Discussion YMMV / GilmoreGirls

Should the Retroactive Recognition entries be moved to the Trivia tab?

Edited by Astraea802

Pulled these:

• Unfortunate Implications:
  • There's never a character who ends up at a top university or has any sort of academic ambition who doesn't also go to a prestigious private school. All the students we see at Stars Hollow High, the only public school mentioned and one that doesn't seem too bad, are either bad students (Jess), average and unambitious (Dean), or seem to have no interest in college or otherwise don't really talk about academia or their future (Lane). Lane was an especially egregious example, since her obsession with music could have actually made her great in the music industry, as an agent or producer, with a little academic ambition. It's not even given as an option to stay at Stars Hollow High and have a hope at Harvard, nor did any character at Stars Hollow High express hope of going to a university that wasn't local, religious, or a community college.
    • When Rory says that her ancestors came here on the Mayflower to point out her prestigious lineage. It kind of suggests there's something about being descended from White Anglo-Saxon Protestants that immediately precludes your family from being looked down upon. Unlike everyone else. While this could just indicate pride in her background, Rory, and her mother to a greater extent, often dismiss their lineage and their family. But tell Rory that she doesn't have good breeding and suddenly she's a Gilmore! And the Huntzbergers would probably have looked down on minorities as well, or anything less than a wealthy, WASP background, so Rory's giving into that sort of perspective gives it a sort of legitimacy, since she's the protagonist.
  • Dean's behavior as the show went heavily implies that he's emotionally abusive, given how short he tended to get in regards to Rory and later, towards Lindsay. In the first two seasons, before Jess even enters the picture, Dean calls her house multiple times and threatened to break up with Rory over her prioritizing her schoolwork over time with him. And yet, the show portrayed Rory as holding up Dean as an ideal boyfriend, calling him "her Dean".
  • It is often implied that Jess suffered considerable abuse at the hands of his mother's boyfriends and Liz' poor choice is men is Played for Laughs while Jess is chastised for being hard and defensive. This gives the implication that abused children should shut up and get over it and it's entirely their fault for having problems even if their parent/guardian invited bad elements into their lives.
    • The episode with Liz's wedding has a pretty terrible scenes all on its own. Liz tells Lorelai about all the men she's been with and the list includes at least three husbands, several boyfriends that she admits weren't "good guys", and a couple of men that walked out on her and Jess. Lorelai - who has spent three seasons attacking and criticizing Jess, and in the very next scene mocks him for reading a self-help book - laughs and encourages Liz about her next marriage. Apparently its fine to be friends with the woman who brought this stream of not-so-good-guys into her kids life, but obviously the kid himself is the devil incarnate.
  • When you look back on the series as a whole, there's a lot of scenes of women frantically apologizing to men, often for things that aren't entirely their fault or aren't actually that offensive as if genuinely afraid of their reactions, rather than just as a basic wacky misunderstanding. The Lorelai/Chris/Luke triangle was fairly central to the show, but in the later seasons Luke's jealousy got to be really over-the-top, to the point where Lorelai was wildly promising never to see him Chris again (even though he's the father of her kid) and Luke was saying things like "We're not fighting...yet" in front of company. Dean showed many signs of this as well with Jess as well...and of course Rory did eventually get with Jess, and Lorelai eventually slept with (and married!) Chris, which really just makes it all worse.
  • The Sookie and Jackson relationship had some weird aspects in the later seasons, particularly when Sookie basically ordered Jackson to get a vasectomy immediately after the birth of their second child, and his shocked-and-then-resigned reaction was Played for Laughs (when of course it would have been horrifying if a husband had forced his wife into sterilization). Then it turns out he didn't get it and Sookie is shocked to find herself pregnant basically against her will. The Retcon is somewhat justified in that the writers had to accommodate Melissa McCarthy's real-life pregnancy, but they probably could've found a less cringey way to handle it.
  • Luke's character is portrayed as being a non-nonsense man, who won't take bullshit from people (especially Taylor), has a bit of a temper, but also a heart of a gold. In later seasons he interrupts a bicycle race in a manner that ends with some cyclists crashing and becoming injured, and also threatens them with a baseball bat - and it's still shown as a comedic incident, just another aspect of not going along with the town's crazy events. When he and Lorelai temporarily break up, he mistreats his customers in the diner and physically abuses some of them when they complain (as well as that one guy who just wanted to get seated). And nobody locks him in the jail or call him a sociopath, it's just treated as a natural, if temperamental reaction of a heartbroken, but ultimately decent guy.

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As per the Unfortunate Implications page: 'no example may be added in this article or on a work article, without proof that it's not just one person thinking.' In other words, citation is required.

• Strawman Has a Point: We're supposed to see Lorelai's parents as uptight, judgmental rich people, but they are often right about her irresponsibility.

  • Except that, even when they are right about her irresponsibility, they're still being uptight and judgmental about it. Hence, the impasse in Lorelai's relationship with her parents and why they will never get along with each other...well that's my take on it anyway. Ex. In "Richard In Stars Hollow" where Richard spends the day with Lorelai and criticizes her eating habits, her clothing choices, the way she interacts with her co-workers, and her relationship with her daughter. Now, while he may have had some legitimate points about all of these things (notably, Lorelai being okay with Rory accepting a car Dean made for her, without asking whether or not he had it checked by a mechanic) I think the point that the writers were trying to make was that neither Richard nor Emily respects Lorelai as an adult capable of making her own choices, which is especially egregious considering that by the age of 32 she's raised an honor student, bought a house, worked her way up from a maid to executive manager of a successful inn, and is putting herself through business school.

I just removed the "Except that,..." part from the YMMV page because it's natter, and I'm not sure how to integrate ot. If someone else knows how it could work.

In general I restored a bunch of content that was deleted recently because it all looked perfectly valid, especially for a YMMV page, and just needs to be cleaned in case other people see some issues with it. Just don't delete it wholesale!

Edited by 216.99.32.45