Category: tv

The New Yorker Festival: Chris Colfer

Last night I went to see Chris Colfer interviewed at the New Yorker Festival. It was the first time I’ve actually managed to get to said festival — I always either have trouble getting tickets or the timing is such that I’m traveling. This time, I just barely made it, as I’m leaving for Europe tonight.

At any rate the experience was both lovely and odd, but neither really in the way I expected. As others have noted, the questions were largely a rehash of topics Colfer has covered extensively before, and, despite the moderator being knowing about how everyone in the audience were largely well-informed fans and Colfer himself answering many questions with the preface of “For the two of you in the back who don’t know this,” little was done to target the discussion to either the actual audience or to Colfer’s upcoming projects (he as a movie he wrote and starred in coming out, a middle-grade book deal, and a pilot in development).

Whether this was a matter of the moderator not knowing that catering to a young audience (it was largely teens) or a fannish audience (like I said, we were in the know) doesn’t mean watering it down, I’m not really sure. Either way, it’s worth noting that neither audience actually likes easy, neat, harmless content, but really loves new ideas and process discussion to chew over. But we weren’t given that, and it was really a disservice to everyone.

That said, Colfer was delightful. He’s verbally playful and well-prepared for questions both awkward and boring (He assumed an audience question prefaced as being awkward to be the usual “what’s it like to kiss Darren Criss?” Instead, it turned out to be about Colfer’s choice of cologne, and while none of it was less inappropriate for all that, Colfer’s navigation of that mess sure was a lot funnier than it could have been for those of us cringing in our seats).

The expressiveness of his face was also fascinating to watch as he got stuck watching clips of himself at various points in the evening. I think I learned more about performance from that than anything that actually got said during the entire program.

But evenings like this, when you’re in fandom and like to write about pop-culture, are rarely just about the content on stage. They’re about the people you see and the friends you have drinks with after. So I was glad to chat with three different groups of people I knew before the thing started, catch up on a bit of gossip, and have a lengthy, meaty discussion afterwards on the construction of fame.

For those of you who missed the event, there are quotes, audio and pictures all over Tumblr and Twitter. I would say some of the paraphrasing conveys a different tonal quality on certain issues than I got from the experience, but if you’re among those who have been wound up about recent Glee spoilers in the last week — spoilers that were heavily yet coyly acknowledged by Colfer, who isn’t just playful with words, but dirty with them — I would say, oddly, to trust. I think they know how deftly they have to tread in what’s coming, and I think the effort will at least be valiant.

My upcoming time-zone shift and work schedule mean I may be a little behind on things until I return in two weeks, although I am planning a bit of meta regarding Kurt Hummel’s clothes, one of the leaked performances in 3.03 and the 3.05-related excitement. So when I get to that some time this coming week (after 3.03 has aired), please remember this is a spoiler rich zone.

Pan Am & The Playboy Club: Romancing a future that’s already happened

The other day I finally caught up with the first episodes of both The Playboy Club and Pan Am, both of which have seemed to be destined to be Mad Men but about women. Certainly, both shows are trying to cash in on the interest in that stifled and stylized world, and neither have in conception struck me as likely to do it very successfully.

On viewing, The Playboy Club seems more in the mold of Mad Men at first glance. It’s dark and no matter how central women are to the story, it’s really feels like a story about men and their clothes, haircuts and ordering of the world. Selling it as a story about women because of the bunnies and the women at the supposed center of the plot seemed besides the point, despite several central female characters I should theoretically care about. Frankly, I was bored.

That said, the show is doing some interesting things odd to the sides, even if I found the female rivalry plots overplayed and the mob drama of no emotional interest. The lesbian bunny is an interesting choice. Being a bunny wasn’t sex work, but queer women in sex work is a real thing, and certainly this is as close to that story as we’re going to get on network TV. If any straight people want to tell me how the Mattachine Society plot line read to them, I’d love to know. For me, it was the first time I really sat up and paid attention. Did I feel the hope and the fear because it was my people? Or was that when the show snapped into some better pacing?

