Everyone hates Dan but I don't understand why. What makes him worse than any other character on the show?
Yes, every single character on Gossip Girl did something horrible at some point. But the reason why many people see Dan as the worst, as the outlier is that Dan was never taken to task for his actions.
The series ends with the revelation that he is a stalker who utilized malicious gossip and lies to gain entrance to a society he consistently ridiculed and demeaned. His actions were excused as a so-called “love letter”, and he still ended up with the IT girl in the end.
Even before the finale, though, his horrible actions were never punished or rebuked the way the other characters were. Blair lies and schemes to haze a teacher and loses her admittance to Yale. Blair refuses to face her feelings for Chuck marrying Louis instead and is not only publicly humiliated but gets trapped in a loveless marriage.
Jenny lies, sneaks out, sleeps with Chuck, disappoints her father, and gets shipped off to Hudson by Blair and Rufus. Nate cheats on Blair with the girl he loves but is repeatedly passed over by Serena and forced by his parents to deny his feelings in order to protect the Archibalds’ finances.
Serena engages in a questionable relationship with a married man and almost ends up dying after he abandons her in the wreaked car. Serena fights with her mother and ends up in jail.
Chuck trades Blair for a hotel and immediately gets dumped; Chuck sleeps with Jenny instead of waiting for Blair to show up at the Empire State Building and ends up getting shot. Chuck schemes to get rid of Dan in 4x18 and immediately gets rebuked by Blair for his actions. Chuck hits rock bottom, earns the disgust of both his best friend and the woman he loves, and is still presented as a horrible person by Dan’s site and by Dan himself even through he spends an entire season working on himself, on becoming a better person.
Every single one of these characters were rebuked at multiple times during the series and every single one of these characters grew up as a result of them facing the consequences of their actions. The closest Dan ever comes to a consequence is losing his friendship with Vanessa, but that never seemed to affect him the way losing Serena’s friendship affected Blair (and vice versa).
He writes a book that characterizes Serena as a “nothing” and ends up on the New York Times Best Sellers list. He cheats on Blair with Serena yet Blair had already broken up with him by the time that fact comes to light and all he loses is the possibility of being her friend, which he did not seem that interested in to begin with. He sleeps with a teacher — the same one Blair reports for an inappropriate relationship with a student — and still gets into Yale.
And, unlike all the other characters on the show, he never loses the respect of his father. He (allegedly) gets a girl pregnant, and his father supports him. He writes a book that slams everyone in his life, mischaracterizes Blair, and glorifies himself, and his father supports him.
It is revealed that he was Gossip Girl, that he posted about his sister losing her virginity online and his father just shrugs his shoulders because Jenny knew about it so, obviously, it was okay. And he even though he is still posting and publishing terrible exposes about his so-called friends and family within in one episode of the finale, he still gets the girl in the end and everyone is supposed to forget about what he did and move on with their lives.
Because, according to Gossip Girl, it should not matter that his site and his lies and his actions embarrassed his sister, humiliated Serena multiple times, contributed to the events where Blair lost her baby, presented Nate as an idiot, undermined his friendship with Vanessa, or constantly reflected a side of Chuck that Chuck was working to change as he manipulated people into getting what he wanted — a relationship with Serena, one with Blair, admittance to the Upper East Side, publication and fame. Nope, he’s supposed to be the good guy. How despicable.
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