#i love me the messy dynamic of fapezberry don't get me wrong

[tuiyla]

With the Quinn/Santana/Rachel dynamic - as much as I don't want to 'bring race/identity politics into it', optics matter and there is something sinister about a POC character being retconned as the 'ringleader' instead of the conservative, conventionally attractive blonde white girl who pretty much gets a pass. as popular as Santana is, she does get a lot of the blame for stuff that Quinn said thanks to revisionist history (obvs leaving Britt out of it because she never liked Rachel anyway).

Oh no Anon please do because way too often fandom discussions take this colourblind approach as if race isn't a HUGE part of Quinntana's perception

I have to admit that's a bit of a different approach than I would have but valid nonetheless. There are just so many layers of this and Glee considers exactly none of them. I'm endlessly fascinated and saddened by Rachel always giving Quinn the benefit of the doubt but somehow never completely finding it within herself to extend the same to Santana. I mean case in point, as far as 5x18 Rachel assumes of Santana what she'd never of Quinn. I think Quinn started out as that ultra-WASP bully as part of the satire (and I have other asks to get to about that oops) and the optics of that were her uber-privileged ass bullying the outcast overeager Jewish girl. But then of course not only was Quinn's privilege, well, sort of examined (wow that's me being VERY generous with the show) but the sidekick Latina was promoted to main. And truly, a lot of the time Glee didn't know what to do with that. See Dr. Lopez and his amazing insurance but Santana being from "the wrong side of the tracks". And that's not to even mention Glee having no idea how to treat Santana as being anything other than Vaguely Latina™ even when Naya herself was mixed-race Afro-Latina, but identities like that were too complex for Glee's token mentality. Anyway the result is, like you say, Santana retroactively getting the blame not only for the things she should be called out for but Quinn's bullying, even though Quinn was very much the Alpha Bitch at the beginning.

I think the most glaring instance of how differently the show itself treats Quinntana based on race, and by extension so does the fandom, is the commentary on appearances/sexuality. Feels like it's been a while but I have gone on many times about how Quinn, blonde Euro-centric definition of beauty Quinn is pretty and less sexualized than Santana even when the show explicitly mocks the irony of her getting knocked up. But Santana is never pretty, just "hot" and sexualized in a very heteronormative way loooong after she comes out as a lesbian. Post for another day?

Then there's also the many racist undertones of the Pezberry feud itself, from mocking Santana's Hispanic heritage to the insistence that she's "lazy". Yikes. Actually all three main WOCs get put into this faux meritocracy narrative in opposition to Rachel (West Side Story, Props, Funny Girl) but that's (another) story for another day.