Rory Gilmore is undoubtedly the it-girl of fall. And while usually I’d find no issue criticizing Gilmore…today I won’t. The reason is simple: I love her. Rory Gilmore is a complicated character. She tends to body shame, she’s self-centered and upholds exclusionary ideals of beauty. And if she were real I wouldn’t even attempt to idolize her. But that’s the great thing about her. She’s not real. So when someone says they want to be Rory Gilmore, we all know they aren’t talking about the privileged Rory, or the pretentious Rory (though they are very real). We know they don’t mean to talk about Rory with the unhealthy obsession of being perfect. When someone says they want to be Rory Gilmore, it means they want to be a more productive, ambitious, put-together version of themselves. We hate who Rory turns out to be as a person. But we love who we perceived her to be at the beginning.

Now personally, I refuse to watch past season two of Gilmore Girls. There are even moments in the first season where I find Rory to be nearly insufferable. But her personality isn’t what I care about. I care about the chunky sweaters, straight A’s, and the Doc Martens. Rory Gilmore being a fake person is perfect. With her, we can do what we can’t with real people. We can pick and choose the parts of her we idolize and the parts we don’t. It’s wonderful that she isn’t a real-life celebrity. This way, we don’t have to hate her, she exists in a world that is semi-exempt from cancel culture. We rarely hesitate to cancel real people, but similar to Rory Gilmore, they aren’t real to us. Rory Gilmore is only as real as we make her, and other people are only as real as we make them.

Just as other people are only as real as we designate them to be, the same goes for us. We exist as the center of the universe only in our own minds, appearing only on the outskirts of others’ memory. It is within these outskirts that we are allowed to exist, perhaps judged, but only temporarily. It is within these outskirts that we are, in fact, allowed to be whatever we desire. We are not Rory Gilmore. Our lives are not plastered on a screen for the world to see, open to criticism from every angle. Many of us aspire to be Rory Gilmore, but even as a work of fiction, there are parts of her, well outside of her own control that none of us would ever truly wish for. We all want to pull off the Gilmore Girl fall aesthetic, and that’s perfectly ok. But there’s more to Gilmore than a chunky sweater.