Unpopular Opinion Time (you get a cookie if you guess about what show, except not really)

[weyrdchic]

So it's become pretty in vogue, among fans, to write/interpret Blaine as kind of an idiot. Like, beyond the inappropriate song choices. (And I maintain that he's had exactly one choice that was SUPPOSED to be inappropriate to date, and when you put it down to him trying to woo an older dude and make himself seem mature and confident, I can see

Comments

[rm]

Department of not just you.

I can totally buy that Blaine thinks he's an idiot who doesn't get basic stuff, because we all think that sometimes when we're 16 and persona-driven people tend to think that a lot, that's why we have personas. But I don't actually think he's that dysfunctional. I think his compensation for his self-perception of that dysfunction is just atypical in its thoroughness, which makes other people Really Buy Into His Deal, which I imagine surprises the shit out of him when that becomes clear to him (and I think that's clear in his "I don't know what I'm doing" speech in the coffee shop to Kurt after the GAP thing

[weyrdchic]

Even a really supportive (see: anti-bullying policy) environment like that is fully of intense, intense pressure regarding social veneers. And it's visibly clear all over Blaine and utterly something that Kurt, who is so performative in other ways, clearly has no patience for (at the institutional level) in the end, even if it is pretty.

This is reminding me a lot of why Special Education as an episode fascinated me in the first place. "Everyone gets treated the same" does not = "everyone gets to be themselves", which my raised-by-public-school-in-media mind interpreted as a stifling of individuality. Really it turned out it's a stifling of expressing yourself, as in you can be an individual but when you perform it's for the group, not for you. (Blaine is lucky that for him, it's sort of both. I wonder if it's what makes him such a good front man.) The Warblers are competitors, New Directions lives in a musical. It's what's going to draw Blaine over there in the end, I think, he's already looked really impressed with them more

[rm]

Exactly. And I think the people who are like "how can this be organic and not just be about Kurt?" can't see it because they're not quite grokking the Dalton thing except on the level of its trappings. Where as I can't stop grokking the Dalton thing, to the point of personal unpleasantness

[weyrdchic]

Which is exactly why I've wanted him at McKinley from the beginning - where so much, especially in Season 1, is about poverty and how you get yourself out of a dead-end ditch of a place and how appealing and shiny fame is as compared to being lost and returning to who you were defined as in high school. To put a Dalton Boy in that environment and see what happens? Kurt is a lot more suited to assimilate into Dalton than the other way around, and the possibilities are just endless

[maplelump]

My icon says it all.

[shaolina]

Fandom has a tendency to run away with things like this, so I'm not that bothered. It's like SE aired and everyone was writing about how soulless the warblers are, what an evil douchbag Blaine is and how Dalton would crush Kurt because molting= changing yourself to have no personality. I think most of us have moved away from that to seeing a bigger picture than that episode alone

[weyrdchic]

The point is, adopting a persona doesn't mean you know how to behave socially towards other necessarily or that you always know what you are doing once you realize how you've been treating connecting with others because you've been hurt, pushed and told you are no good unless you are a certain way. That's absolutely true - it just felt like that persona was very much based around social behavior for Blaine. Like, you can be The Studious One and show off how smart you are and feel freaked out expressing your vulnerability or times when you don't always know the answer, but it's between you and your teachers or your books, not necessarily the reactions of peers. Blaine was some combination of The Sage and The Gentleman, both of which involve connecting to others - being a mentor means he has to understand what his mentee needs (he got the what but not the how, a lot of the time, partly because he was projecting), being a gentleman means you do what we started out watching him do - congratulating, shaking hands, saying hello, talking

[shaolina]

I can't believe my browser crashed an I have to start all over again! Ugh

[nthcoincident]

