#like why have a hate club dedicated towards the one character we see struggling on-screen with his self-worth?

[madwheelerz]

Sometimes, I'm hit with the urge to ask people what they think Mike can do. Like if he's 'clueless', 'too clumsy for a sword/any weapon', 'has rocks for brains', a 'loser', not allowed to be the 'heart', and not allowed to be interesting regardless of how he's framed/what happens to him then what is he allowed? To sit there and look pretty? Be the prize. Be there to love either Will or El and not have a plot of his own?

[sugrmottas]

why do you think people hold his cheating against blaine tho?

uhhhhh double standards???

maybe more like quadruple standards actually...

okay so like, fucking everyone in that show cheats, almost. rachel and finn both do (finn makes a fucking habit of it), so it’s not like our leads are our moral high ground. kurt doesn’t, though the whole chandler thing still squicks me out and i don’t totally remember how the mercedes/sam/shane thing went down but i don’t think she cheated either, so perhaps our secondary leads are more our moral high bar. 

but let’s do a quick stroll through our main characters: quinn cheats (twice), puck helps both quinn and rachel cheat (which ties into his issues with finn more than anything i think but That’s A Different Talk), santana helps someone cheat (canonically she only helps brittany on artie, but i wouldn’t be totally surprised if there were other instances), brittany cheats (once i think?), sam cheats (once? i think? i might talk about that too here), hell tina cheats. mike helps someone cheat. jake cheats, too. so like, blaine isn’t an outlier here.

what makes him different is that we see him actively regretting it. puck, quinn, rachel and sam all show some regret over their actions but we don’t have episodes dedicated to them being sad. and i think that’s the issue, which is the worst thing -- blaine feels bad and he’s demonised for it. of course, it didn’t help that the fandom already didn’t like him and anti-klainers (which were just as plentiful as klainers back in the day) seemed to side with one boy over the other and i always saw more kurt supporters than those who sided with blaine, which like. i get. we knew kurt more, we went through his struggles with him -- we met blaine post-sadie hawkins, post-recovery, he was already well-adjusted (...ish) so there was less to grab onto if we wanted to connect with this character.

but that leads to this: blaine cheats because he’s being emotionally neglected by his partner, which isn’t a Good Thing and i’ll never say it is. but it’s not like he’s cheating for fun -- he’s alone and hurt and has tried to reach out but is rebuffed at every point. blaine cheats and immediately tells kurt (which is rare for glee actually, sam’s the only other person who came forward immediately and i think puck comes forward about rachel pretty quickly) and like, i don’t understand people who say darren criss is a bad actor (*points frantically at his emmy*) because the scene where he tells kurt the truth is genuinely heartbreaking. blaine looks fucking disgusted with himself. 

and at that point, kurt’s definitely valid in pushing blaine away -- he doesn’t want to hear blaine’s explanations, nor should he have to. it’s all too new, too fresh, too volatile. they can talk another time.

except they don’t?

and that leads us to the next four episodes, where blaine struggles with his sense of self -- he doesn’t have closure on his relationship with kurt, because kurt wouldn’t talk to him. and so much of blaine’s identity is tangled up in kurt (which is an Issue obviously) that he just... loses himself. there’s definitely a point to all those metas where blaine coming to mckinley was a major step back for him as a character and we really see that here, and i think that might be where all the hate comes from? we see the fallout from blaine’s perspective, the Bad Guy of the situation (they’re both bad guys imo but it be like that sometimes) so people struggle to empathise with him. also kurt emotionally neglecting blaine was REALLY brushed over because while we only see two episodes of it (and it wasn’t shown in-depth or anything) blaine experienced at least a month of it (i lean towards more because we voted our class representatives two months into the school year but i know things are different) which doesn’t help matters.

i know people get annoyed with the “blaine probably has a mental illness” line of thought but there’s definitely something there -- kid joined 27 clubs, became senior class president and took over a nationals-winning glee club in his senior year. he was also salutatorian (i mean i’m sure he would’ve been bumped if artie and tina sorted out their issue but he still got second-highest marks in the class even if he technically ranked third). there is no way that kid didn’t have something leading him into mania (i have a lot of stock in the bipolar!blaine theory can u tell). 

but if there is something there (ryan even admitted he thought blaine might have depression but there is so much more there), i think that explains his actions a lot. it doesn’t excuse them of course, but explanations are important. 

anyway, people already hated blaine. this just gave them a canon reason to fire against him. 

also, since i said i’d talk about it: sam cheats on mercedes in s5 and it’s shitty and our girl deserves better, but sam tells her immediately. i remember fucking nothing about how that conversation went, but it ended well. the fandom didn’t fire back against sam anywhere near as much as they did blaine (which leads us into a weird talk about how they [the fandom] will fight for kurt but not mercedes but i prefer to look it as the outcome of samcedes’ conversation was more positive), but i definitely remember people using that against him -- while people like brittany, quinn and tina got off without much flack.

(i also don’t really remember finn getting much shit over it but??? i feel like i just missed it???)

so not super sure what the fuck happened there (outside of pre-existing baseless hate for the characters but it’s not like people had a reason to love quinn pre-puck revelation so??? idk???). i do find it interesting though. i never really got why people hated blaine and sam so much when they were genuinely kind-hearted males, something sorely lacking from our tv screens at the time, but... idk, people just wanted to hate, i think.

like people blame them for the downfall of glee but lmao bitch??? that’s on the fucking writers??? chord and darren didn’t storm into the writer’s room and demand writing quality go the fuck down, chill out.

okay so rounding back to klaine again because i have fucking Thoughts on this mess: i do genuinely think that should’ve been the end of them. blaine would learn how to be by himself (which is a huge issue for him, i always found help! a way too fitting song when i took away the context-- my independence seems to vanish in this haze) and kurt would learn to take responsibility for his own shortcomings (which he never did which, thinking about it, may be why at the end of every watch-through i walk away not liking kurt despite fully enjoying him whilst watching the show) and they’d go be very happy.

i’ve mentioned my endgames for them before so i won’t talk too much about it but i don’t really think they’d ever be friends (so many fanfictions have them stay friends post break-up and??? what). kurt’s trust in blaine is too fractured and for blaine, kurt is an ugly reminder of a sad part of his life -- there’s too much history there. they play nice, of course, at reunions and parties and all that, but they never talk much. one day blaine will say i’m happy you’re happy and kurt will smile and say well, i’m happy that you’re happy too and that will be the end of it. elliott will come up and give kurt a big kiss and blaine will leave to go find sam (or sebastian? my endgames are shifting, i think). it’s not an apology and it’s not forgiveness, but it’s as close as they’re ever going to get.