HBO Max's Gossip Girl revival revealed that this time around, the teachers of Constance Billiard are pulling the strings as the titular blogger. However, real ones know that the true Gossip Girl will always be Penn Badgley's Dan Humphrey, who stayed so under the radar as Gossip Girl that even Dan was surprised when GG sent out a particularly hurtful blast. However, Gossip Girl wasn't the only time Badgley played a New York City stalker on television — and the new Gossip Girl revival is reminding fans of that fact, thanks to the addition of a new character.

In Episode 3, Julien (Jordan Alexander) meets her dad's secret girlfriend Lola, played by Elizabeth Lail. Why is this significant? Well, in the Lifetime-turned-Netflix series You, Badgley plays stalker Joe Goldberg, who becomes infatuated with Guinevere Beck, also portrayed by Lail.

Both Gossip Girl and You are produced by Alloy Entertainment, so it's not exactly shocking that there's some overlap between the casts of these shows. However, it's a reminder of just how similar Dan's character on Gossip Girl, and his character on You, really were to one another.

Dan stalked his classmates and wrote about it; Joe stalked his girlfriend and her friends and, well, read a lot. Both thought they were superior for not fitting in with the upper crust of the Manhattan social scene, despite trying their hardest to get in with a girl at the center of it — in Dan's case, Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively), and in Joe's case, Beck and her snobby friends from Brown.

And yes, even Badgley knows these characters are weirdly the same.

"Any part of me that was resisting the Dan Humphrey comparison has stopped because I've come to recognize how much of this is a surreal progression of Dan Humphrey," Badgley told the New York Times. "He's the very special white man who somehow thinks that he's an outsider, and it's like, 'Bro, you're not an outsider — you are the inside; everyone else is on the outside.' It would all be so comical, if it wasn't also the generating impulse for so much prejudice which can get translated into violence."

In the new Gossip Girl revival, Lola is a somewhat flighty blonde with a passion for complicated, not always emotionally available men — not unlike Beck, sure, but also not unlike Serena. (Seriously, tell me Lola isn't just Serena if Serena decided music was her "thing" now.)

Fortunately, there's a lot less murder on Gossip Girl than there could ever be on You (with the exception of that whole "Chuck Bass pulling a Lion King on his dad" thing) which means Lola is likely pretty safe from physical repercussions from stalking. Whether her music career will take off with the help of her music producer boyfriend, however, remains to be seen.

Images: HBO Max