Hi I’m Deboki, and this is okidokiboki.
And uh in the past few videos, we’ve talked
about like, kind of like serious things or
important-is sort of things, like fact-checking
in nonfiction and finding your place on booktube.
But today, we’re going to be doing things
a little different.
Today we’re going to be talking about Vanderpump
Rules.
Which, I would argue, is maybe the most important
topic of all.
Vanderpump Rules is technically just a reality
tv show about a bunch of West Hollywood bartenders
and servers working at SUR, a restaurant owned
by Lisa Vanderpump of Real Housewives of Beverly
Hills fame.
In actual reality, the show is an incredibly
human drama about all the different ways there
are to be terrible, and the toxic hold fame
can have on your friendships.
The show is a masterpiece in reality tv.
There have been fights in Las Vegas parking
lots.
There have been accusations of cheating to
cover up actual cheating, which may be a response
to other cheating, which might also be a response
to other cheating?
The cheating on this show has gotten to a
point where there have been infirm 90 year
old women have been quietly minding their
own business while cheating goes on in the
room next door.
And at the core of all this is probably one
of the most consistent casts on Bravo.
This is a cast made up of people who have
done some terrible things to each other but
who have also been so committed to the pursuit
of fame, until it’s no longer clear what
morality even really looks like on this show.
Of course, all of this has lead to the first
Vanderpump Rules book.
Next Level Basic was written by Stassi Schroeder
and came out this past.
You might be wondering if Bravo TV stars getting
their own book deals is part of the ongoing
dumbing down of culture.
To which I say that culture has been dumb
for as long humans have been making it.
But also, Next Level Basic promises to be
“the definitive basic bitch handbook”
and truly there is no one more qualified to
write this book than Miss Stassi Schroeder,
who once asked the important question “Is
that my problem?
That I’m too pretty?”
My secret shame as a Vanderpump Rules fan
is that don’t know when I’m going to actually
read Next Level Basic.
But I still wanted to mark this momentous
occasion with something, so I’m going to
do the next best thing, which is to introduce
the cast of Vanderpump Rules into something
resembling a literary canon.
And I’m going to do that by basically casting
the cast as books, describing what kind of
book they are?
It might be that they have some kind of kinship
to the plot of a book.
It might be a particular character in a book
that they like, kind of seem to be very similar
to.
Or it might be just something to the way they
lead their existence, at least on the show,
reminds me of a particular feeling generated
by a book.
I don’t know, this makes no sense there’s
no rules.
But just bear with me, stick with me because
like I feel this compulsion to do this.
I do want to, I don’t know, issue a preemptive
statement of sorts going into this because
reality tv does bring out a lot of strong
opinions in people, me included.
And sometimes it can get uncomfortable to
sometimes read the way people talk about reality
tv stars as if we fully know who they are
just because we watch them on our television.
Anything I’m about to say is based solely
on what the stars of Vanderpump Rules have
chosen to put on screen or on social media
or any of their other public platforms.
I’m treating them like they’re characters
in a story because in some ways that’s all
they are kind of to me.
You know Vanderpump Rules is a show I watch
weekly, and that I binge regularly…probably
it’s not good for me.
But whatever it is, these people to me are
just characters, I’m missing out on the
bajillion things that are part of their lives
that are you know, not a part of the show
and are not for me as an audience.
Some of the people I don’t like on the show
might actually be wonderful people in real
life, and vice versa.
And at the end of the day, the joke is on
me.
Whatever judgments I have, they’re out there
getting paid a shitton of money to be basically
partying and fighting all day.
So.
Let’s go into it, let’s start with the
woman of the hour herself: Stassi Schroeder.
Stassi started the first season of Vanderpump
Rules by saying, “My mom always told me
that I’m the descendant of a Swedish princess,
so I try to act like one.”
And boy has she.
Stassi spent the first season as either probably
the most sympathetic villain on TV or the
most unsympathetic heroine on TV, and over
time her status as queen bee has gradually
diminished.
But she’s had this sort of interesting trajectory
over the course of the series.
As for what book she is?
Stassi is probably the A Song of Fire and
Ice series by George RR Martin.
And I kind of resisted making this comparison
for her because I was a little bit resentful.
One of the most basic things about Stassi
is her deep love for Khaleesi.
Um, I’m kind of curious about how that love
is playing out right now.
Um, but whatever.
Um, it’s..I felt a little bit resentful
that I, that I was kind of playing so neatly
into her hands.
But by the same token, I feel like that resentment
I feel is part of why I have to go for it.
Because like Stassi herself, Game of Thrones
and its follow-ups are gratuitous in their
depiction of violence.
They’re both cruel to women and display
a seeming disregard for the existence of people
of color.
At the same time, they’re enormously compelling,
keeping you as the audience far more invested
than you might even want to be.
