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kurt blaine intimacy

When Lurkers Attack

It Mostly Just Tickles

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Spoilery Review of "A Very Glee Christmas"
kurt blaine intimacy
The parodic aspects of the PBS special left me completely cold and I am not culturally ignorant. I grew up on Nick at Night watching The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Patty Duke Show, Dobie Gillis, I Love Lucy, The Donna Reed Snow, and many other sitcoms from this era.

Despite this, I have no experience of 60's Christmas specials. I was born in 1978, and I imagine that most Glee fans are my age or younger and had similar trouble finding the Special funny. The dialogue made me cringe. What was the "end times" stuff about? I totally blocked out the Cheerios number. It would have made much more sense to parody "A Christmas Story" or "A Charlie Brown Christmas," which are very popular among young people.

The Klaine dance scene was awful---not so much their performance, but how much work the choreographers had to do to keep them 7-8 feet apart throughout most of the song. It made sense for them to be distant in "Baby, It's Cold Outside" since it is a song about pursuit, but this song was all about cuddling. If Darren Criss wasn't constantly clutching Colfer's shoulders like a drowning man, these characters wouldn't touch at all.

I'm frankly tired of being expected to love the crumbs of physical affection they throw the gay characters. I'm tired of the excuse that Klaine cannot show affection in public, while never giving them an opportunity for a private moment of intimacy. I'm tired of Brittana's lesbian relationship being completely ignored. Would the occasional lingering hug or kiss on the mouth drive away more viewers that these bullshit, song-crammed, CD-boosting, plot-free "specials" do?

Beyond cutting the ring scene and Naya's song, which pissed me off (they should have shortened Rory's and Rachel's songs instead, since they were ultimately rejected anyway) I had a hard time swallowing the message of the ep. I didn't see why they had to feel guilty about having the opportunity to perform for television. They didn't even get paid for their performance. They can sing condescending carols to the homeless on Saturday. They'll still be homeless, right? They're not going anywhere./sarcasm

Random Thoughts:

*Sam was unbearably self-righteous.

*Rory needs acting and elocution lessons or he needs to go.

*Rachel is ambitious and self-centered, but she is not materialistic.

*Tina, Artie, Puck, and Rachel are all Jewish, right? And Kurt's an atheist. You'd think someone would mention that 45% of the group doesn;t worship the baby Jesus.

* But who cares if Tina is Jewish anyway? It's amazing how much the Glee people don't care about Tina's character. She has been a regular for years, and I know nothing about her character. She is Asian, used to be Goth, has a light voice, and does exposition well. I know more about *Mike* than Tina.

*Upside? Amber looked ridiculously gorgeous throughout the episode and this whole season. They finally stopped making her dress like a reject from the 90s in cheap, unflattering, too-tight neon. Seriously, the way they dressed Amber in S1 and S2 is how white people who have never met a black person imagine we like to dress. She also had the best song of the night.

*The other upside? Matt Morrison was barely in it. I honestly think those kids could run the clubs themselves far more competently than Schue does with Artie in charge.

I didn't know I had all these feelings until I wrote them down.

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Hi! I wanted to comment on your post on kurt_blaine but it disappeared before I could! I hope it's okay that I stalked you back to here. None of my friends are interested in Glee, so I'm constantly dying to find someone to talk to about it.

I have to agree with you on many points. I find it hard to believe Rachel would ask that much of Finn, considering it's pretty obvious that it would be financially impossible and everyone knows it. Heck, considering she was heartbroken last Christmas, I'd think she'd just be happy to be with Finn from the get-go.

I would like to point out, though, that the distance between Kurt and Blaine was most likely not choreographed to purposely keep them apart, but as a solution for filling up space and selling their parody. They do stand and sit close in several parts. The times when they're dancing rather far apart seems like an attempt to balance the shot. If you look carefully, they're practically framing the set behind them. The segment itself is a parody of the 1963 Judy Garland Christmas special, complete with an almost identical set and similarly cheesy lines. Thus in creating this opening sequence, any decent director would do what they could to highlight the similarities between their version and the original.

Also, I'm no expert, but I was under the impression that that's how people reacted to gay couples in that time period. Kind of a "everyone knows, but it's a dirty little secret we laugh about" type of thing. While I too wish we could see more affectionate scenes between Klaine (and even Brittana), I understood their distance in this episode to be less censoring of their relationship for current viewers than a play on how they might have been portrayed in 1963.

You're spot-on about Rachel and Rory's solos though. We didn't really need those, they should have cut them instead or at least shortened them. At most, we only needed a tiny portion of Rachel's so Artie could cut in and set up his vision for their special. I'm peeved they cut the Klaine scene and the sexy Santana song, it seems like a cheap ploy to get us all to buy the DVDs.

Thanks for your response, and this is not stalking at all. I wondered what had happened to my post on KB. Do they not allow negative reviews?

On the dancing: I agree with your points, but I think that the creators of the show find a suspicious number of plausible reasons for Klaine to rarely show physical affection.

On Rachel: They can never really allow her to grow, can they? She always has to take three steps back depending n plot necessity.

On Rory, Rachel and DVDs: The entire episode was a ploy to get us to buy the Christmas CD---which I won't be doing.

We don't allow individual reviews, or every day after the episode would have 6000 individual posts.

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