Hunting the Unicorn

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Harsher in Hindsight: The Fanfic.

"Here is there, and high is low; all may be undone. What is true, no two men know; what is gone is gone." Fairy tales are harder to live through than you'd think. —The story's summary.

Written by CrossoverQueen (aka Sharysa), this is a character study of Kurt Hummel and Blaine Anderson from Glee. Like many Klaine-centric fanfics, Hunting the Unicorn takes place before and during Kurt's time at Dalton Academy. Unlike many such fanfics, it is influenced by The Last Unicorn and written in a similar style.

The author originally planned it as a short piece that addressed Kurt's characterization switch from the beginning of the show to the episode "Sexy," but she discovered that the Dalton Arc and the novel's plot and themes matched up very well in her head, and the story quickly became a Deconstruction Fic of Kurt and Blaine's relationship. It draws parallels between the Glee characters and those of The Last Unicorn, though with the current length, they are becoming much looser.

Excerpts and poetry from the novel set each chapter's tone, and several scenes are inspired by parts of the book. While it is certainly not a happy story, there are lighter moments that keep it from being too depressing.

Read it on FanFiction.Net, Livejournal's Gleefic community, or on the unrelated Gleefic Archive, where it gained status as a Featured Story. It is also on Archive of Our Own here.

Tropes used in Hunting the Unicorn include:

