sharing a three and a half page essay, comparing and contrasting blaine and rachel, that i wrote for my english class because i *could*
i wrote it in about three hours and idk how confident i am in it, but whatever
cw: rachel hate
Blaine Anderson and Rachel Berry from the Fox Network Television show Glee are very similar characters, but my thoughts and opinions on them are very different. Their character’s relationships follow similar arcs and the two of them have similar roles within their glee clubs, and even dress similarly. However, as similar as they may seem, they have some key differences and are far from the same character.
Rachel is introduced in the first episode of the first season, Pilot, and right away, the type of character she will be is obvious. She will be the confident, gold star of the Glee club, the person who gets the solos and takes the lead when it is needed. Blaine is introduced very differently. First of all, he is not introduced until the sixth episode of the second season, Never Been Kissed, and at first, he is just a much needed shoulder for Kurt to cry on.
Although they are both the leads for their respective glee clubs, Rachel for the New Directions and Blaine for the Warblers, right off the bat, Blaine is written to be more likable than Rachel. Rachel is written as a talented, yet self centered character who is liked by the glee club director, Mr. Schuester, more than her peers because of her talent, while Blaine is written as the charismatic and kind character who is very talented, but manages to not be self centered.
The thing that keeps stories moving is a character’s goals and how they go about achieving them. In Glee, it is clear that Blaine and Rachel have two different goals, Rachel's being being in the biggest spotlight she can at any given moment, and Blaine’s being having a stable relationship with Kurt and getting to perform, no matter the context or size of the spotlight. Because of this, their reactions to similar situations are very different. For example, when, in the twenty-first episode of the third season, “Nationals,” somebody asks Rachel for an autograph, she gets very excited and loves the taste of fame, it is very clear that she is happy that her talent is being appreciated, especially because she is being recognized as more talented than her fellow glee club members, as they are not asked for autographs. When Blaine is in a similar situation, having it be pointed out to him that his talent is more appreciated than his fellow glee club members, he reacts negatively. While both Kurt and Blaine are in the Dalton Warblers, Kurt says that it seems like the Warblers are “Blaine and the pips” and Blaine doesn’t like the idea that he is considered more deserving of the spotlight than other people in the Warblers.
Rachel and Blaine have many differences, but they are also very similar, right down to their outfits. Rachel, and Blaine when he starts going to McKinley, both dress very preppy, with Blaine wearing button downs and sweater vests and boat shoes and Rachel wearing pleated skirts and her sweaters and flats or small heels.
Along with the similarities in their outfits, their relationship arcs in Season four are similar. In “The Breakup,” an episode where all four of the main couples in the show at the time–Kurt and Blaine, Will and Emma, Santana and Brittany, and Finn and Rachel–either break up or have a big fight. Although all four couples have big, emotional scenes, Finn and Rachel and Kurt and Blaine’s scenes are intercut, with all four of them being visible in the background or foreground of some parts of the scene.
Even the storyline and scenes leading up to their breakups are parallels. In the scenes right before both couples break up, Rachel sings a duet version of Give Your Heart a Break with Brody and Blaine sings an acoustic version of Teenage Dream, each performance cuing their respective boyfriends into the fact that something is very, very wrong.
Even earlier, we see that both couples are trying to maintain long distance relationships with inadequate communication. For Kurt and Blaine, Kurt’s job at Vogue.com, school, Kurt’s attempt at his band: Pamela Lansbury, and the general hustle of living in New York are keeping Kurt from prioritizing Blaine in his life. For Rachel and Finn, Finn’s sixteen days in the army and his shame in his semi-honorable discharge so early in his failed army career, keep Finn from even contacting Rachel. The reason that both couples break up is also the same; somebody cheated. Blaine was with Eli C. and Rachel kissed Brody. It’s almost as if the two storylines are just copied and pasted.
It seems as though the writers of Glee love making Blaine and Rachel similar. They make them so similar, in fact, that in the first episode of the fourth season, “The New Rachel,” Blaine competes to be and is eventually voted as, the “new Rachel.” I find it very interesting that it is around this time that many fans of Glee start to dislike Blaine, because it seems to me that they just don’t like the Rachel-like qualities that Blaine starts to take on.
Even when Baine is acting very similarly to Rachel, there seems to be more reasoning. Blaine is looking for control over something in his life to try to stop feeling like he was floating in the abyss after losing his tether that is Kurt. This is made clear by how he looks for control. In the seventh episode of the fifth season, “Puppet Master,” Blaine acts in a very Rachel-like way and comes into the choir room, announces that Mr. Sheuster is busy, and then tries to act as the teacher for the day and convince the rest of the glee club to do what he wants to do for their next competition. When he’s unable to convince the rest of the glee club, he makes puppets of Kurt and some of the members of the glee club so that he can control them. This is one of the things that hints to his depression and anxiety throughout the show, something that I won’t be getting into.
Maybe my love of Blaine and dislike of Rachel comes down to how much each of them are developed throughout the show. After all, although women make up more of the population than men, according to a study conducted by Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, a character is four times more likely to be a man than a woman in literature ((USC) Study finds that males are represented four times more than females in literature), this statistic also bleeds into other forms of storytelling, such as movies and television. This makes women a minority in media. Because of that, writers and directors tend to put less work into developing characters who are women than they put into developing characters who are men, because their philosophy is that at least they put this minority into their piece of media.
Although Blaine and Rachel have many parallels and similarities, a key difference between them is their goals in life. This makes the way that their similarities presented themselves throughout the show very different, which leads to me, somebody who is a lot more similar to Blaine than I am to Rachel, to like Blaine a lot more.
