Ask Your Questions Wednesday

[narceus]

A slightly belated post today, but we're up, and we're ready to let the meta fly.

Ideas/questions/concepts, anything at all you're ready to spin off into a discussion of something meta but don't quite have a full handle on yet--we're open for business. Come on in, and have at.

(PLEASE NOTE: any spoilers you're working with should be in appropriately-marked threads, IE, the number of the unaired episode you're spoiling in the comment header. TIA!)

Comments

more thinky thoughts later, but this has been bothering me for a while

[jakia]

If singing is about expressing yourself, and dancing is about being yourself, then how do we feel about Blaine being the third (or fourth, depending on how you want to classify Artie) best dancer in New Directions?

Also, sex on a stick and sings like a dream, because this line has stuck with me for a while now.

A) Who even told Sebastian that, especially in all boy a capella group that appears to be filled mostly with straight boys?

B) Darren Criss is sexy. Blaine Anderson, I would argue, is not. I mean, we are talking about a boy who, in the scene, is an virgin who wears bow-ties not ironically. What.

C) Sometimes I feel we haven't had much development for Blaine because I don't think he's supposed to be treated like a real character--he's just a dream instead. How many times has the dream motif come up with Blaine? The first song he ever sings is Teenage Dream. Kurt says Blaine is as dreamy as ever. He sings like a dream, and Finn gets mad every time he opens his dreamboat a capella mouth. I know Blaine is sort of in limbo--not really alive or dead--but how much of him simply isn't real?

Re: more thinky thoughts later, but this has been bothering me for a while

[robotsfighting]

A) It's my firm, vaguely cracky belief that Trent was the guy who said that to Sebastian. I mean, probably not in so many words. I don't think anyone can seriously let the words sex on a stick pass their lips without irony other than totally unselfconscious creepers like Sebastian. But I can totally see Trent interjecting into a group conversation with The New Kid about how Blaine was their attractive, charming former lead, now tragically lost to the foreign lands of McKinley High. And Sebastian latched onto the idea, and when he actually saw Blaine, well. He thought he might use it to his advantage.

B) Hey. Bow ties are cool. /nerd But! No, I totally agree, except that to me Darren Criss is just goofy, with the ability to occasionally be caught making a face that isn't ridiculous. I find both Darren and Blaine adorable, but nowhere really on the spectrum of "sexy." But I'm a horrible judge of these things. Especially for guys. He was maybe a little sexy doing Janet/Michael Jackson? Control and Wanna Be Starting Something?

C) That dream thing is fascinating. I would never have connected those instances. I sit in the camp of Blaine Was Warblerbot Before Kurt. I come to these characters (ALL of them) with way too much headcanon backstory to actually approach them exactly the way the show presents them, especially Blaine, but I feel like Dreamboat A Capella is a moniker Blaine assigned himself in the mirror every morning at Dalton, pulling on his jacket and pushing everything that wasn't Prep School Gentleman as far away as he could. I think that meeting Kurt (brave, fierce, mostly unselfconscious, unashamed to be who he was) put a chink in the Blaine's White Knight armor, and he tried to rally through it anyway, and constantly managed to screw it up, because he really wasn't good at being that person.

I think that Blaine went through a process of coming to terms with the fact that he wasn't and couldn't be perfect (Silly Love Songs, Blaine It On The Alcohol, Sexy), and at the same time Kurt was starting to see him for who he actually was, instead of the uniform he put on. So, with Kurt, the Dreamboat thing fell away, and he was just Blaine, who danced to Roxy Music in his undershirt and got drunk and mad and threw his hands up and walked away and then apologized.

But I still think that Blaine presents a front to the New Directions. It's gonna be a great year, I can feel it. We're all gonna go to Nationals! He's still trying to be somebody he isn't, until it breaks sometimes, and he's just Blaine, pushing Sam and boxing a punching bag. I think he's still breaking out of the self-defense habits that make him fake.

Re: more thinky thoughts later, but this has been bothering me for a while

[likeasouffle]

Oooh, I love it! I love the idea that Blaine is just a dream, and I didn't notice that he's been referred to as a dream so many times in canon. Pair this with Kurt's line "I can't believe I made it all up in my head" and I think wonderful things could be done in fic with the idea that Kurt literally made up Blaine in his head. He appeared right when Kurt was feeling the most lonely, vulnerable, and scared. Along with the perfect school, rich and beautiful and full of polite non-judgmental (and cute) schoolboys. It stops working as soon as Blaine starts interacting with characters other than Kurt, but still. Awesome.

Re: more thinky thoughts later, but this has been bothering me for a while

[narceus]

Okay, I'm really intrigued by this. For several reasons.

Dreams and dreaming are a huge theme in Glee, and not at all limited to Blaine, although it does seem to coalesce around him. Something to point out, though, is that dreams and dream imagery and metaphors also tends to surround Kurt. Blaine is a dream. Kurt (and we have really got to get that magic meta up) makes dreams come true.

And usually, Kurt can't bring forth his own dreams. He can plan his dad's wedding, but when he tries to bring Finn into his basement things explode. He can bring the Gershwin stage to life, for Rachel. So if Blaine is Kurt's dream...

(I would argue against the whole 'Blaine doesn't get much development' thing on the grounds that Blaine, who has, after all, only been on the show for a little over a season, has gotten at least as much development as several other characters who've been around since the beginning. Sure, very little of it is the out-in-your-face, "Here are Blaine's parents. These are Blaine's issues. Hi, Blaine's issues!" sort of way, but that's true for everything. Puck drops a few lines about sleeping with soccer moms and they just sit there, for two seasons, while in the back of our heads we very quietly know, hey, that's repeated statutory rape. Santana just barely started being a person right around 'Sexy', with only the hints of it's kind of the best part of my day and helping Brittany read in the background to keep us going. So far with Blaine we know that he tries desperately to make other people happy, that he fits into situations as best as he possibly can, that he has serious violent anger issues, problems with his parents, and survived a violent attack a few years ago. We didn't find out about Lucy Caboosey until last season was almost over with. Blaine is highly developed, as far as Glee does--he just does it all out of the corner of your eye. Like everybody else on this show.)


But in terms of the idea of his lack of character being because he's a dream instead of a real person...well, can't 'being a dream' be the basis for his character? Every Glee kid gets one central note to start out from, and then gets built out around that as sort of a, "And what does it actually mean, for a real person to live this?" thing. Brittany starts off as the dumb blonde cheerleader, and eventually we have to deal with the fact that dumb blonde cheerleaders get raped their own teachers mock them in class and it all just gets swept under the rug and not talked about. So Blaine starts with the one note of being the Prince Charming, being Kurt's dream. So his job is to be perfect, to be exactly what Kurt wants and needs.

And what kind of person does it take, to have your defining characteristic as, "being everything this other person wants and needs"? Well, it takes somebody who is very, very good at playing the role that is required to him, somebody who's highly attuned to other people's needs and highly motivated to fulfill them, someone who suppresses all his own anger and frustration until they get almost, but not quite, explosive. It takes Blaine. Blaine is the real person that the Prince Charming role requires.

Basically, I think the answer is that Blaine, like Alice, is a figment out of the Red King's dream. So he gets to be a person for now, until Kurt stops wanting him. And then he's screwed. (But Blaine was always, always presented as a tragedy. Goddamn that boy.)

Re: more thinky thoughts later, but this has been bothering me for a while

[likeasouffle]

Ooh I love everything about this. I love the idea that Blaine is a real person who has made it his role to be somebody else's dream. And I definitely agree that he hasn't really been given less development than other characters.