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“Yeah, well, this is a club”: On Brittana, Complicated Dynamics, and the New Directions

So the wonderful @letmerebloginpeace asked

i know you've done a post about what all the ND kids think about brittana but what do brittany and santana think about each of the new directions kids?

Unsurprisingly, my answer got a little unwieldy.

I will warn you up front that just like with my posts on what the New Directions think about Brittana (see here and here), this post comes down a little on the negative side. While there are certainly a handful of their glee teammates that our girls love wholeheartedly and count as true friends, there are also more than a few of them that they straight up can’t stand or with whom they have toxic relationships.

Though Glee tried to sell the idea that all the kids in the New Directions were the dearest of dear chums, they weren’t always successful in doing so, particularly in Brittana’s cases. There was lots of bad blood between Brittany, Santana, and the New Directions, and while Brittana undeniably share in the blame, they’re not the only guilty parties.

As I say in my original post:

Examining the New Directions’ views of Brittana is not an entirely uplifting pursuit. It requires that we as Brittana fans talk about some of Brittana’s worst traits. It also requires that we look at examples of how a group of people who preached acceptance often could not find it in their hearts to accept Brittana, despite Brittana’s best efforts to win them over.

In writing this response, I’ve realized, not for the first time, how Glee mishandled so many potential friendships over the years. Things could have been so much better if the Glee writers knew how to wield their characters better and to allow for true, meaningful character growth, forgiveness, reconciliation, acceptance, etc.

Since they didn’t, this is what we’re stuck with: five and three-fourths seasons worth of bad relations between Brittana and the majority of their glee club peers.

If I haven’t scared you off by now, let’s get on with the analysis.

More discussion after the cut.

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“Oh, please, you guys love me”: On Brittana, Character Development, and How Self-Perception Shapes Their Relationships with the New Directions

The main factors that affect how Brittana’s respective views of their teammates change over time are their individual character development and perceptions of themselves as people.

In the beginning, both Brittany and Santana have bad reputations, Brittany as a “dumb slut” and Santana as a “mean” one. While deep down, the girls don’t like that their classmates view them in these ways, they feel helpless to do anything to change the status quo, particularly as at the time they’re both guarding deep, personal secrets that they feel they cannot reveal without then suffering lasting social consequences.

Brittany’s secret is that despite her reputation as the ultimate easy girl who is too stupid and aloof to care about who she sleeps with, she is actually deeply in love with Santana, and if she had her druthers she would choose to be with Santana exclusively.

Santana’s secret is of course that despite her reputation as a sharp-tongued, hyper-heterosexual bitch who’s screwing half the football team, she is actually secretly a sweetheart with an ooey-gooey center and deep and monogamous love for her female best friend, Brittany.

Brittany can’t stop pretending that she is indiscriminate about her sexual partners for fear of upsetting Santana and causing her gay panic about their relationship, while Santana can’t drop her “mean girl” guard and show her sweet, caring side for fear of making herself socially vulnerable and perhaps even causing her peers to realize the truth about her sexuality (see here).

So they both carry on, not only passively “allowing” their classmates to think poorly of them but oftentimes actively contributing to the perpetuation of their own negative stereotypes (see here).

For as much as Brittana don’t necessarily enjoy being pariahs in glee club and knowing that their teammates distrust and even in some cases dislike them, they’re both too scared to drop their guards and let everyone see who they really are inside. In this early stage in their development, they feel that it is better to be misunderstood and rejected than it is to be understood perfectly and rejected anyway. Sure, it hurts when people don’t like them based on the personas they project, but it would hurt even more if people didn’t like them based on who they really are inside and after knowing the things that are nearest and dearest to their hearts.

So for a long time, Brittana go along playing the bad girls.

Brittany is very much in the business of letting things slide. If someone treats her badly, more likely than not, she’s going to just take it and not do anything to confront the person or stand up for herself. With few exceptions, most people treat her poorly, so she’s just kind of “gotten used to it.” She expects her classmates to call her stupid, disparage her sexuality, and treat her like she is a child, and she’s even convinced herself that if they do these things in a “gentle” way, she can still count them as her friends. She’ll just let their meanness roll off her back.

It isn’t until S2 that she starts to really grow out of her go-along-to-get-along mode of operation.

Part of her learning process involves taking ownership of her own feelings and realizing that she doesn’t have to “settle” when friends or even lovers treat her poorly. Part of it involves quitting Cheerios and refusing to accept Sue’s bullying anymore. Part of it involves joining the Brainiacs and proving that she isn’t dumb like everyone thinks. Part of it involves making a conscious decision to be hopeful about her future (see episode 2x22). Part of it involves recognizing that she is so much happier being herself than she is pretending to be someone else. Part of it involves standing up first to Santana (see episode 2x04) and then to Artie (see episode 2x19), demanding that they treat her with the respect she deserves.

Brittany learns to advocate for herself and starts to actively seek after her own happiness. It takes her a while, but eventually she gets to the point where she is no longer willing to allow anyone to treat her badly, whether that person is her true love, her former cheerleading coach, the boy she’s dating, her glee club instructor, the captain of the football team, the school’s biggest diva, or anyone else. No more passes for people who call her stupid. No more forgiveness to people who do things to hurt her (or Santana) and then fail to sincerely apologize and change their ways. Brittany is all out of fucks to give, and she isn’t about excusing people’s bad behavior anymore. It’s not enough to just be “less mean” to her than others are. If you really want to be her friend, you have to actually be nice.

It is with this attitude in place that in the later seasons, Brittany starts to lose her patience with a lot of the kids in the New Directions, to the point where by S6, most of them are on her shit list.

She has tried to be nice. She has tried to give them the benefit of the doubt. But so many of them have been nothing but condescending to her and mean to Santana right from the very start, and she isn’t cool with it anymore.

She gets that when she and Santana first joined glee club, they were far from saints, but she also believes that they should be allowed to change and should be accepted for who they are now, not condemned for who they were in the past (see her Heart Locker speech in episode 2x22).

The problem is that from her perspective, the New Directions aren’t adjusting their perceptions based on the new evidence.

Over the years, she has proven that she’s not stupid or daffy like everyone thinks she is. She’s been an academic decathalon champion---who carried her team to victory at nationals---an SAT high-scorer and a certified MIT math genius, but the glee kids still look at her like she’s nuts whenever she opens her mouth.

But what’s even worse, in Brittany’s view, is how they still regard Santana as a bully despite the fact that Santana has opened up and shown them “all the awesomeoness that [she is.].”

Back in the day, Brittany swore to Santana that if she would just drop her guard and make an effort, the glee kids would welcome her with open arms and recognize her as the brave, sweethearted person she really is inside.

But that’s not what happens. Santana tries to make friends---especially with Hummelberry---but is never unreservedly welcomed by the group. Her acceptance always comes with a caveat and is frequently revoked due to petty reasons. Brittany isn’t present to witness the full rigmarole in person, but she hears enough to understand that no matter what Santana does, the New Directions are never going to fully forgive her for the things that she did when she was a sophomore and junior in high school.

---and knowing that they won’t both breaks Brittany’s heart and infuriates her.

While she refrains from directly confronting the New Directions largely for Santana’s sake, she doesn’t hold back from making passive-aggressive comments about them left and right or from trolling them when the opportunity strikes (see for example her mean comments to Tina in episode 6x03 and the way she teases Kurt about his love life in episodes 6x02, 6x03, and 6x08).

Since most of the kids in glee don’t understand Brittany’s wit and erroneously believe that she is incapable of holding grudges, they just ignore her spitefulness, writing her jabs off as “Brittany being Brittany.”

However, if you watch the later seasons with an eye for it, the truth becomes increasingly clear: Brittany no longer believes in what she told Santana during her Heart Locker speech. With few exceptions, the members of the glee club aren’t her family. They’re just a club, and she’s about done with them and their hypocrisy and exclusivity.

