Gilmore Girls/YMMV

• Acceptable Targets: People who listen to Top 40 Music, but especially Avril Lavigne. Occasionally upper-class people, as well.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Given their belligerence in early episodes, and the fact that Paris inexplicably keeps showing whether Rory goes... one sometimes gets the impression that Paris is in love with Rory.
  • Indeed a fencing duel between Rory and Paris in season 3 makes Paris seem like a spurned lover.
• Base Breaker: Logan
• Non Sequitur Scene—Rory and Logan jumping off a tall scaffolding in "I Jump, You Jump, Jack".
  • "I just had a dream that Madeline Albright was my mother."
  • Logan, Colin, and Finn's interruption of Rory's class in "Not As Cute As Pushkin."
• Black Sheep—ABC Family's Gilmore Girls Backstage Special is considered the Star Wars Holiday Special of the series which was designed to introduced the show's reruns onto ABC Family. Inexplicably only focused on the first season, the show has a disturbingly orange Brooke Burke asking very simple and stupid questions about the show (and even a few about their personal lives to their chagrin) to the cast that you can find on even the least detailed fansite, which proves she Did Not Do the Research, much less ever watch a minute of the series until she was shooting the show. It was also produced on a cheap budget by a company which usually compiled Groin Attack video shows for TLC. The fans deplored the show and said it would actually turn new fans from watching the reruns, thus it never reaired or appeared on a DVD extra in any form, and is now relegated to three-week long Bittorrent downloads and YouTube clips for the few who actually want to see it for themselves.
  • Lauren Graham corrects the host a few times because she has obviously never sat down to watch an episode.
• Canon Sue: Both Lorelai and Rory (but especially Rory), to a great extent. They seem to be approved of and admired by almost everybody, and if occasionally a character fails to do so, they are represented as being either weird and unintelligent or plain malicious.
  • Even the character developments of Rory's two best friends, Lane and Paris, are interrupted and twisted unnaturally to prevent them from stealing Rory's glamour away. Both break up with cute boyfriends to be with weirdos or losers, and Lane can't even go to college, marries the loser when she's just twenty, is disappointed with her sex life, and has an unwanted pregnancy almost as soon as she gets married. And we're supposed to believe she's happy and that's the best life she can have.
    • Similarly, Dean started off as a well-read, working-class guy, a fan of Hunter S. Thomson and completely capable of talking to Rory about books. Her book-fetish was implied to be what attracted him to her in the first place. By the end of the series, he's established as no where near as intelligent as the other main characters, without ambition, depth, or even any redeeming qualities whatsoever.
  • Rory's Sue qualities even led her to get into Harvard over Paris, who's only flaw in applying appeared to be a really bad interview. In reality, interviews don't count for much in admission to Harvard. Also, Paris having a list of extracurriculars from childhood to college a mile-long (including adopting a dolphin) should really have made up for that. But of course only one of them could get in and it had to be Rory.
• Creator's Pet—April for the win. When Rory entered the college phase, some fans began to reminisce about the old days when she was still an adorable innocent. The producers picked up on this and voila! She was meant to take up the mantle as the brainy but cute know-it-all who could give the adults a run for their money. Problem was, where Rory's little quirks were charming and gave her character a lot of depth, April's were almost sickeningly cute and came off as more annoying than anything else. To make it worse, she turned Luke, whose gruff exterior made him a fan favorite, into a virtual pansy as the Bumbling Dad.
  • Jess hijacks Rory's copy of Howl and jots his notes all over in the margins. She seems to find this interesting. Many fans thought it was sweet. Some fans, however, were outraged that he had defiled a book that wasn't his, without permission.
  • Whenever April wasn't on screen, the other characters loved to talk about how pretty and smart April was or how she was exactly like Rory, when sadly the actress didn't have most of the charm that Alexis Bledel had in the early seasons.
  • Logan is supposed to be an incredibly likable guy, despite often coming across more as a Smug Snake.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Kirk
• Fanon Discontinuity—Amy Sherman-Palladino's contract ended before she got a chance to execute the way she envisioned the series to end. Most fans choose to ignore the existence of anything after season five, or at the very least until April shows up in season six.
• Fan Disservice—Kirk shirtless in a sauna. Not that Kirk is all that hideous from the neck up, but from the neck down... shudder.
  • And that wasn't even the first time Kirk was partially nude. He appeared nude (covered by a pillow) in one of the finales and, according to the show's creator, fans responded positively... even more shuddering.
    • Though the actor himself has never mentioned his condition, the general consensus among fans is that Sean Gunn has pectus excavatum; which is literally a sunken chest. The fact that he was brave enough to go shirtless on a popular TV show seems like more of a Take That to the media's beauty standards more than anything else.
    • Noted in-universe by Rory.

Lorelai: So, how are you feeling?
Rory: Haunted by the sight of Kirk's bare chest.

