eddiekaspbraklives-blog

[eddiekaspbraklives-blog]

it's like one day you're 13 and in love with your best friend and you spend summer days curled up with him in a hammock and you have to pretend like the sensation of his body against yours and your hand on his calf doesn't set you aflame. and there's a murderous entity after you but at least you get to hold him and take his face between your hands and you think it might all be worth it in the end if you were to die looking at him and he's hurt and you can't breathe and his mom takes him away so you spend the summer in the arcade alone and when henry bowers finds you he calls you an ugly word, a dirty word, and dirty is the last thing the boy you love makes you feel but you realize that your town isn't meant for boys like you so you can't tell him the secret that's burrowed its way into your heart but there's so much inside of you that you peddle as fast as you can to the kissing bridge and you carve your initial right there alongside his because if you don't put your love somewhere it's going to crawl right out of your throat the next time you see him. and when everything is over and you have to tell him you're leaving town for good you swear there's a look in his eyes that makes you wonder if he has the same secret you do but you're leaving and you love him too much to burden him with the weight of what you feel and when you hug him you hold him a little closer than usual and you don't feel guilty and it doesn't matter because you won't remember this anyway.

and then you're 40 and it's been 27 years and it's only been a moment and it's only been an eternity but then you see him and you wonder how it was ever possible to have forgotten him or how he makes you feel and your heart cracks so loudly in your chest you're afraid he's heard it. he's older now but he still has the same expressive eyes and the snappy attitude and he's still the only one who can match you in every way. but you catch sight of the ring on his finger and your throat closes up and it's not just the alcohol that leaves a bitter taste in your mouth so you hold him at a distance with quips about his wife his height his mother his sexuality when all you want to do is pull him close like you did that day in the abandoned house that you can't think about. and too soon you have to fight the monster again and he's paralyzed with fear and you tell him that he's brave when what you really mean is that you've loved him for your entire life and that you've always been his in every sense of the word. and though this could be your last chance you don't say any of that but you do catch the look in his eye that catapults you to that summer day when you were 13 and wondered if he might love you back. and the next thing you know you wake up only to find him bleeding out and he's the one who was stabbed but you think that if you touched your chest your hand would come away red and wet with whatever bleeds from a broken heart. and you want to lay there with him forever and you don't care that the world is crumbling around you because the only person who ever made anything make sense is an empty shell in your arms but your friends don't let you and they pull you from the wreckage. and you want to get out of this cursed town but you stop at that kissing bridge and you carve over those letters the same way you did 27 years ago and you think that while his body wasn't immortal, the love you felt for him is and it's forever engrained in this bridge the same way he's forever intertwined with your soul.

[eddiekaspbraklives-blog]

Was there a moment in the book between eddie and richie that had you start thinking maybe there were deeper feelings between the two?

Like as in the earliest moment in the book where I started to go ‘hmmm’ on the very first read through?? Anon that was a long time ago!!! 

Okay so, assuming I am 14 years old and reading IT for the very first time, without that much practice interpreting symbolism and without the world knowledge needed to make certain connections that seem so obvious to me now as an adult, and I’m just casually reading the novel having only ever watched the miniseries as a little kid… these are the moments that probably jumped out at me first: 

For Eddie, it was The Dam in The Barrens (aka one of the most meaty chapters for Eddie analysis)

When Richie makes his entrance in the flashback, the first thing he does is pinch Eddie’s cheek. Then we get Eddie quietly observing Richie’s face when he’s being uncharacteristically solemn. Shortly after, Richie winks at him. 

And then we get THIS:

‘Ben, Eddie saw, was looking at Richie with a mixture of awe and wariness. Eddie could understand that.’

And this little reference:

‘….Richie’s sometimes enchanting, often exhausting charm.’

And then this:

“Oh—you mean it was your idea, Eds? Jesus, I’m sorry.” He fell down in front of Eddie and began salaaming wildly again. 

“Get up, stop it, you’re splattering mud on me!” Eddie cried. 

Richie jumped to his feet a second time and pinched Eddie’s cheek. “Cute, cute, cute!” Richie exclaimed. 

“Stop it, I hate that!”

And finally: 

‘A piece of Red Cross adhesive tape was wrapped around one of the bows of his glasses, and the loose end flapped against his cheekbone as he worked. Bill caught Eddie’s eye, smiled a little, and shrugged. It was just Richie.’

This is all in the span of like… four pages, and it’s relevant that our very first introduction to Richie as a kid is through Eddie’s eyes, and that he spends the whole sequence inner monologuing about how great yet confusing Richie is. 14-year-old me definitely picked up on the ‘this guy teases me playfully and I pretend to hate it but I’m actually obsessed with him’ dynamic.

