WEBSITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION - WILL IS BECOMING MORE POWERFUL BY THE DAY

ORIGINS OF WILL SCHUE I LOVE TO RAP

as mentioned on the homepage, the will schue i love to rap cult came about on the 21/08/2022, as part of project gleewatch. here i shall provide context as to what project gleewatch is, how it all started, and how it birthed the beautifully accursed will schuester i love to rap.

project gleewatch (see project documents here)

context

when i was eleven years old, i was a major part of the harry potter fandom on pinterest (OUCH), and to make a long story short on the 07/08/[x] i watched a very potter musical and promptly became enamoured with darren criss (my beloved) (note to readers: i love this man so much). from this point, i decided to look at some of his other projects, and i'll mention that this was exactly the point where i was starting to realise that i'm not exactly the straightest of people, and so i saw glee and decided that i'd watch it. now, being eleven years old, i didn't have the greatest taste in media, and that is the story of how i came to absolutely love glee, watching up to approximately s4e8 (based on what i can piece together from my rewatch).

the project

as for project gleewatch, in june-ish 2022 i remembered the fact that i had this unfortunate era and decided to put myself through all of that again to see just how bad glee is. and thus, on the 24th of july 2022, project gleewatch officially began.

during the summer holidays, the format of the project was that i'd watch one episode a day, catching up on days i'd missed by watching extra episodes. i also watched extra episodes where possible, in order to speed up the project. by sunday the 4th of september (the last day before the holidays) i'd watched exactly 69 episodes. n i c e. after the holidays had ended, the format shifted to a sort of "watch whatever you can whenever you can", so the project isn't done yet. i've been keeping commentary, lists, and episode summaries in a discord server i'm in, so they might be uploaded here when it's all over.

the birth of will

because the internet is a predatory data mine of a place, shortly after i began project gleewatch i started getting many youtube recommendations related to glee, because of course i did. one of such recommendations was mike's mic's video, "ranking glee characters from flop to icon (mr schuester is my sleep paralysis demon)". if you look at the thumbnail of said video, you might notice that part of it looks slightly familiar:

youtube thumbnail of a video by mike's mic, from two years ago. a man, presumably mike, is sitting looking disgusted in the centre of the thumbnail. next to him is an image of will schuester looking soullessly towards the camera. above will, in white text, are those fateful words: i love to rap.

this was discovered on the 17/08/2022, just four days before the i love to rap image we know and love today was created. i think i must have just subconsciously retained the mike's mic version of the image, because i honestly didn't remember it at all until i looked back through the channel to find some old episode summaries. either way, that is the first instance i could find of the phrase "i love to rap", so i thought i should include it.

the creation of the image

looking at the image, you may think that i just found an image of will, slapped the words "i love to rap" onto it, and called it a day. and you'd be entirely right, in essence, but in reality it took more compressing than that. here's a step-by-step list of how i did it:

  1. found image of will schue
  2. imported into drawing app and added text
  3. compressed
  4. exported
  5. screenshotted x4 for that slightly fried aura
  6. imported
  7. compressed
  8. exported
  9. imported
  10. compressed
  11. exported
  12. imported
  13. compressed
  14. exported
  15. probably a bit more

for this reason i had, at one stage, i think ten versions of him on my phone? it was quite an issue so i do not recommend recreating this at home

the project at present

recently, project gleewatch went on hiatus that lasted from 4th december 2022-12th march 2023. although this did slow the project, i am nearing the end of season 5, so the end is in sight. here is, as of 15th march 2023, the list of gleedia (glee media) i am planning on watching, provided i can find all of it:

  • glee season 5
  • glee season 6
  • glee: the concert movie
  • the glee project
  • gleeful: the real show choirs of america (channel 4) (this is not part of the franchise but is still related and on the wikipedia oage :sob:)
  • don't stop believing (channel 5)
  • the price of glee

i did not know how much i was entering myself in for when i started this project