#my relationship with cheerio kurt is something to be studied

[cryscendo]

absolutely sick and disgusted at the under-utilization of cheerio!kurt. ryan murphy got rid of him bc he knew he served too much cunt

[sugrmottas]

(this genuinely isn't judgey fodpsapid) but quinn, puck and santana having rachel's ambition is...a lot.

i mean, it is.

it also isn’t.

like, rachel definitely outpaces all of them, don’t get me wrong – rachel has lived her life being told she is going to be successful, and i think that changes things. quinn grew up believing she was doomed to live the life of her mother, puck grew up being told he was just like his father (which is mostly fan-canon but i feel like there’s enough Illusions in actual canon to back it up) and santana grows up in what qualifies for the Hood (adjacent) in lima, ohio – but like, rachel grew up with dads who worship her. who tell her she is going to be amazing because she has to be. her peers always say cruel things, but rachel trusts her fathers so much more than she does her peers, so girl grows up knowing she will be successful, if she works for it.

but then there’s puck, too. puck who is a young jewish kid in what is predominately a protestant state (on that line: i know quinn’s evangelical but what is mercedes actually? where we given anything more than just plain christian? also sam? why did glee never expand on anything??? ugh) so already feels like a fish out of water – but he (canonically, at least) only has two peers his age who share the same faith. jacob ben israel, who is disgusting, even from a young age (is it canon that puck’s always bullied him?) and rachel, who i truly do believe he grew up knowing, even if i don’t think they were the best friends fanon likes to paint them as. he grows up in a heavily jewish household but in a community that does not share his faith, or even respect it, and that’s hard. add to it a burning desire to not become his father (i’m not sure if it’s actually canon that his mother told him he was just like his father, but it’s a headcanon i hold very close to my heart) and a mother working her ass off to provide for him and his sister, and kid is fucking angry.

so puck has anger issues, which i feel is mostly backed up in canon anyway – which is his passion. his ambition blooms from this – a burning desire to prove everyone wrong, the need to get the fuck out of lima. i do think finn and puck have a very deep friendship, but it’s one that adds to both of their insecurities. finn is the Golden Boy, he is (seen as) kind and talented. puck is the Bad Boy, he is charming and capable. they spend their lives being compared and i think puck is mostly reserved to coming second (hence his anger at finn going off-book and joining glee) but he also maintains that he Wants to beat finn, wants to be the best. puck has selfish ambition (but really, what ambition isn’t at least a little selfish?), but he has so much of it.

remember his first Real line? i’m not like everyone else in this cow town, i got star potential. kid makes it very clear he’s getting the fuck out of lima, no matter what his peers think. i do hate how glee handled him in s4 (he got out of lima sure, but he didn’t do anything, which i feel was such a disservice to him – he struggled with school because he isn’t a learner, but he’s always been a doer, let’s not forget the kid had an actual business at 16) but i hate what they did with most characters in s4, so i tend to ignore it for everyone bar the newbies and finn. the unravelling of klaine was interesting too, if only because we saw how co-dependent they actually were. otherwise fuck s4. (santana and rachel both had Moments, now that i think about it.)

anyway, like – of the four, i think puck has the least ambition. i also think he has a lot more purpose than say, santana, so his ambition is a lot more Realised. 

and then there’s santana, who i think has the clearest ambition in the show, even if it’s constantly overshadowed by rachel’s. i believe santana’s family is religious (her abuela definitely is but we don’t know too much about her parents actual lives despite actually meeting her mother, it’s of my personal belief they are religious but non-practising) but santana fails to perceive any proper value to religion.

(this is going somewhere, i swear.)

santana also doesn’t have a Great Big Dream, she eventually settles on wanting to be famous but that feels so much like a cop-out that i fail to see any value to it. she doesn’t particularly live for cheerleading or glee club either. 

what i’m getting at here is that if santana has ambition (she does, i’ll get to it) she doesn’t have purpose to go with it. and ambition without purpose can be fucking dangerous and santana is such a good example of that.

onto her ambition: i do think it’s pretty clearly shown within the show, even from the beginning of her character, as underdeveloped as she was. of the three cheerleaders, she’s the one who wholeheartedly throws herself into sabotaging the glee club – we don’t see too much of her in the first half of s1, but i believe she was working away at some of the weaker characters (read: artie, because santana lopez genuinely does read super prejudiced, but i’m probably still salty about her biphobia) until the back half came along and girl turned it up, went after finn hudson and took his virginity (i have so many feelings about finntana, mostly in a platonic sense but there was a glee meta years ago on them sleeping together that still sticks with me) and took so much pleasure in quinn fabray losing her status (quinn and santana read weirdly similar to finn and puck, but i don’t think their friendship is anywhere near as deep so they have less reason to empathise with each other) and girl was fucking messy.

it was great. i lived for it.

