(no subject)
I've spent the last hour yelling at my iTunes because I realized that the Great Radioactive iTunes Meltdown of February 2011 ate up all of my Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes music, which I wanted to listen to for the first time in months today and now I have to buy it all over again, so I'm in a very testy mood. And then the I Feel Pretty/Unpretty mashup popped up on shuffle, so I'm going to channel my anger towards that instead of actually beating my computer with a crutch.
It’s depressing, but I’m a realist, and if there’s one thing that’s been demonstrated by the writing this season (and the second half of the first season as well, actually), it’s that there’s very little concern with actual character development. Everything about this show, when it comes to the characters, are broad sweeping strokes of development-yeah, okay, Puck was a douche initially and now he’s recruiting the football team; Santana went from hating on Kurt to sticking up for him in front of Karofsky, blah blah blah-but the in-betweens, the actual interactions that show development or growth or change? Are shit.
Ideally, this song would be the catalyst for Rachel and Quinn’s characters figuring out that they’re actually rather similar people, that they’ve been fighting and backstabbing each other for petty reasons, and that everyone around them would be happier if they could just get along. From day one, Quinn was introduced as Rachel’s competition-she had the boy Rachel wanted, and the popularity, and the acceptably nuclear family. I think they wanted to write her as Rachel’s foil, but that just didn’t work because for all of the bad decisions she made in the first season, there was too much vulnerability written into her character for her to really be Rachel’s foil (if anyone is, I’d say it’s Santana, but that’s not the point). Right from the get-go, Rachel and Quinn were linked. They’re constantly defined in the context of each other-Quinn measures her social status against Rachel, using her as a benchmark; Rachel contemplates all the reasons Finn would chose Quinn and wonders what she that causes fireworks that Rachel doesn’t-and, after the end of last season, they’re irrevocably connected because Rachel’s mother adopted Quinn’s daughter. The only more concrete, finite relationships that exist on the show are Brittany and Santana’s whatever-you-want-to-call-it and Quinn and Puck because of their daughter. Rachel and Quinn are tied together by Beth and Shelby and the fact that they spend as much energy focusing on one another in the fight for Finn as they do focusing on Finn.
If I had any pull with the show, this song would close the episode. It’d be wonderfully fluffy and adorable if they argued throughout the episode, had a big blow-up fight in front of the rest of the glee club, and then talked their shit out and figured out that they’re the both insecure, lonely, terrified teenagers, and then they sing it for the rest of the club as a way of cementing together the fact that they really, actually don’t hate each other. But that chances of that happening are probably somewhere around 4%.
Slightly more likely is them arguing, or fighting, or bickering, or thinking angry voice-over thoughts about each other-Quinn has everything, why does she have to take this from me; Rachel doesn’t need Finn and she just wants him because she lives in a fairy tale-and then the song being some split-screen angsty goodness of them both dealing with the fact that feeling unattractive and unwanted is a constant defining presence in their lives, that they’ve been making all of their mistakes because they want to be accepted and loved and wanted, and maybe that it’s time to buck up and sort their shit out. That’s probably got…oh, I don’t know, somewhere around a 4% chance, too.
What will probably happen is that they argue about Finn. Again.
(Maybe they realize that his constant insecurities and waffling has made them both feel worthless about themselves and that it’s time for all three of them to learn to stand alone and grow from their failed relationships, and they move on from there. But that has like a 1% chance, so, no, won’t be happening, because apparently the entire world will stop if the Finn/Rachel fans don’t have something to salivate over.)
They’ll argue about Finn. It’s hard to tell if Rachel will be more like the Rachel who ran away from the piano crying after Quinn yelled at her or the Rachel who stood up and yelled at Santana, but either way, it will be about Finn. Quinn will be desperate and bordering on pathetic, her sights locked on the prom queen crown and Rachel an unfortunate obstacle in her way, because I really don’t see the writers putting any real effort into salvaging her as a character: since the first Sectionals episode, they’ve spun her around and thrown her in whatever direction necessary to make a subplot happen. Trying to rewrite her reputation with the glist? Sure, why not. Striking up a friendship with Mercedes, despite exactly zero prior interactions between the two of them? Yeah, sure, because bonding over feeling fat is a fabulous basis for a friendship. Tossing Santana under the bus for the cheerleading captaincy, being unbelievably vulnerable around Sam during the duets competition, letting hers elf be forced into resigning from the glee club (by the same woman who the bloody well blackmailed for a yearbook page last year, might I add) and then talked back into it by Finn, cheating on her boyfriend again? Yeah, whatever, it makes things dramatic even if it doesn’t make any sense that she had even an iota of growth last year.