• Adults Are Useless: Averted with the Dalton staff, although Blaine's parents aren't too useful.
• Adult Fear: Blaine is a minefield of this: He's painfully lonely, makes absurd mistakes because nobody's there to tell him otherwise (or he waits until the absolute last minute to ask for help), and then he gets a Stalker with a Crush who kidnaps him and his friends. And is he a juvenile delinquent? No, he goes around being a Knight in Shining Armor because that's what his parents taught him before they dropped out of his life.
• All Love Is Unrequited: Blaine comes damn close. Two guys were his unrequited love interests, his father's emotionally negligent, and two more guys had to deal with Blaine's own Selective Obliviousness. Five people, one successful relationship. And Alex makes it six.
• Alternate Universe Fic: After the episode "New York," it's completely (and abruptly) diverged from canon.
• A Man Is Always Eager: Played With. There's nothing wrong with losing your virginity once you're legally able to consent--it's when you also think Sex Equals Love that things end badly.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: Blaine doesn't actually say he loves Kurt yet, but it's obvious what his huge speech in The Clock means.
• Anxiety Dreams / Bad Dreams: Blaine (both) and Kurt (the second). Both are symbolic.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Wes wins any bet he makes, and a past Warbler nearly died because he wasn't careful. Played for laughs until he ups the ante on a Kurt/Blaine duet at Regionals.
  • Kurt's got a minor case of this, seeing as he wanted a Knight in Shining Armor and he got one. With all the baggage this entails.
• The Bet: "Kurt and Blaine will hook up within the next decade, it's just a matter of what will finally do it."
• Becoming the Mask / Love Redeems: Blaine's good manners used to be just a habit. Then poor, miserable Kurt came along, and Blaine liked making him happy.
• Berserk Button: You hurt Kurt, and his boyfriend will take you on even if you're twice his size. You hurt Blaine, and twenty-one guys will want to rip your kneecaps out. Also, don't joke about gay marriage with Blaine.
  • Kyle threatened to burn the guy Blaine slept with alive in his own house.
  • Kurt's not taking Blaine's abduction very well.
• Big Fancy House: The Andersons' mansion. Has a voice-activated gate, a huge driveway (that Wes implies to be on the small side), a pool, and two theaters. Blaine's theater has movies from the 1920s, and at first Kurt thought it was just a really big room until Blaine started opening a bunch of secret compartments.
• Born in the Wrong Century: Played With. Blaine's knightly tendencies mean that he's self-sacrificing, honorable, and far too naive for modern standards. See Shown Their Work and Deconstruction Fic below.
  • Depressingly lampshaded by Kurt in The Harpy when he tells his mom he has to remind Blaine that "he is in fact his boyfriend and not his liege lord" to which Blaine always gives him confused Puppy Dog Eyes. So yeah, Kurt sees the Courtly in Courtly Love in-universe apparently.
• But Not Too Foreign: Blaine and Wes are half-Filipino. It turns out relevant to Blaine's character.
• But Not Too Gay: An indirect result of Blaine and Kurt's various issues. Heavily lampshaded by the Warblers.
• Butterfly of Doom / Thirteen Is Unlucky: The thirteenth chapter is named after the butterfly in The Last Unicorn. It's the chapter where Blaine gets a stalker.
• Break the Cutie: Obviously Kurt, but Blaine comes pre-broken. And they're not done yet.
• Breather Chapter: The Outlaws and The Men At Arms.
• Broken Ace: Played With. Blaine is obviously type two, but he's literally an ace who got broken. His chivalric tendencies are overcompensation for his regrets and low self-esteem.
• Call Back: Story-wise it's a Call Forward, but "[X] is just an excuse to spend time with you" makes an appearance in Blaine's flashback about Terry.
• Call Forward: "May I have this dance?"
• Calling the Old Man Out: Blaine tries to call his dad out on his Parental Neglect--but he's concussed and can't seem to recognize that he's actually talking to Greg, who is very clearly concerned.
• Cannot Spit It Out: The Warblers are increasingly annoyed by Kurt and Blaine's inability to say "I love you."
  • Until Nikos. And then things kind of go south.
• Central Theme: Purity--how it wouldn't work in reality, and how it would.
  • Being broken can make you a better person.
  • Desire. There's "what you want vs. what you say you want," "what you want vs. what someone else wants," and even "what you want vs. what else you want." Implicitly, "what you want vs. what's right" is there if you squint.
  • Sex. It had to be said.
• Cerebus Retcon: Three major aspects of Blaine's character have been retconned: Blaine's Knight in Shining Armor personality, played as straight as possible, would be extremely unhealthy in modern society. His obliviousness to love is even less fun when you're not Kurt; on the sad side, Blaine completely believed a friend's excuse to invoke a Dance of Romance--alone, in an empty room, with nobody watching. On the Fridge Horror side, he has no idea that he's garnered the attentions of a stalker.
  • Klaine's annoying chastity is torn apart. Unlike most fanfics where Kurt is the wibbly, terrified Uke, Blaine seems to project that image on him because Blaine tried to invoke Sex Equals Love out of loneliness and naivete. Not only did that fail hard, he was pretty clearly unprepared for his siblings going crazy and is now carrying lots of emotional baggage. Their Sickeningly Sweethearts portrayal is an extension of this.
  • The Warblers treat everything as Serious Business, which means Blaine had no idea they were genuinely worried about the stalker following him around.
• Character Development: Blaine and the Warblers get a lot of fleshing out, as does Karofsky.
• Chekhov's Gag: The Warblers' buddy system turns out very justified in Nikos, while the "Tom and Jerry" gag shows up again at the end of The Cat.
• Chekhov's Gun: David's cuff-links. In The Outlaws, they're just another tracking device that he uses to keep tabs on Klaine's progress. Fifteen chapters later, they record at least part of Blaine, Wes, and David's kidnapping.
• Chekhov's Gunman: In The Cat, Jerry from the fourth chapter reappears. It's Greg.
• Chekhov's Habit: David writes everything down. It comes in handy when you're keeping track of a stalker.
• Code Name: After the Warblers clear up a mistake involving another student getting welded into a closet, Wes and David hear the dean call up someone named Jerry. He then gives his own name as "Tom."