Pan Am, on the other hand, is a much larger bucket of weird. It’s a lot less subtle, and really, as much as I’m all over it, the sweeping movie soundtrack music and the completely pornographic shots of airplanes before every commercial break are a little much. I love that stuff, but really, I can only take so many emotional climaxes about our past imagined future in 48 minutes. And there are lots of moments that feel like heightened reality (particularly in the repeated row of marching stewardesses routine) in a show that, in its domestic dramas (here again, another confrontation between two women who have slept with the same man), is also trying to be delicate. That it also seems to have two subplots involving international spying just adds to the possibly delicious ridiculousness.

Of the two shows, Pan Am managed, I thought, to be a greater love letter to the era and showcased the rivalries between women with a greater subtlety. But both shows’ emotional tones feel so off — The Playboy Club is too full of despair for a first episode and Pan Am is a little too up about a future that’s already happened. For me, they really only worked as companion pieces, bracketing the world as it was and is.

Pan Am was definitely more fun to watch, and I suspect it will last longer. But I really want to see where the Mattachine Society plot on The Playboy Club goes, although right now, I’ll be surprised if the show survives the season.

Anyone got any bets?

Glee: Let’s talk about “Glitter Bombing”

Glitter bombing is not a Glee-ism. It’s actually a recent but recurring political act, with real world history, usually carried out by activists against anti-gay politicians. In fact, the only instance of glitter bombing not related to LGBTQ issues on the Wikipedia page is in its “in fiction” category — and that is Schuester’s use of the tactic in “The Purple Piano Project.”

I wanted to point this out, because most of the discussion I’ve seen of Schuester doing this revolves around either his immaturity or the wackiness of Glee, but without the non-fiction political context, I don’t think that’s a meaningful conversation.

The thing is, I can’t quite figure out what Glee was trying to do with this. Was this another case of Schuester thinking he’s doing the right thing and not? Let’s face it, Sue may say all sorts of appalling things to Kurt, but she also gave him solos, stuck up for him on the atheism thing, and doesn’t seem to hold his queerness against him any more than she holds anything against anyone.

Schuester, on the other hand, spends a huge amount of time being exasperated by Kurt’s queerness (something which previews for next week’s episode suggest will be back), trying to be supportive, and basically just doing things (when he does anything at all) that aren’t about Kurt but are about himself.

So one easy argument is that Schuester is being incredibly appropriative in an incredibly inappropriate way.

The other possibility is one about how Glee defines queerness. By using Glitter Bombing to defend the arts, Schuester suggests that the arts are inherently queer, that his glee club is inherently queer. And not just because it’s more filled with LGBTQ people than he knows.

Certainly, there are a lot of people on Glee besides Kurt, Blaine, Santana, Brittany and Karofsky, with arguably queered sexuality. Tina and Rachel are both othered at various points for liking sexual activity. Artie, through both words and deed, points out that his wheelchair doesn’t getting in the way of his sexual abilities. The women Puck desires are not an expected or necessarily accepted part of his sexuality in the WMHS environment. The intersection of Emma’s OCD and her demi-sexuality has been a near constant topic. And I certainly know more about Schuester’s sex life than I ever wanted to (remember his ex-wife?).

Glee is very insistent that everyone is not just the underdog, but really weird and possibly revolting to someone out there. Sometimes the show is awkward about it; sometimes it’s hilarious. Often it’s both. And, when we look at the ways in which it uses songs (stretch those lyrics, stretch them!), it’s easy to assume they’re just stretching the meaning of Glitter Bombing here to this larger underdog story. On some level, everything on Glee is a metaphor about LGBTQ-ness, and all the LGBTQ content on Glee is also just a subset of a larger story about a broader sense of queerness.

