Glee Finale; thoughts on the season
So I wasn't going to bother, because most of the instant thinky thoughts I had RE: the finale were the same ones that exploded all the heck over the internet ten minutes before I finished the episode. But hey, I have never been one to jump on a bandwagon before it's already half a mile down the road and on its way out of town, so, some things that have been sticking in my head:
There are the seeds for a whole bunch of Santana meta in the back of my head, and I just have to figure out how to put them in order. Oddly, they have nothing at all to do with Brittany and little enough to do with her sexuality, yet, though they might by the time I sort through it all.
It's about "Glee's kinda the best part of my day" and "This is the only chance we have to feel good about ourselves for something". It's about the kind of character archetypes she embodies, and what they did there, because I think they managed to take an after-school-special inspiring kids' cartoon trope and make it kind of work. I think that's what's going on and why it's resonating so hard with me.
Because. Santana's at the beginning of Glee is the Queen Bitch, right? She's the hot cheerleader who uses all the guys and tears down all the girls and doesn't need anything from anybody but will get them to give it to her just because she wants it all the same. That's the trope, that's the cliche, she's the Mean Girl. And.
And in a lot of ways I'm a terrible cynic. I got teased and bullied right through middle school, and by high school I settled into the debatable safety of anonymity. I kind of get the impression that this entire fandom knows what I mean, even the ones that were the mean kids in high school, even the ones who see more of themselves in Quinn than Mercedes and regret it, because if you were happy or content and honestly liked who you were in high school then I can't imagine getting the point. And there are some plotlines it's just hard for me to believe, have always been hard for me to believe, and the Bad Guy changing and learning the error of his ways through the power of love and friendship is enemy trope #1.
And of course Santana has low self-esteem, of course every iteration of that archetype of a character has miserably low self-esteem, because nobody tears other people down that hard if they like themselves, but. But god, if you're sixteen or seventeen and all the power and security you've built for yourself in the world is a giant wall of spikes and manipulation around your soft gooey center, then you don't, you don't just drop it because other people show you their soft gooey centers. You jam a spike home. Because it's reflex, because even if you're feeling pity it's reflex, and because if you're so scared and sad that you have to build that wall just to keep yourself safe then chances are you hate that week delicate soft part in yourself and hate theirs for reminding you of it.
And yet. And yet Glee Club still somehow wormed its way into her heart. And it's not like Quinn, who fell from grace and had only Glee Club there to catch her. She wasn't forced into a tailspin by Brittany and her sexuality and then fell to them as her only remaining friends. If anything, it's the other way around--Santana would never have confronted those feelings in the first place if Glee Club hadn't started chipping and softening first.
We talk about after-school programs helping kids and inspiring kids and giving kids a safe place, and I look at Kurt and Rachel and Tina and Mercedes and Artie and it's of course. It's, this is the place they aren't getting slushied, the place where they're protected from the rest of their peers and given the approval they're so obivously, outwardly craving. They're already raw and half-open, crushed as low as they can get. They can only be built up.
And Santana's already built up on a pedestal of razors to cut any of her peer group who comes near and tries to topple her down. And. I don't know, I feel like I'm talking all the way around what I'm trying to say, why this is special, why this is different, why the fact that Santana is acknowledging out loud that she has self-esteem that depends on accomplishing things for herself and not just tearing other people down is so important. And I think it's because nothing broke her down first to get her to look out at those kinds of feelings and the squishy parts of herself. She's not Quinn. She wasn't helped through a hard time when her armor was starting to fail her and she was looking for another option anyway. She wasn't toppled until all she had left was the pain and the fear and the Glee kids holding her hand. At the beginning of Season 1, Santana was as fine as she'd ever been.
Santana chose. She let her squishy bits out all on her own to try and grasp at the little rays of goodness and the power of opening yourself up to joy. She chose to sing Landslide and she chose to walk off the Cheerios and she chose to stick with them and it's all because of the power of good feelings and music and love. It's because accomplishing something good makes her feel good about herself.
And I don't know why that simple proposition should be so stunning to me, because don't we try to do that with our youth all the time? Make them feel like they can accomplish something and then they'll stop being cruel, being too hard, attacking other people and attacking themselves. But I think this might be the first time I've watched it done like the real world.
I'm also sort of pondering the 'Lima Heights Adjacent' question. My current theory is that Lima Heights is the really nice neighborhood or suburb right out of Lima, and Lima Heights Adjacent is the housing development or odd little unincorporated area right outside it. The one that's not quite as nice. Maybe (probably) the one that's a lot more heavily Hispanic, probably also Black, because Lima Heights itself is the kind of community where it's just really uncomfortable to be Hispanic or Black. The area where some of the houses are probably bigger and nicer than even many of the houses in Lima Heights, but it's still Lima Heights Adjacent. It's still an over there. You can have a 'the wrong side of the tracks' at any economic level, even though when the houses on the wrong side of the tracks have five bedrooms and inground pools it just feels like privileged bullshit.
And if you add in a good helping of geographical racial/ethnic demographic sorting, all of the sudden Lima Heights Adjacent becomes a name that you can spit out in a fight and mean, "That's right, I'm from where those people live". I'm not sure how much canon supports this, but I can completely see this fitting into Santana's personality. Could be interesting to explore.
Sam has pretty much had the worst year of anyone ever on Glee, hasn't he? In part because it just started so well.
His dad gets an awesome new job. He starts at this new school in a new state, and he is ready to jump in and make friends and do sports and conquer down that dyslexia and seriously, I think about Sam at the beginning of Season 2 and I just want to hug him and all his optimism and then tell him to run, run far and fast.
He joins football because it'll be fun to play and he'll make friends. He joins glee because it's fun to sing and he'll make friends, because, as Sunshine said, it's supposed to be a safe place. He starts dating and falls completely in love with Quinn because she's beautiful and sweet and popular and kind of sad and he wants to make her smile. And then he dislocates his shoulder, gets added to the Weekly Slushie List, has to parade around in tiny gold shorts, gets beat up in a fistfight over the stepbrother of some guy who isn't even there. His girlfriend cheats on him and then lies about it, and the girl who snaps him up after that pretty much only uses him to make out in public places and buy her dinner, makes fun of his mouth all the time, and then doesn't even bother breaking up with him, just stops taking his calls and eventually informs the entire glee club that she's dating the guy who gave him the black eye in the aforementioned fistfight. Also his dad loses the great job that brought them there in the first place, they lose their house, and end up in a motel. His name and that of two of his closest--only--friends get dragged through the mud in the school paper, and also, Azimio's started tagging an extra homophobic slur and a shoulder-check onto the end of the weekly slushie.
Every good thing he tries to get at the beginning of the year, basically, turns to crap with the possible exception of the football team, and even that created all sorts of tension and injury. He gets buffeted left and right by the forces of the glee drama wheel, alternately used, abused, and ignored as other people's needs demanded. And at the end of it all, the glee club, this whirlwind of a destructive force that doesn't even make showcase at Nationals, is all he has left.
Okay he wasn't pregnant and he wasn't sexually assaulted, but that's kind of the best we can say for Sam's year. Poor Sam.
So, Mercedes. Somebody, in a meta post I have since lost track of, commented very astutely that all of Mercedes plot lines kind of boil down to look at me look at me please. She's friendly to people who are friendly to her first, often hugely and super-supportively friendly, but when they start getting into other things we see a lot more of Mercedes being left on her own and/or starting tater-tots riots than pursuing them or making other friends. So. Given that, what do we have?