• Continuity Lock Out: Averted. You don't need to read The Last Unicorn to enjoy the story, although it helps with shout-outs. It would be difficult to find someone who hasn't been exposed to fairy tales, after all.
• Contrived Coincidence: Averted in The Cat. A concussed Blaine, who is in his stalker's basement instead of a hospital, calls his dad and finally calls him out on his neglect. ...Except he's talking to Greg.
  • Played With in The Skull. Kurt finds Blaine in an alley, calls it the "best coincidence ever," and starts calling Finn over. Which lets Alex find them.
• Cool Big Sis and Brother: Blaine's siblings Kyle and Lydia are respectively a photographer and an art student studying in California, and have a much better relationship with Blaine than their parents do. Then again, it doesn't do much good since they're not home very often.
• Courtly Love: A depressing take on Kurt and Blaine's But Not Too Gay portrayal. Kurt's not too enthusiastic on the matter of sex, but Blaine takes it really far. And he has a reason.
• Cuffs Off, Rub Wrists: Averted. Wes and David are tied to chairs. After they're released, neither can walk properly and they suffer pins and needles, which tips the police officer off that they've been like that for much longer than they think. That means Blaine's been wandering the city in a blind panic for two hours.
• Culture Clash / Values Dissonance: A source of conflict for Blaine, whose mother is old-fashioned.
• Curb Stomp Battle: A literal (attempted) curb-stomp is mentioned in Blaine's flashback about Terry.
• Crazy Prepared: The Warblers. Played for Drama with The Butterfly, where they refuse to let Blaine go around alone. For good reason, as mentioned in Cerebus Retcon and Fridge Horror.
  • And boy, does it pay off in Nikos.
• Crying Wolf: The Warblers' penchant for melodrama is partly why Blaine had no idea about Alex.
• Cry Into Chest: Kurt with Blaine in The Midnight Carnival. Blaine with Kurt in the The Clock.
• Damned By Faint Praise: The only thing Kyle can say about his and Blaine's father is that he could be worse.
• Dance of Romance: Terry tried to invoke this. It didn't work.
• Dark Fic: The fic starts with Kurt being miserable, exposes Blaine's Broken Ace status very thoroughly, and the author's notes on Livejournal warns people that there might be assault (physical or sexual) later on.
• Deconstruction Fic: And how. Ties in nicely with Cerebus Retcon above.
  • Blaine's chivalrous nature makes him a good person, but he's also insecure, fragile, and naive. The Warblers poke fun at how painfully romantic and chaste he is, while his decision to let Kurt go back to McKinley is derided as being Kurt's bitch. On the other hand, the Warblers, Greg, and Blaine's siblings are so protective of him that he doesn't tell them things because he's afraid they'll overreact.
  • The Power of Love changes both Kurt and Blaine for the better, but it can't help with Kurt's insecurities, it makes Blaine's Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality worse, and it's pretty clear that Blaine never expected Kurt to stay at Dalton anyway. This sets the readers and the Warblers up for an I (Would) Choose To Stay situation... until Kurt really does say he wouldn't, because he's not that kind of person.
  • The work is Troperiffic, but trying to invoke a trope in-story will often end badly.
• Deuteragonist: Blaine (deuteragonist) and Kurt (protagonist).
• Did Not Get The Guy: Terry didn't get Blaine.
• Distressed Dudes: Blaine, Wes, and David get locked in Alex's basement. It Got Worse when Finn got locked in the Navigator's trunk and lost track of Kurt and Blaine, who are no doubt being pursued by Alex.
• Double Meaning Title: The Princess refers to the guy Blaine dated, but it could also refer to Blaine--a Rare Male Example of a Princess Classic due to his optimistic and naive nature. Let's not forget that Kurt's Expy is the unicorn, and the chapter revolves around a certain purity. Or lack thereof.
• Dramatic Irony: The fic runs on Type Two.
  • For someone who always worries about his boyfriend getting hurt by the cold, cruel world, Blaine is the one in genuine need of protection by the thirteenth chapter. And the nineteenth.
  • The Warblers constantly tease Blaine about his Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality, unaware that he has a really good reason for it. Until Drinn.
  • Kurt and Blaine both view the other as a Love Martyr. This means they try really hard to stay honest and considerate.
  • Meta-examples: Though "I Am Unicorn" is campy and lighthearted, this is probably why it makes the story feel worse. Similarly, "The First Time" is adorable, romantic, and what fic!Blaine really wanted his first time to be like.
  • Blaine is the perfect boyfriend because the rest of his life is miserable. Which he refuses to complain about because his parents taught him to be chivalrous.
  • Blaine phones his dad and finally calls him out on his Parental Neglect. The problem is, he's concussed and has no idea he's actually talking to Greg.
• Dramedy: It's a mix of Glee and The Last Unicorn. Of course it's a dramedy.
• Dude Magnet: Blaine is a toned-down example with "only" two guys on his record plus one he doesn't know about, but he makes it up in sadness and terror.
• Dysfunction Junction: Blaine's family: A well-meaning but extremely old-fashioned mother, a distant father, a Parental Substitute, and two well-adjusted, caring older siblings... who are almost never home.
• Easy Amnesia: Invoked and Played With by Terry. He pretends that his concussion was more serious than it was so he'd have an excuse to invoke a Dance of Romance. It doesn't work.
  • Averted in Nikos, which gets worse in The Cat. Blaine gets a concussion, wakes up with no memory of the past half-hour (during which David and Wes say that he was rambling incoherently), and after calling home he mistakes his Parental Substitute Greg for his dad.
• Elephant in the Living Room: In-story, Blaine's sheer terror regarding sex. For readers, the warnings about assault and Blaine's abduction/pursuit by Alex are almost certainly connected.
• Epiphany Therapy: Subverted. Blaine has an epiphany in The Harpy, but it's a messy ramble that doesn't solve his issues.
• Exact Eavesdropping: Played With. Wes and David track Kurt for three hours before the Kliss, but then they accidentally watch Kurt tell Blaine about his nightmare.
  • And then comes The Clock.
  • And Nikos.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Fairy tales are harder to live through than you'd think.
• Exact Words: Fans of the novel may have noticed that in The Hunters, the quotes that the author uses are from the beginning of TLU. The story will end "when she runs out of quotes"--she never said anything about chronological order.