But, at the end of the day I don’t think that’s what is actually happening around this particular act. I do think this is one of our first hints that Schuester is going to remain ineffective, boggled and cruel through obliviousness when it comes to Kurt (and the other LGBTQ kids he’s aware of), because he, like pretty much all the characters on the show, is too wrapped up in his own drama to engage other people in a useful way. Schuester taking Glitter Bombing, screwing it up on behalf of the arts, and then finding a way to mess up the equilibrium of any number of the LGBTQ characters? It seems like a given at this point, and last night’s episode warned us that that’s coming loud and clear.

Torchwood: Miracle Day — Redefining heroism for the Whoniverse

I finished Torchwood: Miracle Day last night, and I find myself more satisfied by the idea of it, than with the series itself. Honestly, that’s largely a matter of pacing. Children of Earth had particularly stellar pacing, and Miracle Day did not.

A lot of that, especially in early episodes, was the by-product of having to introduce the show to a whole new audience. But even then, I thought most of the slowed down pacing was less committed to helping us understand Jack and Gwen and the idea of Torchwood and more to the creeping horror of the Miracle. This would have been perfectly fine, it if weren’t a relatively simple concept to grasp, one that would have been more terrifying, immediate and less distracting in its allegory, at high speed.

But a five or seven episode Miracle Day would have been a different animal, one that could never have contained Jane Espensen’s brilliant episode 7. And let us be clear, I’m not a fan of the episode for the gay romance or Barrowman’s ass (which is, I think, a criticism that gets lobbed, not entirely fairly, but not entirely unfairly either at a lot of fandom and at a lot of female viewers in particular); I’m a fan of the episode for its inherent Romanticism and its narrative about loss — two central traits of the larger Whoniverse which appeared with a poetry in Miracle Day in a way that they actually didn’t in Children of Earth, despite that being the stronger of the two series.

Without episode 7, Miracle Day would also not be a story about Jack. It’s the knitting to his arc, one which many people in fandom have been writing very eloquently about coming full circle in this series (please post links if you’ve got them). Certainly, as one of those fans with a deep commitment to the Face of Boe story, to see Jack finish this series with his immortality intact and a real sense of peace and wonder with the world again, I was relieved. I was also satisfied, when Gwen shoots him to prevent him from being a suicide.

Giving up one’s life for the cause is, essentially, how heroism is defined in the Whoniverse. Jack, when we first meet him, is mortal, screws some stuff up, and is ultimately willing to give up his life to fix it. He doesn’t. Then, later, when he’s willing to give up his life to save his friends, something intervenes and he becomes immortal, robbing this con-man who had become a better man of the ability to execute on heroism as defined by the Whoniverse. This has dogged him through each and every one of his failures across the programs; all he can do is sacrifice others, and that is, we are told, the act of a coward.

When Gwen steps up to be complicit in the death he has volunteered for, she is not just expressing love for Jack, and helping (seemingly) to return to him his heroism. She is actively altering the structure of what it means to be a hero in the Whoniverse; she is taking the gun out of Adelaide Brooks’s (“Waters of Mars”) hand and saying she doesn’t have to do the right thing alone. Gwen, in letting her father go and in being willing to kill her friend, who she loves once again, tells us that maybe Jack was not a coward when Ianto died and perhaps, unsettlingly, not a monster when he sacrificed Steven.

These are some pretty fascinating and powerful ideas, littered across an intriguing landscape filled with atheistic play with religious metaphor (something I don’t think Russel T. Davies could avoid if he tried), that culminate in Jack, whose life was in many ways made smaller by his immortality (he wound up confined this this earth full of its restrictive morals about love and sex), witnessing it possibly make someone else’s life (Rex’s) larger.

Miracle Day is, in its parting shots, a return to the wonder that was Torchwood in the largely monster-of-the-week incarnation that defined its first two seasons.

But satisfying in my brain, and satisfying in front of my eyes are two different things, sadly. And of all the series, this may be the one I am the least likely to rewatch in its entirety for anything other than scholarly purposes. Aside from finding its pacing off-puttingly awkward, its attempt to unify the original show’s queer sensibility with a perception of American masculinity and viciousness was at best inexplicable and extraneous and, at worst, arbitrarily offensive.

