Meta: Blaine and Success
Title: Blaine and Success
Summary: Blaine's idea of success in life is determined by prestige and his people pleasing nature.
Word Count: 1,871
A/N: Blaine's comment about wanting to go to NYADA in Glee, Actually didn't seem authentic to me, and that got me thinking about what type of decision Blaine is going to make at the end of this year concerning his future and where he wants to be later in life. And then this entire essay came out of it.
Blaine and Success
So I was reading this article and there were a lot of things I read that reminded me of Blaine.
However, success only matters when you define it first. And in Blaine’s life, I think his success is definitely defined by other people. Where we see people like Kurt and Rachel with very sure definitions of success, Blaine wanders. He even says it once himself in The First Time: “I just want to make art and help people”. Blaine isn’t sure what he wants, but he’s being pulled along to an idea of success (and I say idea because Kurt and Rachel’s idea of success isn’t the only kind of success, but I’m not sure Kurt or Rachel or even Blaine realize that) because he’s in the company of very ambitious people like Kurt and Rachel. (This relates back to Finn meta I read once. Finn is being swept along in Rachel’s very sure and very ambitious path, and this means he has less time to explore himself and his own ambitions, hence his indecision at the end of his senior year about where and who he wanted to be in life. The same thing is happening to Blaine, except Blaine has more of an upper hand, because he’s disconnected from Kurt, and we’re seeing him realize throughout the season that he doesn’t really know what to do without Kurt and that he needs to figure it out. The “I want to go to NYADA” thing seems to contradict this, but we’ll get to that later.)
These two quotes from the article really seemed to resonate with me about Blaine:
“Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.”
“One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They’re sucked in from other people.”
Let’s look at all of the successes in Blaine’s life before we start, shall we?
Connecting prestige to most of the things on this list is easy, because most of the things Blaine does are for prestige. Blaine is, by heart, a people pleaser. He shies away from conflict and just wants to make people happy, and the way he sees of doing that is through performing. This need to make people happy has been so ingrained in him that it’s even infiltrated the way he is. All throughout his Dalton career, he puts on a performance. All of the successes he achieves at Dalton are because he knows how to play the right part to make people happy, whether it be through superficial or personal matters. The Blaine that Kurt first meets at Dalton is one who’s representing what everyone else wants him to represent, and even Kurt isn’t exempt from exerting that molding influence onto Blaine, even if Kurt himself doesn’t realize he’s doing it. But the thing that doesn’t make this seem bad to Blaine is that he convinces himself that he likes these things. Even if he may not love being the lead soloist of the Warblers, he convinces himself that he loves it passionately and without fault because that’s what Blaine does, he always tries to wrap himself around whatever he’s doing. Even if he doesn’t love the popularity he has at Dalton because it isn’t real and he isn’t being himself, he adapts himself to it because it’s a lot easier than what he had to adapt to at his old school. Even as he transfers to McKinley and learns to face its halls where the truths about a person are forced out by cruel environments, he joins Glee Club, so he can continue having a part to play. Once Glee Club is gone, like in Swan Song, he joins the Cheerios because he “needs to compete”. He needs something to aim for and he needs someone to please. Blaine had never expressed any previous interest in joining the Cheerios before, so it wouldn’t make any logical sense for him to join them unless he was trying to find someone of worth to be again. (Now, an interesting detour on what the relationship between what Blaine thinks of himself and what other people think of Blaine is how he dresses once he’s free to dress whichever way he wants at McKinley, but I connect that back to Blaine’s attractiveness and how cognizant of it he is or not. I think that Blaine dresses the way he does at McKinley because he’s actively trying to fight the ‘attractive gay but not really gay’ stereotype that was thrust on him at Dalton and even by Kurt, and that he’s trying to fight his need to please in a small way. But of course, the over gelling of his hair also shows that he hasn’t completely won that battle yet. Either way, I digress…) In a way, Blaine’s need for prestige in all he does can connect back to his self-worth. Blaine’s self-worth has been beaten down so much throughout the years that he doesn’t trust what he thinks is good and successful anymore; he has to be told by society and the people around him by what they value as prestigious and noble.
