Kurt Hummel's so bright I gotta wear shades

I posted some meta about Sam and Blaine on tumblr and thought I would repost here because I usually post my Deep Thoughts over here first.

Does this mean I am making the dark, irreversible slide into tumblr addict? Oh, no.

(There are mixed metaphors ahead. Beware.)

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( Warning: They are teenagers. Also, imperfect.  )

Pairings: Kurt/Blaine, Rachel/Finn (but the story is gen)
Rating: PG
Spoilers: 3.22 "Goodbye" and "Rachel's Yearbook Message to Kurt Scene"
Word Count: 7,448
Summary: The more Kurt thinks about Rachel's yearbook message, the more he doesn't know what to make of it. Finn does, though. (Reaction fic to "Goodbye" and "Rachel's Yearbook Message to Kurt Scene".)

Author’s Notes: Thanks to punkkitten2113 and lavender_love00 for betaing and being thinky with me. Any errors are mine. Also, I don’t own Glee, and I don’t make any money writing this stuff.

( When she hugs him, it's like she lets go of everything else. )Also here on tumblr. I love comments, but please don't mention any spoilers in them. I stay away from those as much as possible. Thanks!

At the encouragement of glitterwocky, I put back the 37 words of throwaway reference to one of Blaine's sports in "Thursday's Child Has Far to Go." It's only 37 words, and it's really not worth going back and reading the whole chapter just to see it, and it's really not worth going back to search for (it's about halfway through Blaine and Kurt's phone conversation in the last scene but, really, don't go searching for it, because you'll be disappointed). Still, I thought I'd point it out for anyone who might be rereading the story and thinks, "I don't remember seeing that there before."

( Background on why, including slight spoiler for 3.08 - Hold on to Sixteen  )

In all the fan fic I've read that refers to Blaine's ethnicity, he's always identified as at least partially Filipino. Just a wild guess, but I'm assuming that this is because Darren Criss has Filipino heritage. (What exactly the heritage is, I don't know, because I tend to avoid learning too much about actors I like. Okay, for the purposes of this entry, I just looked it up and the ever-reliable Wikipedia says his mother is Fillipina by nationality and Filipina, Chinese and Spanish by heritage.)

The fanon about Blaine being Filipino or partially Filipino isn't based in canon, because there have been absolutely no clear references to Blaine's ethnicity on the show - at least not that I've noticed. (And yeah, the dialogue moves fast, so I very well could have missed something.)

The closest reference has been when Rachel, in BIOTA, imagined a possible future in which she and Blaine could have "vaguely Eurasian-looking" babies together. But I take this as meaningless, because my grandfather used to tell me I looked Japanese - when there is absolutely no Japanese heritage anywhere in my known genealogy - and I have had more than one Korean ask me if I am half-Korean when they've learned about my personal history. I'm not. I'm something like 80% WASP, 12% Swede, and 8% other (mostly or all European). (At least one of my great-grandparents claimed some Native American heritage, but it's unclear whether this is a true claim or wishful thinking.)

So, this is my lead up to asking: Am I a freak that my headcanon does not have Blaine's mom being a first-generation Filipina-American? I honestly don't know what her race/ethnicity is -- it's probably a bunch of things, and Filipina might be in there -- but she's not first-generation American. Is that somehow an insult to Darren Criss?

Because I look at the other characters, and many of them have ethnicities that don't quite match up with that of their characters. For example, Rachel on the show. Her biological paternity is officially unknown, although it is implied by the writers that Hiram, her white dad, is the biological father (her other dad is black). Both her fathers are Jewish, and Rachel identifies herself as Jewish. I've always assumed that, culturally, she leans toward Ashkenazic because if it was Sephardic, wouldn't she have mentioned that? Her bio mom - Shelby Corcoran - appears to be white, but her religion/ethnicity is unknown (although Corcoran is an Irish surname, so we can take a guess at at least part of her ethnicity).

On the other hand, the actress who plays Rachel has a mother who is Italian-American/Roman Catholic and a father who is Sephardic-Spanish/Jewish. So it doesn't quite match.