On the other hand, I still hope there is more. I will always want to follow Jack’s story, because Jack’s story is always. I want more detail and elegance around the Families and the idea of their plan as Writing the Story.

Finally, Jilly Kitzinger? Most fun villain, EVER.

The Emmys: Was that a flicker of feminist awesome I detected?

Did I just watch the most feminist Emmys ever?

First there was the amazing Mad Men gay marriage moment in the opening video thing (it’s around the 4:20 mark).

Then, we had a whole bunch of female winners who were over 35 and/or not size fours. “Regular” looking people can be just as talented and luminous as what you’re used to seeing on the red carpet.

Next, we had Jane Lynch’s dig at Entourage, which was pretty hilarious.

And finally, there was the long sarcastic bit about the power and diversity of roles men finally have access too.

Was this awesome and subversive? Is feminism (and lesbians) the new (old) edgy? Was it so not enough (the whole thing was still epically white, among other things) that those glimmers just don’t matter?

And most importantly, did any of it even remotely make up for the fact that we were subjected to the Emmytones?

Discuss.

Trash day is totally out of order

Like most of New York City, we survived the hurricane without major incident: some expected basement flooding that isn’t technically our problem; mistaking a neighbor’s woodsmoke grilling in 40pmh winds (who does that?) for a fire; one of the cats falling into the bathtub filled in case of water problems; and me getting beaned on the head with a tree branch. If any of this sounds dramatic, I assure you it was merely humiliating.

Tomorrow, assuming all goes as planned, we leave for San Francisco. I’m looking forward, in my weird way, to airport time; and also to scarf weather upon arriving in SF. Patty, I hope, won’t hold the weather against the city — she likes it much warmer than I do.

Of course, our immanent departure means I have a ton of work to do before we leave. And of course, that work is staring me in the face when I’d rather be restringing my guitar and taking a dance class (both of which I actually hope to do today, but doubt I’ll have time to).

In the meantime, I’m once again behind on Torchwood and desperately want to write about this piece on “The Downside of Immortality” in The New York Times that uses it as a hook for the author to basically promote his new book.

However, I am fascinated by a drive-by assertion in it, that implies we are crueler when reminded of our own mortality. This, when connected to the systems we have in place to seek immortality (including, as noted in another drive-by remark in the piece, the desire for fame), actually presents some pretty interesting ideas about the why behind the need for statements like “Don’t Read The Comments On News Articles”/”Never Read Anything Anyone Says About You on the Internet.” — basically, since the appearance of “Internet fame” is easy to come by, so’s the random nastiness that pools in various parts of the Internet in various ways. The article, alas, isn’t really about this, and is brief and full of poorly-supported pessimism. I’ll probably check out the book for more complete arguments, and also because of my whole interest in how people respond to death.

Meanwhile, and ever so faintly on point, my buddy Jill just linked me to an amazing mashup called “Stayin’ Alive in The Wall,” which yes, is the Bee Gees mashed up with Pink Floyd.

I can’t really top that, so I’ll leave you there.

Torchwood: Miracle Day – Finally Getting to America

Once upon a time I had a letter published in the New York Times in response to a piece they did on Russel T. Davies. In it, I noted that Torchwood felt like a show about people like me, just with more aliens.

What I meant by “people like me” wasn’t necessarily obvious. Because it wasn’t the show’s queer content so much as the smart-people-with-complex-friendship-and-romantic-networks-who-are-in-over-their-heads factor. But sure, the queer content helped, of course.

While I was one of the people who loved Children of Earth (so much so that academic research related to events in it took over a year of my life), Miracle Day, the current series, has been a bit of a struggle for me.

That’s been natural, I think. Aside from having to adjust to new characters and settings, there’s the sense of frustration that’s unavoidable as the show’s founding conceits are introduced to a new audience while us long-time fans are waiting for the plot to advance. But some of that has also been a frustration at tonal shifts that have been the result of the show’s coming to America.

