Glee 3.20&21 - and A Silly - AND! Why I love Threesomes
In which I wax poetics because Rachel Berry is possibly one of my very favorite female characters on television today. (Glee poetics behind cut because I am unsure where my highly-vampire-oriented Flist even stands on the Gleek front)
What I LOVED (just cannot say how much I LOVE) about Rachel's storyline in this: in so many HS shows *coughGossipGirlcough* - the IT-girls are walking around with the best of everything, but very little attention is paid to how HARD it would be for a HS girl to accomplish the things that in teen-dramas we/the audience take for granted. The male characters play a sport and are usually portrayed as C-average students. Females are supposed to be ALL OF THE THINGS and have a high GPA and be a "good girlfriend" and, and, and ... in order for Rachel Berry to exist in the Real World - yeah, she'd have to wake up at 5am and rehearse while everyone plays and be the president of every club and still have a 3.8 gpa and that's a LOT of work. It felt like the show telling the audience: "We know that some of you love to hate her, but seriously? Not many people can do this." ... Tina is the audience for a moment, she gets to step in and tell Rachel why she's unloved: and glory-be Rachel actually states the obvious: I FUCKING WORK HARD FOR EVERYTHING I HAVE!
THIS is why I love Rachel Berry. Because even though it is a HS show, and even though her story is often mishandled as being *just* a Finchel love-story... she works her ass off, and isn't ashamed to say: I work hard. She's not just raw talent ... it's what a lot of people I think miss in her character ... sure, she has raw talent. She may have a good natural rhythm/ear ... but she works every moment to get better - to be the best. I've never felt like Rachel thought she deserves solos/recognition just because - if anything, she *doesn't* believe that she deserves it, but baby: that doesn't mean she isn't going to FIGHT for it at every turn. She's "bossy" and "self-centered" because she's been so often ignored, overlooked, undermined, misunderstood, teased, beat down .... She is single-minded in her belief that someday the world won't be able to ignore her anymore, that she will have worked so hard, that she won't have to fight anymore.
Which is why - when she had her first duet with Kurt, when they sat together and sang that beautiful harmony of "Happy Days Are Here Again/ Get Happy" ... I was SO happy - because who else on this show could understand each other more than THESE TWO BEAUTIFUL KIDS!?!?!?! It was a friendSHIP that I was holding my breath for ... for FAR TOO LONG. And when they sang For Good I cried and cried - why? Because this song was written for them - they were written to sing this song together. Because these two need more than a "good man" in their lives. They need each other. They need to fight and compete and support each other. Because they BOTH work for every moment of their lives. Rachel's plotline got a little too "easy" for me in this last season: she finally "had" Finn (which I still say is a mistake: doesn't she know she's in love with Quinn? Don't they both realize that Finn is abusive not a good thing for them? Have you SEEN I feel Pretty/Unpretty? Those girls are SINGING TO EACHOTHER AND DON'T EVEN KNOW IT!), she was on the top of the foodchain for the first time (for moments that mattered) and even though that changed their dynamics: she was still his best friend. And having Rachel Berry as a bestie = totally worth it in my book, because that girl is FIERCE.
I have just one final thing to say about Glee:
PUCK'S STORYLINE IS AMAZING AND THEY DON'T EVEN KNOW IT. If Puck was female and (s)he was having sex with ALL THE OLD MEN - no one would take it lightly. If Puck was female and (s)he HONESTLY BELIEVED that having sex with a teacher is the only way to raise (her)his grade - no one would take it lightly. If Puck was female and had an unsupportive mother, an absent father, a weird relationship with (her)his baby's adoptive (father)mother - NO ONE WOULD TAKE IT LIGHTLY!