We have Sam, out of general chivalry and Rachel's arm-twisting and some friendly fondness taking Mercedes to prom, asking her to dance, complimenting her, and generally paying her all sorts of attention. We have Mercedes, who is really, really succeptible to that. (Point of discussion: how much of Mercedes' diva-tude in Night of Neglect was just down to Lauren leading her around by the nose? Quite a lot of it, to my eye, although it all got put on Mercedes by the other characters. And yes, badass though she may be, Lauren is completely the type to exploit an easily-led character just because she can.) Who will almost surely respond by meeting attention with attention, and kindness, and totally focusing on Sam. Who has not been anyone's primary focus all year: not Quinn's, certainly not Santana's, and not even his parents'.
It's a 'pair the spares' where it makes total sense for the spares to be pairing themselves, just to have someone who's paying attention to them. He will be sweet and chivalrous, because that's just who Sam is. She will be flattered and supportive, because that's who Mercedes is. So. Are they just using each other? Well, yeah. I have no idea whether there's any kind of genuine spark there or what. But I don't necessarily think that matters, either. Dating for affection and companionship and somebody to make out with when you haven't done that before--people do worse things. And when one of them breaks it off because it isn't anything more than that, there will be drama and ouchies, but it's TV, y'know? And I kind of like that they have the chance to be happy like this, in this warm, glowy, "somebody is looking at me" sense. We've seen what the fires of great passion have done to Finn and Rachel and Quinn and also anyone else they've ever touched. I am all over giving Sam and Mercedes a happy summer.
Okay, an opinion on the "I love you" is obligatory at this point, isn't it?
Here's what I noticed: how easy it was for Blaine. Not in a, "why so casual, oh serenader of GAP employees?" sort of way, just in a...
Blaine really has never done anything halfheartedly in his entire life, has he? He's never second-guessed himself pretty much ever--at least, not until his singleminded driving plans have blown up in his face (I would start listing examples, but..). Which is almost funny, because ha's universally acknowledged to be kind of repressed and not terribly good at engaging with his own feelings. You'd think, of the two of them, that Kurt 'heart on his sleeve' Hummel would be the more straightforward one and Blaine less, but he's so, so not.
Kurt has a complicated relationship with the truth. Anyone who uses sarcasm that much does. Things have degrees and facets and angles for him, and he knows how to rotate them until those angles cut when he has to. He keeps secrets. He has a complicated history with desire, because he has a long history of desiring things he shouldn't, and also things that aren't wrong but he still can't have, and also things that he might have but would be unwise to go after, and..... Remember, even before S1 starts, he's spent how long trying to closet himself from his own father? And that's before the whole Finn fiasco. Kurt feels plenty, and he's often plenty demonstrative about it, but he's not always showing every emotion he's feeling about a certain thing at a particular time, and he often has quite a few emotions about any particular thing. Kurt is complicated.
And Blaine probably is too, but unlike Kurt, Blaine has no idea about this within himself. It makes me wonder a lot about his family and his life pre-Dalton, because he has never once indicated doubt about the rightness of his wanting anything. The closest he's ever come is asking Kurt about 'is it a good idea to serenade a guy on Valentine's Day', which is a check on the methodology of pursuing that desire. Blaine has plenty of feelings about stuff, sure--see: everything about Prom Queen--but he pretty much never engages more than one or, at most, two, at once.
This kind of twists my Blaine characterization around a little, too, because--okay, Dalton!Blaine. Dapper, charming, kind of repressed, very good at everything, very put together, lots of facade. We all sort of base an image of Blaine off the question of, "why would he need to put up that kind of facade?" Which, maybe that's not it at all. Maybe he's not so, so good at being Dalton!Blaine because that kind of pretend-to-be-good-at-stuff-so-you-don't-have-to-confront-the-problems appeals to him. Maybe he's just putting on Dalton like he puts on anything else: all systems loaded and full speed ahead. We've seen how different he is one-on-one with Kurt when they're off campus and out of uniform or whatever. Everybody is slightly different in different environments, but for most of us it's a lot more mixed together. Our professionalism suffers when we're having personal issues. Our mannerisms change a little. Blaine's change a very noticable amount. I wouldn't even call it 'compartmentalization' with him, just 'focus'.