There are a few good apples in the bunch, but the rest of them are a bunch of petty narcissists who don’t deserve the time of day from Santana, let alone her friendship.

Now, with Santana, things are different.

Santana starts out being super aggressive and hostile toward everyone in glee club except for Brittany. Aside from the outside pressure she gets from Sue, her biggest reason for being so truculent is that she is trying to use offense as defense. Simply put, Baby Girl feels vulnerable and like if she lets anyone too close, they’ll hurt her, so she keeps everyone—except for Brittany—at arm’s length for her own emotional safety. Hers is a “strike first or be stricken” mentality.

Of course, the interesting thing is that for as much as Santana purposefully drives everyone in the glee club away from her, at her heart, she just wants them to love and accept her. She builds a high, unbreachable wall around herself in the hopes that maybe someday someone will care enough to climb it.

For the longest time, Brittany is the only one who does, and no one else.

Eventually, Brittany tells Santana that if she wants the glee club to accept her, then she’s going to have to make the first move and show them “all the awesomeness that [she is]” (see episode 2x22). It’s a scary proposition for someone as insecure as Santana, but Santana makes a go of it. She’s still prickly, of course, because that’s just her nature, but she tries to also be sweet and supportive and at times even generous, and she does make many concerted efforts to reach out to the people she has formerly bullied, such as for example when she tries to help Kurt defend his boyfriend from bullies (see episode 3x11).

But the sad thing is that even though Santana really does try to change, most members of the glee club never accept her efforts and still regard her warily all the way up through S5 (see episodes 5x12, 5x13, and 5x18).

For a long time, Santana tries her damnedest to get in their good graces, but eventually—circa the events of episodes 5x12 and 5x13—she seems to realize that no matter what, the New Directions are never going to accept that she’s changed, no matter how many evidences she shows them.

From this point forward, she continues to be her reformed self, but she stops holding her breath waiting for the love and acceptance she is never going to unconditionally win. With few exceptions, she settles for surface-level acquaintanceships at best, which is what we see from her throughout S6.

So onto our discussion of the individual relationships themselves.

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Finn Hudson

Finn’s history with Brittana is complicated at best. They start out in the same social strata---he a football player, they cheerleaders---and come into incidental contact through their respective relationships with Quinn and Puck. However, as Sue starts to target the New Directions, she essentially sics Brittana on Finn and instructs them to run interference in his burgeoning relationship with Rachel.

This mid-S1 development causes Brittana to have more direct interactions with Finn and ultimately starts the three of them down the path that will lead to Santana taking Finn’s virginity, Finn outing Santana to all of Western Ohio, and Finn becoming one of the most troubling figures in Brittana’s collective history.

We’ll start with the Brittany side of things.

Early on, Brittany doesn’t seem to give Finn much thought. He’s a football player and for a time Quinn’s boyfriend but not someone she has a lot of personal interest in herself. She may occasionally cheat off his math assignments, but it is not as if they are friends. He only really comes onto her radar as she notices Santana becoming increasingly fixated on him throughout the school year.

Brittana go on one unsuccessful date with Finn in episode 1x14, and then in episode 1x15, Brittany suggests that Santana make another attempt to get with Finn, this time solo.

From an outside perspective, it is difficult to understand why Brittany would tell the girl she loves to sleep with a boy she knows said girl doesn’t care about.

But Brittany does have her reasons.

While Brittany knows better than anyone that Santana isn’t truly romantically or sexually attracted to Finn---despite what Santana may be trying to tell herself---she also knows that Santana is not one to drop an obsession once she’s gotten it into her mind.

The thing is, Brittany isn’t putting ideas into Santana’s head that weren’t already there to begin with.

Santana has long been interested in possessing Finn for herself, not because she actually has any personal interest in him but because she feels insecure about her ability to make and maintain lasting relationships with guys and she is jealous that Quinn and Rachel have had success in that pursuit when she hasn’t.

Particularly after Sue sics Brittana on Finn but they fail to seduce him, Santana is left wondering why she can’t manage to get Finn into bed with her. Shouldn’t he want to sleep with her when she’s giving him the option to? Is she not sexually attractive to him? Does some part of him know she isn’t really interested in him? Does he realize that there is something “wrong” with her?

Santana feels so conflicted inside. She knows she “should” want Finn, but the fact is that she doesn’t. Her head and her heart are constantly at war, the former telling her that she has to get with boys, the latter not wanting to. The less her heart wants her to be with boys, the more her head tells her that she must do exactly that.

Part of her feels so relieved when her and Brittany’s BreadStix date with Finn ends before it even really begins, but another part of her feels guilty that she feels relieved.

In her mind, she should want Finn, or at least she should want to want him. She clings so hard to that belief, and ultimately she convinces herself that she has to get with Finn even if the mere thought of doing so makes her feel sick.

Brittany knows what’s going on inside Santana’s mind and heart in her intuitive, Brittany way, and she sees that Santana is going to go after Finn regardless of how she really feels about him, so she tries to ameliorate the situation---because that’s her m.o. at the time.

Sure, it breaks her heart to see Santana throwing herself at a boy she doesn’t actually give a damn about, and, yeah, she knows that Santana will walk away from the situation feeling terrible once all is said and done. But Brittany isn’t yet in the habit of calling Santana out on her bullshit. Santana’s gonna do what Santana’s gonna do, and since Brittany can’t stop her, Brittany’s only recourse is to try in advance to minimize the damage.

By essentially giving Santana her blessing to go after Finn, Brittany hopes that maybe Santana will at least not feel guilty where she’s concerned. She’s basically telling Santana, “Go do what you feel like you have to do. I understand. I’ll be here to pick up the pieces when it’s over.”

Now, throughout all this drama with Santana, Brittany’s opinion on Finn himself doesn’t actually change much. She would prefer that Santana not sleep with him, of course, but she also knows he’s not really doing anything wrong. He isn’t the pursuer in this situation, and he also isn’t at fault for not being romantically attracted to Santana even though Santana wants him to be.

He is just an object in Santana’s larger power play, and Brittany knows as much.

So.

Brittany remains mostly ambivalent to Finn throughout S1. But in S2, her opinion of him starts to change.

Here, Finn makes a few missteps that cause Brittany to occasionally side-eye him, the most notable of which occurs right in the season finale, when he kisses Rachel on stage at Nationals, and his actions get the New Directions disqualified from competition. While Brittany isn’t herself overly upset by this turn of events, Santana is, and Brittany takes note that Finn has the propensity to hurt people through his thoughtless behavior. Still, she is willing to allow that everyone makes mistakes from time to time and to both move on from the incident herself and encourage Santana to do the same.

Cut to S3.

No surprises here: Brittany’s true dislike for Finn starts during Santana’s outing arc. First he calls Brittany stupid and offers only the lamest apology afterward (see episode 3x04). Then he has the audacity to not only out Santana to the entire school but act like he is a hero for doing so (see episodes 3x06 and 3x07).

“Lady Music Week” is what changes Finn from acquaintance to enemy in Brittany’s books.

Of course, Glee doesn’t actually allow Brittany to talk for most of S3, so we don’t get a lot of dialogue to confirm Brittany’s feelings in this regard. It’s all in her furious silence, which is something that the genius Marjorie discusses at length in this post.

Note: Marjorie has retired from the Brittana fandom. Please respect her privacy while you enjoy her archived work.

Now. Had Finn properly apologized to Santana for violating her privacy and really seemed to learn from his mistake, then Brittany probably would have forgiven him---because, after all, she has herself made some mistakes in how she has approached Santana’s coming out process (see episodes 1x13 and 2x19), and she’s had to learn from them and do better (see episode 3x04). But from Brittany’s perspective, Finn never acknowledges that he has even committed any errors. He just rationalizes what he has done by saying that he was motivated by his concern for Santana’s welfare. He isn’t sorry. Just smug.