And for all the trappings of moral ambiguity
in both of them, there seems to be a beating
heart at the center of it all that kind of
makes you root for them even when you don’t
want to know.
Next, of course, has to be Ja.
Oh boy.
Jax is a former male model who started the
show as Stassi’s boyfriend, uh, only for
their relationship to fall apart very quickly.
At first, the demise of their relationship
seemed to largely fall on Stassi’s temper
and possessiveness, but one of the defining
moments of the show, really one of the moments
that, that told you from the beginning what
Vanderpump Rules was going to be, was the
revelation at the end of the first season
that all her fears about him were completely
grounded.
Jax is an emotionally manipulative vortex
who seems to take bright happy young women
in and then proceeds to betray and devastate
them.
Future partners have had ample warning, thanks
in no small part to the fact that his antics
have been displayed and dissected on a very
large platform.
And yet they willingly sign up for the ride,
in part because the most dangerous aspect
of Jax is his charm.
Jax is A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara.
I have not read A Little Life, and much like
Jax himself, I am not quite sure I understand
the allure.
I have spent 7 seasons watching multiple women
fall for Jax the way I have watched multiple
people start A Little Life, knowing that it
will tear them apart.
I have been told that it is a very well-written
book, and I believe that, just as I believe
that Jax is a charmer who makes convincing
attempts at change.
But if there’s ever a book that feels like
the equivalent of finding out that your boyfriend
impregnated a stripper in Vegas and then turned
all your friends when you called him out on
that, and then a year later finding out that
he boned your best friend on her boyfriend’s/his
best friend’s couch, and then spending the
next few years learning about all the new
creative ways he’s found to cheat on his
girlfriends—if ever there was a book that
felt like the emotional equivalent to all
that, I think it might be A Little Life.
And with that said, let’s move on to Jax’s
fiance, Brittany.
I had a hard time thinking of a book for Brittany
in part because I don’t quite get her yet.
Uh, she came onto the show a few seasons ago
as this like sweet southern girl dating Jax,
and she’s really spent her, her seasons
built up as the one who’s ~changed~ him.
Except that spoiler alert: he cheated on her.
She decided to take him back after he underwent
some of his own traumatic shit, and she decided
that he had changed enough and she forgave
him.
And now they’re engaged.
And Brittany has spent the show kind of really
leaning hard on her southern charm, um, but
over the past season, she’s aligned herself
with some pretty mean behavior on the part
of her friend’s and her fiancé.
So that’s part of why I still feel like
I’m getting a handle on who she is.
Um so for now for Brittany, I ended up going
for another series I haven’t read, um though
at this point it’s been talked about so
much that I feel like I have.
And this is the Twilight series by Stephanie
Meyer.
Like Bella, Brittany is living out her major
transformation, though I guess instead of
becoming a vampire, she is becoming reality
tv star.
You could argue, “What’s the difference?”
We’re not gonna get into that right now.
This transformation is due in part to a relationship
that, you know, similar to Bella, is only
romantic if you decide to ignore a lot of
the major red flags along the way.
Just as I am grudgingly happy for fans of
Twilight that they have something they love,
I am happy for her and the people who enjoy
her story even though I personally am deeply
cynical about it and don’t really enjoy
watching it on screen.
Let’s move on from Brittany to Kristen Doute.
Kristen started off dating Tom Sandoval, who
we’ll get to later.
He cheated on her only for it to come out
later that she had probably cheated on him
several times cheated on him, but most notably
with Jax who is his best friend.
Understand that I respect the genre too seriously
to say this lightly: the trajectory of that
revelation is one of the greatest narrative
arcs in reality tv.
Kristen is a rollercoaster.
At times you root for her because she’s
kind of an endearing mess.
But she also has a tendency to become fixated
on revenge like at a point where it’s far
exceeded something that’s healthy for her.
Um, from helping to bring in a girl from Miami
who she thinks her ex-boyfriend has cheated
on his current girlfriend with, uh, to repeatedly
yelling at the girlfriend of a different ex-boyfriend,
it takes Kristen a long, long time to move
past a slight.
Which means that Kristen has the distinct
honor of being The Count of Monte Cristo by
Alexandre Dumas.
Like the Count, Kristen has a flair for the
dramatic, and at times, she seems to realize
that her grudges have gotten past the point
of being good for her.
At her core, like the Count, Kristen just
wants justice.
So if you need someone to theatrically carry
out some kind of angry revenge plan for you,
Kristen’s probably your girl but like.
Probably better to leave it be.
For our next one, we’re going to do things
a little differently, we’re going to do
a double.
We’re going to do Tom Schwartz and Katie
Maloney.
Together.
So Tom Schwartz is Jax and Tom Sandoval’s
best friend.
Katie Maloney is best friends—or has, throughout
different periods of the show—been best
friends with Kristen and Stassi.