This is going to bite him on the ass so many times until he learns to stop and think. He gives terrible advice because he's in Dalton!Blaine mode and giving advice while being slightly superior is what a Dalton boy does to some kid in need from public school. He completely misses the budding sexual tension between him and Kurt, because he is all BEST FRIENDS YAYE!!!!!!! His reflexes are growing flirty and his emotions are growing romantic and he is basically completely in love with Kurt miles before Original Songs, but his brain is stuck in the rut of BEST FRIENDS YAYE!!!!!!!!! so he doesn't even notice. He nearly gets beat up by Karofsky more than once because he gets angry and just goes in for a physical altercation without pausing to consider that, oh yeah, this guy makes two of him.
But it's also kind of awesome, because when the good stuff does happen, Blaine doesn't doubt himself. Kurt starts feelings all sorts of emotions of fondness and affection and attraction and the whole suite of stuff that happens as you start to fall for a friend, and he's on top of all of them from the beginning, but they're a predictable mess and he doesn't really do anything about them. Blaine is Unaware of His Emotions one minute, and then there is a canary eulogy and bam, Blaine is In Love. And procedes to give Kurt a duet and then kiss him and bam, Blaine has a boyfriend. There's not really any dithering there.
So Blaine can say "I love you" the first time so easily it's like the tenth because there's no fear, no doubt, no conflict there. It's just true. It is a fact. And Kurt has to do the quadruple-take of hearing it, and hearing it with no fanfare, and all of Kurt's ability for emotional complexity which means that he can be in love and still feel fear and anxiousness and doubt means he takes a second or two. His super-casual tone there? Totally calculated for "okay, we're saying this without drama, mustn't make too big of a deal out of it or else".
And it doesn't mean that Kurt's less in love or Blaine's going to get his heart broken (at least, not by Kurt, although that kind of headfirst dive into everything he does is going to break him plenty along the way), it just means that they engage with that love differently. And are both seventeen and have some growing up to do before they engage with their emotions in a way that's quite worked out for either of them.
Hmm. That took longer than I expected and didn't really get anywhere. Ah, well. Fare the well, Glee, we'll see you in September
There are the seeds for a whole bunch of Santana meta in the back of my head, and I just have to figure out how to put them in order. Oddly, they have nothing at all to do with Brittany and little enough to do with her sexuality, yet, though they might by the time I sort through it all.
It's about "Glee's kinda the best part of my day" and "This is the only chance we have to feel good about ourselves for something". It's about the kind of character archetypes she embodies, and what they did there, because I think they managed to take an after-school-special inspiring kids' cartoon trope and make it kind of work. I think that's what's going on and why it's resonating so hard with me.
Because. Santana's at the beginning of Glee is the Queen Bitch, right? She's the hot cheerleader who uses all the guys and tears down all the girls and doesn't need anything from anybody but will get them to give it to her just because she wants it all the same. That's the trope, that's the cliche, she's the Mean Girl. And.
And in a lot of ways I'm a terrible cynic. I got teased and bullied right through middle school, and by high school I settled into the debatable safety of anonymity. I kind of get the impression that this entire fandom knows what I mean, even the ones that were the mean kids in high school, even the ones who see more of themselves in Quinn than Mercedes and regret it, because if you were happy or content and honestly liked who you were in high school then I can't imagine getting the point. And there are some plotlines it's just hard for me to believe, have always been hard for me to believe, and the Bad Guy changing and learning the error of his ways through the power of love and friendship is enemy trope #1.
And of course Santana has low self-esteem, of course every iteration of that archetype of a character has miserably low self-esteem, because nobody tears other people down that hard if they like themselves, but. But god, if you're sixteen or seventeen and all the power and security you've built for yourself in the world is a giant wall of spikes and manipulation around your soft gooey center, then you don't, you don't just drop it because other people show you their soft gooey centers. You jam a spike home. Because it's reflex, because even if you're feeling pity it's reflex, and because if you're so scared and sad that you have to build that wall just to keep yourself safe then chances are you hate that week delicate soft part in yourself and hate theirs for reminding you of it.