  • Blaine's "never been anyone's boyfriend." He just really, really wanted to be.
  • The fic itself could be seen as this, seeing as Klaine is a fairy-tale romance and the story was inspired by the Deconstruction of a Fairy Tale.
• Expy: Invoked.
  • Kurt is an expy of the unicorn, as is Brittany. He's also Lady Amalthea.
  • Blaine is an expy of Schmendrick and Prince Lir. With The Princess, he's also Molly.
  • Karofsky is compared to the harpy before his Heel Face Turn.
  • Wes might be another expy of Molly, David is Schmendrick, and the Warblers are Captain Cully's outlaws.
  • Blaine's father is Drinn and King Haggard.
  • Blaine's stalker is either the Red Bull or the spider from the Midnight Carnival.
• Extreme Doormat: A Cerebus Retcon of Blaine's Shallow Love Interest portrayal--he tries to be Kurt's perfect boyfriend because he's a Lonely Rich Kid with no self-esteem. Who had a REALLY bad breakup. Very much Played for Drama.
• Face Palm: Quite a lot, regarding Blaine's stupidity. Bob Stoneridge mentions the urge to Head Desk when David tells him about Blaine's stalker.
• Fan Art: The author made a banner for the Gleefic archive, pictured at the top.
• Fatal Flaw: Blaine's unquestioning trust in people is heading towards this.
• The First Cut Is the Deepest: Oh, Blaine. Bonus points for the guy being his literal first.
• Fix Fic: On LiveJournal, the author says Blaine's Character Development could have been similar if RIB hadn't kept pandering to the loudest fans.
• The Four Loves: Blaine's lack of Storge (intended and unintended) means that he throws himself into Eros and Phileo. The former led to him losing his virginity in an attempt to invoke Sex Equals Love, which didn't go well, and his Agape has attracted his stalker Alex.
  • On the positive side, the Warblers are a perfect example of Phileo and the Eros with Kurt is mutually genuine. Blaine's siblings and Greg are also an example of Storge, even if two-thirds of them aren't there to show it.
• Foregone Conclusion: Kurt leaves Dalton. But this time, we get to see Blaine's heart break into tiny little bits. Fun times.
• Foreshadowing: Here is there, and high is low; all may be undone. What is true, no two men know; what is gone is gone.
  • Kurt mentions back in the second chapter that Blaine's incorrigibly sheltered. By now, it's pretty obvious that he is.
• Freudian Slip / Accidental Innuendo: A serious example at the end of The Princess--Blaine is thinking of what to say to Kurt, and it starts running together into "I want you."
• Genre Savvy: The Warblers, as well as Kurt. Played for Laughs for the first, increasingly Played for Drama as the story goes on.
  • In The Clock, the Warblers are Wrong Genre Savvy. But only when it comes to romance, as they are perfectly justified in telling a staff member that Blaine's getting stalked.
• Hates Being Touched: Kurt says he didn't want Blaine to touch him in a dream, and that's enough for Blaine to keep his distance.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: Blaine's lack of self-esteem shows painfully in his Love Martyr and Extreme Doormat personality.
• Hero Secret Service: The Warblers are a minor case for Blaine, and they are very right to do so.
• Honor Before Reason: Blaine follows this and verges on Too Dumb to Live (in the modern era, at least).
• Horrible Judge of Character: Blaine. Played With in that while he is selectively oblivious, his real flaw comes from being insanely trusting.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The chapters are all titled after characters except for The Midnight Carnival, The Quest, and The Clock.
• If I Can't Have You: Alex threatens to run over a concussed Blaine with Blaine's car if David or Wes calls 911.
• I Have This Friend: Who has a stalker.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Played With. Blaine considers Kurt to be this, but it seems more due to the pedestal he's put Kurt on. Blaine himself is a much better example, given all the shit he's gone through.
• In the Style Of: Peter S. Beagle, and fairy tales in general.
  • The chapter Drinn juxtaposes the main chapter with Blaine's life told as a literal Fairy Tale.
• In Vino Veritas: Wes goes from stoic to highly emotional (and convinced that Blaine is Harry Potter).
• It Got Worse: Blaine's life. He has an estranged father--depressing, but logical. Then we see just how much Kurt leaving affects him, because Blaine had his heart broken before. And in The Hunters, we find out that despite everyone's assumptions, Blaine's not a virgin. He clearly isn't happy about it, and did we mention that Blaine is seventeen? He needs a fucking hug.
  • Turns out Blaine was sixteen when he tried to invoke Sex Equals Love, and had a horrible breakup because the dude didn't seem very inclined to take responsibility for him. No wonder he got so upset in "Sexy."
  • And that's not getting into the plot, which involves Blaine's stalker kidnapping him, Wes, and David. Meanwhile, Blaine got a concussion that leaves him barely aware of things.
  • He is now wandering the city in blind terror and nigh-incoherent. There was a Hope Spot where Kurt and Finn found him half an hour after heading to Westerville, but now Finn's locked in the Navigator's trunk and we have no idea where Kurt or Blaine are.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Played With. Blaine lets Kurt transfer back because he wants Kurt to be happy, but the Warblers try to make Kurt stay because they want Blaine to be happy.
• I Will Wait for You: In a familial sense, Blaine's been waiting for his father to accept him for the past two years. And there are signs that he's done this romantically without success. Confirmed in The Princess.
• Lampshade Hanging: The Warblers, so much. Kurt and Blaine are a Lifetime couple, "Candles" is only romantic if you don't pay attention to the lyrics, Blaine is a chivalrous idiot, and he uses too much hair-gel.
  • In a serious example, Kyle lampshades how ridiculous it would be for someone to turn down sleeping with Blaine.
  • "We forgot about David's cuff-links."
• Let's See You Do Better: A short version of the author's notes is that "There are so many things RIB could have done with Blaine and Kurt, but since they're busy pandering to the rabid twelve-year-olds, I'll do it."
• Locked Out of the Loop: Played With. The Warblers try not to lock Blaine out, but since they treat everything as a life-or-death matter, Blaine thinks they're just exaggerating about that guy hanging around campus.
• Lonely Rich Kid: Blaine, so much.
• Love Hurts: For Blaine, romantically and otherwise.