The superhero play in Dynamic Duets has a lot to do with this concept of prestige also. The entire theme of Dynamic Duets is Blaine learning to recognize what is good, not only for other people, but for himself. This is also why the plot point of him finally getting over what he did to Kurt is woven into that particular episode. Blaine kept torturing himself about what he did because, in his mind, he had twisted that action into the noble thing to do, the thing that might make other people call him a “good person” again. In a masochistic way, torturing himself was another way of fulfillment, because he had himself convinced that that was a form of people pleasing too. And that’s why he’s only able to stand up to the Warblers after he forgives himself for cheating on Kurt, because he now has enough faith to judge joining them again as wrong for himself and himself only, and that it’s completely okay to think like that.
As far as how much of what Blaine values as success is his own thinking, it’s already been established that, since his default setting is to please, his idea of success is to make other people happy. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it becomes a difficult thing to deal with when the people he wants to please are gone and aren’t listening anymore. However, if you look at the list, all of the successes Blaine has had so far (disregarding the ones with Kurt) that don’t involve him trying to sell or cement a certain image of himself are when he actively tries to deconstruct the need to please. Standing up to Finn, Cooper, and the Warblers are all examples of him taking control and doing what he wants to do. It is important to note, however, that these successes only come after he reaches a boiling point. Blaine would feel ashamed of standing up for himself too much if it caused conflict, and he probably felt ashamed of his outbursts in retrospect too. Although these things yielded positive results, he probably didn’t view them as successes so much as moments of weakness that gave him favorable results.
hat leaves us the successes we’ve seen of Blaine’s life that revolve around Kurt. These do the exact opposite of everything else he’s achieved in his life: they allow him to be himself. Confessing his feelings to Kurt, overcoming his past demons by asking Kurt to dance at prom, telling Kurt he loves him? These aren’t things that he feels obligated to do or that repress him; they allow expression. Protecting Kurt from the toxic slushy? He wasn’t forced to do that either, but it allowed him to play the part of “heroic boyfriend”. Kurt’s influence on Blaine isn’t one that is designed to do him damage, and it, for the most part, does the opposite. However, as Blaine always plunges too deeply into things and takes things too far, Blaine takes this concept that being with Kurt allows him to be himself to an extreme, so that when Kurt is gone, he doesn’t know which direction he’s heading anymore, and he loses himself. After reconnecting with Kurt again after sectionals, you see him trying to follow in Kurt’s footsteps again, to be successful like Kurt again. That includes him joining the Cheerios like Kurt did and telling Burt that he wanted to go to NYADA after high school.
And that brings us to the entire reason I started thinking about Blaine’s idea of success: When Blaine said that he wanted to go to NYADA, I didn’t believe him. Blaine has ambition, make no mistake, but he doesn’t have a clear path to realizing it, and the relationship between his rampant insecurities and his need to do something worthwhile complicates his decisions. I think Blaine knows he could be great, but he doesn’t know how, and all of his insecurities are eating at him, telling him that he can’t be great the way he thinks he can. Since Kurt is the greatest thing in his life, he sees Kurt being great in New York and getting into NYADA and generally being the successful person Blaine always knew he would be, and he thinks that that is the way for him to be great too. But I don’t think that’s Blaine’s path to success, because he isn’t the type of performer that Kurt is, so he can’t do the same thing Kurt’s doing and have the same sort of success. New York may be his ticket to success, but NYADA isn’t
Summary: Blaine's idea of success in life is determined by prestige and his people pleasing nature.
Word Count: 1,871
A/N: Blaine's comment about wanting to go to NYADA in Glee, Actually didn't seem authentic to me, and that got me thinking about what type of decision Blaine is going to make at the end of this year concerning his future and where he wants to be later in life. And then this entire essay came out of it.
Blaine and Success
So I was reading this article and there were a lot of things I read that reminded me of Blaine.
