Again, let’s start with his relationship with women, and specifically the long-suffering Serena. Sexism-aside, Dan’s just downright not a nice person most of the time. In fact, he slut-shames pretty much every female character throughout the show’s run, including his little sister Jenny – publishing locker-room lies about her losing her virginity, and then actually reporting the truth when she sleeps with Chuck Bass, who, let’s remember tried to rape her in the first episode… Ouch. Oh, and there’s that time during their summer break, when they’re split up and he’s getting jiggy with every girl with a pulse, but still finds plenty to say about Serena’s character flaws because she’s seeing Nate.
Gossip girl because i love her series#
What’s even more infuriating about this is how hypocritical it is – Dan did the exact same thing a series prior. Much later on in season 4, he’s at it again, looking down on his ex for hooking up with her teacher. In the second episode of the first season, when he finds out that she slept with Nate before they had even met, he slut shames her, telling her he thought she was ‘different’. Despite his self-proclaimed knight-in-shining armour complex, he was actually pretty sexist, particularly to on-off girlfriend Serena. Even the actor that played him hated his guts, once calling him a ‘douchebag’ and a ‘tool’. He was our ‘in’ to the glamorous world of the Upper East Side and his story followed the classic ‘fish out of water’ trajectory.Īs an outsider to the world of wealth and Prep school hierarchy dominated by the rest of the cast, Dan was the filter through which we saw how over-the-top and out-of-reach the lives of the other characters were.īut while Blair was often painted as the obvious villain of the show, it was actually Dan who was the agent of a lot of the drama (and not just because - spoiler alert- he was Gossip Girl). In many ways, Dan could ostensibly be seen as the main character of Gossip Girl, more so than Blair Waldorf or Serena van der Woodsen.
With a Gossip Girl reboot on the horizon, it’s an appropriate time to reflect on what was one of the biggest cultural moments of the late noughties, catapulting Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, Ed Westwick and Penn Badgley to (differing levels of) fame, and pretty much predicting the rise of influencers, Internet trolls and headbands for grown-ups.Īnd while most people are focussing on the two breakout stars – Blake Lively, now wed to Hollywood mega-star Ryan Reynolds, and Leighton Meester, now wed to Adam Brody from The OC (all of our fan fic dreams came true with that one) – we want to talk about Penn Badgley, and specifically, why his character Dan Humphrey was the absolute worst.
0 kommentar(er)