THIS BOY AND HIS ADORABLE FRACKING FACE! He's so perfect. He sneaks up on you. AND OF COURSE his story would be the one that would make Beast realize that she's being abused, that she deserves better, because "being a bad ass" doesn't mean that you don't get hurt... which I'm saying right now actually means: BEING MASCULINE DOESN'T MEAN YOU CAN'T BE RAPED/ABUSED/HURT/BEAT. Puck is repeatedly the victim (VICTIM I SAY!) of statutory rape - SO MUCH SO that he believes this to be a LEGITIMATE solution to his problems. If this was a teenage female character, it would not be on primetime television. It just WOULDN'T, OKAY? And placing Beast of all characters in parallel to him says so much more than "we need a way to get Puck to graduate" - it's spinning the heads on all gender norms that we know. Norms that say that teenage boys want to have sex and therefore it is socially acceptable (though frowned upon) for older women to sleep with teen boys. Norms that say that masculine women are lacking "femininity" and therefore, are in no danger of being harmed by their partners, that masculine women do not "need protection" the way that Emma might, for example. And that's pretty amazing for the show to do. To show that Beast not only deserves better, but that she learns from Puck - not from the fierce Glee-ettes. The girls who are pretty (or at least: read as "feminine") have the "luxury" of gender norms that Beast does not feel privy to - those girls fighting for her don't mean as much as Puck fighting for himself... for fighting to fit into a stereotype that is HARMFUL to his sense of self.
Which is all my long-winded way of saying that, like Dean Winchester before him, I now read Puckerman as coded female. If you do: it's scary and frightening what they have done to his body/mind this season (and season one - I think in season two his characterization was a little less... problematic).
Oh! And my silly thing! I was having a (highly hilarious) kdrama conversation with my Roomie in the car earlier tonight and after listing off all the K!heroines that we love - and deciding that Eun-hye is the best of all the best... because she is... I suddenly gasped out: yeah, but KIM NANA.
Yo - Kim Nana is a BAMF.
I decided that Kim Nana is in a league all her own and that she's not like the other K!heroines because she's... well.... watch City Hunter and that will pretty much make it clear how DIFFERENT she is. This girl DOES NOT sit back and take crap from ANYONE. She's a fighter. She's pretty much my hero.
SO then I said: Who would win in a fight? Kim Nana or Elena Gilbert.
And it was decided that they are EVENLY MATCHED... so long as it is human!Elena.
THAT IS HOW MUCH KIM NANA OWNS MY SOUL!
[EDIT] I meant to post about this earlier and now it is just going to be tacked on the end of this, because... well, why the hell not? On Saturday I recorded with LostPod, you know - like I do EVERY Saturday morning, and right towards the end of our marathon recording (3 in the afternoon when we started at 10 - doubling up sucks) I said: Kate/Jack/Sawyer are a perfect OT3 in this episode (because we were recording "Dues Ex" and quite frankly, they ARE) ... which seemed to go right over every one's heads without me noticing... until a few minutes later at which point I used the literal word "threesome" and BOY! Did that start a shit-storm.
So I said to them, I said: The reason why the love triangle is SO compelling, is NOT about the fight between the two men, it's not about women making choices: it's because there is always the possibility for a threesome, for all taboos to just fly out the window, for our rules to no longer apply, for the possibility of a threesome. Love triangles aren't just about competition, about women as commodity, as women as a homoerotic vehicle - the Love triangle is compelling because it is the closest we can get to acknowledged threesomes in our culture. ****
I know that by tacking this point on the back end of such a long post may mean that it will get lost... but I think I'm going to play with this a bit more. What I LOVE about tVD (because everything always comes back here, okay?) is that there's a double taboo: not just the possibility of a threesome, but also the overt "underlying" incest between Stefan & Damon. It is one of the reasons why I love love love Polidori so so so very much: because the vampire is used in order for the hero to lust/fear/desire his own sister. (Which, coincidently, is what I believe is happening in Henry James' The American - the French brother tries to convince his sister's suitor to fight with him over another woman, but it doesn't work - he can't fight the man over his sister gasp!incest!gasp - so let's both sleep with the same prostitute and get jealous, so that I can desire a man that my sister loves - without actually engaging in EITHER homoeroticism OR any implied incestual desire. This poor French guy ends up dead, Spoilers.)
*** I also decided to tell all my podcasters all my odd!ships, including Sansa/Hound : THEIR LOVE IS REAL, OKAY?