Going off to college can be a frightening experience. For many, it can be the first time away from home and making one’s own decisions. Most freshmen rely on the advice of older siblings or upperclassmen in order to navigate their way through collegiate life, but there is a much more interesting resource: the fourth season of two 2000s era television shows: Gilmore Girls and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
It’s a pure coincidence that both shows had the protagonist attend college in the fourth season, but one that might provide a helpful comparison. For those who have never heard of either show, Gilmore Girls follows the studious Rory Gilmore, who dreams of attending Harvard but ends up enrolling at Yale. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a more supernatural show, has a pretty self-explanatory title: Buffy, born to hunt down vampires and slay demons, has to learn to balance fighting the forces of evil with living a normal life. In the fourth season, Buffy ends up attending the fictional University of California Sunnydale. Though the premises of these shows are wildly different from one another (Rory’s biggest problem is finding a solid relationship, whereas Buffy’s is stopping the end of the world), the fourth season of both these shows place their protagonist in college and can provide valuable lessons for those too scared to ask someone in the real world.
Rory Gilmore went through most of her life as the perfect child: great behaviour, great grades, great morals. She worked her way up to a private school called Chilton, where she graduated as valedictorian, spending most of her life working towards one goal: Harvard. However, she ends up at Yale, the alma mater of her grandfather, and here is where life begins to get hard. Possibly the first problem Rory (and a lot of us college students) experienced was homesickness in Season 4, Episode 2. Rory is so afraid to leave her home behind, she ends up inviting her mother to simply stay the night. Most of us don’t have the luxury of just being able to ask our parents to drop everything to sleep in a college dorm with us, but what Rory does next can provide valuable advice: She learns to adapt her way of life at home to her new way of life in college. With help from her mom, Rory creates a comfortable environment for herself and for many of the girls she meets at Yale. Together, mother and daughter organize a party where all the girls in Rory’s dorm try out the local take-out places (a favorite pastime at the Gilmore house), thus bringing a piece of home to Yale and its students. This is one of the sweeter lessons we can learn from the fourth season of Gilmore Girls, while the rest of the season is spent watching Rory fall into more and more trouble as her time in college continues.
However, before diving deeper into the lives and lessons of Gilmore Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s beginning episode of its own fourth season also hits upon the notion of homesickness, but in a different way. For Buffy, there is no mother-daughter sleepover. Instead, there’s vampire hunting. Appropriately titled “The Freshman,” Season 4, Episode 1 of Buffy encapsulates the hectic and overwhelming first moments at college. Buffy feels left behind by her friends – Willow, her witch best friend, is fitting in perfectly and Zander, her other best friend, is away – and even her own mother, who has transformed Buffy’s room into storage space. Homesickness in Season 4 of Buffy means feeling a desire to return to a certain time, not place, as Buffy yearns for the simpler days of high school. However, in true Buffy Summers fashion, these feelings are overcome through teaming up with her old friends to take down some evil vampires. Though not exactly as realistic as Gilmore Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer does have a much more optimistic tone, as every problem can be solved through friendship and a little bit of battle against the forces of evil.
Yet, homesickness is only one problem we college students face. If the plights of fictional television show characters are any indicator, then we also have to deal with forging new relationships, handling bigger responsibilities and facing failure. Rory Gilmore had to deal with these pressures more than most, yet her decisions do not ultimately lead to the best outcomes. From stealing a yacht (definitely don’t do that) to just dropping out of college, Rory’s choices reflect the mental state of someone who does not know their own identity yet. Though she may have tackled the homesickness issue easily, Rory suffered from not knowing who she was. Shifting back to Buffy, we can see a character who struggled for a brief period with her identity but then quickly showed strength and dedication to her own morals. Maybe because Buffy had a special destiny or maybe just because she knew who she was, Buffy fared better than Rory.
Of course, it can be hard to compare a slightly campy supernatural vampire show to a realistic drama. At the end of the day, we cannot be like Buffy and simply stab our college problems with a pointed wooden stick. We, as college students, will most likely face trouble in the manner that Rory Gilmore did: lots of trial and error. However, I hope that looking back at the good and bad choices of beloved 2000s television show characters in their college eras will give us a nudge in the right direction.
Jane Locke is a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at jlocke@cornellsun.com.