Rachel will be Rachel-hopefully the brilliantly graceful one we’ve seen the last few episodes-and Quinn will be whatever Barbie doll they dress her up as this time-super-bitchface or super-vulnerable, it’s hard to guess. They’ll fight, and then, as many people have predicted, we’ll probably get a split-screen montage of them both pining after Finn. Because, as has always been the case with this show, neither Rachel nor Quinn can exist without the focal point of Finn. 90%.
Final 1%: they bond over insecurities, realize that attraction has been hiding as loathing, and throw themselves into one another’s arms for tearful admittances of mutually romantic feelings. And then the internet explodes because every Rachel/Quinn shipper in the world blew up their tumblr and/or LJ account.
I actually don’t want that to happen, really. I mean, it’d be preferable to them mooning over Finn, because it’d be Rachel and Quinn talking about and feeling things for Rachel and Quinn. It would be them passing the Bechdel Test. It would be them talking to each other about each other in the context of their feelings for each other, rather than Finn. But honestly, I want to see them as friends. Partly because, frankly, Rachel Berry and Quinn Fabray as best friends? Let’s be honest. It would be the most unbearably awesome thing the world has ever witnessed. But mostly because they’re connected, they’re similar, and they’ve demonstrated that they can get along quite well. Because they both need to focus on being themselves, not Finn’s girlfriend or Sam’s girlfriend or Puck’s girlfriend.
Rachel stood on her own for so long, and while it’s understandable that everyone wants someone holding their hand and standing at their side, Finn has demonstrated time and again that he isn’t reliable, Puck never even pretended he could be for her, and Jesse ran away to LA rather than try and fix things between them-Rachel needs to be Rachel, to stop trying to define herself as a power couple, and to focus on being the person she wants to be instead of the person other people want her to be. She’s demonstrated that, when left to her own devices, she’s a very good-hearted and kind person. Be that person, and then work on the boyfriend side of things.
And Quinn… Quinn has clearly always been defined as one half of a relationship. We’ve only seen her as single for a few episodes-at the very beginning of the second season-and she was desperately looking for her life raft to keep her afloat atop the high school hierarchy. She needs to stand on her own, be on her own, and find her friends. Constantly melding herself to some boy’s side-and oh, how the writers haven’t even touched on the potential brilliance of that story line, with the overwhelming patriarchal pressure she felt growing up, being kicked out by her parents, the massive daddy issues she clearly has-has kept her from figuring out not just who she is, but who she wants to be. The foundation of her character is one of the strongest and most intriguing I’ve ever seen-she’s so terrified of the world that she’s blind to the fact that she’s overwhelmingly capable of doing anything she wants, and continually self-sabotages herself as a result-and the writers could really, really redeem themselves in my eyes if they set her on this path to figuring herself out and coming to terms with it all. Even if they won’t. Ever. Because that requires thinking of the possibility that there are people watching this show who care for continuity or consistency or storytelling.
The two of them being friends would help them both immensely. Quinn needs someone to metaphorically give her a kick in the pants and make her realize that her future doesn’t have to be determined by her pregnancy and a plastic crown, and Rachel needs someone who’s smart enough to keep up with her but too stubborn and willful to be walked all over. They both need friends, and even if the show wasn’t horribly lacking any other potentials for those roles-Puck is Rachel’s friend, yes, but he’s so enamored with Zizes that his focus is always on her; Mercedes is too envious of Rachel to ever be a real friend to her, and Kurt will always side with Mercedes; Santana is too wrapped up in her own anger and angst to be anyone’s friend; Brittany can’t pay attention long enough to focus on anything to be good to anyone but Santana; Artie doesn’t care; Sam’s too upset with Quinn; Mike and Tina are perfectly content in their relatively drama-free corner; Finn is Finn and doesn’t know how to be friends with a girl without blowing his load-they’re so very, very suited for it. Quinn can keep Rachel’s ambition grounded in reality and prevent it from bursting out in destructive, infuriating bursts; Rachel can help Quinn tap back into the ambition she once had and remember that life doesn’t end with high school.
Will any of this happen? Yeah, no, probably not. Everything the characters on this show do is motivated by or stemming from some twisted romantic premise. There’s no such thing as real friends on Glee, and though that bothers me to no end, I’d be okay with it if they would just write linear, consistent characters. But they write to create drama and suit whatever songs they have the rights to this week, or whatever guest star is bumbling around, and that’s that.