So going forward Brittany gives him no more free passes. She starts holding him accountable for being thoughtless and self-important. As he continually condescends to her during his S4 tenure as the glee club director, she becomes increasingly passive-aggressive toward him, at one point even presenting him a severed Barbie doll head just to mess with his mind.

Ultimately, Brittany thinks that Finn is a bad leader, and she never forgives him for the way he treats Santana.

When he dies, she opts not to attend his funeral because she knows she doesn’t share the same positive opinion of him that most of the other kids in glee club do. To her, Finn Hudson wasn’t a heroic person or great leader. He was just a selfish boy who often hurt other people through his thoughtless words and actions and never really seemed to learn from his mistakes. While she certainly isn’t happy that Finn died, she also isn’t about to pretend he was perfect when she knows for a fact that he wasn’t.

Now for the Santana side of things.

Like we discussed above, early on in her development, Santana fixates on Finn because he represents everything that she thinks she “should” want. He is the popular, handsome stud quarterback, and any would-be prom queen such as Santana would socially benefit from being his girlfriend.

Of course, no matter how much Santana tries to force her feelings for Finn, the truth is that she isn’t ultimately into him, and the fact that she isn’t frustrates her. Eventually, she lashes out at Finn as the object of her frustrations. When she can’t manage to “hold onto him” even after she takes his virginity (see episode 1x15), she switches tacks, trying her best to sabotage his love life as he dates first Rachel and then Quinn.

It is only after Santana comes to terms with her sexuality that her attitude toward Finn shifts and she for the most part gives up on being actively aggressive towards him. While his self-righteousness as the glee club captain and smarminess in his relationship with Rachel still annoy her, she’s no longer interested in either possessing him or destroying him. If left to her own devices, she probably would have mostly ignored him going forward.

But Finn doesn’t leave Santana to her own devices.

Instead, when Santana and Brittany defect to the Troubletones in S3, he takes their departures from the New Directions as a personal affront and starts harrassing them about their choices. In the process, he calls Brittany stupid, and Santana gets riled. She shoots back a litany of insults of her own, until finally her and Finn’s quarreling comes to a head when Finn outs her in a crowded high school hallway.

Santana is understandably furious about what Finn has done to her, but even though he never truly apologizes, she still somehow eventually finds it in herself to forgive him.

Nobody in the New Directions would believe it, but Santana is actually an incredibly forgiving person, perhaps because she so craves forgiveness for herself.

Going forward, Santana and Finn don’t have many more personal interactions. Still, when Finn dies, Santana is deeply affected, largely because she feels guilty for her contentious history with Finn over the years.

In what is more than a little bit of a retcon, she claims that Finn was nice to her as they were having sex. She seems very touched when Kurt tries to give her Finn’s letterman jacket as a memento to remember Finn by.

Rachel Berry

Brittana’s history with Rachel is a fraught one. While Brittany basically dislikes Rachel from start to finish, Santana goes from disdaining her to admiring her to trying (unsuccessfully) to be her friend to realizing that she will never fully extend her acceptance and somewhat moving on.

To be fair: Brittana are really awful to Rachel during S1 and S2, so it’s not as if they are innocent parties in everything that goes down. However, to also be fair: Particularly in the later seasons, Rachel dishes out just as much as she gets, and she is very hard on Santana, even during times when Santana is legitimately trying to be her friend and confidante, so there is blame to be shared all around.

Getting into the details, then:

Brittany hates Rachel.

In the beginning, it is just because Rachel dresses badly, talks down to her, and is full of herself, but as the seasons wear on, Brittany’s big sticking point becomes Rachel’s mistreatment of Santana.

Brittany can’t understand why, but for some reason Santana craves Rachel’s approval and friendship, and after S3, she works damn hard to earn them. Sure, Santana and Rachel get off to a bad start when they are in high school, but Santana changes a lot as she becomes increasingly comfortable with herself, and once she graduates and moves to New York, she makes a real, concerted effort to become a part of Rachel’s inner circle.

Santana scores Rachel a job at the diner, supports her fledgling Broadway career, and, oh yeah, helps her through a pregnancy scare, and yet Rachel still treats her with patent disdain and distrust, kicking her out of the Loft and then getting her kicked out of the band, accusing her of stealing her theatrical glory, and constantly questioning her motivations for doing nice things (R: “Well, I mean, I wanted to see what you wanted in return.” S: “Is that the kind of friend that you think that I am?” R: “Yeah”).

Brittany isn’t present to witness all these slights firsthand, but she hears about them through the grapevine, and she sees how much Rachel has beaten Santana down, particularly after the accusations Rachel makes against Santana in front of the glee club in episode 5x12 (“You’re so cruel, Santana. You’re only doing this to me because I’m the lead of Funny Girl, and you’re just the lowly understudy. You want to make me feel bad because I’m better than you, and you’re an awful person”).

Brittany understands that no one is obligated to forgive their high school bully even once they reach adulthood and even if said bully has reformed, but she doesn’t understand why Rachel keeps stringing Santana along, pretending to be her friend for short stretches of time just to then reject her again immediately afterward. To her, it seems like Rachel is using Santana and wants her friendship only when it is convenient or profittable but never otherwise.

In Brittany’s view, if Rachel isn’t ever going to forgive Santana for what happened between them in high school, then Rachel should just say as much and be done with it. She shouldn’t keep giving Santana hope that they can be close only to then steal that hope out from under her. That’s just shitty behavior, and especially when Santana is being so earnest and contrite.

—and that is why during S4, S5, and S6, you can see just how 1000000% done Brittany is with Rachel and why she takes every opportunity to troll her.

If Rachel is going to disregard Santana’s attempts to be friends with her, then Brittany is going to mess with Rachel’s mind and vague the hell out of her at every opportunity.

She isn’t going to confront Rachel on Santana’s behalf because that’s not her place, but she also isn’t going to make any secret of the fact that she thinks that Rachel sucks.

As for Santana’s own feelings about Rachel, they’re fairly complicated, too.

Early on, Santana fixates on Rachel much in the same way that she does on Finn, mainly because she is jealous of Rachel’s emotional transparency.

When Rachel wants something, everybody in the world knows that she wants it, and Rachel never backs down or apologizes for pursuing her desires. To someone like Santana, who at the time feels trapped by her fears and is repressing a huge part of who she is, Rachel’s unapologetic Rachelness is enviable. Santana wishes she could be as brazenly herself as Rachel is. She wishes she could go after what she wants. But since she feels that she can’t, watching Rachel just frustrates her. It pisses her off that someone as unpopular and obnoxious as Rachel is out there achieving her dreams when she can’t herself do the same.

Among Brittanalysts, there is some debate as to whether or not Santana has an unwilling crush on Rachel. I personally don’t think she does, but regardless:

Throughout high school, Santana behaves aggressively towards Rachel due to her frustration, and it is only in their senior year that they start to make amends.

Following graduation and Santana’s brief stint at Louisville, when Santana ends up moving in at the Loft in NY, she does so knowing that she has been horrible to Rachel in the past and feeling guilty for it (“I think I just have this weird guilt-trip thing about being friends with you because I was so awful to you in high school. Quinn and Britt hated you, too, and that’s mostly just because you sucked so bad and you walked with that weird feet-pointing-out thing. I made Quinn look like the boss, but I was really running the ‘hate on Rachel’ parade”).

She tries her best make amends, but, as described above, Rachel frequently rejects her overtures, deeply hurting her feelings. While there are definitely occasions when Pezberry seem genuinely endeared to each other (see episode 4x15), they never seem to last, with Rachel refusing to believe that Santana is capable of altruism.

Rachel consistently expects the worst from Santana, and confirmation bias causes her to interpret Santana’s behaviors in the least charitable way possible. Santana, unable to win for losing, then lives down to Rachel’s low expectations, causing Rachel to feel justified in her original opinions. The longer this cycle goes on, the more frantic Santana becomes.

The final straw is their fight over Santana’s role as Rachel’s understudy in Funny Girl, the fallout from which I describe at length here and here.