Despite a team of US and UK writers, much of the show’s American content has felt like an impression of America from outside itself run through a damaged lens. This has come off less like commentary and more like just not understanding the nuances of life here: from our homophobia to our paranoias (justified and not) around the healthcare debate. It’s largely been a cartoon America, drawn hastily, with the wrong tools, and it’s been distracting.

These problems, however, are nothing compared to the ones Miracle Day very deliberately sets up for itself. Nazi allegory, even heavy-handed Nazi allegory, is nothing new in SF/F, of course. But it sets the bar high – how do you rise above the crowd with this trope? And how do you do it without being, well, assholes? (context, part 1: I’m half Eastern-European Jewish) While it can be harder and harder for many of us to remember, WWII and its atrocities are still events within our collective living memory.

I’ve been mixed on the show’s handling of this. Episode 4, for example, filled me with a near constant (and perhaps useful and strategic) rage. It reminded me of too many TV movies from the 80s, where people with AIDS were tattooed and put in camps. It was allegory upon allegory, and combined with the character of Oswald Danes, convicted pedophile, going in amongst metaphoric plague victims like Jesus, made some pretty unpleasant connections to some of the more revolting corners of our collective imaginations related to disease and queerness and the corruption of children. I was not comfortable, and I was unsure if the show had a remotely good reason for putting me in such discomfort.

Episode 5, however, knocked me over. Even as the Nazi allegory became even more aggressive to a degree that was perhaps insulting to the audience’s intelligence (yes, I can see that they are setting up camps), I was engaged. And I was perhaps most engaged when Oswald Danes gave his speech about us becoming angels, paralleled with the show’s examination of humans as monsters. I don’t know where Miracle Day is going with this (or if it was just a pretty speech) but at that moment I hoped, and perhaps still do, that part of the mystery to be revealed will have humankind as, in fact, the Nephilim – maybe we have been the supernatural and the monstrous all along.

But through all of this, Miracle Day hasn’t necessarily felt like it was a show about people like me. The interpersonal relationships were sketched too quickly; the casual queer content felt like a sloppy mockery of US homophobia and added nothing to the narrative; and while everyone was smart and in over their heads, they weren’t trying their best. Watching it, I felt, I guess, lonely.

And then, Episode 7 came along (after 6 mitigated some of my reservations about the Nazi allegory, because there’s a specific and legitimizing power when a UK citizen calls out another one on helping to set up camps in their own country), and it was everything I had hoped and wanted Torchwood to be since I first watched Season 1.

It was not just the content (Jack backstory, although where in Jack’s timeline it’s hard to tell), and it certainly wasn’t the sex, but the tone. Here was Torchwood once again understanding that what this show has always been, at its very best, is a romance, not because of Jack’s many relationships, but because of Jack’s many losses and the debt/reward relationship the show, and its source, Doctor Who, has always focused on between mortality and the wonders of the universe.

But it was, for me, also more personal than that. Now, I’ll grant you, fictions I love are always personal for me, and Torchwood has a very special place in both my personal and professional lives. However, that still didn’t mean I expected Episode 7 to take place in Little Italy in New York City or to hear gay slurs that I had previously only heard from my relatives (context, part 2: I’m half-Sicilian).

So it may have taken seven episodes, but my weird show about dysfunctional people trying to save the world with not enough resources while distracted by interpersonal dramarama is back. It’s even in America; one I recognize, finally, because my family came through Ellis Island too and sometimes uses some pretty terrible words.

I’ll do a real analysis of Miracle Day and its various references, allusions and allegories when it’s over. But right now, I’m a little too busy being grateful and stunned.

trash day in a whole new borough

The new house is fantastic, even if it’s still filled with boxes, even if the new couch isn’t here yet, even if the new cable service is completely screwed up (a technician is coming on Monday), and even if we totally can’t find an accent chair we agree on. The fact remains, however, that while we’re no longer exhausted, we don’t quite have the energy to get everything solved. It’s perhaps only now, that so much of the weight of the last month and a half has lifted that I get how really bad and exhausting it’s been. It’s going to take a while to get back to ourselves, but we’re getting there, I think.