You make me better. You make me better, and now you're going to leave, and I have this--stupid feeling that you won't come back. Because no one ever comes back to me, Kurt, especially not someone like you.

• • It gets worse in The Princess and The Harpy.
  • And The Cat.
• Love Makes You Crazy: In Nikos. See If I Can't Have You above.
• Love Martyr: Blaine for his father and Kurt. His father is neglectful as opposed to a stereotypical homophobe, and Kurt genuinely cares about him, but the above quote has some ugly implications. Especially since Blaine's not a virgin.
  • Blaine is now a full member of Love Martyrdom, what with making excuses for his Parental Neglect and sleeping with someone to try and feel closer to him.
• May-September Romance: Besides Kurt, at least two of Blaine's past love interests are older. Jeremiah's older, Terry works for UPS while Blaine's still in school, and the guy in The Princess is implied to be older since Kyle puts so much emphasis on Blaine being sixteen. Alex is older, too.
• Meaningful Echo: Not exact echoes, but:

Kurt to Blaine: Can you stay here for a while? (Blaine does.) Blaine to Kurt: Would you want to stay with me? (Kurt wouldn't.) Blaine: I wanted him to stay with me. (It didn't work.)

• Men Don't Cry: Averted. It's okay for men to cry when they go through as much as Kurt does. Or if their heart is utterly broken like Blaine's is.
  • Or if they're getting therapy and facing particularly hard mistakes.
  • Or if they're locked in a basement with no memory of the past half-hour and desperately calling their neglectful dad for help.
• Mood Whiplash: Nikos is equal parts absurd, terrifying, and heartwarming. One reviewer couldn't stop laughing.
• Mundane Utility: Wes can re-route an entire school's worth of security cameras (or at least a significant portion of them), and he uses it to secretly record Kurt and Blaine. He also has a near-100% success rate in betting pools, about anything, and uses it for solving Warbler drama.
  • Re-routing the security cameras wasn't so mundane after all.
• My Beloved Smother: Blaine's mother disapproves of Blaine's singing, though it's not as clear-cut as most examples: She's Filipino, grew up poor, and doesn't want Blaine to end up a Starving Artist. Wes calls her traditional despite his own mother being Filipino.
  • Played With in The Princess--after Kurt talks about how crazy Burt would go in Blaine's situation, Blaine's mother doesn't take Blaine losing his virginity very seriously.
• Nakama: The New Directions. The Warblers are also close-knit and care a lot about Kurt and Blaine's relationship. When Blaine implies that his situation with Kurt has happened before (with even worse consequences), they're rightly pissed.

Nick: We need to find that bastard and rip his fucking kneecaps out!

• • They also set up a buddy system to keep track of Blaine once David realizes Blaine is getting stalked.
  • Wes and David force Alex to kidnap them because they won't leave Blaine alone. The other Warblers are helping the police look for them.
• No Name Given: Blaine's first.
• Non-Indicative Name: The Princess and The Butterfly are two of the biggest Wham Chapters in the story.
• Noodle Incident: How did Blaine end up stranded in the rain with a drunk Wes and David? Wes won a bet.
  • David and Wes once hospitalized Blaine's dad while the Andersons' mansion was being renovated. It made the paramedics laugh at him.
  • Nick was dragged into therapy earlier in the year. When someone asks him about it, he just flips the guy off with a Death Glare.
  • The Warblers worked with the drama students once, and they refuse to do it again.
• Oblivious to Love: Blaine, so much. And with The Butterfly, it has a terrifying bent.
• Oh Crap: When David realizes that Blaine's stalker has slipped past campus security disguised as a delivery guy.
  • The Warblers let off a Mass "Oh Crap" via text-message in Nikos.
• One of Us: A lot of readers are tropers, and some have read The Last Unicorn.
• Papa Wolf / Mama Bear: Greg, Burt, and Carole, in a strong contrast to Blaine's parents. Emphasized in King Haggard, where Luke asks Greg why he didn't find out Blaine got kidnapped until hours later.

