Taking This One to the Grave
Spoilers: Up to 2.08.
Warnings: Bullying, homophobia, sexual assault, mentions suicide attempt.
Rating: R-ish, erring on the side of caution
Word Count: 4, 749
Disclaimer: RIB and FOX own everything ever.
Also available: In fantabulous podfic format as read by diane_mckay.
This prompt. Some people have diaries; Kurt has Azimio, his French partner for the ( Read more... )
Warnings: Bullying, homophobia, sexual assault, mentions suicide attempt.
Rating: R-ish, erring on the side of caution
Word Count: 4, 749
Disclaimer: RIB and FOX own everything ever.
Also available: In fantabulous podfic format as read by diane_mckay.
This prompt. Some people have diaries; Kurt has Azimio, his French partner for the ( Read more... )
And the fact that Kurt makes that phone call, that he still wants--after Karofsky nearly kills him and assaults him again, maybe even BECAUSE of that--to help Karofsky, or at least keep him alive. And again, that he's reaching out to someone who he thinks will respond to "your friend tried to kill himself" because it wouldn't ever occur to Kurt that someone wouldn't respond to that, or be so unwilling to believe it. The horrible feeling of impending tragedy at the end is just unbearable, watching Karofsky spiral toward another almost-inevitable suicide attempt through the eyes of someone who doesn't know how to help him and doesn't want to, really, not more than he wants his world to get back to "normal" and not more than he wants to keep believing that nothing he does is truly damaging. "It's nothing personal, and it's not dangerous"--that refrain starts as something true(sort of), when it's comparing the usual bullying to Karofsky's obsessive pursuit of Kurt--obviously that's personal and this isn't. But by the end it's obviously such a lie because the culture created by that not-personal, not-dangerous bullying nearly killed Kurt and it is killing Karofsky, right in front of him.
(Okay, and one more thing--I really like how the lines spoken in French are just a little bit stilted, not many contractions and the occasional word that wouldn't be the natural first choice in English. It's such a small but crucial touch.)
(This got SO LONG, oh god. But it's your own fault for being so damned thematically coherent.)
(OKAY ONE MORE THING: I think the single tiny detail that is knocking me out the most, at least right at this moment, is: "You have told me a lot of things." Not "you told"--he uses the perfect tense. Something about that choice just makes the line hit a hundred times harder.)
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Also, Kurt, just Kurt. He so whack. I thought... I don't know, this could be pushing it even for him, the phone call, but also, I think he does feel a weird kind of responsibility for Karofsky. Like in a "but I want him far away from me" kind of way. And this would be the perfect solution - K-Money plainly needs a friend and FINALLY someone else knows the big secret, so here, I give you the info, now go be a friend - if Azimio weren't completely screwed up himself. Like "here okay now if he kills himself it's your problem not mine" but Azimio is just like "NO WHAT PROBLEM WHERE THIS! IS! NORMALITYYYYYYY!" and goddd I hate writing that because I think friendship is the most important thing ever, I could go off on a goddamn Yu-Gi-Oh! spiel, but.
For true, oh god. Another thing I hated writing: that refrain. Because dude, no, it's not personal to you, but to the kids you're hurting... Also, THROWING PEOPLE IS DANGEROUS, SORRY BRO. (I need to write Carl just to have an excuse to write the word "bro" as much as I feel the need to, omg.) And it was a fiddly thing to write because what K-Money is doing is worse but that doesn't change the fact that what they do every day is really fucking awful and damaging, and it killed me to be so dismissive of it. BUT I HAVE AN AWESOME AUDIENCE OF YOU SO IT'S ALL GOOD.
Re: the foreign-language lines: omfg, I take Spanish and German and, recently, Japanese. If there's one thing I know from, it's how stilted one is in a second language.
"Thematically coherent" oh baby you know just what I need to hear.
Ftr, "You have told me" was because of two things - one, once you learn the perfect in a foreign language, in my experience, it's easier than the preterite and tends to get overused; and two, that is just all Azimio right there, completely. Because "told me" would be - the actual PAST, as in over and done with, whereas "have told me" is more like, yeah it happened recently and may still be happening, whatevs, EVERYTHING CAN GO BACK TO WHAT I'M USED TO NOW RIGHT, THIS DOESN'T LIKE CHANGE ANYTHING, RIGHT?
