Mitchum lowkey was right

I'm sure this has been talked to death, so I apologize, but I'm fresh off a rewatch and I just saw someone talking about this on Instagram and it got me thinking about it. For the record, I think Mitchum is a complete asshole who bulldozes his way through life and has no regard for other people, least of all his son. But I don't think he was entirely wrong about Rory not being cut out for journalism, and I actually think the way he told her was nicer than we see him be at any other point in the show. I think it was something she really needed to hear.

I think most of us agree Rory is incredibly coddled as a child and that leads to a sense of entitlement as she gets older and goes to Yale. I don't think she realizes she's entitled and I do think she usually has good intentions. And I'm sure we all agree it's not really her fault - she's spent her whole life with an entire town, grandparents and a mother telling her she can do no wrong. The only time we really see her struggle before the incident with Mitchum is when she's just gotten to Chilton and is struggling to catch up, and Lorelai's response is to try and get her to quit Chilton instead of encouraging her to lean into the challenge. So it's inevitable that hearing criticism from Mitchum would crush her because she's never really gotten it before. But even though the show frames it as Mitchum being an ass and her big redemption arc is proving him wrong, I think he had a point.

She's undoubtedly a great writer. We're told that time and time again. But she struggles throughout the show with having a journalistic "voice." Doyle tells her when she gets to the Daily News that her articles are boring, and the only way she can figure out how to make them interesting is to be mean. That works for her in the ballet article, but you can't lean on that every time. She also seems to struggle to find a good story when one isn't being assigned to her. Her first instinct is the music downloading story, which has been done to death and has no new viewpoint. Luckily, she stumbled onto the Life and Death Brigade, but what if she hadn't? She does well as the editor of the Daily News, but that's because her job is more about being organized and managing a staff and all the paper's moving pieces, all things she's proven to excel at during her time away from Yale. And then, in AYITL, we see that she's floundering as a journalist and can't keep a steady job. She walks right past the line of people in the city, asks one of them what they're waiting for, hears "oh, I don't know, I just saw a line" and then walks away without immediately jumping to interview him about that?!? It seems like she just doesn't have good journalistic instincts.

This is a long winded way of saying I think Mitchum called it. I don't think he's right in saying she'd make a great assistant - she would, but she obviously can do more than that - but she probably would have done better pursuing some other form of writing as a career rather than journalism. Writing a book makes a lot of sense for her. And I know people say that his delivery could have been better, but I actually think he was fairly nice about it. He told her that it wasn't personal and that he thinks she's very bright and capable, just that she might need to shift her goal towards something else. She needed to hear it and he was the only person who was willing to tell her.

Sometimes people need their dreams "crushed," for lack of a better word. It's kinder to tell them than to let them work towards something that's never going to work out for them. I minored in creative writing in college and I was in classes with a lot of people who were majoring in it and just objectively didn't have the talent to make it big with writing; but no one ever told them. Their pieces got critiqued heavily in every workshop, but they never showed any improvement, and no one ever sat them down and told them that writing needed to be a hobby for them instead of a career. No one wants to have that awkward conversation, but I truly think they would have been better off hearing that then and having the time to adjust instead of spending their whole college career working towards something just to be left in the lurch when they graduated.

I wish that, instead of letting what Mitchum said derail her, Rory had taken a minute to mourn the future she envisioned, then said "okay, what other kind of writing can I pursue?" and worked towards a new goal. She could have been a fantastic book editor or publisher. It's just sad to see in AYITL that she wasted so much time.