not language but a map

Right, so. This fic requires me to talk a little bit about why I wrote it; that, as it happens, is just the nature of this particular beast. My apologies—I generally attempt to avoid doing this sort of thing, but in this case, it’s kind of important to me, so: 

I am not, in any noticeable way, in the Glee fandom. I watch the show, largely because I marathoned the first two seasons last spring in a drugged, post-surgical haze and could not quit it; I pop up every once with an opinion or a feel on tumblr, but by and large I’m not all that invested. However! This season, Glee bungled a lesbian storyline so fucking badly that it still boggles my mind, and I just. There’s bad storytelling, and then there’s irresponsible storytelling, and then there’s setting up easily one of the most horrifying concepts I can imagine and not doing any proper follow through, and…rrrgh. 

I started writing this story the night “Mash-Off” aired, and then I stopped, halfway through, and didn’t touch it again until today. I, myself, went through the experience of being a queer teenage girl in Ohio, and large swathes of this story are based on my own experience, and the experiences of my peers; I worried that I’d be cutting too close to home, that I’d be crossing the dangerous line into the territory of self-insert, that my visceral emotional reaction to this storyline would prevent me from writing anything about it in a readable way. But the thing is, there are stories that aren’t being told, stories about girls and women who are trying to figure it out like anyone else, and if us queer girls from swing states aren’t going to tell them ourselves, no one is going to tell them for us.

So this is the story of how it could have gone for Santana, of how I think it would have gone for Santana, in the aftermath of what happened in “Mash-Off.” This is the story of high school and what happened after; this is the story of a girl growing up and figuring it out. And, yeah, you know what, a little bit it’s my story, and a little bit it’s the story of every brilliant, beautiful queer girl I’ve met who’s called this state home, and mostly it’s just one of a hundred thousand stories I wish the media was telling, because they are so worth hearing, every last one of them. ♥