Rachel del Valle | The Rory Gilmore complex

There was a time when The WB, now The CW, was the go-to place for sentimental but entertaining teen dramas full of fleshy, interesting characters. But the days of “Dawson’s Creek,” “Felicity” and “7th Heaven” have come and gone. Now, the programming seems to mostly be about attractive, supernatural people.

There are no more Rory Gilmores on television, and I wonder what kind of role models young girls find when flipping through the channels. “Pretty Little Liars” might have a bookworm in its lead foursome, but she’s hardly a Rory.

For those of you unfamiliar with the cherub that is Rory Gilmore, a primer: Rory Gilmore was the younger of the eponymous “Gilmore Girls,” an hour-long program that ran on The WB from 2000-2007. She was adorable, fast-talking and insistently bookish, acting as the straight man to her screwball single mother.

Rory’s charm stemmed from her many paradoxes: She ate like a burly man but looked like a waif; she preferred reading to partying, but had multiple suitors at a time.

To me as a middle schooler, Rory felt so real, so possible, so perfect. I wear a uniform to school, too! My hair is brown, too! I love junk food, too! I want to go into journalism, too!

But, at a certain point, my relation to Rory became more than vicarious. Blind admiration turned to skepticism.

As I got older and closer to Rory in age and experience, her image started to fray. What kind of girl has her mother sleep over on her first night at Yale? A Gilmore girl, that’s who.

In one memorable episode in the high school years, Rory brings a book to a house party and still manages to get kissed.

Aspiring to be like a WB character might seem like something to scoff at, but to a formative middle schooler, Rory was everything: brainy, witty, beautiful and socially inept. I had one of those things down, and I figured the rest would come eventually.

At that age, I was impressionable in a way that I’ll probably never be again. I recognize this, and yet I still can’t shake the “What Would Rory Do?” mentality from my head. I probably never will — and I know I’m not alone.

It’s a bit disheartening to realize that your childhood role model is little more than a television trope. I think there’s a Rory guiding the subconscious of us all.

Maybe you fancy yourself a feisty Jane Austen heroine or aspire to the tight-lipped coolness of a James Bond.

But fictional role models are dangerous. They have minimized flaws, neat trajectories and sometimes little or no connection to the present world.

And while hero worship often does occur with characters on film or in literature, there’s something about the ostensibly everyday pace of television that makes it feel more realistic to compare yourself to, say, an Aaron Sorkin type.

Of course, we shouldn’t look expectantly to television for realism — not even reality TV represents the quotidian. If it did, no one would watch it.

If a given character is a creation of network TV, their life is surprisingly PG-rated. If they’re on cable, every episode is filled with some sort of exciting sexual encounter.

Where is the happy medium?

For the rest of us operating outside of a screen, there’s the dullness of actual living. Life doesn’t organize itself into episodes. There are long periods of time where nothing happens. There aren’t neat end of season wrap-ups in real life. And if you bring “The Bell Jar” to a party, no one’s going to make out with you.

Sure, sometimes there are special guests and new love interests and plot twists, but never with the frequency and coolness that television trains you to expect.

We spend a lot of time with the figments of writers’ imaginations, sometimes forgetting that that’s what they are.

Now that I’m nearing the college-graduate age that Rory was at the end of “Gilmore Girls,” I’m realizing that my own life, average as it is sometimes, is better than a fictional one. At least it keeps on going.

Rachel del Valle is a College senior from Newark, N.J. Her email address is rdel@sas.upenn.edu. Follow her @rachelsdelvalle. “Duly Noted” appears every Tuesday.

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