hi everyone I am princess weaks with the financial diet team and I am discussing six of my most favorite delusional money moments in Gilmore Girls this is a lovely video supplement to our amazing coffee and old money podcast available for premium members you can sign up on patreon or click the button down below in the description to join up and hear more of our amazing takes because as you know we are usually right I am princess weeks I am a professional pop culture yapper and I have worked with the financial Diet before on videos about
sex in the city and I have talked about Gilmore Girls in the past which is why I was lucky enough to be tapped to do this special segment and I'm really excited to do it because I love Gilmore Girls and I love even more to complain about it lovingly I it's it's fall I had a pumpkin spice latte today it's time to get to Lulu with the Gilmore Girls all right so my number one moment and this is one of the things that when I was watching this series for the first time it's out to
me and it's when Rory goes to Yale and she pays $20 to sit underneath her study tree now she goes to Yale we know it exclusive School very luxurious multiple libraries but she can't work any of those no she needs this one particular tree and $20 in 2034 was damn good money okay you were going to get a couple of lunches out of that um and it's just one of those moments where Rory is just being so silly yeah it just has always stuck out to me especially cuz I really hate her haircut in this
season so the bad haircut and the bad money decisions of giving away $20 for a tree hand in hand although someone has turned it into an ambient study playlist and I think if there's any good use of that moment it would be that number two is everything Logan with his season 7 finances I'm A Logan girl I love my butt face Miss Grant but it is very interesting how all of his financial stuff happens in that season he's very much at the beginning of this era of the.com Boom he loses a million dollars in Vegas
and then has to apologize to laurelai about it you just lost millions of dollars I know I know I did believe me wild and there's so much stuff in season 7 about Logan and Rory dealing with the realities of their own privileges as you know trust fund kids Logan moreo and my favorite episode is definitely introducing Laura life planet Arium where Rory goes to a party where all of Logan's like investor and colleague friends are there and she writes this very scathing article where she says Let Them drink Cosmos and kind of laments the fact
that you know these places are for people to get access to and to meet people and Logan defends himself in these actions and brings up that like Rory isn't exactly paying rent either and she makes a comment about his million dooll trust fund which completely ignores that canonically at this point Rory has a trust fund of her own so it's just a very interesting way in which the show uses Logan to discuss with a little bit finer Nuance than the gilmores themselves the reality of what it means to be sort of a um a privileged
waspy person throughout the season we see Logan try his best to get out from under his father's thumb to gone in his own way something that laurelai should be able to appreciate but she says that this is not a silver spoon family that they were a spork family this was not a silver spoon household this was Spork City all the way now I don't know about you but I've never seen lauraa use a spork in any of those episodes so citation needed but it is a very interesting way how Logan just by being who he
is brings out the dulu in the Gilmore Girls uh I've I've been corrected that it's a $5 million trust fund which I got to say uh wow you should have married him Rory it would have been a much better way for you to handle things that hunts buer that hunsburger hunsburger that hunsburger money the next moment is Christopher fumbling with the small town living stuff one of the things about season 7 as someone who did enjoy the Christopher and laurelai lore Dynamic is how season 7 which is when Amy Sherman Paladino is no longer being
the showrunner how they're trying to bring together all these plot elements from the previous season which includes Christopher and laurelai not just sleeping together but then eventually going to to Paris eloping and getting married it's all very weird and Christopher decides to come live with laurelai and tries to assimilate himself to small town living and one of the things that happens is they have this big giant niton where they're knitting to raise money and Christopher decides to write a check uh giving all the money to the community which he thinks is a good thing but
the point of the activity is the journey that we've gone on together so everyone's kind of upset about this and it kind of makes him look like a douchebag in Universe I personally am like if the point is to raise the money and we raise the money we can still knit but I think it shows this way in which a lot of the activities that we see in Gilmore Girls that are for fundraising that we never really see what those funds actually do unless it's like a personal store thing it highlights the way in which
a lot of these things are just for the quirks it's not so much about what does it mean that we have someone who can help bring this economy into our town or help flood it with money it's about like does money make you ridiculous and um while I don't agree with the final thesis I do think it's this moment of showing how Laura Li especially has turned Stars Hollow into sort of her own illusion of what middle class living is like it's her little escape from the Privileges of her family Society but because it's a
wish fulfillment show it also doesn't really talk about the way that we actually do need people to like fund these things and take care of the roads take care of all these little bits of infrastructure like Taylor can't be doing all of it himself and everyone here is working and we know from what we did in the podcast that these people are not making outrageous amounts of money so it is weird to have a moment where someone does actually fund something in the town for them to be like but we wanted to just do labor
when it comes to this idea of laureli stating that she did not raise Rory with a silver spoon in her mouth that they were Spork City I think that's interesting because I think there's no doubt that laurelai made a lot of sacrifices being a Teen Mom and did have to make a lot of hard decisions in raising Rory however I think once the show picks up in Earnest one of the things that kind of happens and that we discuss a lot on the podcast is how the way that the women live their lives does not
