Since the finale, I’ve been thinking a lot about that dark time in early season 3 when Sam Evans was gone for good, as far as we knew. I can’t imagine the last three season of Glee without him. The day we got the news he was coming back was a great day even then, but looking back on it now, it’s 100x more important. I’M JUST SO GRATEFUL FOR SAM EVANS.

I’m also forever grateful to the fandom for pulling together and making it known that we wanted him back, because I definitely think that played a part in the eventual reconciliation. People worked tirelessly in the summer of 2011 to tweet about it and buy his songs on iTunes, and actually got in front of the headline, so most outlets reported it as “Overstreet to leave Glee; fans campaign for his return.”

I’ve always thought it was really amazing that such a sweet character actually inspired this divisive fandom to band together with a common goal like that. And we were rewarded with some wonderful storylines and music for our effort!

shawnphunters:

goodbye glee meme [5/10 characters]: Sam Evans
“I took care of my whole family when they had nothing. When they were as poor and homeless as McConaughey. I made sure they ate, I made sure they had a roof over their heads, I made sure my little brother and sister got to school on time. Me. Sam. ‘The slacker.’ I know that I forget about appointments sometimes and I leave my clothes around the apartment when I get distracted playing video games. But that doesn’t mean I’m a joke.”

voices-echo:

Goodbye Blaine Anderson // Day 3: Storyline you wish to have happened

→ ♪ Three is a charm / Two is not the same /
I don’t see the harm / So are you game? ♪

2×04 / 6×13

What is your opinion on Sam’s ending?

I liked it! To be honest, it was way better than I’d dared hope for. Sam had a real journey of grappling with his desire to be a leader, realizing how little those distinctions matter, and devoting himself to being a total team player. Since his first season, we’ve seen him be incredibly good at reading other people and identifying the things they’re self-conscious or worried about – he actually mirrors Santana in that respect, except he uses it to reassure people and encourage them to be more confident. (See: Quinn, Mercedes, Marley, Blaine, Brittany, Rachel, etc.) He’s also been one of the most immediately accepting characters when it comes to sexual and gender identity and personal choices. He never engaged in bullying and challenged those who did.

So I think he’s got the perfect disposition for teaching, especially a subject that involves a lot of raw emotion and vulnerability. He’s destined to be the Will Schuester we all deserved, and I think that’s pretty awesome. I’ve found it compelling that Sam wasn’t fixated on fame and never cared about being a star, because that’s so rare among the Glee characters. It doesn’t feel like a let-down for him to find a path out of the limelight, because that’s just his speed. I’ve always thought the modeling thing was borderline unhealthy for him, since it seemed to stem from his body image issues and the self-esteem black hole that is underage sex work. He teetered on the edge of believing his self-worth was directly related to being aesthetically pleasing – which is obviously untrue, and pretty tragic for a character who’s sensitive and caring and has so much to offer.

I also think it was a good choice to leave him unattached in the end. He has the weird distinction of being romantically linked to all of the first gen glee girls, and spent most of his time on the show bouncing from relationship to relationship. I know a lot of fans wanted a Samcedes reunion, but after her many firm rejections over the years, that would have fallen pretty flat for me. He really didn’t have a well-developed OTP pairing the way most of the central characters did, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing – like Mercedes and fame, or Rachel and Broadway (which obviously Jesse personified), Sam’s real narrative partner was always the idea of family. So it makes me happy that he’s spending the future as an important part of a supportive, close-knit community. That’s basically a best case scenario.

Curiously, the one character who best captured the season-one theme of reconciling big dreams with small ones was not around for Glee’s beginning: Sam, who essentially ended up inheriting the Finn Hudson role. It’s Sam, the kid from a financially strapped family, who ends up deciding that chasing fame won’t make him happy, and who reminds his New Directions group of a philosophy that powered some of Glee’s most emotionally true episodes: “If we want to be great, we need to be able to sing about hurt and loss.

His students’ reaction to that line is to suggest singing Kenny Chesney’s “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy”–which is probably a shout-out to Overstreet’s father having written that song, but is also emblematic of how, in the long run, Glee went for the crowd-pleasing over the bittersweet. Obviously, Glee is not the only show to go all-in on the happy endings; see the recent finale of Parks and Recreation. And given the show’s sense of mission–toward bullied kids, outsider kids, kids without privileges–maybe it was inevitable.

Glee Holds On To That Feelin’, One Last Time. (via overstreetnews)