then s2 happened and we met santana lopez, properly – the girl from the hood (adjacent) who was so angry and so scared and wanted so much. and the season was full of ambition from her, even if stupid little ways – wanting to win the duet competition and knowing her and mercedes would be the match-up, knowing she wants to keep sleeping with brittany so tricking her into thinking it’s not cheating (we can talk about who was the real bad guy of the two of them for that for days but the correct answer is both, because brittany pierce is not as dumb as she seems but santana lopez still had full intent to make b cheat on artie), rejoining the cheerios at the first opportunity because she wants to win, no matter the consequences (i’m not sure how i feel about the three of them ditching the competition because it’s just a weird situation but this isn’t a finn hudson meta). and she cares about glee club a lot, of course, for a lot of reasons, but you cannot tell me she’s so upset about finn and rachel losing them the competition solely because… what? they ruined it for the club? no, they lost it for her. fuck them for that.

s3 is really the season i point to to prove the girl lacks purpose, so we’ll skip over that to s4 – santana is on her own, for the first time. she’s on a scholarship to a big school relatively far from home and she doesn’t handle it well, of course. gets super untethered. and then visits home and remembers Santana Lopez, The Star. so she goes to new york and still lacks purpose, sure, but she has a stage. she just has to figure out what part she’s playing.

and this is where the danger comes in, because santana sees her friends succeeding – rachel mostly, but kurt too – and gets restless. does stupid shit like her yeast-i-stat commercial. but most importantly, decides her life’s mission is playing fanny brice. which isn’t stupid on its own, but like, for someone who cares so much about her friends it reads so strange that she would actively go after something that clearly matters so much to what we pretty much assume is her best friend. the deterioration of rachel and santana’s friendship was written awfully so i won’t go into it, but like. god. someone give this girl a purpose so she has something worthwhile to invest herself in and stops sabotaging all her relationships.

so santana has bucketloads of ambition (i’d rank her third of the four) but she has nowhere to put it and it fucks her over every single time.

and then quinn. oh, quinn. ohhhhhhhh quinn.

quinn has so much fucking ambition – she has a life planner from age six. she details every moment of middle school, every moment of high school, every moment of college, every moment of life. she’s going to go to an ivy league college (she thinks she’d like brown, her dad went there, but yale sounds nice and freeing) and she’s going to study law and she’s going to become a family lawyer. she’s going to help kids get away from abusive parents and she’s going to make sure everyone she comes into contact with is safe and happy.

on the flipside, lucy quinn fabray is already resigned to living her mother’s life. doing a short course in real estate and then becoming a realtor. she’ll marry a nice boy, maybe finn hudson, and they’ll buy a house with a white picket fence and have 2.5 children and a dog. 

quinn fabray’s ambition is fucking tragic, because it was killed before even getting the chance to thrive – and it’s still there, of course. in some ways. when she tells finn she’s pregnant, she says i really thought i had a shot at getting out of here. when she’s wondering whether to give up drizzle or not, she knows she shouldn’t – her religion doesn’t look on the act kindly and i’ll never forgive glee for overlooking quinn��s faith post-s1 – but it would allow her to move on with her life.

quinn fabray is tragic, because she loses her future-husband to rachel berry, who has all of her ambition and none of her fear (or all of it, but quinn doesn’t get to see that, nobody gets to see that). she loses her husband to everything quinn wanted to be, and it’s awful.

s2 sees quinn not gaining her ambition back, as she hoped. or maybe as i hoped. s2 sees quinn getting back with finn. s2 sees quinn telling rachel that she’s wasting her time with lima because she’s going to be successful and they aren’t (or rather, quinn isn’t). 

but it comes back, eventually.

i don’t know when. s3 fucked quinn over so bad. but it comes back.

and she writes so many fucking essays about her emotionally neglectful father and her child who she loves so fucking much but had to give up and her friends, her glee club, who helped her through fucking everything.

it comes back.

quinn gets accepted into yale.

quinn gets accepted into yale.

rachel and kurt are (eventually) accepted into a prestigious performing arts school, which is perfect for them, but let me reiterate – quinn (and mike actualy) gains admission into one of the most prestigious schools in america. 

quinn fabray is going to be fucking amazing, and she knows it – she’s going to live her own life, the one her mom wanted to life, but was always too scared to pursue. quinn knows how short life is, she also know she can’t let anyone drag her down – quinn is going to motherfucking yale and she is going to be fucking wonderful. 

there’s a quote i’ve always used for quinn – i can’t abandon the girl i used to be, so i carry her. and quinn carries lucy with her every single fucking day – and lucy gets to see her ambition realised, gets to see herself succeed and become everything she dreamed of.

and it’s amazing.

so maybe nobody has rachel’s ambition, not really. but a lot of glee club have their own wild ambitions (mike, mercedes and tina all come to mind).

but i do genuinely think puck, santana and quinn all come very close to the standard rachel set, in such different ways. 

and i think that’s wonderful.