But I need to stop and meta for a second because this chapter is FULL of Eddie subtext and most of it flew over my head 15 years ago:

Before we’re even introduced to kid!Richie, adult Eddie reflects on, and admits to the reader, that he actually liked when Richie called him Eds because it was a secret identity Richie bestowed upon him. He also informs the reader that as a kid people made fun of him by using homophobic slurs, and that Bill was not one of those people. It is so important that the chapter which contains an almost absurd amount of gay coding begins with those two things: that as a kid Eddie had more thoughts about Richie than he let on, and that Eddie was not just targeted by bullies for his asthma, but also for his sexuality. 

As the chapter goes on, it becomes very clear that when Richie calls him Eds, Eddie doesn’t always react to it. He reacts to it only when it’s accompanied by something flirtatious, a cheek pinch or a ‘cute’. This is the part that makes Eddie say he hates it, therefore it’s also the part he secretly likes. Also, when Eddie is watching Richie in that typical Eddie way where he can somehow make poorly taped up glasses sound poetic and delicate - Bill catches him in the act of staring, perfectly nonjudgmental. It’s important that it’s Bill who catches his eye - it connects back to the beginning of the chapter when he specifically states that Bill never called him a “sissy queerboy”. Bill never judges.

And then, of course, this scene leads right into Eddie’s recollection of the hobo sexually soliciting him, solidly drawing a connection between Eddie’s fear of sexuality and his fear of rotting/disease. Sandwiched between the real hobo and the IT leper encounter, there’s a short scene where Eddie tells Bill and Richie about what happened. Richie asks Eddie if he ‘knows about fucking’ and Eddie’s reaction is that he ‘hoped he wasn’t blushing’.

Then - THEN!! - Bill references gay sex, and in the same beat Richie says syphilis makes you rot, inadvertently creating a subconscious connection for Eddie between those two things. Sex gives you diseases.Sex makes you rot. Men can have sex with other men. If you have sex, sex with men, you get a disease, and you rot. It’s not a coincidence that after this conversation, not only is Eddie DRAWN to the house own Neibolt Street and pictures himself as the rotting hobo, when he eventually does encounter IT as the leper, it’s extra rotten and hones in on the blowjob solicitation… I mean, come on. 

For Richie, it was the following chapter, Georgie’s Room and the House on Neibolt Street:

So like, the possibility that Richie had a school-yard crush on Eddie had already crossed my mind before this because of him winking at Eddie and calling him cute and stuff in the previous chapter. But this chapter definitely cemented it because it’s from Richie’s POV and there is one obvious standout…

“They’ll all pinch my cheek and tell me how much I’ve grown,” Eddie said. 

“That’s cause they know how cute you are, Eds—just like me. I saw what a cutie you were the first time I met you.”

The SMOOTHNESS of it all. Richie has this wonderful ability to blatantly confess his feelings without ever being taken seriously for it. Can you imagine if Ben told Bev “I saw what a cutie you were the first time I met you”? It’s true, that’s exactly what happened. But would he ever say that to her at this point in time? NO! Because it’s very obviously FLIRTY LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT SHIT! But because it’s Richie and he’s cultivated a very specific persona where everything is done for laughs, he can just… make that kind of statement like it’s normal. Hiding in plain sight. 

More meta things from this chapter that flew over my head 15 years ago:

First, way before the movie scenes, Richie has to make sure no one is looking before comforting Bill because they are out in public on the street and he assumes that other people would think he’s gay for… patting his friend on the back to try to get him to stop crying. Compare this to his easy physicality with Eddie down in The Barrens - physicality that is much more likely to be interpreted as flirtatious if anyone saw - and it’s very obvious that Richie is hyper-vigilant about being seen, publicly, as anything but straight. In The Barrens, it doesn’t matter - they tell Officer Nell mere pages before this that The Barrens is where they can all be themselves. Richie is himself in The Barrens, when he’s pinching Eddie’s cheek and calling him cute. Out on the street, he can’t even do something as normal and expected as comforting his crying friend without worrying about the potential ramifications of it. 

Second, when Richie meets up with Bev and reflects on how pretty she is, he gets all flustered and shit. And although nothing here involves Eddie, we do get this iconic line and perfect insight into Richie’s behavior:

‘Richie, as he usually did in such moments of confusion, took refuge in absurdity.’

His immediate, instinctual response to this confusing, uncomfortable newfound attraction to Beverly is to… throw himself on the ground and comically praise her, do Voices, and generally act like an idiot. Who does he act this way around the most? You guessed it! Eddie Kaspbrak!