WHICH REALLY FUCKING SUCKS.
It’s depressing, but I’m a realist, and if there’s one thing that’s been demonstrated by the writing this season (and the second half of the first season as well, actually), it’s that there’s very little concern with actual character development. Everything about this show, when it comes to the characters, are broad sweeping strokes of development-yeah, okay, Puck was a douche initially and now he’s recruiting the football team; Santana went from hating on Kurt to sticking up for him in front of Karofsky, blah blah blah-but the in-betweens, the actual interactions that show development or growth or change? Are shit.
Ideally, this song would be the catalyst for Rachel and Quinn’s characters figuring out that they’re actually rather similar people, that they’ve been fighting and backstabbing each other for petty reasons, and that everyone around them would be happier if they could just get along. From day one, Quinn was introduced as Rachel’s competition-she had the boy Rachel wanted, and the popularity, and the acceptably nuclear family. I think they wanted to write her as Rachel’s foil, but that just didn’t work because for all of the bad decisions she made in the first season, there was too much vulnerability written into her character for her to really be Rachel’s foil (if anyone is, I’d say it’s Santana, but that’s not the point). Right from the get-go, Rachel and Quinn were linked. They’re constantly defined in the context of each other-Quinn measures her social status against Rachel, using her as a benchmark; Rachel contemplates all the reasons Finn would chose Quinn and wonders what she that causes fireworks that Rachel doesn’t-and, after the end of last season, they’re irrevocably connected because Rachel’s mother adopted Quinn’s daughter. The only more concrete, finite relationships that exist on the show are Brittany and Santana’s whatever-you-want-to-call-it and Quinn and Puck because of their daughter. Rachel and Quinn are tied together by Beth and Shelby and the fact that they spend as much energy focusing on one another in the fight for Finn as they do focusing on Finn.
If I had any pull with the show, this song would close the episode. It’d be wonderfully fluffy and adorable if they argued throughout the episode, had a big blow-up fight in front of the rest of the glee club, and then talked their shit out and figured out that they’re the both insecure, lonely, terrified teenagers, and then they sing it for the rest of the club as a way of cementing together the fact that they really, actually don’t hate each other. But that chances of that happening are probably somewhere around 4%.
Slightly more likely is them arguing, or fighting, or bickering, or thinking angry voice-over thoughts about each other-Quinn has everything, why does she have to take this from me; Rachel doesn’t need Finn and she just wants him because she lives in a fairy tale-and then the song being some split-screen angsty goodness of them both dealing with the fact that feeling unattractive and unwanted is a constant defining presence in their lives, that they’ve been making all of their mistakes because they want to be accepted and loved and wanted, and maybe that it’s time to buck up and sort their shit out. That’s probably got…oh, I don’t know, somewhere around a 4% chance, too.
What will probably happen is that they argue about Finn. Again.
(Maybe they realize that his constant insecurities and waffling has made them both feel worthless about themselves and that it’s time for all three of them to learn to stand alone and grow from their failed relationships, and they move on from there. But that has like a 1% chance, so, no, won’t be happening, because apparently the entire world will stop if the Finn/Rachel fans don’t have something to salivate over.)
They’ll argue about Finn. It’s hard to tell if Rachel will be more like the Rachel who ran away from the piano crying after Quinn yelled at her or the Rachel who stood up and yelled at Santana, but either way, it will be about Finn. Quinn will be desperate and bordering on pathetic, her sights locked on the prom queen crown and Rachel an unfortunate obstacle in her way, because I really don’t see the writers putting any real effort into salvaging her as a character: since the first Sectionals episode, they’ve spun her around and thrown her in whatever direction necessary to make a subplot happen. Trying to rewrite her reputation with the glist? Sure, why not. Striking up a friendship with Mercedes, despite exactly zero prior interactions between the two of them? Yeah, sure, because bonding over feeling fat is a fabulous basis for a friendship. Tossing Santana under the bus for the cheerleading captaincy, being unbelievably vulnerable around Sam during the duets competition, letting hers elf be forced into resigning from the glee club (by the same woman who the bloody well blackmailed for a yearbook page last year, might I add) and then talked back into it by Finn, cheating on her boyfriend again? Yeah, whatever, it makes things dramatic even if it doesn’t make any sense that she had even an iota of growth last year.