Suffice it to say that in the end Rachel never really gets Santana’s motivations for behaving in the way that she does—hint: Santana doesn’t go after the role because she is in any way trying to undermine Rachel, and she also ultimately doesn’t relinquish the role because she is in any way lazy or unmotivated—but Santana reaches a place where she no longer cares.

Brittany teaches Santana that she can just walk away from Rachel if she’s not getting anything out of their relationship (“You have spent most of your life in the closet because you cared about what people thought about you. Walking away from a dream that you don't actually care about is you winning because it's you saying, ‘This is not who I am, and I don't care who knows it’”), so that is exactly the thing that Santana does.

Though she is still kind to Rachel when they come into contact later in the season, she clearly isn’t desperate for her friendship in the same way that she was before (see episode 5x18). When Rachel misjudges her, she allows it to roll right off her back. She can be the bigger person even if Rachel doesn’t realize that that’s what she’s doing. She can go high when Rachel goes low.

Santana closes out the show comfortable in the knowledge that she will never be Rachel’s bosom friend and that whatever “friendship” they have will always be mostly superficial. Rachel serves as a bridesmaid at her wedding and is someone she probably keeps in contact with throughout her life, but theirs is never really an intimate friendship, and, finally, after so many years, Santana is at peace with the fact that it isn’t.

Quinn Fabray

Brittana’s relationships with Quinn are complicated and presented ambiguously throughout the series.

While the Unholy Trinity often purport that they are best friends, Brittana frequently ostracize Quinn, and Santana frequently fights her. It is also uncertain to what degree Brittany has a personal relationship with Quinn independent of Quinntana’s personal relationships with each other.

Still, despite all the complications and unanswered questions, I do tend to believe that deep down the Unholy Trinity are friends and do care about one another, albeit in their own particular way.

I’ll link you to this post, where I discuss the issues at length.

Noah Puckerman

Brittany’s relationship with Puck is very minimal, at least as it plays out where the audience can see on screen.

While Santana insinuates that Brittany may engage in a casual sexual relationship with Puck sometime prior to the start of S1 (see episode 3x01) and Brittany may participate in a threesome involving Puck and Santana as late as the events of episode 2x06, in general, Brittany has far fewer personal interactions with Puck throughout the course of the series than do either Santana or Quinn.

By her own report, Brittany thinks that Puck is dumb (see episode 2x04). However, despite what fanon tells us, we have no indication that Brittany bears any secret or special animosity toward Puck, even though Puck is Santana’s boyfriend and sexual partner throughout S1 and some of S2.

As I discuss elsewhere,

It is worth noting that, historically, Brittany has always responded to Santana showing romantic attention to persons other than herself with a sort of quiet stoicism sometimes tinged with sadness and reservation, such as we see when she approaches Santana during the Dirt Locker scene (“Wait, you’re still dating Sam?”), in episode 4x13 with her heartbroken look as Santana kisses Elaine in the choir room, and during her speech to Santana in episode 5x12 (“And I’m sure your girlfriend’s great, but you can’t recreate what you and I have”).

As much as fanfiction likes to imagine Brittany being openly hostile toward anyone Santana bats an eye at, we don’t have much canon evidence to say that she would do so. Even when she’s suggesting that Santana should break up with Dani, Brittany is not insulting toward Dani or disparaging of her character. She respects Santana’s choices and attractions, even if she would prefer that Santana not date anyone but herself.

That being the case, I don’t think Brittany hates Puck even though Santana long uses him as a beard—and particularly because Puck, for as crass and rude and opportunistic as he can often be, never does anything in particular to hurt Santana, unlike, say, Finn, whose actions end up hurting Santana a lot in the long run.

Yes, Puck uses Santana for sex, but Santana uses him for sex right back. Moreover, Brittany knows that sex is all there is between Pucktana. There is no emotional connection there and nothing for her to really be jealous of. Ultimately, Santana isn’t even attracted to Puck. She’s just flaunting him for the social benefits, and Brittany knows as much.

While Brittany certainly doesn’t like the arrangement and would prefer that Santana not feel the need to maintain a beard at all, she does understand that Pucktana’s relationship is both reciprocal and consensual and that Pucktana are at liberty to do what they will in regards to each other.

The times when Brittany finds Pucktana’s relationship most hurtful are the times that Santana rubs it in her face (episode 2x04), and in those instances, Puck is just the tool Santana is using to hurt Brittany, not an active participant in bringing hurt to Brittany himself. Brittany’s sense of sadness and frustration in these situations is therefore directed at Santana, not at Puck.

Once Pucktana go their seperate ways in S2, Brittany doesn’t seem to give Puck much thought thereafter. The fact that Puck attends Brittany’s wedding to Santana shows just how much of a nonfactor she considers him to be.

As for how Santana feels about Puck, as I discuss in another post,

Making her private business with Puck public knowledge affords Santana some cover. If she is having sex with the most popular boy in school and everybody knows that she is doing so, then most people won’t give a second thought to her close relationship with Brittany. Consequently, the more Puck brags about sleeping with her to his buddies, the more secure Santana feels in her life.

It also works for Santana that she and Puck are scarcely friends outside of their sexual relationship, as frankly she has no real interest in Puck as a person—he’s just a means to an end for her. Constantly berating Puck, keeping him at arm’s length emotionally, and making him perfectly aware that her relationship with him is entirely contingent upon his ability to service her social needs are all tactics that she uses to keep Puck from getting all needy on her.

In fact, as we see in episode 1x18, when Puck makes an ill-advised attempt to form a deeper emotional bond with Santana, looking to her for comfort in his time of emotional vulnerability, he gets himself burned in so doing—and badly. Not only is Santana totally unsympathetic to his plight, but she cuts off his access to her sexually because he no longer appeals to her after having lost his alpha male status.

Throughout S1 and early S2, Santana’s relationship with Puck fluctuates according to the pattern I describe here.

Basically, she turns to him whenever she is feeling insecure and needs to “reassert her heterosexuality” but then also frequently ignores him in favor of Brittany. Her lack of real attraction to Puck causes her frustration and anxiety and prompts her to occasionally lash out at him, weakening their already tenuous bonds to each other.

By my estimation, the last time Santana and Puck sleep together is circa the events of episode 2x06. Thereafter, Puck completely abandons his sexual relationship with Santana in order to romantically pursue Lauren Zizes, and he even emphatically tells Santana that he’s finished with her come episode 2x12.

Eventually, Santana replaces Puck with Sam, using him as her beard instead.

From then on, Pucktana have little contact throughout the rest of the series. Like Brittany, Santana doesn’t seem to bear Puck any ill-will going forward, but she also isn’t at all close to him and doesn’t maintain any kind of real friendship with him after they graduate.

My guess is that in adulthood, Santana probably doesn’t like to dwell on her memories of Puck, not because he was necessarily horrible to her but just because she was so deeply unhappy during the time when she was with him. It’s sad to think back on herself at fifteen years old, scared to death, believing that her farce of a relationship with Puck is perhaps the best “romance” that she is ever going to experience. She’s glad that she eventually grew up and grew out of that stage in her life, and she doesn’t want to really revisit that old headspace even now that she’s clear of it.

Kurt Hummel

Both Brittany and Santana have complicated relationships with Kurt over the years, which I have written about at length here.

Mercedes Jones

Though at first they mostly ignore her, Mercedes eventually becomes one of Brittana’s best friends from S3 onwards, and particularly once she hires them as her background singers on her nationwide mall tour between S5 and S6.

Santana is generally closer to Mercedes than is Brittany. However, both girls get along well with Mercedes on an interpersonal level.

I have rambled a lot about their individual dynamics with her here.

Tina Cohen-Chang

Early on in the series, Brittana tend to ignore Tina, having few personal interactions with her on screen.

Though in S2, Brittany participates on the Brainiacs with Tina and Tina serves as Santana’s accompanyist for “Trouty Mouth,” we see no one-on-one conversations between them.