However, success only matters when you define it first. And in Blaine’s life, I think his success is definitely defined by other people. Where we see people like Kurt and Rachel with very sure definitions of success, Blaine wanders. He even says it once himself in The First Time: “I just want to make art and help people”. Blaine isn’t sure what he wants, but he’s being pulled along to an idea of success (and I say idea because Kurt and Rachel’s idea of success isn’t the only kind of success, but I’m not sure Kurt or Rachel or even Blaine realize that) because he’s in the company of very ambitious people like Kurt and Rachel. (This relates back to Finn meta I read once. Finn is being swept along in Rachel’s very sure and very ambitious path, and this means he has less time to explore himself and his own ambitions, hence his indecision at the end of his senior year about where and who he wanted to be in life. The same thing is happening to Blaine, except Blaine has more of an upper hand, because he’s disconnected from Kurt, and we’re seeing him realize throughout the season that he doesn’t really know what to do without Kurt and that he needs to figure it out. The “I want to go to NYADA” thing seems to contradict this, but we’ll get to that later.)
These two quotes from the article really seemed to resonate with me about Blaine:
“Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.”
“One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They’re sucked in from other people.”
Let’s look at all of the successes in Blaine’s life before we start, shall we?
- · We’ve got the (implied) successes that we see on Blaine before we know anything much about his character: his popularity at Dalton and within the Warblers, his singing talent, and his charisma. Now, I say implied, because most of these things become deconstructed or devalued upon his transfer to McKinley anyways, and we’re left to wonder which, if any, are genuine.
- · To a degree, although he probably doesn’t consider this a success, we’ve got the success of his physicality. Blaine is attractive, which is something he knows but doesn’t flaunt. He knows he’s sexy and girls come up to him asking for his number and he’s hit on by Sebastian.
- · Confessing his feelings to Kurt in Original Song
- · Asking Kurt to dance in Prom Queen
- · Telling Kurt he loves him in New York
- · Getting the lead in West Side Story
- · Standing up to Finn in Hold On To Sixteen
- · Protecting Kurt from the toxic slushy in Michael
- · Standing up to Cooper in Big Brother
- · Winning Nationals with ND
- · Winning the New Rachel competition
- · Winning the class president race
- · Not succumbing to the Warbler’s pressure to rejoin in Dynamic Duets
- · Reconnecting with Kurt both in Thanksgiving and Glee, Actually
Connecting prestige to most of the things on this list is easy, because most of the things Blaine does are for prestige. Blaine is, by heart, a people pleaser. He shies away from conflict and just wants to make people happy, and the way he sees of doing that is through performing. This need to make people happy has been so ingrained in him that it’s even infiltrated the way he is. All throughout his Dalton career, he puts on a performance. All of the successes he achieves at Dalton are because he knows how to play the right part to make people happy, whether it be through superficial or personal matters. The Blaine that Kurt first meets at Dalton is one who’s representing what everyone else wants him to represent, and even Kurt isn’t exempt from exerting that molding influence onto Blaine, even if Kurt himself doesn’t realize he’s doing it. But the thing that doesn’t make this seem bad to Blaine is that he convinces himself that he likes these things. Even if he may not love being the lead soloist of the Warblers, he convinces himself that he loves it passionately and without fault because that’s what Blaine does, he always tries to wrap himself around whatever he’s doing. Even if he doesn’t love the popularity he has at Dalton because it isn’t real and he isn’t being himself, he adapts himself to it because it’s a lot easier than what he had to adapt to at his old school. Even as he transfers to McKinley and learns to face its halls where the truths about a person are forced out by cruel environments, he joins Glee Club, so he can continue having a part to play. Once Glee Club is gone, like in Swan Song, he joins the Cheerios because he “needs to compete”. He needs something to aim for and he needs someone to please. Blaine had never expressed any previous interest in joining the Cheerios before, so it wouldn’t make any logical sense for him to join them unless he was trying to find someone of worth to be again. (Now, an interesting detour on what the relationship between what Blaine thinks of himself and what other people think of Blaine is how he dresses once he’s free to dress whichever way he wants at McKinley, but I connect that back to Blaine’s attractiveness and how cognizant of it he is or not. I think that Blaine dresses the way he does at McKinley because he’s actively trying to fight the ‘attractive gay but not really gay’ stereotype that was thrust on him at Dalton and even by Kurt, and that he’s trying to fight his need to please in a small way. But of course, the over gelling of his hair also shows that he hasn’t completely won that battle yet. Either way, I digress…) In a way, Blaine’s need for prestige in all he does can connect back to his self-worth. Blaine’s self-worth has been beaten down so much throughout the years that he doesn’t trust what he thinks is good and successful anymore; he has to be told by society and the people around him by what they value as prestigious and noble.