Greg: I didn't call you because I was looking for Blaine.

• Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality: Obviously Kurt, but David reveals that Blaine has "chivalrous panic attacks" about pushing Kurt too much. Both are (un)motivated by a host of insecurities, played for dramedy. And we've found out that Blaine's not a virgin, which makes all of the jokes sound horrible now.
  • Later, we see Blaine get uncomfortable listening to "Touch Me". He also takes lots of cold showers to deal with his feelings, and he can barely talk about it to anyone.
• Parental Substitute: Greg, the Andersons' house manager; he has shades of Old Retainer.
• Parental Neglect: Luke to Blaine. And Blaine's mother is incredibly lax on sex-ed.
• Played for Drama / Played for Laughs: Sometimes both at the same time. It's a Glee fanfic, after all.
• Playing with a Trope: There's a lot of this. It helps that the author is One of Us.
• The Power of Friendship: Played With realistically. The Warblers are insanely invested in Klaine and will tamper with school cameras just to validate a bet, but they genuinely care about their members, such as dragging Blaine into therapy and telling someone that Blaine has a stalker.
  • And forcing the stalker to kidnap them if he doesn't want them to call the police.
• The Power of Love: Is great, but not enough to keep Kurt or Blaine from having insane insecurities. Or for Kurt to stay at Dalton.
  • Sex is important, but it does not equal love. Not even for you, Blaine.
• Puppy Dog Eyes: Both Kurt and Blaine.
• Reality Ensues: And does it ever. Look at all the tropes that have been Played With and deconstructed.
• Reality Subtext: The author totally didn't base Blaine's mother off of her own. ...Okay, she did.
  • Blaine's failed invocation of Sex Equals Love is pretty common in Real Life... for girls.
• Real Dreams Are Weirder: Played With. Blaine and Kurt's dreams are plot-relevant, but they still skip around and follow strange logic. In a meta twist, Blaine's dreams in the eighth and eleventh chapters are lifted from the novel. Played for Drama in a more realistic manner than usual.
• Reconstruction: Veering on Decon Recon Switch by now. As hard as Kurt and Blaine have been deconstructed, the story still makes an effort to show how their relationship makes both of them happy.
  • And The Men At Arms reveals that as conflicting as Blaine's relationships with his parents are, his siblings and Greg certainly do care about him.
  • Therapy isn't as bad as Blaine thought it would be.
  • If the Warblers aren't a reconstruction of The Power of Friendship, nothing is.
• Refuge in Audacity: Secretly taping your friends for months? Creepy. Secretly taping your friends for months because you've got a $200 betting pool on them? Readers go, "Lol, those Warblers and their stalking!"
  • David, Nick, Trent, and Wes drag Blaine to counseling. Literally.
  • Nikos starts with Kurt and Blaine saying "I love you," abruptly cuts to Blaine, Wes, and David getting kidnapped, and ends with the Warblers freaking out via text-message.
• The Reveal: Frequently combined with Wham! Episode.
  • The Hunters: Blaine's not a virgin. Elaborated via Flash Back in The Princess.
  • The Butterfly: Blaine has a stalker. In Nikos, he kidnaps Blaine, Wes, and David.
  • The Cat: Blaine's father-figure Greg is "Jerry."
• Running Gag: The secret/emergency Warbler meetings, where they essentially lampshade everything about Kurt and Blaine. Nick is constantly harped on for smoking weed.
• Second Love: Kurt for Blaine.
• Secret Keeper: Wes promised he wouldn't tell anyone that Blaine stays up looking at family photos. Wes and David won't show anyone the accidental recording of Kurt and Blaine. Several of the Warblers know about Blaine's first relationship.
  • By default, Sarah is this.
  • Everyone is keeping some kind of secret from each other. Except Kurt and Blaine.
• Seme / Uke: Played With. Blaine looks like a standard seme, but is unbelievably trusting and naive. Meanwhile, Kurt looks like a standard uke but is far more assertive and confident than Blaine.
• Serious Business: The Warblers. They treat everything from bets, Zany Schemes, and relationships to emotional breakdowns and a Stalker with a Crush as if it's life-or-death. (The last two are justified.) Forty minutes is a record-breaking amount of time to resolve arguments.
  • Which has now been Cerebus Retconned (see Crying Wolf above).
• Sex Equals Love: Not necessarily. It gets worse if you try to invoke it.
• Shipper on Deck: The Warblers, dear god. We have Wes to thank for "Candles," by the way.