In S3, Tina acts alongside Santana in West Side Story and shows tacit support for Brittana’s relationship, but there are again no definitive exchanges between her and Brittana either individually or as a couple.

It is only in S4 that Tina seems to come onto Brittana’s radar, and only then because she starts to become obnoxious to them. In the S4 premiere, Brittany jockeys with Tina to become “the new Rachel” of the glee club. Then in episode 4x06, Santana returns to Lima and “steals” Tina’s dream role in the school musical, much to Tina’s chagrin.

During this time, Brittana still remain mostly oblivious to Tina, though she starts to resent them, feeling as if she has waited years for it to be her turn to shine only to have them continually steal her opportunities and overshadow her.

Tina gets her revenge on Brittana in episode 4x13, when she springs the news that Brittany is dating Sam on Santana in a surprise phone call.

As I say elsewhere,

In the long run, Santana is more upset by the message than by the messenger who brought it to her and seems not to hold anything against Tina for letting the proverbial cat out of the bag. Their relationship doesn’t much evolve from this point forward.

Brittany, on the other hand, never truly forgets the slight—which is why we see Brittany be downright mean to Tina in S4 through S6 (such as, for example, when she cuts Tina a new one in episode 6x03 when the glee girls go to talk to Becky).

Artie Abrams

While fanon likes to imagine lots of bad blood between Brittana and Artie following S2, I honestly don’t think that such is the case.

For a long time, both Brittany and Santana basically ignore Artie’s existence, to the point where when Brittany approaches him in episode 2x04, professing her supposed sexual interest in him and asking him to be her duet partner, he has reason to question if she even really knows who he is (“Okay. Sorry, I’m just a little confused. You’ve never even made eye contact with me”).

Of course, at this point, Brittany really doesn’t know Artie much at all and she has no actual personal interest in him. She is just using him as a pawn in the emotional chess game she is playing with Santana, trying to get back at Santana for shooting her down and hurting her feelings the night previous.

She chooses to make Artie an accessory in her revenge plot specifically because she knows that he breaks every “rule” Santana has set for her regarding their dating relationships (see here).

Brittana only date boys for the social perks, but Artie isn’t popular, and if anything being with him will hurt Brittany’s reputation. Plus, Brittany is pushing his wheelchair around like he is her boyfriend-boyfriend, and that is a status she and Santana typically don’t afford their male dates. They’re not supposed to treat boys like partners, just objects. Santana wouldn’t be caught dead holding hands with Puck, so what the hell is Brittany doing sitting in Artie’s lap? Everything about the way Brittany approaches Artie is meant to agitate Santana.

---and it does.

Big time.

Brittany seduces Artie, and then Santana confronts Artie, revealing to him that Brittany is using him. Hurt, Artie unloads on Brittany for cheapening his first sexual experience.

Only then does Brittany really even seem to see Artie for the first time and realize that he is not just some object she can use to mess with Santana. He is an actual person with thoughts and feelings and considerations of his own, and she was wrong to assume that sex didn’t mean anything to him.

Though it takes Brittany until episodes 2x06 or 2x08 to really start dating Artie in earnest, the things he says about sex being special really seem to stick with her and make her think in the interim.

For years, Santana has been telling her that sex isn’t dating, but now Artie wants sex to be a part of dating---and a part that conveys real feelings and functions within a larger network of affections. Unlike Santana, Artie is actually proud to be by Brittany’s side. He loves being able to say that the most popular girl in school is his girlfriend. Plus, he is sweet, and unlike every other boy at the school, he hasn’t called Brittany stupid.

Sure, being with him isn’t like being with Santana, and Brittany’s feelings for him, though warm, don’t come close to her true love, which is reserved for Santana alone. Still, if she can’t be Santana’s girlfriend, being Artie’s is maybe the next best thing.

So Brittany dates Artie between episodes 2x06 and 2x19---and during that time, she does really come to care for him. Even though she is in love with Santana, she does come to love Artie and value his feelings, and she learns a lot from being with him about what she wants and needs from a relationship and about how important it is to communicate emotions to one’s partner.

For as unpopular as Bartie is with our fandom, the truth is that Artie is a pretty good boyfriend for Brittany.

His downfall is mostly that he misunderstands her.

Like my dear friend Roch points out,

The problem with most people in the Gleeverse and their understanding of Brittany is that there’s often a failure to balance 1) Brittany’s belief in "magic" and unconventionality, and 2) Brittany’s ability to reason and behave like most other people do. Most often, people rely on the second option too much, which accounts for the raised eyebrows when she speaks in Brittanyisms.

What results is that people fail to respect her nonnormative way of approaching the world. However, when people rely too much on the first option, they tend to infantilize her and treat her like her understanding of “magic” means that she completely disregards any facet of reality. What results is something like Artie’s “magic comb” scheme from “Special Education.”

Note: Roch has retired from the Brittana fandom. Please respect her privacy while you enjoy her archived work.

Like most of the New Directions, Artie believes that Brittany is of below average intelligence. However, whereas most of the New Directions across the board look down on Brittany for being “dumb,” Artie actually finds her “dumbness” somewhat endearing.

To him, Brittany is a whimsical but ultimately simple creature whose joie de vivre and naïveté on the one hand make her attractive but on the other hand cause her to be particularly susceptible to being taken advantage of. Artie likes the idea that Brittany needs him to protect and guide her, but it also scares him that she could so easily be swayed. He is allowed to sometimes trick her when his doing so is “for her own good,” but he doesn’t want anyone else swindling her or exploiting her for their own gain or at her---or really his---expense.

Though Brittany doesn’t actually come from a “magical land,” Artie acts as if she does, and he is the benevolent human man whose job it is to guide her through our harsh and unforgiving reality.

At one point, he literally tells her that her brain "exists in this magical other dimension where anything is possible," and he means what he says in a pretty straightforward way.

It’s all a take on the Born Sexy Yesterday trope.

Of course, in a classic Born Sexy Yesterday relationship, the woman typically has no sexual experience prior to meeting the man. Obviously, such is not the case with Brittany and Artie, as in fact she has much more sexual experience than he does. Nevertheless, the trope still applies inasmuch as while Artie is not Brittany’s first sexual partner, he is very much her first serious boyfriend, and he believes that he possesses greater emotional maturity than she does regarding sex. For all her worldly experience, Artie still can and does conceive of Brittany as an ingénue, believing that she knows nothing about love or being in a committed relationship and that he will therefore be in a position to teach her and mold her to his liking.

The problem (for Artie) is that Brittany wasn’t actually born yesterday.

For as much as Artie thinks that he is doing what is best for Brittany and treating her well, the truth is that it is his very belief that he has a better understanding of her life than she does that ultimately leads her to sever her relationship ties with him.

Brittany will humor Artie when he wrongly assumes that she still believes in Santa Claus and possesses a Dumboesque trust in magical objects (like combs), particularly early on in S2, when her basic m.o. is still to just go along to get along and to not confront people about their bullshit even when remaining silent causes her to look foolish.

But when Artie asserts to Brittany that he knows more about Santana than she does and decries Santana’s actions to her as if he holds greater insight into them than she, that’s Brittany’s line in the sand. Artie says that Brittany is stupid because she can’t see that Santana is manipulating her, and between how much the insult hurts her and how wrong Artie is to disparage her true love’s character, she decides she won’t take it anymore.

She’s done.

Now, even in the aftermath of the Blurt Locker, Brittany doesn’t necessarily hate Artie. Her primary feeling is rather disappointment---in him for so underestimating her and her cognitive abilities and in herself for “allowing him” to persist in treating her like a child for so long. She had known for the entire duration of their relationship that Artie had the wrong idea about her and her intelligence, but she figured that since he was being relatively nice about it, she would let it slide. Only recently has she acquired enough confidence in herself to realize that she deserves better and that even the kindest of condescension is still condescension.

