“With you, she was always caught up in schemes and takedowns, but that’s not really her. She’s intelligent, she’s intuitive. You know, she weeps when she watches Nights of Cabiria. If Blair’s happy, then maybe you should let her be.”

Dan Humphrey about Blair Waldorf: 4.18.

Ok, so despite the fact that I said I would remain purposefully blind, deaf and dumb on the subject of new developments in the Gossip Girl-verse, being a part of its internet life inevitably means you end up reading stuff even when you really don’t want to. For a perfect example of why, see the quote above. I couldn’t let this one go. Dan Humphrey, you insufferable hipster. “She weeps when she watches Nights of Cabiria”? I would weep too if I were forced to spend night after night trapped in a room in Brooklyn with one Daniel Humphrey as he extolled the virtues of Fellini whilst presumably wearing an ironic t shirt, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and crying gently into my hair as he decried his bourgeois bohemia and how reading Nietzsche had changed his life until the hoi polloi appropriated The Birth of Tragedy for themselves when they just didn’t understand it like he did! Spare me the philosophy of filthy rich pseudo-intellectual Williamsburg kids with all their middle class malaise, whose sole experience of life is through the prism of Andy Warhol and Whole Foods and watching five hour Eastern European black and white documentaries with no subtitles because that’s the only way to truly understand the underrated artistry of insert-obscure-director’s-name here. Jesus, now Blair knows how Annie Hall felt. How Serena put up with this shit for so long is beyond me.

Apparently all it takes for Dan to see the humanity in someone is to witness their tears over a bit of celluloid. My God, the Gorgon shed a tear?!! Alert the media people, she is a HUMAN BEING! In other news, Bernie Madoff cried when he watched Bambi. Maybe Dan should scurry over to his prison cell and hold his hand? By the way Dan, I’m pretty sure even Hitler wasn’t averse to great art. He probably cried when listening to Wagner’s Ring cycle.

As for his love of revisionist history – “With you, she was always caught up in schemes and takedowns, but that’s not really her” – wait, excuse me, I just have to laugh hysterically for a second. Ahem. I presume he is referring to the time when she schemed against her best friend, his sister, his best friend, her mother, her father, her father’s partner, her boyfriend, her other boyfriend, Juliet, and various misbehaving minions who spoke out of turn over the years. All with or without Chuck’s help, (and indeed, with or without Dan Humphrey’s help, lest we forget) thank you very much. She is more than capable. And thank you Dan for informing Chuck that Blair is “intelligent and intuitive”. That is BRAND NEW INFORMATION, I’m sure, for someone who has known her presumably most of her life and who was her boyfriend for almost a year.

Apparently, the many many examples of the way in which Blair goes about dealing with her many many issues (I say this with love by the way) are not Blair Waldorf really Being Blair Waldorf. That was someone else. The Blair Waldorf who cries at movies is the only Blair Waldorf that has ever existed. Dan just didn’t see her until now, because the poor thing had to keep up the masquerade of being a magnificent bitch for all these years. But now she is free to…eat pizza. And fall asleep in front of her laptop. And wear mis-matching shoes. All while Dan mugs for the camera at what that silly goose is up to this week! Oh, the hilarity! Now all Dan and Blair need to complete their transition into I Love Lucy is a laughter track and a special guest appearance from a celebrity desperately trying to counteract the backwards slide of their career.

Silly Dan. No amount of whitewashing a person’s history can make your version of them an actuality. Dan suffers from that archetypal writer’s problem that must be avoided at all costs – egotism. If he is ever to truly appreciate the characters who populate his life; to see them and do them justice, he must learn to stop imposing himself, and his judgments, on the world he surveys.

Yes, Blair does in fact scheme, and always has. She has been a manipulative, devious, Machiavellian mastermind since the show’s very inception, and that is what drew me to her early on. But this does not define her, and it is not the sole reason for my appreciation of her as a character. No, this does not define her, but neither does crying at a Fellini movie about a prostitute who is continuously screwed over by men until she learns to value her independence. Blair is neither a very bad person, nor a very good person. Her scheming is a symptom of her immense insecurity and her desire to control everything and bend every reality which doesn’t suit her purpose or conform to an ideal around her iron will. Dan does not want to see these things. In this respect, he is very like the Blair of old who refused to even acknowledge that anything existed outside of the ‘movie of her life’ version of her reality. I have always felt that he fell a little more out of love with Serena every time she failed to live up to his exacting ideal of her; this romanticized notion of who “Serena van der Woodsen” was before he even met the real Serena van der Woodsen. I don’t spend a lot of time analyzing Dan’s behaviour, or his motivations, because I really do not care enough about him. But what I do know is that if he keeps compartmentalizing the people in his life, painting them in tones of monochrome, and indulging in fantastical notions instead of dealing with the reality of a person who is flawed, fallible, and human, he will never know anyone, and he will certainly never know what it is to truly love someone from every hair on their monstrous head down to their cloven hooves.