Okay, in the haze of the ALA conference and a number of other things, this list spilled over into a new month. Forgiveness!
If you haven't watched Gilmore Girls (which also made my list of favorite love triangles), here are the basics:
Lorelai Gilmore ran away from her stiflingly blue-blooded parents when she was sixteen and pregnant with her daughter, Rory, rather than marry Rory's father.
When the show begins, Lorelai is a hotel manager in the quaint and quirky New England small town of Stars Hollow, and Rory is sixteen, starting at a high class prep school, the first expense Lorelai has had to turn to her parents for since she left.
The series follows both of them for almost seven years, through their various romantic entanglements, their career steps, their rocky relationships with Lorelai's parents, and through it all, their relationship with each other.
When he leaves with a bad case of the shudders, they go about their day, indulging their shared caffeine addiction, bantering with the diner owner and Lorelai's ultimate will-they-or-won't-they foil, Luke, and we realize quickly that they're both extremely intelligent, especially Rory, and have a great sense of fun, especially Lorelai.
Lorelai's the cool one, Rory's the responsible, ambitious one.
Suffering clear flashbacks to her own missed opportunities, Lorelai takes an instant, arbitrary disliking to Dean, plays her seldom-acknowledged mom card, and insists Rory go through with the transfer.
For better and worse, Lorelai's not quite as happy-go-lucky as she presents herself. She’s a mom, loving and well-meaning, figuring things out as she goes, and influenced by her own issues.
Rory comes to be glad for the transfer but keeps seeing Dean, who does win Lorelai's approval with his general decency,
Lorelai and Rory's relationship is complicated, made more complicated by their shared difficulty maintaining healthy relationships with men, and naturally goes through a temporary falling out plotline because, hey, it's a long running show, but it's always fascinating and believable, because neither of them gets stuck playing antagonist, mentor, or McGuffin to the other one.
Lorelai can turn on a dime from being the wacky, often annoying friend who talks Rory into competing in a Dance-A-Thon with her to embarrass their more annoying neighbor,
In making the top spot on this list, Lorelai has the definite advantage of being a parent on a TV show that's about, of all things, a positive parent/child relationship.
Hey, stranger things have happened.
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