who is rory gilmore and who are you?

a bold and slightly silly new gilmore girls research project

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I feel like I’ve been trailing the start of this series forever, but then I got completely caught up in writing my Big Paper for my Big Conference, and then I got the plague. So coming to the start of my big Gilmore Girls idea feels like something we (I) have had in the works forever, like a momentous occasion.

The purpose of this essay is to share the research question and research methodology for my very important, not frivolous at all, research project. I’ve got about eight weeks left before the PhD starts, and while I can’t predict completely what that will be like, I do think it’s fair to say I’ll have less time for silly little media studies side projects for about four to six years from October. So this is how I decided to use this last little bit of time, doing something completely unrelated to medieval studies that doesn’t enhance my employability even a tiny bit.

What I want to work out is:

How well read is Rory Gilmore compared to how well-read we want her to be? What does it say about us that we the fandom imagine a Rory Gilmore who doesn’t entirely exist? What can we learn from the imaginary Rory, the more literary Rory, who we would all rather remember?

I’ve been fascinated by the totemic figure of Rory Gilmore that exists among bookish girls on the internet for a really long time. She’s less a character people love and more a patron saint. I mean that quite seriously — the relationship I see people on various social media having to Rory as a guiding light and way of living reminds me of medieval cult saints as much as anything else I see around me in the modern world. Rory has taken on an afterlife completely separate from being a character in a show. On TikTok as I write this, the hashtag #rorygilmore has been used in 396,600 posts, well over double the number her mother, the other main character, gets.

The Rory that exists in these TikTok posts is a well-read girl/woman. She exists as an avatar of studying, learning for learning’s sake, classic literature, writing skill, Shakespeare essays. People who love her on social media amplify her most literary qualities and reflect them back at each other through posts and fan edits.

I’m not saying Rory isn’t a reader in the show — sure, she’s got a book in her hand a lot. She likes to read, but more in early seasons than later seasons, and perhaps slightly less than our folk memory remembers. When I started rewatching the show for this project, I tried to note down her reading in each episode, what she says about it, and how it’s portrayed.

We’ve all read the Gilmore Girls book list, which exists across the internet in a bazillion Goodreads lists and quiz challenges that invite you to see whether you can truly ‘read like Rory Gilmore’. That list, with four-hundred-odd books on it, has suffered some mission creep in its lifetime. I’m not sure the list’s original creator intended for it to be used as a checklist of how to be like one character in the show. A bunch of the books on that list might be a book Richard mentions owning a copy of, so we can’t even be sure he’s read it, let alone his granddaughter. There are books Luke mentions having disliked in his childhood on there. So the list gets roundly criticized for having an artificially inflated total number of books, which I’m not sure is completely fair as I have no idea of it having been intended to be used that way.

There’s also the Real Rory Gilmore book list, which was created to fulfil the actual brief most readers wanted from the longer list. As far as I can tell from the blurb from the creators, it sets out to include books Rory mentions having read, or someone else mentions her having read, or we see her reading, or we see on her bookshelf, or a school scene makes it clear she has been assigned in class. This is more along the lines of what people want, and it’s a good list. I think it just goes up as far as the end of season three, unless there’s an update on another website I don’t know about.

The Rory we see in the actual source text, the actual episode, reads but reads less than we might imagine based on the moodboards we’ve seen. She mentions a lot more films than she does books. When I mentioned this project to a friend who knows the show but isn’t invested in any online fandom, she said ‘but Rory doesn’t read that much does she? She studies a lot and watches films?’. I was confused by that for a moment — surely reading is Rory’s main personality trait? The episodes make my friend look pretty correct, though. Even in season one, arguably Rory’s most bookish time, whole episodes go by without a book meeting the Real Rory Gilmore book list’s standards for inclusion, but she’ll mention ten films.

So where can I go to meet Imaginary Rory and compare her against her source text counterpart?

The answer, of course, is fanfiction.

This essay doesn’t exist to be an ode to fanfiction (though I could easily write one), but I do want to talk for a minute about how much of a disservice we do ourselves when we skip over fanfiction as a way of understanding how people feel about literature. Fanfiction is an act of love, given away for free, used to build community, used to build and shore up theories and interpretations. Its organic, chaotic and whimsical nature, responding only to the changing tides of people’s feelings and not to publishing industry decisions, makes it feel wonderfully medieval to me. In my academic life as a medievalist, there are concepts I can only try to explain to my non-medievalist friends and family using fanfiction concepts. Modern publishing couldn’t create the Arthurian legendarium, but fanfiction could.