Blair Waldorf and Chuck Bass have always had a very passionate and tumultuous relationship on "Gossip Girl." With season two ending with Chuck traveling the world to collect treasures for Blair to prove he cares for her, it does seem that, at least for now, these two are trying to make it work.
"I mean, that's pretty romantic. I think he knows now what he wants. They're done with high school, so any drama associated with that is sort of gone," Leighton Meester (a.k.a. Blair) told MTV News. "I mean, I think I'm pretty satisfied with what happened. I was really happy when I knew they kind of ended up together at the end of this season."
But Meester also warned fans that although things seem great in the world of Blair and Chuck, that doesn't mean they'll have a picture-perfect ending: "It's still kind of a cliffhanger 'cause ... every other episode they're back [together], they're not, they're back. But now I feel like it's more official and he's willing to admit his feelings and she is too. That's a relationship I really like a lot."
She added that the couple have a "fun dynamic." "Them together just seems so real. I mean, he loves her," she said. "The point is you love to hate him. You hate to love him. And he's such a very definitive character and he's always changing too. He's awesome."
So, if things don't work out again between Blair and Chuck, what guy would she want to see with her? Well, none! "Every time she breaks up with Chuck I don't want to see her with anybody. They're never actually broken up; she still pines over him. I think, from my point of view, a tumultuous relationship is an unhealthy one, and for them to be together it's going to take work. But they might just fight and break up and get back together. They seem like that kind of couple." (bwahahahaha!!!! It's Chair or NOTHING for the Queen and you all know that what the Queen says it's law)
She may not know what will happen with Chuck, but she does have some predictions about her own character. "I don't think Blair's losing her queen-bee status just yet," she said, adding that she would like to see her lose something else. "I think we might retire the headbands. ... To me, it's always been where she's at in her life. Maybe she'll start wearing them to regress."
Lindsey in Boston: Anything you can share about the Gossip Girl finale?
You know how we saw those Gossip Girl set photos where Blair kissed both Chuck and Nate on the street? One of them was a total fake-out. Teehee! In other finale news, Little J comes into her own (and there's a nice rapprochement between her and Blair), Gossip Girl calls Nate a whore, you won't realize Lily-Rufus spawn is already there until the very last minute and there's a hint that several familiar background faces might become recurring or even regular characters in season three. (We'll tell you more about the realistic prospects for those recurrences after you've all seen the finale on May 18.)
Question: Any new scoop on Gossip Girl? --Kathleen
Ausiello: One relationship won't survive prom night.
oh ausi!
5. How will Chuck react to seeing Nate and Blair at the prom?
Gossip Guy: Probably with a couple of classic Chuck brooding stares, but Gossip Girl spoilers suggest he won't take any action. You're killing me Chuck.
1. What was your favorite Gossip Girl quote from the episode?
Gossip Guy: It may be the Chair fan in me, but I got all giddy through the whole scene where Chuck and Blair met up while she was spying. We'll give the best quote to Chuck Bass for noticing the beret and immediately asking who she's spying on.
3. Harder to believe: The distance between NYU and Columbia constituting a long-distance relationship, Lily and friends forking over cash in minutes in this economy, or any scene involving Vanessa?
Gossip Guy: Phew. I thought I was going to have to think about this and then you gave me the easy out. Definitely the useless Vanessa. Did we really need her pointless "I Never" scene? Ooh, she made the big reveal about Rufus not having enough money to send Dan to school. Big whoop. He knew that, retard. Did you not hear about his catering job?
5. Should Blair move in with Nate?
Gossip Guy: No way! Blair held Chuck's hand while they slept in the limo and that was way hotter than all her moments with Nate combined.
5. Will Chuck and Vanessa hook up again?
Gossip Guy: Excuse me, I had to just swallow the vomit that almost came up.
3. Do you feel bad for Vanessa?
Gossip Guy: Seriously? Next question.
4. Should Chuck have done as requested when Blair said "take me now," or did he handle the situation correctly?
Gossip Guy: Chuck, I admire that you were trying to do the right thing but you are a better man than I. Idiot.
2. Nate and Vanessa: Kind of cute, totally useless or both?
Gossip Guy: Totally useless. Personally I thought Nate was being cute with the little joke of sending the mask, but I think when you send it to Vanessa all humor and cuteness instantly convert to uselessness.
2. Can Derena's romance survive the love child twist?
Gossip Guy: You kidding me? Their love can't survive a little murder, their parents being former lovers, or a gust of wind. How are they possibly supposed to survive sharing a half-brother?