It’s also in this chapter that we’re introduced to Richie’s thoughts on the teenage werewolf:

‘The Teenage Werewolf was somehow scarier, though … perhaps because he also seemed a little sad. What had happened wasn’t his own fault. There was this hypnotist who had fucked him up, but the only reason he’d been able to was that the kid who turned into the werewolf was full of anger and bad feelings.’

At first it’s like, aw, that’s cute, Richie’s showing empathy. But later in the same chapter, when IT appears as the werewolf with Richie’s name stitched into the jacket, it hits different - Riche wasn’t just showing empathy, he was relating to the werewolf’s struggle with ‘bad feelings’ and the sadness of him being a monster through no fault of his own. 

Also in this chapter, there’s a small bit where Richie is lost in thought about Eddie’s trauma with the leper, and when he snaps out of it and talks to Ben, Ben is lost in thought about Bev’s trauma (the bruise on her cheek). Oh the parallels!

Anyway, this chapter functions the same way for Richie as The Dam in the Barrens does for Eddie - it starts out by demonstrating Richie’s discomfort with other people thinking he likes boys, moves into a series of interactions in which he flirts with Eddie and Bev, introduces the reader to his main IT manifestation, the teenage werewolf, and confirms that he relates to being a monster. Like Eddie, he feels an attachment to his ‘monster’ for reasons that are rooted in the way he sees himself. The subtext is much more subtle for Richie and there isn’t as much of it, but it’s there.

SO LONG STORY SHORT!! The moment(s) in the book where I first put two and two together as a casual reader were the ‘school-yard crush’ moments of pigtail pulling and flirtatious teasing. That stuff is obvious. Years later, as an adult, I can see that those same chapters that pinged for me as a teen are literally OVERFLOWING with subtext.

[eddiekaspbraklives-blog]

it was always you.

[eddiekaspbraklives-blog]

I’ve been crying for the sixth day

[eddiekaspbraklives-blog]

Suddenly he was very proud of them, very proud to be with them. After all the years of being counted out, he was counted in. Finally counted in. He didn’t know if they were still losers or not, but he knew they were together. They were friends. Damn good friends. 

[eddiekaspbraklives-blog]

i tried not to upset you let you rescue me the day i met you i just wanted to protect you                … but now i’ll never get to

[eddiekaspbraklives-blog]

And they loved you. Really loved you.

[eddiekaspbraklives-blog]

if my words don’t come together, listen to the melody because my love is in there hiding

[eddiekaspbraklives-blog]

the scene where the remaining losers hug richie in the water and richie’s quiet little thank you like this is them all mutually acknowledging richie’s “dirty little secret” and saying without words that they know he’s gay, they know he loves eddie, they’ve probably always known, and they love him unconditionally

[eddiekaspbraklives-blog]

[eddiekaspbraklives-blog]

[eddiekaspbraklives-blog]

you’re thirteen and dragging your best friend into the photo booth. there’s laughter in your bellies and your heads are fuzzy from guzzling too much soda. there’s a nick on your left knee from where you got pricked by a plant earlier. his glasses are smudged. when you look up at him you hope he sees what you’re trying to tell him, the words you can’t quite fit your mouth around – it’s safe here, i think. we’re safe here. you’re safe. 

(the more terrifying ‘i love you’ is still locked away. you don’t even want to think it right now, though the more you try not to the harder it becomes.)

he laughs, ducks down next to you like he’s going to kiss you, but before your heart can race away from you the rest of them are crowding inside, too, and you’re left with him smushed against your back, hands on your shoulders, muffling his laughter and dirty jokes into your hair, and all you can think is that this place is full of so much love you could drown in it.

[eddiekaspbraklives-blog]

Be true. Be brave. Stand. Believe. And dont ever forget, we're losers and we always will be.

[eddiekaspbraklives-blog]

tag your shit with spoilers dumb bitch

the book has been out for literal DECADES lmaoooo so. also there’s no need to be an asshole who hurt u !!!!!!!! hmu if u need to talk

[eddiekaspbraklives-blog]

hi i love you more than ANYTHING please get back on ur tumblr so we can be a couple in public

i’m back baby boi (♥ω♥*) 

[eddiekaspbraklives-blog]

how i’m gonna be watching eddie and stan die in the theater on september 6th as if i didn’t know exactly what was going to happen

[eddiekaspbraklives-blog]

me after realizing that we’re actually going to see stan and eddie die and we’re going to see richie sobbing over his dead body i-