I Will Always Love You

Marie Antoinette + Hints of falling in love with her husband Louis XVI

I go into a lot of detail here but the short version is this:

We all know this show has a problem with depicting characters doing terrible things, and then pretending those characters did nothing wrong, and genuinely expecting the audience to buy the charade. I don’t mean Blair and Serena; I mean Chuck.

We all know this.

But the biggest con of all time is that Dan didn’t suddenly become an asshole from end season 5 onwards. He was always that person.

Even in season 1, when his “worst” flaw that he was “too judgmental”, that’s not the full story. He was controlling. He’d treat Serena like a guy training his badly behaved golden retriever. Approval and affection when she did things his way; frowns and guilttripping when she went to her friends for help, acted a little bit like she wasn’t a middle class Brooklynite, deviated from his fantasy of her in any way.

Of course you can say that this some pretty GREAT foreshadowing, but literally everyone suffers consequences for this privilege and arrogance. (Vanessa and Jenny get dunked on just for existing.) Dan just always gets away with it.

NJBC using their respective powers to get Serena out of jail:

YES! I mean, he had a terrible opinion of her to start with, but it flipped like a switch when he saw how ruthless her mother was in Bad News Blair.

Which is fair because why should he not be empathetic, but he never extends half as much courtesy to Serena, and always holds “her world” against her, even though Blair’s problems also come from the same place and also shape her personality.

Also when Serena gets tired of being made to feel badly and becomes the new queen bee in The Serena Also Rises, remember his pikachu meme face? After repeatedly guilting for being born rich and being privileged, he is actually shocked when she behaves exactly how he expects her to.

Asdfghjkl okay I know if Dan so much as breathed near Serena in season 1, I am ready to nuke him but.

What he did in season 1 happens between people. Not good people certainly, but among stupid, insecure, moron children one of whom has spent forever pining after his unattainable dream girl. It was not okay for him to get mad when she didn’t live up to his made-up expectations for her, but it just means they were incompatible. And that relationship was doomed because of mistakes both parties made, Dan’s being countless and Serena’s being staying with him even though she was terrified of what would happen if she fell off the pedestal.

But what he did in seasons 5 and 6 was vile. It was actively malicious. It was just so pointlessly cruel. Like maybe he didn’t mean to release the sex tape, but he made one? He openly admitted that he didn’t care about finding a disappeared Serena, he was just in it for the drama? When he knew how desperate she was to be with him again, he manufactured a recreation of their first date just so he could laugh about her in an article????