The delicious tension of a great love story lies in dramatic irony – we know what they do not; that which is utterly self-evident but to which they are utterly blind. It is no use blinding the audience and then asking them to see. To have every character extolling the virtues of Nate and Blair when your audience was told since the Pilot that they are utterly wrong for one another, that Nate was in love with someone else, that their relationship was based on social expectation, childish ideas about love and Blair’s determination to be Audrey Hepburn even if it killed her, is ludicrous.
Vanessa’s homespun honesty and her lack of guile were what attracted Nate to her; her lack of interest in playing the game and, most importantly, the fact that her nature was antithetical to Blair’s. Every time any woman in his peripheral vision has behaved like Blair (Catherine, Jenny and now Vanessa), he has aborted their affair instantaneously. Nate does not like his girls complicated. His sudden desire to be with Blair has returned precisely at the moment when she has begun to behave the least like herself. Just as it did before. She’s softened her edges, repressed every ugly part of herself, retracted her claws. In short, she has relinquished the power she has in spades which terrifies a man like Nate. Their being together does nothing for their maturation; it merely compounds the very worst of themselves. Their relationship keeps them in a state of suspended animation, which, for Blair at least, keeps the pain of her father’s abandonment and the death of all her youthful ideas about a perfect family, at bay. This is arrested development, a state of being which I think any psychologist would agree is a very bad thing. Indeed, any attempt by the show to validate their relationship will be, for this viewer, truly disturbing and regressive. Is the audience supposed to believe that the disempowerment of a woman is what is necessary for ‘true love’ to persist? That preserving some Victorian ideal of a simpering, deferential femininity is a good thing?
Do you expect anyone to cheer for the resurgence of this? Do you expect anyone to be sold on the idea that a man who has flitted between five other women, who we were being told was in love with Vanessa until he coldly revealed to her, and the audience, that we had all been misinformed, is in love with someone he cheated on and didn’t tell for six months and with whom he has shared a total of five scenes within eighteen episodes?
Question: Scoop on Gossip Girl please. --Bri
Ausiello: First, a correction about something I said last week. Turns out, Chuck does not try and sabotage Blair's campaign for prom queen. It's actually just the opposite.
"Leighton fully understands why viewers have become fixated on the love affair between Blair and Chuck. "They're so perfect because they get each other. Chuck knows about her deep, dark side, and he finds it hot," she says. "But the best part of their relationship is that it's realistic. People dont always date for a while and then slowly fall in love. They start by hooking up one night. It takes time to get to know someone, and then you realize you're in love later on."
Kim in Bath, England: I need to know if Chuck and Blair are ever going to work things out on Gossip Girl!
We can promise that this year's Gossip Girl finale is not going to be a repeat of last year's Bluck disaster: This time around, Chuck doesn't screw over Blair. In fact, we can promise that if you love Chuck and Blair, you will love the finale, and you will be compensated for all your pain and suffering over this past year.
Given that the writers are idiots and Nate is actually a loyal and good guy who is good for Blair (whatever that means), I still think Chair trumps Nair fair and square. The biggest problem I have with Nair is that their relationship is based on love as a commodity. An emotion is not an object that we can push around. It is not a number. It is something that happens without a good reason that we can tell our parents. It is not something we can choose after rationally weighing the pros and cons, deficit and surplus.
I like Nair, but for what it is: a childish relationship that ends (and must end) once either of them outgrows it. Of course, Chuck and Blair are both incredibly childish -- but their relationship is not, oddly enough. Which is probably why their relationship is the only thing pulling them out of their most difficult moments, the one thing saving them.
Allow me to elaborate:
Nair's love is childish and problematic, because it is planned. It is planned by Blair from start to finish, and Nate is just going along with it, because he doesn't have plans. He is okay with just being a part of Blair's plans because it's not like he has anything better to do anyway. It's easy to have someone else plan things for you. And can you blame him? Hell, if someone who cares about me was willing to plan my life out for me, I'd totally let them.
A relationship like Nair exists in abundance in real life, and many people get married while in a relationship like this -- and then they wonder what went wrong as they sign the divorce papers. (We were so perfect before! It all added up and made perfect sense. So why are we so dissatisfied now?) In this way, Nair was a perfect fit, because their plan/non-plan matched up, kind of like a buyer of Red Hot Chili Peppers concert ticket for $50 and a seller of RHCP concert ticket for $50 matching up on Ebay. Or those dating websites that match people up based on your personality traits (Oh, you're friendly? I'm friendly too!)
Nair to me is about give and take. Blair gets to weave Nate (nice and ultra-pretty Van der Bilt prince) into her plans, and Nate gets to have someone love and support him and plan everything out for him.