And yet. And yet Glee Club still somehow wormed its way into her heart. And it's not like Quinn, who fell from grace and had only Glee Club there to catch her. She wasn't forced into a tailspin by Brittany and her sexuality and then fell to them as her only remaining friends. If anything, it's the other way around--Santana would never have confronted those feelings in the first place if Glee Club hadn't started chipping and softening first.
We talk about after-school programs helping kids and inspiring kids and giving kids a safe place, and I look at Kurt and Rachel and Tina and Mercedes and Artie and it's of course. It's, this is the place they aren't getting slushied, the place where they're protected from the rest of their peers and given the approval they're so obivously, outwardly craving. They're already raw and half-open, crushed as low as they can get. They can only be built up.
And Santana's already built up on a pedestal of razors to cut any of her peer group who comes near and tries to topple her down. And. I don't know, I feel like I'm talking all the way around what I'm trying to say, why this is special, why this is different, why the fact that Santana is acknowledging out loud that she has self-esteem that depends on accomplishing things for herself and not just tearing other people down is so important. And I think it's because nothing broke her down first to get her to look out at those kinds of feelings and the squishy parts of herself. She's not Quinn. She wasn't helped through a hard time when her armor was starting to fail her and she was looking for another option anyway. She wasn't toppled until all she had left was the pain and the fear and the Glee kids holding her hand. At the beginning of Season 1, Santana was as fine as she'd ever been.
Santana chose. She let her squishy bits out all on her own to try and grasp at the little rays of goodness and the power of opening yourself up to joy. She chose to sing Landslide and she chose to walk off the Cheerios and she chose to stick with them and it's all because of the power of good feelings and music and love. It's because accomplishing something good makes her feel good about herself.
And I don't know why that simple proposition should be so stunning to me, because don't we try to do that with our youth all the time? Make them feel like they can accomplish something and then they'll stop being cruel, being too hard, attacking other people and attacking themselves. But I think this might be the first time I've watched it done like the real world.
I'm also sort of pondering the 'Lima Heights Adjacent' question. My current theory is that Lima Heights is the really nice neighborhood or suburb right out of Lima, and Lima Heights Adjacent is the housing development or odd little unincorporated area right outside it. The one that's not quite as nice. Maybe (probably) the one that's a lot more heavily Hispanic, probably also Black, because Lima Heights itself is the kind of community where it's just really uncomfortable to be Hispanic or Black. The area where some of the houses are probably bigger and nicer than even many of the houses in Lima Heights, but it's still Lima Heights Adjacent. It's still an over there. You can have a 'the wrong side of the tracks' at any economic level, even though when the houses on the wrong side of the tracks have five bedrooms and inground pools it just feels like privileged bullshit.
And if you add in a good helping of geographical racial/ethnic demographic sorting, all of the sudden Lima Heights Adjacent becomes a name that you can spit out in a fight and mean, "That's right, I'm from where those people live". I'm not sure how much canon supports this, but I can completely see this fitting into Santana's personality. Could be interesting to explore.
Sam has pretty much had the worst year of anyone ever on Glee, hasn't he? In part because it just started so well.
His dad gets an awesome new job. He starts at this new school in a new state, and he is ready to jump in and make friends and do sports and conquer down that dyslexia and seriously, I think about Sam at the beginning of Season 2 and I just want to hug him and all his optimism and then tell him to run, run far and fast.