Of course, deep inside, Brittany also knows that she doesn’t get to walk away from this breakup along the moral high ground. She was cheating on Artie, and despite how she tries to rationalize that behavior to him, the fact is that she had always known that what she was doing was wrong. Santana wasn’t fooling anyone---least of all Brittany---by claiming that sex doesn’t count when the plumbing is different. Brittany just hoped that maybe Artie would see things that way so she could have her boyfriend and be with her soulmate, too.

But when Artie calls her out, she knows in her heart that he is right to feel hurt. She has wronged him, and the fact that her affair was with Santana doesn’t somehow make it more excusable. Once again, she has made harmful assumptions about how Artie values sex and monogamy.

She may have never meant to hurt him, but she has.

Going forward from the Blurt Locker experience, Brittany realizes that she has some things she needs to work on in herself before she gets together with anyone, including Santana (see episodes 2x19 and 2x20).

Part of that work involves making active decisions about her love life.

So when Artie tries to woo her back to him in episode 2x20, Brittany doesn’t give in. In S1 or early S2, she may have. But now she tells him, “Artie, that was lovely, but I’m not gonna go to prom with you. You called me stupid, and I really didn’t like that, so, I’m sorry, but I’m gonna go to prom by myself and really work on me and dance with other people’s dates.”

Brittany stands her ground, and Artie says he understands.

---and from that point forward, Brittany never really looks back at Artie.

Like I said before, Brittany doesn’t go away hating the kid, but she also realizes that he was never the one she really wanted and that she isn’t going to settle for him anymore. Brittany wants to be with Santana, so when Santana is ready, that’s what she does, and she soon becomes so absorbed in their relationship that she seems to completely forget about the bizarre, old Bartie days, to the point where, in S4, when Artie mentions that he and Brittany used to date, Brittany can easily pretend she has no idea what he is talking about (see episode 4x03).

Despite Artie’s initial bid to win Brittany back following their breakup, he eventually comes to share in her resignation. They were fundamentally incompatible as a couple, and with time and distance, they both realize as much. There are no regrets on either side that they couldn’t make it last. For as difficult as things were in the moment, they can both agree that everything worked out for the best in the end.

Though Artie serves as Brittany’s campaign manager and running mate in the class election of S4 and her and Santana’s wedding planner during S6, they never resume their former closeness. They are friends but not close ones, and that’s just fine with both of them.

Now.

On the Santana side of things, Baby Girl completely ignores Artie until suddenly he’s dating her one true love. Then, in classic Santana style, she freaks out.

Like I talk about in this post,

Unfortunately, the fact that Brittany has a relationship with Artie is misery for Santana.

Despite her initial jealousy towards him in episode 2x04, Santana never really considers Artie a rival for Brittany’s affections prior to when he and Brittany officially start dating in episode 2x08.

Sure, Brittany had had sex with lots of boys in the past, but she had never had a real boyfriend or even acted like she wanted one before she and Artie became a thing. Both she and Santana had always remained emotionally aloof from the boys they had hooked up with. That was their basic mode of operation. They could fool around with however many football players they liked, but they always went home to each other at the end of the day. In Santana’s mind, that was the way things had always been and the way they would always be.

Consequently, after Santana quashes the early Bartie relationship, she figures that she has made her point and that things will “go back to normal” between her and Brittany thereafter. She never expects that Brittany and Artie will start dating in earnest, let alone that Brittany will develop feelings for Artie. Seeing Bartie not only together but happy comes as a total shock to her. She has no coping mechanisms to deal with losing “her girl” to a male rival, and especially a socially undesirable male rival like Artie Abrams.

Brittany dating Artie breaks all of her and Santana’s rules. Artie isn’t popular, so he doesn’t boost Brittany’s social cred. He also isn’t really a side thing, so Brittany being with him isn’t a corollary function to her and Santana’s relationship. He quickly becomes Brittany’s main partner, supplanting Santana, which is something that has never happened between Brittany and Santana before.

When this great shift occurs, Santana feels jealous and hurt, but she doesn’t know how to express her feelings, not when, by her estimation, she isn’t supposed to even be feeling said feelings to begin with.

During this time, Santana lashes out at various other happy couples in glee club but doesn’t dare go after Bartie or even just Artie for fear that if she does so, Brittany will fully choose him over her once and for all. Instead, she watches from a distance and frets, worrying that even though Artie is infinitely less popular than she is, she still can’t compete with him just because he’s a boy and he can be himself and he and Brittany can have a “normal” relationship in a way that she and Brittany can’t.

Eventually, most likely sometime between episodes 2x11 and 2x14, Brittana recommence their sexual relationship, with Brittany cheating on Artie with Santana. When they do so, Santana tries desperately to justify their actions, telling both herself and Brittany that what they’re doing “doesn’t really count” because they’re both girls and they’re just doing as best friends do.

Of course, in her heart of hearts, Santana knows that what she’s saying is a load of shit, and she knows that Brittany knows that what she’s saying is a load of shit. She’s just so scared to lose Brittany again that she tries to rationalize their bad behavior, giving them an excuse to continue.

The situation is a miserable one because for as much as Santana craves a relationship with Brittany, the kind of relationship they have now---where they’re both cheating on their boyfriends to be together, making excuses for their intimacy, and pretending that their sexual encounters don’t mean anything when clearly they do---isn’t truly fulfilling her needs. Though she has tried for years to deny it, Santana wants/needs to be Brittany’s primary (and really only) partner. Having to share is killing her.

By the events of episode 2x15, the center cannot hold, so Santana approaches Brittany willing to make some huge admissions and at the same time ask for the things she wants. Unfortunately, what she wants isn’t yet tenable, because it’s for Brittany to break up with Artie without telling him the real reason why and then be with her in the same way that they have been together before, secretly and constantly dreading that someday the jig will be up.

It’s not that Brittany needs Santana to come out in order for them to date.

S3 proves that she doesn’t.

What she needs is for Santana to be honest with herself.

The Hurt Locker is a big first step in that direction, but there’s still more work to be done. Brittany understands that. Santana doesn’t.

Like I talk about in my tags on this post,

It takes Santana totally by surprise when Brittany doesn't dump Artie on the spot in response to her Hurt Locker confession.

Going into that moment, Santana never even imagines that Brittany might turn her down because Brittany has never turned her down before.

Brittany’s demurral throws her completely off balance because suddenly all her biggest fears are being realized: Brittany ''doesn't want her.'' She isn't ''good enough.'' Artie does have something that she doesn’t have. She has made her big, brave gesture, and there isn’t going to be any payoff for it.

The thing Santana doesn't realize is that Brittany turns her down not because she is somehow inadequate but because Brittany wants them to have a real chance at being a couple. She doesn’t want them to be this hasty, dishonest, unjust thing anymore. Brittany loves Santana too much to do that to her.

If they’re going to be together, she wants them to be together in a way that’s going to last. Out or not, they need to be able to be honest with each other.

But of course Santana just thinks the worst.

---and that’s why after Brittany turns her down, Santana does start saying mean things about Artie (see episode 2x16).

From her perspective, Brittany clearly chose Artie over her, and the fact that Brittany did lends credence to the notion that Brittany’s heart does perhaps belong to Artie after all. Santana feels second best and frustrated and mostly scared. She put her heart on the line, and Brittany, in her words, “blew [her] off” (see episode 2x16). She doesn’t know how to handle the rejection except to be vicious about it.

Still, for as much as she rags on Artie, the truth is that she isn’t really angry at him. She’s angry at herself and the situation, and she’s scared about her future and sad because she thinks that she is never going to get the thing she wants most in the world.

But she can’t really even bring herself to hate Artie---not when, deep down, she knows Brittany’s right, and Artie hasn’t really done anything wrong.

So for a while, Santana sulks, and she licks her wounds, and then she comes up with her ridiculous plan to win Brittany away from Artie---as if that is really the issue---only it turns out that her machinations are all for nothing because Brittany and Artie break up without any prompting from her.

