The list of ways in which Glee's Blaine Anderson is absolutely nothing like Queer as Folk's Brian Kinney is a long one, and includes almost every personality trait, virtue, and fault I can think of.

There is, however, one major way in which they're alike, and it's this: Their most devoted fans are absolutely incapable of allowing the slightest fragment of blame to fall on either of them for anything they do, and are correspondingly prone to condemning the people who hurt them far out of proportion to any canonical evidence that either was actually hurt in the first place.

Queer as Folk example: Lindsay telling Brian to go to the White Party instead of staying for her wedding. Brian didn't want to go to the wedding. He said so forty or fifty thousand times, in graphic detail. When he finally relents and tells her he'll go, she also relents, and tells him to go to the White Party and have a great time.

Brian skips happily down the stairs to go dance and fuck, and the Brian-worshipping fandom promptly attacked Lindsay for cruelly rejecting Brian's apparently tender and fragile attempt at showing friendship -- a cruel rejection for which there is not one iota of supporting evidence in canon.

I am constantly seeing the same thing with Blaine. I can't remember exactly when I first noticed it, but it was particularly striking during "Big Brother," when the bootstrapping of explanations for everything wrong in Blaine's life was dazzling. And right now, of course, it's going on with the promos for the next episode, in which Brittany bans hair gel from the prom and tells Blaine, in typical ditzy fashion, that she doesn't like the way he looks.

You'd think Blaine was a puppy and Brittany had garotted him.

I suppose I could be wrong, but my guess is Blaine isn't going to give two moment's thought to what she said. Nor is it the first mean thing Brittany has said (she took Rachel down pretty hard a time or two, and she was frequently a "mean girl" in Season One).

What's more, Blaine himself was pretty nasty to Sam when Sam came back to New Directions, and he did more than make a context-less remark about someone's looks; he accused Sam of being a whore.

Now, I love Blaine and Brian a lot. I don't require that my real life friends and family be perfect before I love them, and I don't need my fictional characters to be perfect, either.

Apparently, however, some fans do. Because the mere suggestion that either of their guys even has a flaw, or that anyone might be justified or, at least, not be damned to the fires of hell, for anything bad they might have done to their heroes, sends them into such a frenzy of ret-conning and bootstrapping and sheer backstory-inventing that they often seem to have constructed an entire new character and show all their own -- and one that varies a great deal from the show the rest of us watch.

I mean, I saw some tortuous meta the other day about how Blaine needed his gel because of his PTSD from getting bashed at his school dance.

I seriously, seriously fault Glee for giving us what sounds like a severe gay-bashing in the backstory of a character and then doing jack shit with it. And I hope we do learn more about it, and it's not just some kind of random factoid to explain a ten second hesitation in accepting Kurt's prom invitation last year, and why he didn't like Kurt's kilt.

But as of this moment, we don't have anything in canon to suggest that Blaine needs to be handled with extra care around any sort of school dance, nor that Blaine is upset at the gel ban for any reason other than the sartorial. Even if we do end up being given that, there's also zero canonical evidence (so far) that Brittany knows about his past, nor that she meant anything rational by her gel ban, nor even what she meant about not liking the way he looks. I mean, she thinks Joe is a girl. Who knows that the world looks like to Brittany S. Pierce?

And even if it was mean, was it truly meaner than a dozen other things that have happened on Glee that didn't involve Blaine, about which these same fans had no opinion or reaction?

Anyway, just venting. I've never changed a Brianite's mind and I'm sure the Blainers will prove equally immune to my persuasive skills. But I still say Brian and Blaine don't need to be perfect to be loved, and they're not perfect, and the people in their lives are also not perfect, and don't need to be for Brian and Blaine to love them.

Or for us to love them all.

Has there ever been a crossover funnier and more in-character for both sets of characters than this brilliant little Friends x Queer as Folk gem from LJ's darksylvia?

No More Ugly Naked Guy

Which of these scenes do you think is the most romantic in Season Two?

Which of these scenes is the most romantic in Season Three:

Which scene is the most romantic in Season Four:

Which of these is the most romantic in Season Five: