what if we had sparklers, but like, we’re inside

- i follow from @starlightswait

- midtwenties

- marley rose lover, blaine anderson defender

- glee season 1a is a masterpiece to me.

- s4 apologist

- i ship everything and nothing.

one of my favorite quinn moments in all of season two is her being so upset and hurt and angry that she slaps rachel, but also, her eyes immediately fill with tears and she seems genuinely HORRIFIED with herself as she apologizes. she (and really this is a constant back and forth between them) thinks she wants what rachel seems to have and feels as though rachel has Taken Something From Her. and honestly, i think a lot of her frustration is very valid, even if that aspect of it isn’t entirely fair or true. rachel doesn’t decide what finn does—he jealously confronted jesse on all his own.

and while i maintain i don’t think her feelings for finn are one hundred percent inauthentic or just about popularity/status, i do think those things are inherently tied together for her. she thinks one will get her the other, in both directions, and she thinks she *should* want finn at this point, even though she previously chose sam over him before he dumped her, bc she sees him as a good guy, and that seems like as much success and happiness she can imagine for herself at this point: staying in a hometown she doesn’t seem to like very much, working a passionless job in real estate, and marrying someone she at least believes is a Good Guy she Should Be with, who her feelings for are ambiguous at best. that’s not fair to finn, but it’s not particularly fair to herself either.

so it’s easy for me to feel sympathy for her/what i think they were going for in quinn’s character this season (i don’t know how well i think it was executed on a writing level, but diana worked well with what she was given). but it still doesn’t make it actually justified—rachel hasn’t *done* anything to her, not really, and certainly not this ep. and even if she had, it doesn’t justify violence.

in many ways, she’s backslid a lot, and isn’t truthfully *in action* a much better person than she was last season, in which, lest we forget, prior to canon and for at least some of early canon, she was seemingly leading the charge in at least cyberbullying rachel.

except she *does* feel genuine remorse and horror with herself here. i can’t imagine the quinn of early season one apologizing so immediately and with the level of sincerity she does here! she seems to be at a real crossroads with how she’s acting vs. who she wants to be, and i don’t think that arc for her was ultimately handled well in season 3, but in the hands of writers who like…. maybe cared about her in a more nuanced way, it could have been fascinating!

i do also like that the show doesn’t do that thing of “oh she’s a plus size girl but he likes her Anyway” (like they do with puck x lauren tbh). and to the best of my memory the show is generally pretty good about that? not really anything Else re: this relationship, by the end, but on this front at least.

like sam genuinely finds her beautiful. it’s not an exception or something he’s just Tolerating. he outright rejected rachel, and while i think he was lying to cover up financial issues about her not being his Type (don’t really think he has one), i also don’t think he’s attracted to her.

i do think a LOT (and shoutout to @tanhands for mentioning this bc Yeah) about what blaine might have been wearing at sadie hawkins. we have no idea! we have no idea if he used to dress much more similarly to the way he starts to and is coming back to it in season 3+ onward or if that’s new to him.

and i do have to wonder if part of the appeal of dalton when he transferred was the uniform. because it means that in his day to day life, he doesn’t very often have think about what to wear or how to present himself or how he wants to present himself! it’s already decided for him!

i will start by saying: i get very sad for and really empathize with kurt here! he has been fighting so hard to be able to express himself and not have to hold back and he’s back at mckinley and starting to feel like maybe things could be different and now here he is getting told he Should try to hold back a little by two people he thought were very supportive of him overall. and he shouldn’t have to!

and also: like he said, he worked hard on this! the biggest L on burt’s part to me here is that he apparently had no idea what kurt was even working on bc he’s surprised enough to express some amount of disapproval.

and i don’t really Agree with burt’s reaction or mindset—bigots are going to be bigots regardless of what you wear, that doesn’t make it kurt’s fault for not trying to conform—but i do think burt’s reaction is one of flawed but overall well-meaning parent, and honestly, in the grand scheme, “i don’t like it and i have concerns but i’m not going to stop you from wearing it” is pretty measured. his job as a parent isn’t to agree one hundred percent with everything kurt says or does — it’s to support him as best he can. and the balance between when that means thinking about your child’s safety vs. thinking about their agency and freedom of expression is a hard thing for even good parents to find. i don’t necessarily think burt came out entirely on the right side of that balance this time around, but that doesn’t mean i can’t see where he’s coming from. and again: “i’m not gonna stop you from wearing it” is still a lot better than many parents would do.