When Artie calls Brittany stupid, Santana is pissed at him, sure. But mostly she’s just concerned with helping Brittany to feel better. For the first time in a long time, she is able to forget herself and her own petty problems and just focus on cheering Brittany up.

With Bartie split up, Santana’s focus shifts entirely onto what she needs to do to set things between her and Brittany to rights, and she very quickly forgets about Artie, particularly as the events of episodes 2x19, 2x20, and 2x22 play out.

---and for as much as certain fanon likes to imagine that Santana carries lingering resentment towards Artie into later seasons, I think the truth is that she doesn’t much fuss about him going forward.

As she becomes increasingly comfortable with herself and in her and Brittany’s relationship, all the things about Artie that used to cause her to feel insecure just kind of fade away. She no longer has to worry about whether or not he is better than she is or if Brittany prefers him to her. Once he is no longer Brittany’s boyfriend, he recedes into the background again, and Santana mostly ignores him, to the point where she is fine with Brittany hiring him to plan their wedding.

Santana and Artie never become close friends, but they also aren’t in any way enemies. He’s just one of the glee kids, same as the rest. Both Brittany and Santana are okay with him.

Mike Chang

Mike is a football player when Brittana are cheerleaders, and he is their glee club teammate for three years and Brittany’s Brainiacs teammate for one season. On several occasions, he serves as either Brittany or Santana’s dance partner (see for example episodes 3x09 and 5x12).

That said, despite some subtextual suggestions that Brittana—and particularly Brittany—may have a friendship or even a dating relationship with Mike early on during their sophomore year, the truth is that Brittana never share any conversations with Mike on screen and seldom even refer to him when they are speaking to others, so it is impossible for us to gauge exactly what their feelings about him may be.

Fanon, of course, loves to imagine Bike bonding as the glee club’s two resident dancers, and some fic writers posit that Mike is such a likable person that he is one of the few boys in glee club whom Santana can actually stand, but canon offers no main text confirmation for these ideas.

Even after six years, Brittana’s feelings towards Mike remain a mystery.

Sam Evans

Glee tells us two very contradictory stories regarding Brittana’s feelings towards Sam Evans.

The one story unfolds in S2, S3, S5, and S6, the other only in S4.

The first story is one mostly of ambivalence. The second is one of longstanding jealousy, animosity, and love triangles.

The fact that these two conflicting narratives exist within the same series can be attributed to various retcons and shifting priorities on the parts of the writers.

Unfortunately, their very existence complicates our understanding of the entire Bramtana dynamic.

Throughout S2, it seems that Brittana are mostly ambivalent towards Sam.

To Santana, Sam is a social multitool: something she can steal away from Quinn as payback for Quinn stealing the Cheerios captaincy from her; a new beard to replace Puck now that she has lost him to Lauren Zizes; a boyfriend she can use to perhaps make Brittany jealous; a football player to boost her ailing popularity and help her, as she frames it, “have some buzz at [sic] school.”

Though in her initial attempts to convince Sam to date her, Santana acts as if he is the party who will most benefit from them having a relationship, the truth is that it is her who really stands to gain.

Throughout most of S2, Santana is in a tailspin. At the time when she starts dating Sam, she is off the Cheerios; on the out-and-outs with both Quinn and Brittany; heartbroken and frustrated due to Brittany’s relationship with Artie; confused about her own feelings and sexuality; a social pariah in the glee club; and just generally directionless and flailing. She needs something to help her reassert herself as the HBIC at McKinley, and that something turns out to be the Machiavellian plot she pulls to break up Fabrevans and score Sam as her boyfriend.

To her, their relationship is just smart business.

—but that’s basically all it is.

Obviously, Santana has no real feelings for or attraction to Sam. He is just the only vaguely popular boy she can entice into dating her at the moment. She doesn’t have any real interest in getting to know him or in spending time with him in private. Instead, she needs her classmates—and especially Quinn and Brittany—to see her sitting on Sam’s lap and sucking his trouty lips in public. It’s all a power play, and Sam is just an accessory.

Case in point: Santana gets as much mileage as she can out of Sam between episodes 2x13 and 2x18. Then when she is done with Sam, she immediately moves on to using Dave Karofsky without even dumping Sam first.

Come S3, her attitude toward Sam shifts to reflect her increasing comfort with herself and her sexuality. Since she no longer needs to use Sam to help her pretend to be something that she is not, she can drop her guard around him and show him more of her true character, which is exactly what she does.

When he returns to McKinley in episode 3x08, she greets him with a litany of insults, but the insults are purely affectionate—a fact that Sam actually recognizes himself at the time (“I missed you, too, Santana”), despite what later retcons may say.

Though she and Sam don’t have many other personal interactions throughout S3, Sam does show tacit support for both the Troubletones and Santana’s relationship with Brittany, and Santana seems to appreciate that he does.

Throughout both S2 and S3, there is nothing to suggest that Santana particularly hates Sam or has it out for him. At best, he is an acquaintance she feels somewhat friendly towards. At worst, he is a tool she uses to mess with Quinn and Brittany and maintain the illusion of her own heterosexuality. Even when Santana is mean to Sam, the meanness seems to derive more from her own frustrations with herself rather than from genuine animosity towards him. He is collateral damage, not the real object of her anger.

During all this time, Brittany is only aware of Sam insofar as she is aware that Santana is using Sam as a beard, and she feels sad that Santana is still so uncomfortable in her own skin that she feels the need to pretend to be someone she isn’t (“Wait. You’re still dating Sam?”).

Yes, Brittany and Sam kiss at the Rachel Berry House Party Trainwreck Extravaganza in episode 2x14, but their interaction occurs on a purely physical level, and there is no evidence that either one of them goes away from the encounter yearning for anything more, particularly as they both remain with their respective partners thereafter.

Indeed, Brittany doesn’t even have any one-on-one conversations with Sam in either S2 or S3. The first time that she ever personally addresses him is in episode 4x02.

—which is why what Sam says in S4 about how he has always felt attracted to Brittany and Santana has always known that he did and felt jealous of his interest represents such a major retcon.

Simply put, Sam’s supposed S2-S3 infatuation with Brittany just doesn’t exist, and neither does Santana’s supposed S2-S3 jealousy of and hatred towards him. Prior to S4, Brittany and Sam aren’t even really on each other’s radars, and Santana uses Sam to her own purposes, but she never indicates that she feels any personal animosity to him, and especially not on Brittany’s account.

But the trouble is that at least in the bizarre, self-contained OOC universe that is Glee S4, Sam’s supposed longstanding crush on Brittany and Santana’s supposed animosity towards him are canon—as are the supposed depth of Brittany’s feelings for Sam and the love triangle that exists between Bramtana.

During the days when S4 was originally airing, it was hard to make sense of it all. It’s only now that the rest of the show has played out that we can look back and see what was really going on.

To quote another post at length,

One of the first rules you learn as a writer is “Show, don’t tell.”

The Glee writers really wanted to make Bram fetch happen, but in the end they fell short of their goal because what they were telling us didn’t carry much weight and didn’t match up with what we were shown.

They told us and told us that Bram was the real deal, but their telling seemed quiet in comparison to the louder, more glaring cues we saw—and particularly as we compared Bram to Brittana and watched Bram eventually unravel and disappear into oblivion, never to be mentioned on the show again.

Sure, the writers engineered a Bram “wedding.” Sure, they had Brittany say that she loved Sam and that Sam was the person she was thinking about during the school shooting. Sure, they had Brittany spout nonsense about how Sam’s the one who really gets her.

But that was all telling, and poor telling, at that.

Brittany’s initial reluctance to date Sam spoke louder than much of her eventual dating him did. Her unenthusiastic response to many of Sam’s romantic gestures towards her spoke louder than all the writers’ telling, telling, telling about Bram as a great romance. The fact that she would rather serenade Lord Tubbington than Sam drowned out anything the writers had to say about how she felt about Sam as her boyfriend. The fact that she would kiss Santana while she was dating Sam spoke volumes.

