Jess Mariano is My Favorite Triple Scorpio

he may be a sad boi, but he's OUR sad boi.

archetypical delves deep into fictional characters using the language of archetypes and stars. Signs, placements, and charts may or may not be accurate to their actual birthdays but I’m pretty sure Amy Sherman Palladino wasn’t reverse engineering every character’s astrological chart to be perfectly accurate anyway, OK? OK. Let’s get on with it.

Is anyone more perfect to inaugurate this series then Jess Mariano? In season 2 of Gilmore Girls, Luke’s errant nephew hurtles through Stars Hollow like a meteor and shifts the gravity of everything around him. Not just for his Uncle Luke, but for the titular Gilmore Girls, too. If Dean is the first boy who noticed Rory, Jess is the first boy that Rory noticed. He’s exactly the kind of big-headed sad boy who would ruin your life and you’d let him. You might even want him to. 

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So what’s Jess’s deal?

SCORPIO RISING

SUN in SCORPIO 

MOON in ARIES 

MERCURY in AQUARIUS

VENUS in SCORPIO

MARS in AQUARIUS 

Of course he’s a triple Scorpio. The affinity for second hand leather jackets and camouflage baby tees would have given it away if the sleepy eyes, melancholy and fondness for secret keeping didn’t. 

A crocodile pushing along through dark water, all scales and jagged teeth. His feelings come out like a snapping bite. Jess yells at Luke for being overbearing and presumptuous when he’s really not ready to be hurt by a parental figure again. He pranks Doose, the town fascist just to stick it to the stickler and because it’s not like anyone likes that Nazi anyway. Especially early on, nobody really understands the inner machinations of Jess. They see the intimidating façade and the chip on his shoulder. The rawness of his feelings and his destructive tendencies. But Jess, Scorpio in Venus, Aries Moon, is deeply passionate and romantic. He wants to be intertwined with others spiritually, emotionally, and completely. But he’s not used to it and he’s afraid of getting hurt. 

Just look at the deep fear in his eyes when one of his connections might finally be mutual:

Tell me this isn’t a Scorpio.

But there is a magnetism to Jess—he’s prone to pulling people under into deep, vulnerable wells. We see this with Luke who follows him into the dark at nearly every turn; constantly trying to meet him on his level and engage where no one else will. Jess provokes the people around him, but Luke is one of the few who engages. Luke adopts Jess when his mother can’t take care of him. He’s the one who tries to give Jess a semblance of a parental figure and a stable life (although, at that point it might have been a bit too late.) Luke follows Jess into the darkness of teenhood and neglect and tries to pull him out; but Jess won’t leave without kicking and screaming. Jess refuses the help because he doesn’t think anyone can actually understand the depth of his turmoil. It can be painful to stick through with a prickly Scorpio-Aries-Scorpio in the throes of being a teenager and in the end Luke doesn’t pull Jess out of that metaphysical darkness; instead, they keep going until they come out the other end, through a heartbreaking separation and then a reunion, eventually forging one of the deepest spiritual and emotional bonds in Jess’s life.

We also see that magnetism with Rory who he tempts with his enigmatic wiles and out-of-towner intrigue (and magic tricks lol). It’s Jess who pushes Rory to question her relationship with her incel-lite potato sack goblin of a boyfriend Dean. Where Dean is a less charming Lurch Addams with more sports-related head trauma, Jess is smart and cute and exciting, and has a certain je nais se quois that Rory can’t help but notice. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s the only bibliophile besides Paris that can match her voracity for books, or that he’s capable of keeping up with the Gilmore penchant for verbal sparring. Or maybe it’s that he’s a sexy bad boy with a big head.

Rory and Jess have chemistry, let’s just say that now. Where Rory and Dean kind of feel like an obligatory heterosexual coupling between two high school classmates in a dystopian YA novel about forced reproduction, Rory and Jess are an explosion of desire, a fanfic romance, dreamy. For a Venus in Scorpio, there is only room for intense partnerships. Even when Jess starts “dating” rando blond girl #1 they seem to only occupy their time with public tonguing sessions and probably many more private tonguing sessions. With Rory, Jess is ready to abandon everything for them to be together in New York. No Luke and Lorelai nagging them, no Chilton, no Yale. They don’t need parents or school because they’re smart enough to get by on their own and having each other will be enough. That kind of intensity. And, I think, Jess being a triple Scorpio can mean that he tends towards  hopeless romanticism, towards, perhaps, simp behavior. Even years later, Jess still holds a flame for Rory who was one of the brightest girls he had ever met. 

...Listen, Jess didn’t really know Rory in her adult life where she’s a homeless dilettante who’s bad at her job, okay? He was in love with the kind, intellectual, driven girl in a plaid skirt. Which is also why he freaks out when he finds out she dropped out of Yale to be in Future Republican Wives of America. Maybe he wouldn’t have looked longingly into that window if he knew.

In the end, though, destiny pulls both Rory and Jess away from Stars Hollow and in turn, away from one another. And later, when Jess returns, Rory has  learned to resist the intense magnetic pull of a dummy thick novelist who works for a literary nonprofit in favor of blondies with old money media empires. Not even a triple Scorpio can compete with that deep, dark magic of nepotism.

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When we first meet Jess, he stares into the abyss of life but he’s not sure if anything is staring back. And he so desperately wanted something to be staring back. A childhood full of chaos and neglect led him to believe that no one cared about or for him. That it’s just an episode of man vs wild out here on Earth.  