reflect the financial reality of someone who was a teen mother who worked a very you know a minimum wage working class job and now living in a very expensive middle class environment upper middle class some might say and even though the place where Styles Hollow is based off of has more of a middle class vibe to it the inability of lur Li to do basic household tasks like cooking uh is an indicator that there is a disconnect between the realities of what sacrifices come with that bracket versus how laurelai sees herself and so laurelai often
sees herself as a Perpetual Underdog which to a degree she certainly has Underdog Tendencies but narratively I think the show wants so much to give us this triple tier story of mother and daughter that it forgets that there is a real tangible reality to being poor suay that you'll see on shows like Roseanne or Shameless that really highlight the sacrifices that women make so yeah it's disappointing that it's not discussed more in Earnest but I do I have made peace with why it's not the fourth thing that's really ridiculous about Gilmore Girls is the way
in which laurelai expects her financial help but with little to no strings attached and this will often happen with her parents like the Friday night dinners being treated as this Albatross over her neck that she needs to pay them back for which don't do that like you know like just take the money don't pay them back invest in your business in your small business that you want to have with Suki so bad cuz Suki has 10,000 children so you need to do that the way that she does accept Emily and Richard's connections when it comes
to helping her achieve business deals or access to certain levels of capital but at the same time doesn't want to deal with that means having a pretty working relationship with said family you see a lot of this also in the way that uh Luke is brought into her life and the ways and this is actually a redcon this is one of my actually my nitpicks in season one and a little bit of season two of Gilmore Girls Emily is a lot nicer to Luke than she is later on like she does to a certain degree
respect Luke's role in the story and as it becomes a more serious relationship you get this feeling that they're trying to mold Luke into this image of what they think Laura Li deserves and Laura Li pushes back against that but still will not just cut them off you know it's like because cutting them off also means cutting off the money and so there's a certain degree in which Laura's relationship with her par parents especially after Rory goes to college is contrived but always around money around the access to Capital but also access to Rory so
at a certain point it really is about them getting Rory through Yale one thing that's really interesting about Laura's relationship to her mother and those strings and how they come together is how she has no problem stepping on Emily's toes in ways that could be financially negligent or harmful one example that we talked about in the podcast is when she does the seating chart at their vow renewal and has a whole fun time like putting together people who have had affairs and done this and done that and get someone fired and while she is doing
the seating chart she is complaining about the way that children of privilege will play with each other's lives and spend a lot of money on things while not really understanding the importance of money and it's like here she is at an event that's very important to people that people are getting paid to manage and she's just having fun with it because it'll be funny for her to see The Fallout of it whether she means to or not she is a privileged kid who does enjoy doing these kind of things of playing with people's lives and
I think that it's seen as endearing and Charming because she's Scrappy laurelai but it still speaks to a larger issue of the way Laura's own Privileges and ability to get access to Capital throughout the series empowers her to feel like she can do that and get away with especially since her actions end up getting the wedding planner fired and laurelai does not confess that she did this she's just kind of like Mom but who's going to run the wedding now it's like Emily will run it herself as she is want to do number five is
Luke being loaded he is such let me take that let me take my Luke hater hat off for a second put it to the side Luc is set up in a very interesting way of being the man that Laura lik can rely on the most thank you I just like to see you happy Luke very often will go above and beyond for laurelai with very few expectations which I can see why she'd be into that uh she does like to not have many strings but Luke is also then very financially well off uh he's able
to give her a let me check my notes a $330,000 loan uh to Laura like when she needs it for construction which doesn't seem like enough to me and others considering how much work needs to be done but okay my man my man and then he's also in a position to buy the twickum house resend his offer and then start renovating Laura's house and then when they break up it's not a big deal that he spent all this money to renovate a house for them together like that is ridiculous and it makes L it makes
Luke seem as if he either has endless amount of money or just no really big Financial concerns and I think that if you're running a diner especially in small town Americana with regular and you're already like getting fresh ingredients working with people and you also like own the building like I get cutting expenses but having that much money to just throw around is just not only unrealistic to a certain degree but also kind of irresponsible and then also like paying for the wedding working towards paying the wedding and everything leading up to it I just
season 6 is very weird and I feel like it's a big disservice to luk and Laur light's relationship that they meld in their finances so early on in terms of these things and we get no payoff for it but that also kind of happens with Christopher when they have I guess the world's most amicable divorce and no one cares that like he moved his entire life pretty much to start Hollow and just like I'll just leave the next day but uh that's the magic of screenwriting everyone and I was just reminded that laurelai and Max