For those who missed it, the Diner en Blanc matter has had a positive resolution, in that there is no longer an additional burden on queer couples wishing to register for the event. Am I still less than pleased with the phrasing or the suggestion that our existence inherently mars the tradition of a social occasion? You bet. We’ve always existed, and seating arrangements have only really become the end of the world in a world with so many other lost formalities.

I do a lot of things where this stuff comes into play, social and historic dance among them. Patty and I have registered for gender balanced balls with me as the man, worried about how it would go, and then it’s always been fine and without remark. Always. But one still has to go through the explaining your situation politely and being told no and then they worry and plan for what to do when you sneak around the rules anyway and it isn’t fine. The worst part, really, is that I get it — in dance you need a good balance of leads and follows; in historic dance you arguably want to recreate what you are romanticizing about the past.

But the past totally contained people like us, even if the terminology was different. Yes, the level of knowledge and response to homosexuality was varied from social circle to social circle, but that’s not actually particularly different to today, although the word “out” and most terms currently used for sexual, romantic and gender identity are anachronisms in historical discussion. But the fact is LGBTQ people have always been invited to dinner parties, and so the idea that we’re interrupting tradition, when tradition is just history, and history is filled with queerness — well, it’s a little tiring.

That said, Diner en Blanc did the right thing in the end, even if clumsily, and we’ll be attempting to register today.

I should also note that today is photography day for “A Day in Gay America.” So get out your cameras.

Meanwhile, I’m very briefly off to Boston tomorrow to see one of my creative collaborators perform, with the hopes of getting back to a possibly dry NY early Sunday so that Patty and I can picnic in our new backyard.

Finally, I owe you some writing about Torchwood. Through episode 3 I was bored, episode 4 made me angry, and episode 5 made me wonder if they were up to some seriously sneaky (and brilliant) stuff in the midst of all their heavy-handedness. I am almost afraid to wait until after tonight’s episode to write about it, simply because any answers that come our way in the episode may make it less interesting (and my theories less clever, but if you’re long-time fans of the show, I think/hope this is all going somewhere that’s weird, gnostic, about the nephilim and “what’s moving in the dark,” and will addresses just what sins of his past Jack is alternately trying to mitigate or forget about). But I did say I would give it through episode 6 to comment at any length and so I shall.

Thanks to everyone who has picked up Bitten by Moonlight. I’ll try to post an excerpt from “Sanquali” and talk a little bit about the process of writing the sort of thing I never write (Italian AU werewolf lesbians!) this weekend.

Moving is its own time zone

I’ve been absent of late. Not just from this blog, but from my life. The thing about moving is that there is only moving.

The good news is that we have a date, a plan, keys to the new place and a fabulous couch on the way. We’ve also just come back from the beach (which is its own post because of the town we usually go to and its part in America’s wacky religious history). But it’s crunch time now, and I doubt you’ll hear much of anything from me, deep or casual, beyond a bit of Twittering until the move is done.

But, I can still tell you a few random things, including that a guy I’ve known in passing forever (seriously, he’s like a random spoke in every social circle I’m in, it seems), is doing Kickstarter fundraising for his board game, Oh My God! There’s an Axe in My Head!.

I also just want to jump up and down briefly not just about the fact that I’m going to see Darren Criss in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, but that one of my dearest friends is coming to NYC for the first time to go with me. Apparently we’re going to be going to piano bars and Ghostbusters locations. Nerdiest weekend, EVAR. Although, I can’t help being put in mind of the fact that about a billion years ago this happened.

Meanwhile, in an effort to foster discussion (no, really), I need advice on what color claw caps to get the cats to protect the new sofa. Weigh in! Or something.

Finally, as an aside, I post a lot about my personal and my working life here and the giant grey area in between. What I do post here isn’t, however, comprehensive. It can’t be, and it shouldn’t be. I have lots of balls in the air all the time with both short- and long-term projects and possibilities. And just because I totally talk about some stuff before it’s ready for public consumption doesn’t mean I’m obligated to talk about anything before that moment happens or that I actually have any consistent habit or policy around that sort of stuff, because I totally don’t. The more the Internet gives us the illusion that we can see the whole of anyone’s life, the more it actually becomes impossible for that to be the case. It’s sort of a neat trick, but one I suppose we’re all still learning how to navigate.

