even europeans must know what that means
December 30
waltzmatildah: Favourite television character OF ALL TIME EVERRRR.
( This is a Chuck Bass appreciation post. Don't like? Don't click. )
waltzmatildah: Favourite television character OF ALL TIME EVERRRR.
( This is a Chuck Bass appreciation post. Don't like? Don't click. )
You're right. It was. I'm not going to try to talk you out of that position, because, well, I mostly agree with it. BUT. I would like to offer some items that may reconcile you to its happening (not that I'm reconciled to it, but, y'know).
I think Blair made it clear at the time that it wasn't the idea of sex for a hotel that upset her as much as the fact that Chuck manipulated her into doing it, although it was muddied later by the writers having other characters and (once) Blair refer to the problem as "pimping her out for a hotel". Don't get me wrong, pimping her out was wrong, and she was upset, angered, horrified, etc. by that, but it was the lack of honesty that really did it for her. Because she'd done a similar thing to Chuck and he'd been devastated, and they'd agreed not to manipulate one another any more. She manipulated him into kissing someone else so that she could make a speech. Obviously that's not the same thing in the mind of any right-thinking person, but I think, to Chuck at that point in his life, it was just a matter of degrees. He'd forgiven her manipulation and he thought she would forgive his. Which, it turns out, she did.
Because it was never a choice between the hotel and Blair for him. He didn't, as so many people say, choose the hotel over her. It never occurred to him that he would lose her. He took her at her word when she said that if he said he loved her, she was his (and I don't even mean in the sense of a possession here, although more on that later if I don't run out of characters), and that she would stand by him through anything. He was clinging all the more tightly to that belief at that moment in his life, when everything else was falling about his ears. He'd just found out that Bart lied to him in the most awful way for his whole life; the mother he thought he'd made a genuine connection with had betrayed him; and he'd lost what he saw as the symbol of his relationship with Blair when his uncle took the Empire.
And that's what the Empire was. It wasn't just a hotel. It was the thing he'd bought because Blair believed in him, it was the first thing he'd ever had that hadn't been handed to him because he was Bart Bass's son, it was the home they shared. Yes, it was his business, but it was its symbolism that mattered most to him. Look how easily he gave it up once Blair had made it clear they were over. At that moment in time, he felt like Blair was all he had left, and the Empire symbolised her belief in him. Without that, he had nothing.
And please don't forget that Blair had just said "We'll do whatever it takes." To Chuck, before Blair, sex was entirely meaningless and you know that he would have slept with anyone Blair wanted him to if it would have helped her out. You and I and everyone else on the planet know that that isn't the same thing, but I think a big part of Chuck didn't actually understand that until he'd set everything in motion. There's the added fact that Blair had already slept with Jack. I know there are a lot of people that think that Chuck was still angry and hurt by that and so this was in some way working through his feelings about that, but I think it was more a case of "she's done it once, another time won't be a big deal".
In defence of my opinion that it wasn't the pimping that bothered Blair the most, I would like to point out that less than half a season later, she asks Chuck to sleep with her boss so that she'll get a good evaluation. Then, when he says he can't because he's being all about Raina at the time, she blithely recruits Nate to do it. Because hey, sleeping with older women for fun and profit is what Nate's there for.
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