They have now declared themselves the Witches
of WeHo.
It’s a whole thing.
Tom Schwartz and Katie Maloney have been together
since the beginning of the show.
They are currently married.
If you thought that meant there would be no
cheating in their story, unfortunately, you
would also be wrong about that.
Tom and Katie have enough going on their own
that like, I could pick a book out to describe,
like their own individual spirit or whatever.
But in the past few seasons, their relationship
and now their marriage has almost become like
its own character on the show, a haunting
presence that lurks behind every cruel thing
Tom says to Katie, and every cruel thing she
says to every other woman on the show.
Whenever they’re on the screen, the book
I can’t stop thinking about is Gone Girl
by Gillian Flynn.
Like Nick Dunne, Tom is a directionless charmer
who, you know, just occasionally calls his
wife a bitch and cheats on her and then calls
her a bitch again.
Katie responds in true amazing Amy fashion
by flexing her own meanness as much as possible,
whether it’s deriding Tom’s genitalia
or calling women whores.
Katie doesn’t quite have the subtlety to
pull off a mastermind plot like amazing Amy
Dunne did in Gone Girl.
Instead, Katie takes more of a blunt approach,
she likes to send her husband and co-workers
long rampaging, abusive texts.
But the result is surprisingly similar.
One of the darkest fights on this show took
place on Katie and Tom’s joint bachelor/bachelorette
party.
But at the end of it, Katie took a—a pretty
measured perspective, you might say.
She said, “We’ve aired a lot of grievances.
We’ve fought enough that we just need to
bottle it up, and we can open that bottle
after the wedding.”
Which I’m pretty sure is the ending of Gone
Girl except for the wedding.
Next up, we’re getting to Tom Sandoval,
the bartender turned bar owner with his compatriot
Tom Schwartz.
They now own the bar creatively titled Tom-Tom,
which was offered to them by Lisa Vanderpump.
There’s probably a lot of shady stuff going
on, I’m very intrigued, I also really want
to try it.
Anyways.
At times, Sandoval has been a model, a musician,
and an actor—which I think is probably like
the holy trinity of West Hollywood.
Picking a book for him was kind of hard and
weird.
It’s not like uh Brittany where I just didn’t
have enough of a sense.
Uh it’s more that like Sandoval’s kind
of a funny character.
I had this book that I immediately, just like
instinctively thought of for him, but I didn’t
know why.
So I like noted it down and immediately forgot
about it.
And then I was in the shower and thinking
again what book should I pick for Tom Sandoval,
and this book came to my head again.
And then I go to my notes, and I see it, and
it’s there, and I’m like, “ooh.”
And that book is Harry Potter.
I don’t know really why.
And I don’t think it’s even any one particular
book in the series.
I just think it’s the whole series.
I think what it is, is that like the series,
Sandoval is a little bit silly but he’s
also a little bit dark, he’s also a little
bit problematic, but he’s a ton of magic.
And so yeah.
Sandoval is Harry Potter.
Next we’re going to go to my favorite person
on the show, which his Ariana Maddix.
She is dating Tom Sandoval.
She’s been attacked by some of the Witches
of WeHo, but is also now starting to become
friends with them.
It’s a whole complicated dynamic.
Um, but I’m going to just admit my biases
upfront: I have been an Ariana stan from basically
her first season on the show.
Has she been perfect, of course not, but as
far as I can tell, she’s a voice of reason
in this show, and I personally think every
reality tv show needs one.
The most common complaint I see about her,
and this is really comes up every complaint
about other voices of reason on other reality
tv shows, is that people think that she’s
arrogant, that she thinks she’s above it
all.
To which I say, I mean, don’t we all think
that we’re kind of like above this?
Ariana’s existence on the show involves
a lot of pointing out uncomfortable truths
to the people around her, and in response,
people act like she is personally coming into
their homes, setting down a pedestal, and
then lifting herself onto it.
Um.
Which makes her The Life-Changing Magic of
Tidying-Up, by Marie Kondo.
Does Marie Kondo want you to throw away all
your things?
No.
Does she want you to dump all your books in
a fire?
No.
All she wants is for you to have a reasonable
perspective on your surroundings, and a careful
assessment on how you interact with all that’s
around you.
And like Ariana, she seems to love mess.
Now we’re on to the last of the OG Vanderpump-ers.
And this is probably one of my other current
favorites.
This is Scheana Marie Shay.
Oh, Scheana.
Her entrance into the first episode of the
show, which segued out of a conversation that
she had with her ex-boyfriend’s ex-wife,
is basically iconic at this point.
Since then, she’s been accused of being
a homewrecker, a flip-flopper, a snapchat-obsessed
Kardashian-wannabe, a bad friend—all sorts
of things.