Anyway, I promise, thinky thoughts will be back next week. This will finally include some writing about the latest season of Torchwood and possibly something on the ever wavering semi-structure that is Glee‘s fourth wall.

Harry Potter & Glee: Hoping some boys can save themselves

Shanna Yarbrough, the hostess over at Don’t Turn It Off, and I have been emailing about a whole bunch of things lately: Glee, the New York real estate market, a secret project or seven, and Harry Potter. And, in one of those emails, where we were talking about going from being Harry Potter fans (and specifically Snape fans) to Glee fans, I said in an offhand way, “Well, Severus Snape is the guy we’re all praying Kurt doesn’t grow up to be.” And, even though I hadn’t consciously gone through the list on it at the time, it turns out, it’s sort of really true.

There’s an external perception of gender variance that follows Snape his whole life if you buy the reading in my post of the other day; I doubt Kurt’s apparent gender non-conformity is going anywhere soon.

There’s Kurt’s incredibly sharp tongue, a trait certainly shared with Snape.

There’s the history of being bullied, and the working hard to seem like something other than what he is: Mechanic’s son? designer clothes? trying to fit in at Dalton? Kurt’s perceived status and choices regarding that status can certainly be read as fairly similar to those of the “Half-Blood Prince.”

And, of course, there’s also the obsessive love and the self-restricted sexuality.

Which is sort of why I’ve just got to hope this Blaine thing works out, because a wounded Kurt is a scary thing. And I have to think, even if only from having been such an obsessive HP fan, that if this boy gets his heart broken, or, rather, blows everything up with his own sharp tongue and natural, reasonable distrust of other people, he’s far too likely to go down the road of someone like Snape, or, to keep it in Glee terms, Sue Sylvester. We’ve already seen Kurt have a surprising rapport with Sue on more than one occasion. Arguably, that’s Kurt’s very real generosity and kindness; or it’s Kurt seeing his own nature and seeing the person he’s trying desperately not to become.

There’s always a temptation, I think, in large swathes of Glee fandom to address Harry Potter. The teen protagonists are the right age to care, and once Darren Criss was cast as Blaine, the opportunity for boy wizard references became ridiculously difficult to ignore. Often, this seems forced. And, in particular, Harry Potter seems like a poor fit for Kurt’s pop-culture interests, which, outside of Broadway, largely seem taken from the lives of queer teens in the 1980s.

But now I can’t help wondering if Kurt did read the Harry Potter series and if they even do midnight screenings of the films in places like Lima. I wonder if he read those books and felt like Harry (Shanna recently summarized the plot of the series on Twitter as “Closeted boy must defend himself and those like him from violence and oppression. Do not despair, Harry: It Gets Better.”) or recognized himself in Snape. Did he think of the man’s spying as he went to snoop around Dalton? Did he smile in the dark at the films every time he noticed all the buttons on Snape’s clothes speaking softly to a love of detail and a pride in confinement? If any or all of these things are true, what does it feel like for Kurt every time he looks at Blaine and realizes he won’t become quite the man he always thought, or perhaps feared, he would?

Certainly, especially during this fandom old home week, I am always fascinated by the way fandoms sometimes migrate collectively to new interests. For example, it seems a large contingent of the broken-hearted over Torchwood‘s third season moved to White Collar en masse: No aliens, but the pretty suits and good banter have made a certain amount of sense as a new focus.

So I have to wonder now if there’s a fair portion of us who somehow migrated from Harry Potter to Glee or rather, from Severus Snape to Kurt Hummel, because after the tragedy of Snape’s end (Snake bubble to the head? Really?) it just feels so damn good to watch this very difficult, talented, wounded, and vicious boy who just might be able to save himself.