@hufflepuffminds asked: So, I've been reading through some of your asks, and I like your take on things. I've been trying to explain to my mom why Jess isn't the devil incarnate, and Dean isn't the perfect angel, but she has a hard time seeing that.
That being said, I fully understand that Jess and Rory weren't a great couple in Season 3, for a multitude of reasons.
However, I have to say my one of my favorite scenes for them (even though they aren't a couple) is the "WHY did you DROP out of YALE?" scene, and I'd like to get your take on it.
Thank you, I appreciate that you like my takes.
I feel like the same people that obviously hate Jess take to conveniently misinterpreting the Yale scene in question severely, and they often do this for the sake of twisting it into a negative scene or a scene that somehow paints Jess in a terrible light, despite the complete opposite happening through it. The fact that Jess before and after this scene is both defended by Rory and behaves completely calm and collected against Logan's incessant nagging and repeated attempts to belittle him in front of his friend/former girlfriend only furthers this interpretation.
I've seen someone say that Jess's sole appearance and him being able to write a book should've been the one thing to snap Rory out of her haze over Yale, and I've also seen others try to say that apparently, even Jess's appearance wasn't needed, and that if someone like Lane had succeeded later in life and come back to visit Rory, this would've had the same effect that Jess's appearance did on her. But both of these interpretations are wrong because a) it had to be Jess, because he was the one most unlikely to succeed in his life after his last season 4 appearance, even more so than Lane, and b) it had to be Jess being direct with Rory and making her confront the question at hand, which is what exactly is she currently doing with her own life. Because the truth is, Rory kept saying that she wanted to find another path if Yale and journalism wasn't something she was meant to do, but she didn't even try to do that once she dropped out in season 5. We kept seeing her distract herself with community service, with organizing parties for the DAR, and even with her relationship with Logan, but we never saw her try to find some other path in her life because she was too hung up on the path she apparently lost by thinking she's never gonna be a good journalist, based off of Mitchum's words. And this is why Jess simply appearing and showing Rory that he did something with his life wouldn't have been the final push that Rory needed in order to go back to Yale, because she would've continued to try and distract herself from feeling like a failure over it. Everyone in her life at that point didn't correctly try to approach her over Yale, and after a while her grandparents and Logan just avoided the topic altogether. But Jess, having been through something similar in his own life where he lost almost a complete sense of himself and then turned a new leaf and rebuilt his life into something better, didn't tiptoe around the subject and just confronted Rory over it head-on. And the thing is, Jess doesn't negate or belittle Rory struggling with dropping out, he simply says that whatever happened isn't complicated because at the end of the day, it's her own decision whether or not she drops out. Jess doesn't ask her what happened or what Mitchum said or what she did, he simply asks what's going on with her that led her to this state that she's in where she's obviously not happy. And it's this particular question that snaps Rory out of it, which is further proven by her later rant to Logan at the bar where she starts to wonder what her life has even come to, because it's obviously not one that she wants for herself.
There are other people that proclaim that Jess simply can't allow Rory to be flawed and not the "perfect person" that he saw her as, but I disagree. Jess doesn't see Rory as perfect in the slightest, especially when she made some mistakes in her life with him. But he cares about her and in this episode, it's clear to him even in their first meeting in years that she's not really happy living at her grandparents' place and having to sneak around, all while avoiding the subject of the DAR and Yale because she stresses that it's "all temporary". Also, a lot people seem to forget that the series and it's characters thrive off of emotional conflicts. And it's a television series, which means that moments like this are bound to be dramatic and loud and obvious. It's practically part of the entire show's formula, and it's also why it's become one of the more infamous moments in it.