He joins football because it'll be fun to play and he'll make friends. He joins glee because it's fun to sing and he'll make friends, because, as Sunshine said, it's supposed to be a safe place. He starts dating and falls completely in love with Quinn because she's beautiful and sweet and popular and kind of sad and he wants to make her smile. And then he dislocates his shoulder, gets added to the Weekly Slushie List, has to parade around in tiny gold shorts, gets beat up in a fistfight over the stepbrother of some guy who isn't even there. His girlfriend cheats on him and then lies about it, and the girl who snaps him up after that pretty much only uses him to make out in public places and buy her dinner, makes fun of his mouth all the time, and then doesn't even bother breaking up with him, just stops taking his calls and eventually informs the entire glee club that she's dating the guy who gave him the black eye in the aforementioned fistfight. Also his dad loses the great job that brought them there in the first place, they lose their house, and end up in a motel. His name and that of two of his closest--only--friends get dragged through the mud in the school paper, and also, Azimio's started tagging an extra homophobic slur and a shoulder-check onto the end of the weekly slushie.
Every good thing he tries to get at the beginning of the year, basically, turns to crap with the possible exception of the football team, and even that created all sorts of tension and injury. He gets buffeted left and right by the forces of the glee drama wheel, alternately used, abused, and ignored as other people's needs demanded. And at the end of it all, the glee club, this whirlwind of a destructive force that doesn't even make showcase at Nationals, is all he has left.
Okay he wasn't pregnant and he wasn't sexually assaulted, but that's kind of the best we can say for Sam's year. Poor Sam.
So, Mercedes. Somebody, in a meta post I have since lost track of, commented very astutely that all of Mercedes plot lines kind of boil down to look at me look at me please. She's friendly to people who are friendly to her first, often hugely and super-supportively friendly, but when they start getting into other things we see a lot more of Mercedes being left on her own and/or starting tater-tots riots than pursuing them or making other friends. So. Given that, what do we have?
We have Sam, out of general chivalry and Rachel's arm-twisting and some friendly fondness taking Mercedes to prom, asking her to dance, complimenting her, and generally paying her all sorts of attention. We have Mercedes, who is really, really succeptible to that. (Point of discussion: how much of Mercedes' diva-tude in Night of Neglect was just down to Lauren leading her around by the nose? Quite a lot of it, to my eye, although it all got put on Mercedes by the other characters. And yes, badass though she may be, Lauren is completely the type to exploit an easily-led character just because she can.) Who will almost surely respond by meeting attention with attention, and kindness, and totally focusing on Sam. Who has not been anyone's primary focus all year: not Quinn's, certainly not Santana's, and not even his parents'.
It's a 'pair the spares' where it makes total sense for the spares to be pairing themselves, just to have someone who's paying attention to them. He will be sweet and chivalrous, because that's just who Sam is. She will be flattered and supportive, because that's who Mercedes is. So. Are they just using each other? Well, yeah. I have no idea whether there's any kind of genuine spark there or what. But I don't necessarily think that matters, either. Dating for affection and companionship and somebody to make out with when you haven't done that before--people do worse things. And when one of them breaks it off because it isn't anything more than that, there will be drama and ouchies, but it's TV, y'know? And I kind of like that they have the chance to be happy like this, in this warm, glowy, "somebody is looking at me" sense. We've seen what the fires of great passion have done to Finn and Rachel and Quinn and also anyone else they've ever touched. I am all over giving Sam and Mercedes a happy summer.
Okay, an opinion on the "I love you" is obligatory at this point, isn't it?
Here's what I noticed: how easy it was for Blaine. Not in a, "why so casual, oh serenader of GAP employees?" sort of way, just in a...
Blaine really has never done anything halfheartedly in his entire life, has he? He's never second-guessed himself pretty much ever--at least, not until his singleminded driving plans have blown up in his face (I would start listing examples, but..). Which is almost funny, because ha's universally acknowledged to be kind of repressed and not terribly good at engaging with his own feelings. You'd think, of the two of them, that Kurt 'heart on his sleeve' Hummel would be the more straightforward one and Blaine less, but he's so, so not.
