We hate Dan Humphrey, we love Dan Humphrey.
We love Chuck Bass, we hate Chuck Bass.
We hate Serena van der Woodsen, we love – well.
We love Blair Waldorf, we hate – well.
Herein lies the average (maniacal) Gossip Girl fan’s dilemma: do I love or hate these individuals?
For this article, I had to ask myself: why is that such a difficult question to answer? There’s no conventional “good and bad guy” on GG like there is in every other typical TV show/novel – one doesn’t hate a character with every fiber of one’s being and love another with all of one’s heart. Not consistently anyway. I believe it is so because, over the extremely long period of 6 seasons, these characters grow up, graduate and become adults right alongside us. They are almost perfectly human – flawless in the flaws – character development arcs and messy, uncomfortable growth trajectories. No one’s born perfect, hero or villain. One day they’re one and the next, another.
They made mistakes, they swooped in to save the day. They have been petty & they have taken the high road (albeit in pastel-colored vintage Cadillacs. Or limos). They have been glamorous & their perfect facades have cracked just a little sometimes (usually during fascinating masquerade balls). They have been good, bad and everything in between, all inside one person, inside every person.
Are they just badly written? No, they are but human.
But perhaps those two are but the same.
We witness here, a rarity in the entertainment industry, the making of fiction that’s an awful lot like reality. Messy, complex, hopeless, hopeful, heartbreaking, heartening, lovely, abhorrent. Everything that development is, everything that humanity embodies.
We hold a confusing love-hate relationship with all the characters because that is exactly the nature of the relationships we hold with one another. As inherently flawed and intensely complex creatures, we are hardly capable of consistent existence or perception.
We fall apart, evolve, course-correct, hold steady & at the end of the ordeal, emerge utterly unrecognizable — we know Chuck Bass did exactly that. We obsess over power, we feel excluded, misplaced and always left behind but, when the screen lifts, we turn out to be the puppeteers having pulled all the strings all along – we know Dan Humphrey would turn out to be just that. We’re not present for things always but that doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t leave a mark – we know Georgina Sparks did. We may not fancy ourselves the center of the power struggle spotlight but it doesn’t mean we’re still not extremely pivotal in it – we know Rufus Humphrey was.
We punish, we seek mercy.
Both our cries for help and laughter ring through the halls.
Saturdays are for bedazzled dresses but Tuesdays are for hoodies and sweatpants.
I believe this is what Gossip Girl teaches us.
That to be revered is to be human.
That to be passionate is to be human.
That to love and hate and laugh and sob is to be human.
That to be loved and despised is to be human.
That to evolve is to be human.
That to revolutionise is to be human.
What is to be ‘UES’ though?
That’s a story for another article.