A run down of other character/actor racial/ethnic/religious differences:

• Puckerman is Jewish, but Mark Sailing, the actor who plays him, was raised as a Christian.
• Tina Cohen-Chang is identified on the show as "Asian," although her name implies it's more complex than that. "Chang" could be Chinese or Korean; "Cohen" is usually Jewish (it comes from Hebrew for "priest") - although I've also read it can be Gaelic. Jenna Ushkowitz, the actress who plays her, was born in Korea and adopted by American parents. Presumably, her bio parents are Korean, but hell if I know.
• Chris Colfer describes himself as Irish-American, while the name Hummel is so freaking NOT Irish I don't even know where to begin. We don't know anything about Kurt's geneaology, though.
• According to some press release I read ages ago, Matthew Morrison is of Scottish heritage. "Schuester" is definitely not a Scottish name.

Back to Blaine. For a while I thought the "Anderson" had to be Scandinavian, which threw me, because Blaine acts like such a WASP. Then I finally looked up the name "Anderson" and found out that it's actually a common surname in England. So "Anderson" is a super-WASPy name, it turns out.

Of course, I shouldn't have been investing so much in the national origins of Blaine's last name, in any case. This is America, and surnames that survive usually have to do with paternal lineage, and not overall heritage. They might reflect the nationality of some ancestor down the line; or they might just be borrowed from people who owned your ancestors as slaves, or from the place from where your ancestors escaped slavery; or they might have been made up on the moment at Ellis Island.

I have no conclusion to these thoughts. I just needed to get them out there.

I didn't watch Glee last night and continued writing some episode 3.05 reaction fic today. Except that I don't know if I will ever post it, because I don't know if I'll continue it, because Blaine is making me so depressed! I mean, I know the episode ends in happiness, but that kid is soooo lacking in the self-worth department at times throughout the episode that I am just beside myself.

I don't know if self-worth is the right word. It's just that Blaine thinks he has to be what other people want him to be, and sometimes forgets that he has his own internal dignity that doesn't depend on how many people like him or approve of his choices.

Blaine, please, get to an Alateen meeting already before you make me cry!

In the non-Glee, cheerful upside, this is Trans Awareness Week and I'm currently reading an awesome book called Gender Born, Gender Made by psychologist Diane Ehrensaft. It's about raising children who don't fall into neat categories in the binary gender system. I highly recommend it whether you are a parent of gender-variant kids or not.

While googling the definition of "glasz" the other day (because I had read it in a fanfic and had never seen the word before, and I'm a professional editor for Pete's sake), I found this great Tumblr meme of the tag glasz. I say "great" because the first entry is a hilarious, if short, diatribe on the author's least favorite Kurt/Blaine fanfic tropes, including the idea "that a medium drip is a specialty drink.  It’s drip coffee.  In a medium cup.  Seriously." (You can see the author's Tumblr page here, but I warn you, it is a spoiler-rich zone.)

But I also was disturbed by the diatribe because I always though the "medium" part of "medium drip" meant "medium roast." And I've been in love with that idea because I hate dark roast, and the fact that a character would specify something other than dark when he orders his coffee just made me so happy.

Am I the only one who thought that? Is the Lima Bean too small of a shop to offer at least one each of a light, medium, dark and French roast on a continual basis? Alternatively, is it too hoity-toity to name its coffees by the degree of roast? Would it instead name them by country of origin? Would it follow the stupid marketing trend of giving coffees totally meaningless names like "Thanksgiving Blend" and "Celebration Blend" and "Summer Roast"?

Please tell me I am not the only one who thought that Blaine drinks nothing but medium-roast drip coffee – well, and maybe a light roast when he's feeling daring. It is such an integral part of my headcanon; I don't think I can ever let that idea go.

(Oh, and if you want to know my least favorite Kurt/Blaine fanfic trope, it's calling Kurt a countertenor in a context unrelated to his singing. Like, he's practicing at Glee rehearsal and gets called a countertenor – awesome; he's in the middle of making out with Blaine and "The countertenor ran his hand slowly down the curly-haired boy's bare stomach and really, really did not want to stop at that &%^*ing waistband" – well, you've just distracted me in what was otherwise a totally hot make-out scene. Just write Kurt and Blaine please, and I will be so so happy.)