, like, waiting for The New York Times. For real. The world is full of young and talented journalists who might be hired by the Times, and she thought they were waiting for her, just because she had a dream.

After she says no to Chilton High School, everything she does is hanging out with her former-boyfriend-now-lover Logan, who is about to get married and who, as we get to know at the very end of the revival, eventually leaves her pregnant.

So, her life seems to be a path from hero to zero, but a tiny bit of hope for her future comes with the comeback of another former boyfriend, Jess.


As true fans will remember, the GG fandom was divided in three teams: #teamdean #teamjess and #teamlogan and I have to admit I belonged to #teamjess and I still do, because the chemistry between Ventimiglia and Bledel, and their characters, is not to be compared with any other love story in the show.

Also in the revival, Jess ispires Rory to believe in herself, to write about what she knows and feels and, above all, not to give up. Even when she works for free at The Stars Hollow Gazette and sees her career crumbling.

And there, I remembered why I used to daydream I was her.

Having a Jess Mariano who believed in me and in my art, and who pushed out of me emotions I didn't even know I had was my personal fixation, as a young girl, and I think it might be Rory's too, if the producers and Netflix decide to agree with another season of the revival.

We don't know if we'll go to Stars Hollow another time, but one thing I know for sure is that I would have preferred an imperfect Rory Gilmore from the beginning of GG.

Her determination in trying to become a journalist was admirable, but I think the producers started out with her as a projection of the daughter that her mother never was for her grandma, and consequently all her family spent too much time protecting her and idealising her and her future.

She was never prepared for failure; she didn't even know it was an option.


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