you know you love me. xoxo

[pocochina]

Watching the first few episodes of Gossip Girl, all I knew about it were very vague descriptions of a couple of the characters, and the identity of Gossip Girl. I’m not sure if it’s going to be a thing for me, but if I’d watched it without the big reveal I’d be really curious what it looked like to someone watching with that information, so.

Comments

[rosaxx50]

OMG POCO WHY ARE YIU WATCHING THIS SHOW??

I was pretty unto Blair/Serena myself. The subtext was strong there. And, mhm, 1% vs 0.001% is a good way to summarise the conflict tbh.

[pocochina]

I'm not sure I'm watching-watching? I mean, I might! but this was more, I wanted background noise while cooking from scratch over the weekend and felt a little embarrassed at the idea of rewatching Game of Thrones again. IDK, though. High school stuff still bums me out. I can watch it if there's the distance of, like, vampires. (It's not even that I don't like teen characters? I like Reign, I like the young characters on shows with wider age ranges. But those particular rites of passage, bleh.)

Blair/Serena is off the wall. Or at least, Blair -> Serena.

[heavenly44]

I really loved gg and dan when it was on, but only for dan/serena. I felt like making dan gg was appealing to a certain subtext of viewers who hated him. I also felt like it was a way to sort of erase the db relationship. Dan to me (without knowing he was gg) was just this sweet kid who had a crush on an unattainable girl and he came to really like her and fell for her for real. The Dan/Serena relationship was the only honest romantic pairing this show had but once the cb fandom took over I felt like they did whatever to appease them. I never really saw as a nice guy trope but rather that guy who crushes from a far.
The dan as gg is still the biggest ass pull ever.

But, that said it doesn't take away from my loving the pairing or dan humphrey.

Blair to me is unobjectively horrible because she is basically a pseudo monarch and not like mary but like a despot who hates the underclass and treats even those she loves like slaves and worse. I never bought BS for many reasons, but ymmv.

[pocochina]

Blair to me is unobjectively horrible because she is basically a pseudo monarch and not like mary but like a despot who hates the underclass and treats even those she loves like slaves and worse.

She's definitely more of a Catherine than a Mary, IMO, someone who's very status-conscious and not particularly interested in hiding it.

[frelling_tralk]

Apparently Dan being GG was controversial at the time, and the EPs swore up and down that they had always intended it to be him? Which, as much as there’s pressure for creators to lie assure fans that they had the same firm handle on the whole thing all along, particularly post-Lost and BSG, I kind of buy. This whole setup has aspiring male novelist/future English professor written all over it.

Hmm yeah I find it a little frustrating because in retrospect Dan being GG and wanting to be on the inside could have made a lot of sense, but then by season 2 there is way too much logic fail there for me to switch off and believe that it was Dan all along, there are just too many instances where it will never make sense that Dan could have been behind certain blasts

[pocochina]

ahah, yeah, my own preference is strongly toward the tonal sense it makes, but that is easier to say without having 100+ episodes of events that need to make sense.

a lot of people took the GG reveal as Dan having some kind of multiple personality disorder, or even saw it as him being a complete sociopath playing around with his friends lifes, but I never saw it as all THAT devious?

I don't think GG would come off any better ethically if it wasn't Dan, though? The focus on Serena specifically becomes a little bit darker from this perspective, but spying on and publishing private information about people he's identifying, for apparently no reason other than it's fun, is pretty fucked up. He's definitely the most interesting character for that reason, though I doubt I'd have felt that way without knowing.

[frelling_tralk]

I guess that the issues come up more from the later seasons where GG kind of becomes more of a character in her own right and is sometimes driving the plot forward so, when you rewatch with the knowledge that Dan was GG, it can occasionally make Dan look really messed-up. I don't want to spoil you too much, but like there's episodes in season 4 when Serena is in a really bad place and Dan is the only person that she can rely on, he's helping her hide out, and then there's a GG blast exposing Serena and making light of her issues. Or in other episodes there's Dan genuinely trying to keep something quiet, only for GG to expose him and he's really appalled and embarrassed by it. Those are the moments that bother me more on rewatch, not minor continuity issues, but with Dan's actual motives in those episodes. If it wasn't for those moments, I would have been able to buy Dan as GG more

[heavenly44]

yeah i don't see it that way at all. It makes him very manipulative imo. But, they all were. They all fed into this thing that he designed. I guess its because I never really saw dan as friends with any of them bar serena.

[pocochina]

OMG I have been meaning to watch at least some of it for a while now, because it's come up in enough contexts that I think there's at least some interesting influences it's had across a couple of genres.

Like, the fandom consensus is that it's Terrible and Nonsensical and The Worst Show Of Our Time and MADE NO SENSE and did the Wrong Things, etc. and I disagree. Even the fact that it kept fandom talking and invested as fiercely as it did...

ahahaha, even having only seen three episodes, I strongly suspect I agree. It's so telling when people get so worked up about X phenomenon being THE ABSOLUTE ACTUAL WORST, especially a phenomenon that is (ostensibly) a teen show on an ignorable network. Like, no, if it was THE ABSOLUTE ACTUAL WORST, people wouldn't care that much, they'd just shrug it off.

I think the show had a lot of interesting things to say about money that I haven't really seen said elsewhere--certainly not at the time it was airing.Most shows that are insightful about this, I've noticed, are comedies? Like, I think TBBT,

[myfriendamy]

I feel like the show had a lot of changing of the guard and this may have been a plan but I do not buy that it was THE PLAN. Especially having had the unique experience of seeing some of the outlines and scripts

[ceciliaj]

I feel like GG is definitely one of those shows, like Dexter, where the first season set up all this awesome stuff it never delivered on. But yeah, will def read future posts :).

[pocochina]

I hope to keep posting about it! There's a fair amount of shows airing that I'm excited about, so I don't know if I'll be watching closely or anytime soon, but it really is fun to watch like "I know the secret!! XOXO!!"

[ever_neutral]

OMFG. WHY ARE YOU GOING HERE? WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO YOURSELF???????????

lol, Dan. I believe his ~real identity~ starts to make less sense later on, not that I stuck around long enough to vouch for that. (It lost its appeal for me after the high school era tbh. But when it was good it was so good, don't touch me.)

Blair and Serena are madly in love, the end.

[pocochina]

WHY ARE YOU GOING HERE? WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO YOURSELF???????????

BECAUSE IT ELICITS THIS REACTION FROM PEOPLE and therefore is probably worth checking out, lol.

Blair and Serena are madly in love, the end.

TOTALLY IN LESBIANS