The superhero play in Dynamic Duets has a lot to do with this concept of prestige also. The entire theme of Dynamic Duets is Blaine learning to recognize what is good, not only for other people, but for himself. This is also why the plot point of him finally getting over what he did to Kurt is woven into that particular episode. Blaine kept torturing himself about what he did because, in his mind, he had twisted that action into the noble thing to do, the thing that might make other people call him a “good person” again. In a masochistic way, torturing himself was another way of fulfillment, because he had himself convinced that that was a form of people pleasing too. And that’s why he’s only able to stand up to the Warblers after he forgives himself for cheating on Kurt, because he now has enough faith to judge joining them again as wrong for himself and himself only, and that it’s completely okay to think like that.
As far as how much of what Blaine values as success is his own thinking, it’s already been established that, since his default setting is to please, his idea of success is to make other people happy. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it becomes a difficult thing to deal with when the people he wants to please are gone and aren’t listening anymore. However, if you look at the list, all of the successes Blaine has had so far (disregarding the ones with Kurt) that don’t involve him trying to sell or cement a certain image of himself are when he actively tries to deconstruct the need to please. Standing up to Finn, Cooper, and the Warblers are all examples of him taking control and doing what he wants to do. It is important to note, however, that these successes only come after he reaches a boiling point. Blaine would feel ashamed of standing up for himself too much if it caused conflict, and he probably felt ashamed of his outbursts in retrospect too. Although these things yielded positive results, he probably didn’t view them as successes so much as moments of weakness that gave him favorable results.
hat leaves us the successes we’ve seen of Blaine’s life that revolve around Kurt. These do the exact opposite of everything else he’s achieved in his life: they allow him to be himself. Confessing his feelings to Kurt, overcoming his past demons by asking Kurt to dance at prom, telling Kurt he loves him? These aren’t things that he feels obligated to do or that repress him; they allow expression. Protecting Kurt from the toxic slushy? He wasn’t forced to do that either, but it allowed him to play the part of “heroic boyfriend”. Kurt’s influence on Blaine isn’t one that is designed to do him damage, and it, for the most part, does the opposite. However, as Blaine always plunges too deeply into things and takes things too far, Blaine takes this concept that being with Kurt allows him to be himself to an extreme, so that when Kurt is gone, he doesn’t know which direction he’s heading anymore, and he loses himself. After reconnecting with Kurt again after sectionals, you see him trying to follow in Kurt’s footsteps again, to be successful like Kurt again. That includes him joining the Cheerios like Kurt did and telling Burt that he wanted to go to NYADA after high school.
And that brings us to the entire reason I started thinking about Blaine’s idea of success: When Blaine said that he wanted to go to NYADA, I didn’t believe him. Blaine has ambition, make no mistake, but he doesn’t have a clear path to realizing it, and the relationship between his rampant insecurities and his need to do something worthwhile complicates his decisions. I think Blaine knows he could be great, but he doesn’t know how, and all of his insecurities are eating at him, telling him that he can’t be great the way he thinks he can. Since Kurt is the greatest thing in his life, he sees Kurt being great in New York and getting into NYADA and generally being the successful person Blaine always knew he would be, and he thinks that that is the way for him to be great too. But I don’t think that’s Blaine’s path to success, because he isn’t the type of performer that Kurt is, so he can’t do the same thing Kurt’s doing and have the same sort of success. New York may be his ticket to success, but NYADA isn’t