As you said, this characterization would have made sense if not for the fact that in order to calibrate and maintain the persona Blaine has, a person needs to have a very high degree of social and relational intelligence. In this case I feel like Glee's wide-angle psychology works really well setting up an archetypal array of the way people adopt personas: Rachel and Kurt set a goal for the kind of person they want to be and grimly go about becoming it until it's not a persona anymore, Finn and Sam have one-note veneers of what they need to be that fall apart because they're not able to negotiate them through difficult circumstances--Blaine's persona is unique because by necessity, it's adaptable. He becomes what he needs to be for any given audience, he makes changes, he does this all so subtly that even the Warblers--shown to be more perceptive than fanon has it, I think--don't notice anything forced about it

[weyrdchic]

He doesn't seem to be able to navigate social terrain unless he prepares in advance, in which case he can do it flawlessly--I can see how some people might interpret that as a little oblivious, but I would still say it's much more than your average 16YO can do.

Yeah, this. Not much has disabused me of the notion that Blaine practices in mirrors all the damn time, but you poke the right spot (Jeremiah, second coffee shop convo, the arguments in BIOTA and Sexy, Burt's bluntness in Sexy) and he falls apart because being off-script reduces him to a mess. Not because he's any more or less a mess than the rest of them - but because he has a Plan, and when that plan goes awry he either lashes out (BIOTA) or freezes (NBK).

[weyrdchic]

I am totally reading that fic and giving my thoughts tonight, btw, if it's PWP I can't do it on my lunch break like I'm used to and I keep forgetting and zonking out in the evenings. :x

[wthis_pattys]

I think it's partially because we see so few scenes without Kurt.

Just like Kurt's ice queen façade doesn't show when he's got scenes with Blaine (For example: coffee house scene with sue in Sexy? It's instantly back), Blaine's persona kind of disappears when he's around Kurt. Because they can be themselves around each other.
Aand because we're kind of used to seeing that, I think it's easy to forget there's also that other side of him.

I think Blaine's obliviousness pretty much only shows up when it comes to love.Imo it's a difficult emotion: If nobody has ever liked you that way before, it's actually pretty hard to notice. And similarly, it's easy to misinterpret someone's niceness when you're desperately seeking for love

[weyrdchic]

Yeah, I can definitely buy him being naive to romantic feeling on certain levels. It involves a lot of emotional intimacy he flat-out says he's bad at. I think as such an accomplished flirt who clearly knows how to perform it, he just has to understand its effect on people; I wonder if what disarmed him about Kurt liking him is he's not performing to Kurt anymore, and yet Kurt wants him. Maybe he didn't factor that in, didn't know how to.

Excellent point on Blaine being able to zero in on Kurt's feelings when it matters. ♥ People give him such shit for the thing at the funeral, too, and no, Kurt would absolutely think something like that because of who he is. The fact that Blaine understood it is important.

Blaine absolutely needs more interaction with people who aren't Kurt; I would have killed for an interaction with Sue. Or to see the date with Rachel, or more of the party.

[wthis_pattys]

Maybe he didn't factor that in, didn't know how to.
Seeing as his show persona seems to be his selling point in his own head, I'm sure he hadn't expected that. You don't go and try to WIGYA yourself into someone's pants if you're confident in your normal self being enough.

What kind of shit do they give him then? tbh I'm kind of out of reading discussion posts in the comms. If I want to hear people complaining I'll go talk to my parents, I wanna have fun. XD

Yeah I would like to see more. But with Kurt being involved with ND again, there's a bigger chance for it to happen, I think. :)

[weyrdchic]

What kind of shit do they give him then? tbh I'm kind of out of reading discussion posts in the comms. If I want to hear people complaining I'll go talk to my parents, I wanna have fun. XD

It's more a Tumblr thing, and something I thought I mainly saw in ship wars, but I've seen Klaine people saying it since - comparing Pavarotti's death to Kurt's mom's death is insensitive or something, because there's no comparison, and it's bringing up a hard memory, or whatever. Which is ridiculous. It reminds Kurt of that. He confirms it.