And Nate soon realizes how problematic this is. He was realizing it in the pilot (which made him an interesting character to watch at least during that episode). He might be confused and lost, but he feels it in his guts that Nair is a bad idea, which is why he suddenly breaks up with Blair after all those years. He outgrew it. In this way, he matured more quickly than Chuck and Blair ever did. After drifting along with the whole thing, he woke up and saw that if he lets this relationship continue, he will be unbearably miserable one morning, because a relationship based on capitalizing on each other's respective value and resources is hallow and meaningless. He sees that this is a childish love, one that he cannot let continue. So he breaks up with Blair, and that's worth applauding.
Blair is distressed by this, because her plans are all messed up now. I don't think she ever used Nate -- because what is there to not love about Nate anyhow? She probably did love Nate, in the way I loved Heath Ledger. I really did love him and wanted him to succeed and I was incredibly sad when he died -- I loved him sincerely, because he was just so talented and pretty and awesome (and rich, too). One difference here was that Blair's Heath Ledger was actually and tangibly her boyfriend, and she was given the chance to actually worship the ground her boyfriend walked on.
But you can't plan to fall in love with someone. I can't find a Heath Ledger (who is my Prince Charming in all my fantasies), put my arms around him, and wait till I fall in love with him. Well, I could, but I would be waiting forever. I could say out loud over and over again that I am in love with him but that wouldn't mean that I am in love with him. Love doesn't work like that. Blair was young and she didn't know, so she found herself a Nate Archibald, who is not only lovable, but also looks really good in her arms -- then she forced love to blossom between them. This was a mistake that reminds us that she's just a teenager with lots to learn. And I love Blair because she is. I don't mean that at all to sound patronizing -- really affectionate is probably what I am going for.
So now let's examine the other couple at hand. Chair is, for all intents and purposes, the opposite of Nair in its inception. Chair is entirely unplanned. The idea of Chair was never conceptualized in Chuck or Blair's head, because they didn't have anything they wanted from each other. What would Blair want from a gross playboy that's shunned by everyone she wants to impress? What would Chuck want from the stuffy girlfriend of his best friend who would never ever ever touch him with an 8-feet pole?
They didn't even consciously care for each other's friendship either, but whatever -- they were friends. And this friendship was fated and inevitable (not the kiss in the limo -- that was a random accident), because they are both messed up people who only know how to express how much they care by deceiving and scheming -- so they never had the choice to not become friends of sorts. It's like if you and I were the only two people in class that loved Bob Dylan and believed that pot lets you "transcend your consciousness" -- we can't help but become friends. If we are both members of a band and share the same vision of what kind of music we want to make, there is no way we can avoid being friends of some kind. In this way, they are too alike to ignore each other completely.
And then that night at Victrola happened and they crossed the line between friends and more-than-friends, transforming in the matter of minutes from comrades in arms to the love of each others' lives. It wasn't something that they planned to do, because Blair was supposed to end up with Nate and Chuck was supposed to end up with a suite full of babes.
It wasn't supposed to happen! Ew! Blair hates that it happened, and Chuck dreads it. And this is so damn hard for them, because this is just so not in their respective blueprints for the future. Blair, after all that planning, can't just say "fuck it" and go with the scum of UES! Chuck, after building himself up as the playboy of the century, can't just discard it and go with this settling down with a gf crap!
But it happened. Blair fights it, but it's impossible. Chuck denies it, but it's also impossible. Their love is not at all commoditized, because it is not about them agreeing to it. It's not about shaking each other's hands in a deal that both are satisfied with. In appearance, they make many deals with each other, but only because that's how they function as lovers, not because their love is a deal. Their love, if they could help it, wouldn't even exist. And you can't get two people to agree to a deal when neither of them wants it -- but this is love, so that rule's out the window. It doesn't work like that in love. You can be in love with someone even if you really really don't want to be. It's because emotions are not goods that you can buy and sell and trade.
And they have nothing to buy from or sell to or trade with each other anyway! They have nothing to give or take. Their love is not about having something to offer each other -- rather, it's about being. And that's what real, mature love is like -- the kind of love Nate left Blair to find. Real love is not about trading of goods. It's not about giving and taking, having and losing, equal distribution of resources, or fair trade.
It's about smiling simply because the other exists in this world and loving the world a little more for it. It's about knowing that the other is there, and that alone making you feel like maybe you are not completely alone in this world, like you have someone on your side in a bloody battle. It's not something you can rationally explain.
It just is. Chuck and Blair is, and for no good reason that you can explain to your acquaintances. And that's why Chair is so amazing: It's because they are each other's comrade in arms, somehow on the same side holding the same flag. They didn't choose it like one chooses a detergent, after calculating in your head how much you need it, the product's quality, price versus value -- it just happened.