are also going to pay for the wedding out of pocket how much money does a teacher at Chon make and I'm just thinking of like his parents offered to pay in like small installments and laurelai is like laurelai just ask your dad like I I'm team get the money from your Rich parents especially if you hate them take their money but that's just me and then number six my biggest one this was the moment B before the tree before there was the tree there was the thre Monon backpacking through Europe moment we both need to
cut weight from our packs I am doing my part here now to paint a picture when this happens about an episode before if not two most Laura Li gets the letter from Yale which says that they will not be receiving financial aid because laurelai got some money from her father based on an investment he made when she was born and gave her the money that influx of money put her into a bracket where now Rory does not qualify for any financial assistance now pause one fact that Laura like thought that Rory would ever qualify for
that is quite frankly ridiculous because she went to Chilton not on a scholarship she just went to Chilton and her parents are very rich legacies so she was always going to pay that money that's number one number two even if you thought she was going to get a scholarship wouldn't this be something that you're saving for like we know that she's saving to to buy the dragonfly in but was her plan always for Rory to get a scholarship to either Yale or Harvard because that feels like a very very uh not very smart idea and
none of those schools give uh merit-based scholarships they are need-based so her need is very high but uh not high enough like there's nothing about Rory's background that would entitle her towards that kind of financial assistance and right after this big thing happens where Laura Li has to once again deal with her parents and mind you she paid the money back to them which again could have saved that money to put Laura Rory into Yale so right after this happens and she has to eat crow with dealing with taking care of that again next episode
they're like we're preparing for our backpack trip to Europe what even even charitably if they're going to the cheapest hostiles three months away with no income no real savings because mind you lur has been saving for the dragonfly in and she wasn't saving for to go to college apparently so I'm guessing it either all went there or all for this trip either way that is three months where she's not working not working on her brand new Inn that is going to be her main source of income and Rory's not working so who's preparing her for
college all this stuff ridiculous and again even with the cheapest way to backpack to Europe traveling through Europe is expensive and honestly as to young women like you might want to pay for higher quality hotels um especially depending on what's going on seasonally where you're going where in Europe it is such a weird moment because it just shows how little they prepare for the financial reality of what they actually want there is nothing I know saving is unglamorous no one wants to talk about it it's not fun to watch on a show but I think
it does a disservice to the narrative that you're trying to tell when you have in one episode them really worried about Rory being able to go to school because you don't have the money and then you're using that same money to go on a massive trip and this is not a poor people shouldn't get to enjoy things to argument because to our knowledge Lura is not poor it is poor financial planning to not have money aside for your daughter to go to college but somehow have magic money to go on a three-month tour of Europe
where you have no ability to make income for that time unless for some reason she's getting passive income for the dragonfly which I don't see why she would it's not even open yet so it's a very very messy frustrating storyline uh and it's probably the moment where I realized that this was completely financially unhinged and that I just can't take it seriously anymore and I and I'm and I'm okay with that it's just very annoying just let them pay for it like just let your parents pay for the stuff if we're going to pretend that
you like just meally have money anyway just be a child of wealth but we like to keep it positive so we are going to end on a high note and that is going to be the amazing Mrs Kim when Elane goes to her mother and tells her that the band is breaking up and they're not going to be a success and Mrs Kim goes you are not the daughter I raised Kims don't give up I was like let's go mama like I think this this part where Mrs Kim essentially goes in and books them an
entire tour using all of her church connections is such a wholesome sweet moment but it's also the kind of Storytelling that I feel like they want to do for laurelai and Emily and it does happen from time to time but it's even more perfect in Mrs Kim and Lane's relationship for the intersections of race and religion that play such a huge role in their relationship but it is this way that both Lane and Mrs Kim deeply love and respect each other and are able to compromise with each other with that love and respect that Mrs
Kim learns to be a more conscious mother that lane needs and help her with her tour but does it in her own way they're going to churches they're going to church stadiums but they're going on their Rock Band tour Lane will never be the traditional girl that her mother wants her to be but she still is comfortable going to her mother for help and willing to make acquiesces to make it easier for her like she when she goes to her mom and says like I know if I go back it's your house and your rules
it's a sad moment but I think it also shows that regardless of all the drama between them Lane does see her mom as a safe space for her to go and get her bearings together and I think that's beautiful I think in a show where the motherdaughter relationships are so tense with the generational divide is is so tense so often that lane and Mrs Kim are that one story where you see true work being done to create a bridge between them and it's crossed it just sucks that Lane's story never really gets better than that
but that's CU of racism and not because of Lane we love you Lane thank you guys so much for watching don't forget to subscribe and to click on the patreon link down below to listen to the rest of the podcast I did with Holly and thank you guys so much for listening I'm princess weeks I'm a YouTuber on this platform you can find me under princess weeks I do videos about pop culture I have a video out about burgerton I have a video out about well not Fire and Blood yet but about Redemption arcs and
it's pretty good I recommend it so yeah thanks so much for watching and remember remember that sometimes those 78 pairs of jimy chews are just not worth it bye