but also: i think blaine antis are, in all honesty, very unfair about blaine in this scene. blaine was on-edge about going already due to his bashing, and hasn’t seemed particularly thrilled about it To Me still — it’s subtle, but his tone at breadstix really makes me feel that way. but also: he asks finn if it’s cool if he sings with them, and if i had to guess, it’s bc he knows he will feel more comfortable if he’s performing for some of it. when he and finn are talking about tuxes, he says specifically he is going for something very “discreet”. and i have lots of thoughts and feelings about blaine and presentation through clothes which is a different post but the point is: he doesn’t want to stand out. that doesn’t mean it’s wrong for kurt to want to, but i also don’t think it’s like, evil of blaine to have expected and/or hoped that kurt might have chosen to be a little subtler in his own styling this time around, knowing what he knows about why blaine’s already a little on edge.

note: this is not me saying i wanted that, bc frankly i don’t. bc don’t think there would have been a way to appropriately convey the horror of it without feeling gratuitous or tonally at odds with glee at this point in the show. even the karofsky stuff with kurt starts to toe that line for me in s2.

but i also think there are a lot of people who tend to forget this or handwave it off as not being important to his character because we don’t see it. (and, in fairness, bc glee sort of does the same.) like, we See the traumatic bullying stuff with kurt and with the other nd. so it’s easier to know and remember and think about how that plays into the way they’re acting and decision-making.

but that doesn’t actually mean the stuff with blaine isn’t affecting him. and i don’t mean to play trauma olympics bc it’s all bad, and the stuff with karofsky for kurt is legitimately terrifying, but it feels like the implication is likely that blaine was in the hospital, considering it was bad enough he and/or his parents felt the need to transfer schools. it’s not just like he got punched. so the fact that (some!) people can’t find it in themselves to have empathy for his position in the kurt-burt tux conflict is! frustrating to me. (and that doesn’t even mean i think he was right! i will have stuff to say about that)

and his soft little “i’m so sorry” ugh </333

i also have complicated feelings about the narrative framing of treating this like something blaine needs to Overcome in the whole sense of “not being able to face up to the bullies” bc i think that is a pretty un-nuanced and victim-blame-y take tbh.

bc like… this actually would have been incredibly relevant to the how and why of how they first met. not that blaine is required to disclose it, obviously, but whether the writers just hadn’t thought of it until later in the season or (and tbh this is more my guess) wanted to wait for the reveal, blaine chose not to tell kurt when it very easily could have come up. and there could be a lot of different reasons for that! i think my personal read is a mix between “doesn’t want to freak kurt out even more with this knowledge of what else is possible to happen as he’s actively dealing with this bully who threatened him” and “doesn’t really want to talk or think about it” partly out if trauma and partly bc the fact that it happened at all and how he chose to deal with it, he seems to perceive as a flaw. and he’s acting embarrassed to admit it’s even a sore spot. you get the sense as he’s talking that he’s trying so hard to think of a different phrase than “beat the loving crap out of us” but there’s just no better way to say it. (this is reading between the lines/headcanon territory but…. i really get the sense blaine is embarrassed, based on everything else we know about him, partly because he feels he should have ‘fought back harder’ in a self-blame-y way, which he does seem to bw prone to (“i let bullies chase me away”…))

anyway darren criss really nailed it here to me in a fairly short scene! and i like that even as he says he’s crazy about kurt and agrees to go to prom and is happy kurt’s happy, you can tell he’s not like, overjoyed. there’s something lingering in his tone that makes his reaction to the whole burt-kurt situation check out to me!

and like… he didn’t just not tell kurt, he arguably outright downplayed it when they first met. he says he got “taunted” and “bullied” and while i’m sure that’s true, i have to imagine some escalation happened and that the bashing was the last straw.