Rachel will be Rachel-hopefully the brilliantly graceful one we’ve seen the last few episodes-and Quinn will be whatever Barbie doll they dress her up as this time-super-bitchface or super-vulnerable, it’s hard to guess. They’ll fight, and then, as many people have predicted, we’ll probably get a split-screen montage of them both pining after Finn. Because, as has always been the case with this show, neither Rachel nor Quinn can exist without the focal point of Finn. 90%.
Final 1%: they bond over insecurities, realize that attraction has been hiding as loathing, and throw themselves into one another’s arms for tearful admittances of mutually romantic feelings. And then the internet explodes because every Rachel/Quinn shipper in the world blew up their tumblr and/or LJ account.
I actually don’t want that to happen, really. I mean, it’d be preferable to them mooning over Finn, because it’d be Rachel and Quinn talking about and feeling things for Rachel and Quinn. It would be them passing the Bechdel Test. It would be them talking to each other about each other in the context of their feelings for each other, rather than Finn. But honestly, I want to see them as friends. Partly because, frankly, Rachel Berry and Quinn Fabray as best friends? Let’s be honest. It would be the most unbearably awesome thing the world has ever witnessed. But mostly because they’re connected, they’re similar, and they’ve demonstrated that they can get along quite well. Because they both need to focus on being themselves, not Finn’s girlfriend or Sam’s girlfriend or Puck’s girlfriend.
Rachel stood on her own for so long, and while it’s understandable that everyone wants someone holding their hand and standing at their side, Finn has demonstrated time and again that he isn’t reliable, Puck never even pretended he could be for her, and Jesse ran away to LA rather than try and fix things between them-Rachel needs to be Rachel, to stop trying to define herself as a power couple, and to focus on being the person she wants to be instead of the person other people want her to be. She’s demonstrated that, when left to her own devices, she’s a very good-hearted and kind person. Be that person, and then work on the boyfriend side of things.
And Quinn… Quinn has clearly always been defined as one half of a relationship. We’ve only seen her as single for a few episodes-at the very beginning of the second season-and she was desperately looking for her life raft to keep her afloat atop the high school hierarchy. She needs to stand on her own, be on her own, and find her friends. Constantly melding herself to some boy’s side-and oh, how the writers haven’t even touched on the potential brilliance of that story line, with the overwhelming patriarchal pressure she felt growing up, being kicked out by her parents, the massive daddy issues she clearly has-has kept her from figuring out not just who she is, but who she wants to be. The foundation of her character is one of the strongest and most intriguing I’ve ever seen-she’s so terrified of the world that she’s blind to the fact that she’s overwhelmingly capable of doing anything she wants, and continually self-sabotages herself as a result-and the writers could really, really redeem themselves in my eyes if they set her on this path to figuring herself out and coming to terms with it all. Even if they won’t. Ever. Because that requires thinking of the possibility that there are people watching this show who care for continuity or consistency or storytelling.
The two of them being friends would help them both immensely. Quinn needs someone to metaphorically give her a kick in the pants and make her realize that her future doesn’t have to be determined by her pregnancy and a plastic crown, and Rachel needs someone who’s smart enough to keep up with her but too stubborn and willful to be walked all over. They both need friends, and even if the show wasn’t horribly lacking any other potentials for those roles-Puck is Rachel’s friend, yes, but he’s so enamored with Zizes that his focus is always on her; Mercedes is too envious of Rachel to ever be a real friend to her, and Kurt will always side with Mercedes; Santana is too wrapped up in her own anger and angst to be anyone’s friend; Brittany can’t pay attention long enough to focus on anything to be good to anyone but Santana; Artie doesn’t care; Sam’s too upset with Quinn; Mike and Tina are perfectly content in their relatively drama-free corner; Finn is Finn and doesn’t know how to be friends with a girl without blowing his load-they’re so very, very suited for it. Quinn can keep Rachel’s ambition grounded in reality and prevent it from bursting out in destructive, infuriating bursts; Rachel can help Quinn tap back into the ambition she once had and remember that life doesn’t end with high school.
Will any of this happen? Yeah, no, probably not. Everything the characters on this show do is motivated by or stemming from some twisted romantic premise. There’s no such thing as real friends on Glee, and though that bothers me to no end, I’d be okay with it if they would just write linear, consistent characters. But they write to create drama and suit whatever songs they have the rights to this week, or whatever guest star is bumbling around, and that’s that.
WHICH REALLY FUCKING SUCKS.