So. You know. You just made my everything ever. I can't even. I'm so flattered you put this much thought into this and typed it up to boot, ilu bb. THANK YOU.
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I totally remembered the Brittany/Britney scenes shortly after posting this, both the letterjacket-tearing/not-hitting-Artie scene and the other one where they kind of tag-team harass Rachel and Finn--Azimio comments on her outfit, Karofsky calls Finn gay. It was so weirdly coordinated.
I LOVED that Puck calls Finn his best friend and his boy in the same episode, the first to his face (well, he calls himself Finn's best friend anyway) and the second to Quinn. It's this effortless codeswitching that just fascinates me. And then using it for Kurt a year later--it is endlessly entertaining to me that it's marked as the masculine, acceptable option because of course to fans like us, it reads SO homoerotic. The Puck/Kurt squealing in people's reaction posts to 2x09 was DEAFENING. *g*
I think a big part of what made Kurt making that phone call ultimately believable, for me, was that he'd been told about the suicide attempt. At the time he was being attacked it would make everything so much scarier, because clearly Karofsky has nothing to lose, but afterward I just--I can't see Kurt as being able to deal with his own trauma at all if he feels any lingering sense of responsibility. It's so clear in that scene that he just wants to offload all his knowledge of how fucked up Karofsky is onto someone else, so he can stop having to deal with that on top of his own issues. Like, he's leaving McKinley and he wants to put this whole horrible mess behind him, but because he's Kurt he can't just put it out of his mind that Karofsky's in danger.
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Oh god, I forgot that part. "How come the gay guys get the hot chicks" lol dude, I don't see one on your arm, oh ice burn. I want to rewatch that episode now and I really should go to bed.
Also, re: Azimio being the leader, oh god peeps. I was just checking the Wiki to figure out which episode that was in and saw some truly impressive mental gymnastics - Karofsky is plainly the leader and brains of their duo but also is only following Azimio's lead in bullying the glee kids. I need some kind of .gif for this fuckery, yo.
Negl, some of the post-"my boy" squealing on Tumblr was a little alarming. I was sitting there like, "...okay, I loved that weird little turn of phrase too, but we are clear on what he actually meant, yeah?" Of course, I was also distracted by Puck's and Schue's faces during "Hey Soul Sister" because wow what. There was a great .gif going around of Schue's face with BITCH YOU ARE NOTHING WITHOUT ME overlaid, I think I saved it somewhere.
Yessss, that. The phone call. It was kind of a caring gesture, but it was mostly a "make this not be my problem" one. Which, then Azimio just turned around and was like "make this not be a problem at all" to K-Money, so. Now I want to write a follow-up to this, too. Gorram, yo.
SPEAKING OF FOLLOW-UPS I am planning an epic one to "Not While I'm Around" after S2 ends, based on our discussion over there. I want to wait for summer because 1) summer project and 2) I'm hoping the show will give me something to go on Finn/Puck-wise, and am sure it will give me something to go on Karofsky-wise. If they give him a redemption arc this season, I want to use him, too, because I like this bullying continuum thing, it's very convenient.
Speaking of both that and my segue, have you seen this Filled with Glee book that's floating around? I am a huge fan of essay-books based on TV shows due to my Buffy devotion. And I'm only a few essays into this one and wouldn't suggest purchasing it or anything so far, BUT. There's a very interesting li'l essay called "Who's the Real LIMA Loser?: The Curious Friendship of Finn Hudson and Noah Puckerman" by Dellamonica, which I would completely recommend reading if you're ever in a bookstore for an hour or so. (It's preceded by the weirdest fucking thing I have ever read, "The Alpha Glee Male", about which I will no doubt rant at length at some point.)
Okay no really, bed.
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I am SUPER EXCITED about a followup to "Not While I'm Around"! It would fulfill so many of my dreams. And that essay sounds extremely relevant to my interests, goodness. I don't really have any real hope for Puck getting much of anything substantial the rest of this season--I get the feeling that the character was created to serve one purpose and undergo, like, one major change, and nobody has a clue what to do with him after that purpose is through nor are they particularly interested in him anymore. But if anything does happen I will of course be delighted.
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But what does mean?
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