That Mercury in Aquarius means that he’s about 12 steps ahead of everyone else and the Mars in Aquarius means he likes to focus his energy on intellectualism and rage against any authority that is obsessed with putting him in a box. If you grew up without anyone around ready to engage with that intensity of knowledge and feeling, of course you’d feel alone.  Jess has spent a lot of time thinking about the things he cares about, and he just wants someone to meet him on his level; he wants someone who isn’t trying to take care of him or belittle him. He wants to play. To duel, debate, and ideate. That might be why Paris and Jess get along so well, actually…

Jess wants what we all want: for someone to understand, to see. An Aries Moon is someone who is sincere to a fault and almost childlike in their world view. Aries is the first stage in the cycle of zodiacs and perhaps the least mature. The most earnest, for sure. They can be inappropriate in the things they say and throw proper timing into the wind. They are loud about their wants and can really only see things as a yes/no binary. Rory saying “no'' to an elopement in New York might as well have been a “no” to the entirety of Jess himself. And when the world is full of middle grays and I-can't-right-now’s, an Aries moon can feel like people are rejecting them left and right, that the entire world is rejecting them.

That quiet sadness can boil over into rage and express itself all at once. See: Jess in every appearance he has from seasons 2-7.

He wants this world to make sense, for confirmation that it isn’t just him vs the universe. We know he’s spent a lot of time alone waiting for something or someone to come along and hold his hand, to be honest. Despite all their bluster, the Scorpios I know are soft and gushy at the center. Jess wants someone to come along and hold his hand and mean it and for the world to not be so scary. 

Jess, like many Scorpios, can tend towards being a loner. That combined with the straightforwardness and emotional impatience of an Aries moon—let’s just say I don’t think he had a lot of friends before we meet him during the series. Rory being raised by Lorelai, two air signs, their life was the opposite. Social interactions are their bread and butter even when or especially when they’re feeling down. They rely on others to feel better. Someone like Jess with an Aquarius in Mercury desperately craves that kind of social interaction, he wants to debate about literature and news and movies with someone because it's fun. He wants to be challenged on his ideas and he wants to challenge others on theirs. The time he’s spent alone he’s been building up his armory of swords of sorts, reading books and studying people so that he can be ready to spar. I think, at his best, he wants to do this for fun like when he and Rory start an impromptu book club so they can talk about Foucalt before they make out (god, gross. Also remember when Rory was desperately trying to convince Jess to read Ayn Rand? What the fuck?) But we often find Jess fighting in self-defense instead. Maybe it’s the fire moon jumping out.

See: when he fights with Lorelai at her house about not wanting to live in Stars Hollow and accuses her of sleeping with Luke. And:

A Moon in Aries tells us he has trouble truly filtering his emotions no matter how hard he tries to conceal them. His hard scorpion shell may conceal his thoughts but it’s translucent so we can see right through it. He resents authority figures because his mom failed him. School bores him because he’s much too wise for the drivel that they shove down his throat. He likes Rory. These are all secrets, or at the very least things he doesn’t want to verbalize. 

Over the course of his life he comes to wield that confusion and darkness a bit better and he stops resisting the change that is constantly swirling around him.  Transformation, mystery, and darkness is a Scorpio’s best friend and an Aries moon craves adventure. In the end Jess understands that and throws himself into the power of the void. When Jess throws himself into the chaos that calls out to him, it takes him to his birth dad, from Stars Hollow to LA, and eventually back home to New York. In the darkness of the water he can transform into something new. 

Underneath that bite, scale, cloak & dagger is a nerdy goof with many interests and fun fixations. Aquarius in Mercury tells us that his analytical mind is broad and creative. He can see the value and fun in stupid shit like magic tricks (if you remember, he uses magic to impress Rory during his first 48 hours in Stars Hollow for god’s sake.) This implies that he has spent hours of solitude practicing card tricks and sleight of hand. He’s read books that collect the magic secrets of Dai Vernon and Houdini. He leaves notes in the margins of books for Rory to engage with. He probably thought Lord of the Rings was too obsessed with lore to tell a good story and prefers the Wizard of Earthsea instead. 

When we find Jess in the revival, he’s matured like a fine, sexy wine. Less of a rushing waterfall of emotions and a little more in control of that Scorpio charm and intuition. He advises Luke in love and marriage with his relationship to Lorelai, he helps his parents out of a vegetable-based cult, and he suggests Rory pull a Little Women to break out of her writing rut. By this point Jess is less of a meteor displacing everything in its trail and more of a shooting star in a leather jacket helping to recalibrate the people around him. It’s peak Scorpio, babes!

At his best, Jess delves headfirst into the unknown—whether that's spiritually or physically—to find out what’s on the other end. 

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Finally, I leave you with a song that I think captures Jess best.

Funny how it seems like yesterday
As I recall you were looking out of place
Gathered up your things and slipped away
No time at all I followed you into the hall
Cigarette daydream
You were only seventeen
Soft speak with a mean streak
Nearly brought me to my knees
Do do do do do do
You can drive all night
Looking for the answers in the pouring rain
You wanna find peace of mind
Looking for the answer
If we could find a reason, a reason to change
Looking for the answer
If you could find a reason, a reason to stay
Standing in the pouring rain