But of this cast, except for maybe Ariana
and Brittany, I think Scheana’s probably
done the fewest terrible things, at least
on camera.
There’s definitely a few things with regards
to her ex-husband and like that divorce that
I think you like could reasonably call out.
But overall, she’s been on the lower side
of problematic om this cast.
The worst thing you could say about her is
that she’s kind of a striver: she’s leveraged
a wedding and a divorce for airtime, and she’s
fallen in and out with thewitches of weho
so many times that it’s almost strange watching
her in the past season where she finally doesn’t
seem to care about htem.
She kind of makes me think of Vanity Fair
by William Thackeray.
And like, confession: I’ve only seen like
the movie adaptation of the book, so I’m
basing a lot of this on the wikipedia entry,
so I don’t know how legit this is.
Um, but Scheana kinda seems to have that Becky
Sharp quality to her.
She’s clearly ambitious and striving and
probably manipulative, and she may not go
about her ambitions in, like, the most pristine
of ways.
But she’s also a little bit charming in
her own self-centered kind of way.
So from there, we’re going to move on to
like, the last two of the newer cast.
And the first is James fucking Kennedy.
James is one of the more recent additions
to the cast, and I guess you could say he
contains multitudes.
He’s a DJ who has described himself as White
Kanye.
He was actually going to be roommates with
Tom Sandoval when Tom Sandoval and Kristen,
like first broke up.
Except that James then had sex with Kristen.
On Tom Sandoval’s bed.
Famously with Tom Sandoval’s condoms.
It was a whole thing.
But basically that’s how James got on the
show.
Since then, he’s been both the bully and
the bullied, treating people like absolute
shit while also being held to a standard that
most of the rest of this cast can’t meet.
As a lot of people have pointed out, he’s
kind of like a younger version of Jax: he’s
manipulative, mean, and misogynist.
But also strangely compelling.
When he’s good, he’s hysterical, pointing
out the absurdity of everyone around him.
But when he’s bad, he’s horrifying.
He reminds me so much of Fight Club by Chuck
Palahniuk, a book that is filled with men
who are basically just self-sabotaging and
literally fighting with themselves in lieu
of actual improving themselves to be like
functioning members of societ, but who are
also entertaining in a way that you hate yourself
for.
Last, and maybe least?
Lala.
The other more recent addition to the cast,
Lala started off rocky, in large part because
she lied about what she was a modeling work
trip, but turned out to basically be a boat
party.
She’s fat-shamed other people and been slut-shamed
in response.
But her power on the show and consequently
her friendships has grown thanks in part to
her off-screen fiancé Randall, who keeps
her and I guess her friends outfitted in private
jets.
Kind of like Brittany earlier, I sort of had
a hard time picking something for Lala, just
because I don’t really fully get her.
But I’m going with Memoirs of a Geisha by
Arthur Golden for a few reasons.
Memoirs of a Geisha was written by a white
American man taking on a highly specific aspect
of Japanese culture and femininity.
Is it possible for this to be done respectfully?
Sure.
Was it?
Ehh..
Like the book’s depictions of geisha, Lala’s
sense of empowerment and sexuality—while
maybe rooted in something real for—are kind
of portrayed on camera as if they’re largely
informed by the male gaze.
And Lala’s entire affect is appropriative
and fetishistic, though in her case, she’s
a white woman from Utah talking about popping
people on the streets and the spirit of Tupac
taking over her body.
So there we have it.
We have the Vanderpump Rules cast as books.
I’m just kind of picturing a library of
these books together, and they’re a bunch
of books just basically yelling at each other.
Like it’s a library just full of toxicity
or something.
I’m going to be honest.
I uh may have spent way too much time planning
this video, I put in a lot of thought, um,
even if it doesn’t seem like it.
And I’m not sure I should have.
I hope you guys enjoyed it.
Any moment to talk about Vanderpump Rules
is in my opinion a good moment, so.
If you are a fan of Vanderpump Rules, definitely
let me know.
Definitely let me know what you thought about
the season, even if you loved it, because
I hated it.
One last note, I forgot to put this in when
I was filming, so I’m doing like another
little quick filming right now.
I started a newsletter.
I basically realized that I haven’t been
able to post videos as frequently as I want,
but I still have a lot I want to talk about
in terms of Booktube and science and all this
stuff.
Um, so I wanted to start a newsletter where
I could do some more writing about all that
stuff.
Keep you guys updated on things I’m reading
and watching and everything.
Um, and also have a little section of, um,
Recent Science Reads, um, which is something
I’m going to be doing again on my channel,
but I want to do that on a more regular basis
because there is always more science stuff
to read.
Um, so if you guys are interested, it is at,
um, you can subscribe at okidokiboki.substack.com.
I will have a link below.
And thank you to you guys who already have.
So uh yeah.
Bye.