David: We need to subtly change his goal from transferring back there to staying with Blaine. (beat) At Dalton.

• Ship Tease: Jeff and Nick. They're almost always together, there's a reference to Jeff and Nick being the subject of Warbler bets, and considering Nick got hauled into counseling and won't tell anyone why...
  • In The Butterfly, a stoned Nick accidentally falls in the swimming pool and somehow mistakes Jeff for Batman. Nick then remembers his last name is Grayson. And worries that "Bruce" will whoop his ass for cursing so much.
  • In Drinn, Nick insists that Jeff give Blaine a hug, because Jeff's the only one pretty enough to cancel out the estrogen in Blaine's system.
• Shout-Out: Specific ones are:
  • The banner uses parts of "The Hunt of the Unicorn." The metaphor of hunting a unicorn refers to an impossible task, the quest for perfection, or both. However, only virgins can actually catch it, which is a huge subconscious conflict for Blaine. Because Kurt is the unicorn, but Blaine's not a virgin.
  • The shout-outs to Team Starkid and Harry Potter.
  • Blaine is half-Filipino, his eyes are tawny like Molly Grue's, and he twists his hands like Lir.
  • Kurt has a bad dream and tells Blaine, then asks him to sing to distract him from it. This is the turning point in Lir and Amalthea's relationship.
  • "NO MORE UNRESOLVED SEXUAL TENSION!"
  • Blaine's dreams are based off of the novel. In-universe, they're considered as weird as actual dreams.
  • "No power in the universe can stop us," "brain-pan," and the author uses "gorram" once. In "The Men-At-Arms" is the quote "He understands--he doesn't comprehend."
  • Nick's last name is Grayson. His name is Nick Grayson. Lampshaded in The Butterfly.
  • The Warblers need a countertenor for most Rent songs, so they'll have to settle for Spring Awakening.
  • Tom and Jerry are Code Names for the dean and Greg.
• Shower Of Repressed Sexuality: Blaine takes a lot of them.
• Shown Their Work: The author read a lot about chivalry to characterize Blaine instead of relying on The Theme Park Version of a Knight in Shining Armor, and explores both why chivalry works and why it doesn't.
  • She's also studying psychology and averts Epiphany Therapy or Single-Issue Psychology.
  • Unicorns are frequently thought of as sweet, helpless, and pure, and this is why Blaine's dreams involve Kurt turning into one or vice versa. But the author compares Kurt to the medieval unicorn, which is a symbol of pure wildness.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: Deconstructed in that Blaine has no other outlet for love besides Kurt, and he's also really conflicted about the other kind of feelings.
• Sir Swearsalot: Nick. Trying to watch his language makes things worse.
• Skewed Priorities: Nick was more worried about getting caught smoking weed than of potentially drowning. And the Warblers value their bets over the fuzzy legality of tampering with security cameras, although they do have lines they won't cross regarding Kurt and Blaine's privacy.
  • The Warblers are actually somewhat calm in Nikos, considering three of their members got kidnapped. It's only when Kurt finds out that the Mass "Oh Crap" is unleashed.
• Sophisticated As Hell: The Warblers, who use a profuse amount of Precision F Strikes.

Brandon: We're about to serenade a complete fucking stranger. Nick: Yeah, I vote in favor of fucking that. David: According to what I learned in Psych, inexplicable crying means that something's been fucked over!

• Stalker with a Crush: Alex, from The Butterfly onwards.
• The Stoic: Wes, though he has Hidden Depths as Blaine's Secret Keeper. Blaine is also very stoic, with shades of "Well Done, Son" Guy, Wide-Eyed Idealist, and Broken Ace.
• Subtext: Several of these tropes are implied heavily at most. And let's not forget the dreams.
• Sure, Let's Go with That: When Blaine said "I've never been anyone's boyfriend," Kyle and Lydia thought he was pretending his first relationship never happened. Blaine's not about to tell them the truth.
• Suspiciously Apropos Music: Invoked most notably during The Princess, where Blaine has a music therapy session. He sings "Samson" by Regina Spektor.
  • There's also The Creatures of Night, where the Warblers listen to "Touch Me" and Blaine ends up uncomfortable.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: In The Hunters, Blaine claims that he's not repressing his feelings. Though he is repressing his feelings about Kurt, they're very specific ones.
• Theme Naming: Kyle, Blaine, and Lydia. Their father is Luke.
• There Are No Therapists: Blaine avoids dealing with his issues because "they're not that bad" compared to Kurt's. They certainly aren't, but they're still pretty serious.
  • Nobody wants to see a therapist. Kurt doesn't want therapy because he might get pitied. Blaine and Kurt both rely on Wes and David for emotional support; the latter is studying to be a psychologist, yet doesn't even think that maybe they should talk to an actual counselor instead of their friends. Which is pretty much how real teens act.
  • No longer applicable, as of The Hunters.
• Thicker Than Water: Blaine won't let anyone question how his parents raised him, and he puts up with his father's Parental Neglect by saying things could be worse.
• Those Two Guys: Wes and David, when they're not being a Power Trio with Blaine. Jeff and Nick, also.
• Three Scenes, Two Dialogues: The Princess jumps between three different scenes (denoted by then, now, and later) and two dialogues. The first scene is what happened to Blaine a year earlier, while the second and third scenes are about Blaine telling Sarah and Kurt about it.
• Title Drop: In The Hunters.

