April Nardini: A Misunderstood Character

My name is Elizabeth.  I’m a 34 year old chick who is tired of the amount of hate directed at April Nardini of Gilmore girls fame.  Now, please realize I said APRIL, not ANNA… Anna’s all on her own.  That bitch be crazy.  But April is someone who has been painted unfairly as a TWELVE YEAR OLD villain for the past decade.

[Disclaimer: I fully understand that the character of Luke’s daughter was introduced into the plot precisely to cause drama and an eventual break for Luke and Lorelai.  The character as a plot device we would have preferred never happened is not what I’m referring to here.  I’m talking about the people who blame the actions of the character entirely for the demise of their favorite television relationship.]

The biggest arguments I hear against the littlest Nardini are as follows:

1. She was responsible for the destruction of our precious Luke and Lorelai.
2. She was a low rent version of Rory.
3. She pimped out her father to her swim instructor.

1. She broke up Luke and Lorelai.

WHOA BOY!  Back up there for a second.  This is the argument that induces the most amount of rage in my soul.  Let’s all remember that when that little girl showed up in a helmet to Luke’s diner to get a DNA sample for her science fair project, she was all of TWELVE YEARS OLD.  I don’t know about you, but at 12 years old, I was more focused on buying my friends the perfect Looney Tunes poster for their birthdays and not on how to contribute to the utter destruction of an adult relationship that I previously had no knowledge of.  The only two people who were responsible for the dissolution of Luke and Lorelai were… wait for it… LUKE AND LORELAI (okay, and Anna Nardini didn’t help matters).  Luke started by not coming clean to his fiancée about the existence of his daughter for TWO months.  That started a snowball effect of lost trust that Lorelai was never able to fully regain.  And then the postponing of the wedding clearly broke Lorelai’s heart… but let’s be honest, the single most important element in any adult relationship is communication.  And Lorelai unfortunately had her bluff called about postponing the wedding and then never came clean with Luke about how she really felt.  And then… Christopher, as he always does, rides in to ruin the day once again.  But this can’t even be blamed on Christopher, the beloved Gilmore girls scapegoat.  Lorelai screwed the pooch Christopher and while I give her credit for having come clean to Luke… that was the nail in the coffin of what is so lovingly referred to as JavaJunkie (the ship name of Luke and Lorelai).  Nowhere in any of this do I see a twelve year old girl scheming to break up two grown-ass adults.  She wasn’t even trying to pull some Parent Trap nonsense.  She may not even be a teenager yet, but April is above that.

2. The April character was a cheap copy of Rory.

Because God forbid we have two hardworking, studious young women on a single show.  We’re only allowed one.  The rest of the teenagers/young adult women need to be focused solely on how best to contour and whether or not they should get bangs (and don’t get me wrong, I’m not denigrating these things.  I have considered spending my daughter’s college fund at Sephora a time or twelve).   And aside from that, April and Rory are interested in two very different aspects of academia.  Rory is more literary while April is focused on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math).  And to be honest, given this, April is the more revolutionary of the two young female characters.  Literature has always been seen as a predominantly female discipline while math and science are always shown to be dominated by the male species.  So not only are Rory and April not equally engaged in the same branches of academia, it can be argued that the character of April does more for the view of women in media than Rory does.  April actually breaks some of the female stereotypes.

3. She tried to hook her dad up with her swim instructor.

At this point, April Nardini is the ripe ol’ age of thirteen.  She previously had a great relationship with her father’s ex-fiancée (if her mom hadn’t screwed that up.  Thanks Obama Anna!).  They were clearly headed in a direction that could have meant a lifelong friendship (with maternal overtones).  However, at this point in the show, that was not to be.  So April, concerned about her father being lonely, sees something in her swim instructor that might mean they’d be a good fit… even though in the end she was VERY wrong.  April clearly loves her father, even if she’s only known him for a whopping year.  She wants to see him happy and I’m sure she has a clear understanding of how hard the Lorelai break up was for him.  So, she tries to set him up.  I will never understand how anyone sees something devious in the act of a loving daughter who doesn’t want her father to feel lonely.  Luke and Lorelai are not together, this isn’t even a Rory/Logan situation where they may or may not have been broken up.  In the end it’s not and never should be a 13 year olds responsibility to repair a relationship that was already damaged.  Are the fans mad because she spent her energy trying to get her father to date the swim instructor instead of getting her back together with Lorelai?  Again I say… THIRTEEN.

In summation, April is an innocent pawn in AS-P’s universe that somehow is made out to be the bad guy.  And I truly believe that even Amy must be confounded by the feelings her fandom has towards this particular character.  She’s not Christopher, she’s not Anna… hell, she’s not even Rune.  She’s a young girl who has shown nothing but thoughtfulness and kindness to the people around her.  And let’s not forget that this girl had absolutely no father figure in her life until her twelfth year.  She could very well have been angry and bitter that she had been denied a relationship with her dad, that Luke missed out on her first steps, her first science project, the first time she completed the quadratic equation.  But instead she moved forward with her life in the spirit of building relationships with her father and all of the people important to him.  But yeah… she’s the reason we had to endure Lorelai’s as Mrs. Hayden in season seven.  ::all the eye rolls::

As this Bustle article stated, Vanessa Marano should absolutely return for Gilmore girls: Seasons.  Dislike the coincidence of her arrival to the end of Luke and Lorelai all you want…. But April Nardini is Luke’s daughter, maybe (hopefully) Lorelai’s stepdaughter and Rory’s stepsister.  She was a vital part of the final two seasons.  She was a creation of AS-P.  She deserves a spot in the revival and we, as Gilmore girls fans, deserve to know all the amazing ways April Nardini has lit the world on fire since we left her in 2007.