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.
And 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.
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. He was our ‘in’ to the glamorous world of the Upper East Side and his story followed the classic ‘fish out of water’ trajectory.
As 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.
But 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). Even the actor that played him hated his guts, once calling him a ‘douchebag’ and a ‘tool’.
Think about it. Despite his self-proclaimed knight-in-shining armour complex, he was actually pretty sexist, particularly to on-off girlfriend Serena. 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’.
Much later on in season 4, he’s at it again, looking down on his ex for hooking up with her teacher. What’s even more infuriating about this is how hypocritical it is – Dan did the exact same thing a series prior. Literally. The. Exact. Same. Thing. 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.
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.
Sexism-aside, Dan’s just downright not a nice person most of the time. Again, let’s start with his relationship with women, and specifically the long-suffering Serena. As the person behind Gossip Girl, he starts rumours that she’s pregnant, that she has an STD and implies that their relationship is incest because they share a secret half-sibling. So far, so creepy. But even if you don’t buy into the whole ‘Dan is Gossip Girl’ thing, he’s done some pretty shitty stuff IRL.
He dates Serena’s best friend and his former enemy, Blair, in what was one of the worst plotlines ever. (We’re still not even sure why - to scale the social ladder further?) He also makes the character based on Serena in his book into a vapid, vacuous idiot, and pens a nasty profile of her for a newspaper that basically claims she’s got massive daddy issues. He later cheats on best friend and new girlfriend Vanessa with Serena, and also dates Georgina Sparks, AKA the devil incarnate, who was more vindictively out to ruin people’s lives than him. Oh, and on a slight side note, he’s a selfish lover, and totally disregards polite threesome etiquette by ignoring his girlfriend and focussing on the ‘third’, Vanessa.
But even if Dan wasn’t a bit of a creep masquerading as a nice guy, you can’t escape the fact that he’s just incredibly annoying. This is largely because of that giant Brooklyn-sized chip on his shoulder about being ‘poor’. Seriously, how is the audience supposed to relate to him as someone from the other side of the tracks if he basically lives in a hipster loft with his hipster ex-rock star dad, and goes to a Prep school and Ivy League university? Not to mention that most of that chip becomes redundant when his dad marries Lily van der Woodsen and the whole family move to the Upper East Side anyway. Talk about Poor Little Rich Boy.
Feeding into this was his somewhat shallow obsession with the lives of the glamorous, wealthy people around him: if he’s so much better than everyone, why is he a) friends with them and b) writing about their every move? It’s inverse snobbery at its worst. Again, even if you don’t subscribe to him being the author of the Gossip Girl blasts, he still wrote a book about them (minus points here too for his extremely uninventive names for Blair and Serena – Claire and Sabrina). Which brings me on to another irritating Dan stereotype – his clichéd ‘tortured artist’ complex. His whole raison d’etre is a riff on an Oscar Wilde quote, for God’s sake - ‘the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about,’ - writing himself into relevance with the terrible nickname ‘Lonely Boy’.
Miscellaneous crimes to present to the jury include marrying his own step-sister (ew), being best friends with his sister’s would-be rapist Chuck Bass (problematic), and almost preventing the most important love story of the series from happening between Chuck and Blair (unforgiveable). Oh, and the fact that he gets literally no comeuppance whatsoever in the finale episode when he reveals that he has essentially been ruining all of their lives for years. So, there you have it. A comprehensive explanation of why Dan Humphrey was the absolute worst character on Gossip Girl.
You know you love me? I do not, Dan.
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