• • Paris in large sweaters and shirts designed to downplay her bust (and of course, play up Rory), which overwhelmed the real-life zaftig figure of Liza Weil; many are surprised to know she is well-endowed and curvy when she appears in other roles.
    • Your mileage may vary on that, especially as they had more opportunities to make Rory look sexier and didn't (ex. the beach). Then again, it's possible that by then, they had just given up.
• Flanderization—Name someone who wasn't flanderized in the last two seasons of Gilmore Girls. Lauren Graham expressed her distaste for the way her character was being written in an early interview about the CW.
• Fridge Brilliance: In a Season One episode "Rory's Dance," Rory and Dean leave a Chilton party early, and then spend time walking around Stars Hollow before they accidentally fall asleep in Miss Patty's studio. When Rory returns home the next morning, an angry Lorelai makes a crack about Rory and Dean sleeping together on Patty's yoga mats. Fast forward to the first episode of Season Five, "Say Goodbye to Daisy Miller." When Rory and Dean sneak off to have sex for the second time, guess where they meet?
• Funny Aneurysm Moment: Remember when Rory threatened Christopher to stay away from Lorelai to keep her relationship with Luke safe? Yeah... Guess which relationship gets derailed in a few episodes.
  • Lorelai delivers a preemptive Take That speech about how upper class youth feel entitled to everything and can do anything they want. Rory steals a yacht at the end of season 5 and isn't on speaking terms with her mother for about half a season.
• Jumped the Shark—Some insist it didn't, but may point to the episode where Lorelai proposes to Luke, and Rory steals a yacht, then quits school, then moves in with her grandparents. This would qualify as both a Wham! Episode and a Shark Jump. Alternatively, the one where Luke discovers he has a daughter.
  • The CW forcing out the show's creator and her husband if none of those did it for you.
• Les Yay—Lorelai often teases Rory that other girls find her cute.
  • Paris lurks behind Rory's shadow so much in seven years (making sure she knows she must always remain second in grades, begging Rory to get her into the student sorority, having her be her student body president, come with her to Washington, has spoken dreams about political sexual foibles in Rory's midst, edits with her on the paper, swings things around at Yale so Rory must share a room with her, sharing every detail of her sex life with the girl...need we go on?) she might as well be a Stalker with a Crush.
    • Paris and Rory share a kiss on Spring Break (although it took place a month before sweeps in actuality). This was foreshadowed way back in episode 1.11 ("Paris is Burning"). After Paris has caught Lorelai kissing Max Medina, she says to Rory "You're not going to kiss me, are you?" Also, in episode 2.9 ("Run Away, Little Boy"), Tristan and Rory are set to play Romeo and Juliet in a school project, and Tristan spends most of the episode taunting Dean about how he's going to be kissing Rory on stage. At the last moment Tristan is sent to military school, and Paris takes over the role (but chickens out of kissing Rory on that occasion).
    • And then in season seven Paris gets her own Stalker with a Crush in Lucy.
  • Lampshaded/parodied in a cutaway gag on Family Guy, where Lorelai and Rory exchange repartee before sharing a French kiss. (Daniel Palladino, the creator's husband, works on Family Guy as well.)
  • Madeline and Louise learn that they can manipulate boys by kissing each other during their freshman year of college.
• Magnificent Bitch: Trix
• Scrappy—Bootsy, who only existed to deliver the one-liners the other actors rejected for their characters and acted like the most stereotypical New Englander outside of Fenway Park. Gone by season four, but not fast enough for the entire fandom.
  • Later on, April, who found out Luke was her father via a speedy DNA test that would have Maury and every CSI technician question how she got her results in less than a week.
  • Logan.
• So Okay It's Average—Unfortunately for many, the series finale, which felt more like a Fix Fic. By then, many fans had already abandoned the show altogether.
• Straw Man Has a Point: We're supposed to see Lorelai's parents as uptight, judgmental rich people, but they are often right about her irresponsibility.
  • We're also supposed to think Mitchum is a heartless monster for telling Rory "[she] don't got it" to make it as a journalist, except that he's completely right.
    • As was pointed out in the episode itself, Mitchum determined that she wouldn't be able to make it as a journalist and that she would be better suited as someone's assistant, yet we're never given the impression that Rory was anything more than an assistant at the newspaper.
  • Rory rips into a ballerina for a horrible performance in the Yale newspaper. Richard supports it because Rory would be doing the ballerina a favor since she can now pursue a different career. This is completely forgotten when Mitchum essentially tells the same thing to Rory.
  • Lorelai is supposed to be wrong when she dismisses Logan as being the kind of irresponsible guy who gets drunk with his fratboy friends, then the next morning skydives wearing a stupid costume, which is merely the way he's getting to the next stupid stunt he's going to do... a season later, Logan turns out to apparently be planning to do just that.
• Wangst: When Luke and Lorelai break up in 'Say Something', Lorelai takes to her bed for at least two days and cries like a child, even needing Rory to come back and take care of her. It's pretty pathetic, she's acting as if someone has died.
• Unfortunate Implications: Hoo boy.
  • There's never a character who ends up at a top university or has any sort of academic ambition who doesn't ALSO go to a prestigious private school. All the students we see at Stars Hollow High, the only public school mentioned and one that doesn't seem too bad, are either bad students (Jess), average and unambitious (Dean), or seem to have no interest in college or otherwise don't really talk about academia or their future (Lane). Lane was an especially egregious example, since her obsession with music could have actually made her great in the music industry, as an agent or producer, with a little academic ambition. It's not even given as an OPTION to stay at Stars Hollow High and have a hope at Harvard, nor did any character at Stars Hollow High express hope of going to a university that wasn't local, religious, or a community college.
  • When Rory says that her ancestors came here on the Mayflower to point out her prestigious lineage. It kind of suggests there's something about being descended from White Anglo-Saxon Protestants that immediately precludes your family from being looked down upon. Unlike everyone else.
    • I disagree. I don't think it implies that, just that she's proud of her family background. Minorities are told all the time to be proud of their ethnicity, so why shouldn't white people be proud about their family coming over on the Mayflower or whatever?
    • The point here, though, is that Rory, and her mother to a greater extent, dismiss their lineage and their family. But tell Rory that she doesn't have good breeding and suddenly she's a Gilmore!
      • And the Huntzbergers would probably have looked down on minorities, or anything less than a wealthy, WASP background, so Rory's giving into that sort of perspective gives it a sort of legitimacy, since she's the protagonist.