Fandom Misogyny Victim Tournament
Round Two, Bracket 4
Lorelai Gilmore (Gilmore Girls) vs. Amber Volakis (House M.D.)
Lorelai Gilmore
Amber Volakis
Propaganda below the cut:
Lorelai Gilmore:
I know that if Lorelai were a man i wouldn't constantly be seeing people (on tumblr, on reddit, on tiktok, in 8 million insufferable video essays) claiming that she's just as bad or worse than her abusive parents, or criticizing her for going low contact with them, or calling her annoying for using humor as a defense mechanism, or pointing to her every mistake as proof that she's an irredeemably terrible mother, etc. Like, I've seen how people treat single dads in media who have made far worse parenting mistakes than Lorelai ever did, and they get so much more grace than she does about everything. She was a runaway teen mom who grew up with emotionally abusive parents. I think, considering those circumstances, she did a pretty damn good job.
Lorelai, my best friend! she's funny, she's hot, she's a small business owner, she has so so much ADHD, she's a coffee addict, she's always volunteering in her community, she is physically incapable of not making a joke at the most inopportune moments, she loves her daughter more than anything, she's confident and self-assured but also her worst nightmare is for her daughter to turn out like her. When she was 16 she found a town full of people as weird and off-putting as she is and she's never ever going to leave. She's trying so hard to break the cycle of abuse and be better than her parents, and she's not always as successful at it as she wants to be, but she always owns up to her mistakes, and she never stops trying!!! She's complex and nuanced and if I see one more person compare her to Amy Poehler's "cool mom" character in Mean Girls I'm going to explode. People just love to take complex female characters, especially moms, and reduce them to caricatures of themselves and then criticize them based on that caricature, while completely ignoring their actual actions and behavior.
While Lorelai is more loved than some other submissions I can’t help but to feel that the criticism she receives is often in part due to misogyny. She handles her abusive parents with so much grace yet the 30 percent of the time she does clap back she gets accused of being immature to her poor old mother who just wanted a relationship with her. I don’t think a man would be expected to smile as his mother told his child that his old golf clubs were collecting dust with the rest of his potential. I also think that her snarkiness would be more appreciated coming from a man rather than just “annoying.” The last point I’ll make is when people blame her for Christopher’s failures. Apparently her not staying with Richard and Emily for the rest of her life forced Chris to become a deadbeat?
She broke the cycle of emotional abuse. She was an imperfect mother but she was overall a good person. Rory never questioned if she was loved and Lorelai didn’t ever need to make someone else feel small to matter. This coming from someone who’s source of comfort growing up were the maids that her mother didn’t even care enough to keep the same one in the house for any stretch of time.
Amber Volakis:
People simulateously dismiss her relationship with Wilson and make it her whole character. They also take her competitiveness from a competition and assume it applies to her in all aspects of her life. For someone who had a major impact on the show she's often ignored.