Sarah: Hunting the unicorn--the way you are, just looking for it--that means you're trying to make yourself better.

• Too Dumb to Live: Blaine, physically and emotionally.
• Twofer Token Minority: Blaine is a gay hapa. Terry Hanari is also a gay Asian.
• Undercover Cop Reveal: Greg is Jerry.
• The Unfavorite: Blaine. When he tries to call home and get a ride from his dad, it takes three tries and his brother finally answers. It's implied this has happened before.
• Unlucky High School Friend: Terry, to Blaine.
• Unreliable Narrator: It's realistic unreliability (they're teenagers, after all), but there's a lot of misconceptions going around. On a technical note, the narration is third-person limited rather than omniscient, which skews a lot of things towards whoever is the narrator at the moment.
  • Alex is very unreliable. His sugary introduction in The Creatures of Night contrasts sharply with what he actually does in Nikos.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Only the freshmen at Dalton care that four Warblers are hauling Blaine around like a sack of potatoes. Apparently, they do this for at least one of their number every year.
  • Ms. Bradford bumps into Nick and Jeff, who are both soaking wet, and Nick is acting strangely (because he's high, but she doesn't know this). She immediately "gives the nurse a head's up."
• Used To Be A Good Father: Luke Anderson, which is why Blaine's Love Martyrdom is so depressing. In a subversion (inversion?), it's a wonder Blaine's stayed a sweet kid.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Blaine.
• Wham! Episode: The Clock, The Princess, and the second half of The Butterfly.
  • Nikos.
• Wham! Line: After all the Warblers' mostly-affectionate jokes at Blaine's lacking sex drive, "I'm not a virgin" hits really hard.
  • "Having a rough patch, Tom?" Said to the dean by Greg.
• What You Are in the Dark: Played With during The Clock for Kurt and Blaine; they're having a heartfelt talk about Kurt's transfer, and don't know they're being taped by the Warblers. Which leads to a subversion of The Power of Love--Blaine really has changed for the better and they're both head-over-heels for each other, but Kurt is too independent to be content with staying at Dalton.
  • David and Wes don't know they're being recorded either. When they need to decide between calling 911 or running, which would risk Blaine getting run over, they Take a Third Option by forcing Alex to kidnap all three of them.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: Jesus Christ, Blaine.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: The Warblers think Kurt and Blaine are a fairy tale couple and desperately want them to live happily ever after. Unfortunately, this story is based on two deconstructions of that very thing.
  • Blaine is so trusting and helpful that Greg needs to spell out how lucky he is to have met Kurt instead of a Manipulative Bastard or a Consummate Liar. (Or a Manipulative Bastard who didn't genuinely fall in love with him.)
  • Terry may have thought he and Blaine would be High School Sweethearts. Unfortunately for him, that title goes to Kurt.
  • And Blaine's stalker Alex thinks that 1) Blaine is in an All Take and No Give relationship, and 2) he's the Dogged Nice Guy who'll end up with Blaine in the end.
• Wrong Guy First: Heavily implied with Blaine. Confirmed in The Princess.
• X Meets Y: Glee meets The Last Unicorn, of course.
• You Are Too Late: The police find Wes and David in Alex's basement, but Blaine panicked and ran off two hours earlier.
• You Need to Get Laid: The Warblers think Blaine should. Inverted; getting laid was a huge factor in why he's so uptight.
• Zany Scheme: The Warblers try these to make Kurt stay at Dalton. They fail to various degrees.
  • They try to change Kurt's ringtone to a "Love overcomes all" song (Aqualung's "Brighter Than Sunshine"), but accidentally change it to a sad song (Augustana's "Boston"). Kurt's just confused.
  • They hack Blaine's Facebook to send Kurt a marriage request and a five-page poem. As gay marriage is still largely illegal in the US, it's a sore spot for Blaine.

Jeff: Thank god we didn't get the rings.

• • They lock Kurt and Blaine in the closet. Their motive isn't even recognized, since it's such a standard prank.