Think: She would have never kissed anyone else when she was exclusively dating Santana. She and Santana would never cheat on each other, even in that small way.

Look to Brittany’s facial expressions throughout S4. Look to how sad she seems and how she appears to just be going along with things to get along. She uses her Brittanyisms as defense mechanisms, and when she’s with Sam she spouts almost nothing but Brittanyisms—baffling statements meant to keep him at arm’s length and confound him. She’s sometimes downright mean to the kid, such as when she talks about how stupid he is when he bombs the SAT and frequently condescends to him after she is proven a math genius.

Her “marriage” to him reads like a huge misunderstanding on her part—and especially because Sam says in his vows to her that they’re soulmates, and she very pointedly does not reciprocate and instead talks about how she honestly never noticed Sam when he first joined glee club (see here and here).

Her fear for and thinking of him during the school shooting scare is genuine, but her statement that he was the only person she thought of in that bathroom stall rings hollow (see here).

When she fears graduation and what might become of her in the future, she blocks Sam completely out and dumps his ass via an incredibly harsh, even vicious text message.

Then, once Bram is over, it is OVER, full stop.

Brittany never regrets ending the relationship. She never pines for Sam or wonders what might have been with him. She never tries to win him back. In fact, eventually, she seems to completely forget they were a couple. By the time she and Santana get back together, it is as if Bram never even happened to begin with.

Bram do, of course, have some coupley moments. They do express affection for each other. They’re certainly physically intimate, and Brittany does choose to remain with Sam throughout S4.

But, like I said, all of that is just quiet, largely unsupported telling—and what it tells isn’t what the writers seemed to have intended to say.

If you look at the big picture with Bram, it is abundantly clear that Sam was never the love of Brittany’s life—and you can especially see that when you compare Bram to Brittana.

Look back to S2, when Brittany wants so much to date Santana and works so hard to make it so that they can be together. Her pining for Santana from afar, her lovelorn expressions as she watches Santana try to come to terms with their feelings for each other, her heartbreak whenever something sets their relationship back, her genuine excitement and gratitude whenever something pulls their relationship forward, her emotional responses to “Landslide” and “Songbird” and her and Santana’s every locker conversation—all of those things speak volumes, and loudly.

Brittany is so enthused by even the smallest romantic gesture coming from Santana.

(Compare, for example, her reaction when Sam sings a song to her to when Santana does. In the first case, she most often looks amused. In the second case, she most often looks as if an angel has just come down from heaven and shown her a miracle.)

She is so open and heartfelt with Santana.

When she and Santana are dating, and she has a problem or experiences self-doubt, Santana is the first person she turns to and the first person she discloses to. She trusts Santana to give her good advice and to help her find her way—and that is even the case when she is dating Sam. It is ultimately Santana who helps her embrace her genius and make the decision to leave Lima to attend MIT.

It is also Santana to whom Brittany returns to time and time again throughout the series. She dates Artie in S2 and completely forgets she dated him come S3. She dates Sam in S4 and completely forgets she has dated him come S5. But Santana she never forgets about, whether they are dating or not, never mind the season or the day or the hour.

Notice how many times Brittany name-drops Santana, even while she’s dating Sam.

Santana is always the object of Brittany’s heart, from S1 when they are in love in the background to S2 when they try so hard to figure out how to navigate their feelings to S3 when they finally date each other to S4 when distance separates them to S5 when Brittany seeks Santana out again to S6 when they finally work out their happily ever after.

Even when Brittany is with Artie and Sam, it is clear that she never falls out of love with Santana.

Her statement that she is Santana’s, proudly so, is never conditional. It is perpetual. No matter who she is with or where she goes or what the official status of her and Santana’s relationship is, her heart is always, always Santana’s—which is something Brittany very much proves in S5 with the speech she makes to Santana in 5x12.

In retrospect, then, the story Glee actually tells about Brittany, Bram, and Brittana is this, regardless of what the writers intended to say: Brittany has been in love with Santana from the start, and Santana is always both her first and last choice. At times, she and Santana can’t be together—first, because Santana isn’t ready for them to be, then because distance and circumstance separate them. Whenever a relationship between them is impossible, Brittany accepts what she can’t change and waits. One of her greatest virtues is her patience. She dates other people and tries to find momentary happiness where she can. But Santana is always her endgame, her end goal. Sam is a stopgap. She cares for him, and she loveds him in a certain way for a time. He makes her laugh. He is, for the most part, kind to her. He throws himself into their relationship and tries very hard to be a good boyfriend to her. But, ultimately, he never fully understands her, and when she pictures her long-term future, it is never with him. She is always waiting for Santana, until suddenly she doesn’t have to wait anymore.

There is such a difference between the hedging, well-I-guess-so way Brittany gives into dating Sam in S4 and the determined, bold, triumphant way she wins Santana back in S5. In the one case, she is completely passive. In the other, she is a girl on a mission, out to woo her soulmate and restart their relationship on the way to forever.

Brittany may have loved Sam, but she is in love with Santana—and being with Santana has actually taught her what love is, the full infinity of it.

Really, to discern the difference between Bram and Brittana, one needs look no further than to Brittany’s willingness to fight for those respective relationships.

In Bram, she is a passive entity. She falls into the relationship, moseys along until it runs its course, and then goes her way and never looks back. She never once fights for anything with Sam. She never once initiates anything with him.

Like I indicate above, the really strange thing about Bramtana is that for as much as the writers insist over and over again in S4 that Santana hates Sam and Sam has always loved Brittany and Brittany and Sam are perfect for each other and should be together forever, by S5, it is as if that entire story arc never happened.

Brittana get back together, and they proceed to completely ignore Sam for the entire remainder of the series, to the point where they’re even chill with him attending their wedding despite the fact that they have both dated him in the past. Ultimately, the whole middle part of Bramtana history reads like a complete aberration.

So where does that leave us in terms of understanding Brittany and Santana’s respective feelings towards Sam?

My read is that neither Brittany nor Santana is ever as invested in Sam Evans as the Glee writers would tell it. To Santana, he is first a means to an end, then a rival and representation of the unknown, and then a neutralized threat and complete nonfactor. To Brittany, he is Santana’s beard, then a friend, then a means to some temporary happiness on the way to “happily ever after,” then nothing, really—not even a lasting memory.

Looking forward to the future, they probably only really consider him within the context of his relationship with Mercedes.

Blaine Anderson

Neither Brittany nor Santana has much of a personal relationship with Blaine to really speak of. Their interactions with him occur almost entirely within the context of him being Kurt’s man.

For more discussion on this dynamic, see this post.

__________

Conclusion

While Brittana do make a few good friends in the New Directions, the fact of the matter is that they have always been each other’s best friends, and in the end their relationships with their teammates are never as strong as they perhaps could be.

With all of their other teammates, they get off to a bad start. Though some forgive them and eventually recognize that they’ve changed, the majority never learn to fully accept or even remotely understand them.

To most of the kids in glee club, Brittany is a talking mad-lib and Santana is just plain rude. There’s not a lot of deep disclosure happening between them.

Though Brittana---and particularly Santana---would like to have strong bonds with the in-group, ultimately they come to terms with the fact that most of the glee kids are still a bit wary of and perplexed by them, even after so many years.

While this once-removal between Brittana and the New Directions makes sense within the context of their fictional universe, particularly given their tumultuous historites with one another, it also reflects a larger failure on the part of the Glee writers to create and maintain workable friendships across the whole show.

To be fair, changing characters introduced as antagonists into full-fledged members of the main protagonist group is a difficult writing maneuver to pull off successfully.

It’s just that Glee proved especially ill-equipped to handle such a transition, and Brittana’s friendships from S3 on really suffered for that ineptitude.

Though there are a handful of heartwarming moments between our girls and the New Directions in the canon, the truth is that if we really want to see healthy, mutual, fully developed friendships between Brittana and their glee club teammates, the best place to look is in fanfiction.

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