Kurt has a complicated relationship with the truth. Anyone who uses sarcasm that much does. Things have degrees and facets and angles for him, and he knows how to rotate them until those angles cut when he has to. He keeps secrets. He has a complicated history with desire, because he has a long history of desiring things he shouldn't, and also things that aren't wrong but he still can't have, and also things that he might have but would be unwise to go after, and..... Remember, even before S1 starts, he's spent how long trying to closet himself from his own father? And that's before the whole Finn fiasco. Kurt feels plenty, and he's often plenty demonstrative about it, but he's not always showing every emotion he's feeling about a certain thing at a particular time, and he often has quite a few emotions about any particular thing. Kurt is complicated.
And Blaine probably is too, but unlike Kurt, Blaine has no idea about this within himself. It makes me wonder a lot about his family and his life pre-Dalton, because he has never once indicated doubt about the rightness of his wanting anything. The closest he's ever come is asking Kurt about 'is it a good idea to serenade a guy on Valentine's Day', which is a check on the methodology of pursuing that desire. Blaine has plenty of feelings about stuff, sure--see: everything about Prom Queen--but he pretty much never engages more than one or, at most, two, at once.
This kind of twists my Blaine characterization around a little, too, because--okay, Dalton!Blaine. Dapper, charming, kind of repressed, very good at everything, very put together, lots of facade. We all sort of base an image of Blaine off the question of, "why would he need to put up that kind of facade?" Which, maybe that's not it at all. Maybe he's not so, so good at being Dalton!Blaine because that kind of pretend-to-be-good-at-stuff-so-you-don't-have-to-confront-the-problems appeals to him. Maybe he's just putting on Dalton like he puts on anything else: all systems loaded and full speed ahead. We've seen how different he is one-on-one with Kurt when they're off campus and out of uniform or whatever. Everybody is slightly different in different environments, but for most of us it's a lot more mixed together. Our professionalism suffers when we're having personal issues. Our mannerisms change a little. Blaine's change a very noticable amount. I wouldn't even call it 'compartmentalization' with him, just 'focus'.
This is going to bite him on the ass so many times until he learns to stop and think. He gives terrible advice because he's in Dalton!Blaine mode and giving advice while being slightly superior is what a Dalton boy does to some kid in need from public school. He completely misses the budding sexual tension between him and Kurt, because he is all BEST FRIENDS YAYE!!!!!!! His reflexes are growing flirty and his emotions are growing romantic and he is basically completely in love with Kurt miles before Original Songs, but his brain is stuck in the rut of BEST FRIENDS YAYE!!!!!!!!! so he doesn't even notice. He nearly gets beat up by Karofsky more than once because he gets angry and just goes in for a physical altercation without pausing to consider that, oh yeah, this guy makes two of him.
But it's also kind of awesome, because when the good stuff does happen, Blaine doesn't doubt himself. Kurt starts feelings all sorts of emotions of fondness and affection and attraction and the whole suite of stuff that happens as you start to fall for a friend, and he's on top of all of them from the beginning, but they're a predictable mess and he doesn't really do anything about them. Blaine is Unaware of His Emotions one minute, and then there is a canary eulogy and bam, Blaine is In Love. And procedes to give Kurt a duet and then kiss him and bam, Blaine has a boyfriend. There's not really any dithering there.
So Blaine can say "I love you" the first time so easily it's like the tenth because there's no fear, no doubt, no conflict there. It's just true. It is a fact. And Kurt has to do the quadruple-take of hearing it, and hearing it with no fanfare, and all of Kurt's ability for emotional complexity which means that he can be in love and still feel fear and anxiousness and doubt means he takes a second or two. His super-casual tone there? Totally calculated for "okay, we're saying this without drama, mustn't make too big of a deal out of it or else".
And it doesn't mean that Kurt's less in love or Blaine's going to get his heart broken (at least, not by Kurt, although that kind of headfirst dive into everything he does is going to break him plenty along the way), it just means that they engage with that love differently. And are both seventeen and have some growing up to do before they engage with their emotions in a way that's quite worked out for either of them.
Hmm. That took longer than I expected and didn't really get anywhere. Ah, well. Fare the well, Glee, we'll see you in September