strangermoons - Tumblr blog

[strangermoons]

wdym u don’t like missionary. we can kiss AND hold hands while fucking. do u even believe in love???

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I've written about half of a mini-sequel to TBHJB and I do plan to finish it in some form but I am also unfortunately flitting between ::checks notes:: seven other WIPs at the moment and I can't seem to focus on any one of them. so, uh. let's see how that goes!

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The Beat Has Just Begun - chapter 11 & epilogue extras

Today's trailer mood music: Diamond Head, specifically their second album. Eddie's feeling romantic.

The firefighters in my family wish to remind you to never leave lit candles unattended, not even while you wait in the garage for your secret boyfriend.

I can't believe it's done! I could probably go on at length about my version of Steve's mom & their relationship, and Steve & Robin, and Steve & Dustin, but I think I'll spare you, at least for now.

I've got like half a mini-sequel written, but inspiration is fickle and I can't make any promises. If anyone's still reading this: Thank you. I hope at least some of this was interesting.

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Final chapters are up!

The Beat Has Just Begun by ForgetTheMoon Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson Rated M, 106K

Vecna dies. So does Eddie. The world doesn't split open. In the aftermath, Steve goes home to an empty house.

Well. Almost empty.

Steve sighs, hanging his head. One more thing. Then he can go to bed.

The dirty towel can wait until later. He tosses it towards the bathtub without looking and turns to the sink, grabbing his toothbrush and toothpaste. When he looks in the mirror, Eddie’s staring back at him.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/54863449

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The Beat Has Just Begun - chapter 10 extras

Any time a character watches TV in any Stranger Things story I write, know that I checked the date when the scene is set and did my level best to find what was canonically airing on network television on that day. This is not normal behaviour, yeah, I'm aware. And yet.

Steve's watching Monday Night Baseball on ABC. I could not find information on which of the nine MLB games played on April 14 1986 were televised or in which markets, so I ended up picking the Chicago White Sox vs the Detroit Tigers game based more or less on geography and vibes. Thanks to sports nerds I found the box score here and a play-by-play here.

I know almost nothing about baseball, which I hope wasn't too obvious.

Vickie doesn’t have a full name in canon, but in my Hawkins residents spreadsheet she does~

This doesn’t come up, really, but in my heart of hearts I believe Steve is a hunt-and-peck typist, and will stay that way for the rest of his life.

I have a little note for every single instance where Steve has no idea what Eddie’s listening to. At the trailer in this chapter, for example: Megadeth. Talk about mood music.

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Chapter 10 is live!

The Beat Has Just Begun by ForgetTheMoon Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson Rated M, 106K

Vecna dies. So does Eddie. The world doesn't split open. In the aftermath, Steve goes home to an empty house.

Well. Almost empty.

Steve sighs, hanging his head. One more thing. Then he can go to bed.

The dirty towel can wait until later. He tosses it towards the bathtub without looking and turns to the sink, grabbing his toothbrush and toothpaste. When he looks in the mirror, Eddie’s staring back at him.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/54863449

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The Beat Has Just Begun - chapter 9 extras

Spoilers below!!!

I swear this story has a happy ending. Just hang in there!

An extremely unnecessary part of my research for this fandom is looking up vintage 80's band shirts to dress Eddie in. Here's part of Eddie's grocery shopping fit:

Andy the jock doesn’t have a canon last name. Sorry to any Fishers out there.

Songs referenced:  The Bangles - Manic Monday Kiss - Prince & The Revolution  Van Halen - Why Can’t This Be Love?

Side note: Steve categorizing Van Halen as metal based on Why Can’t This Be Love? is uhhhh something Eddie might dispute, let’s just say. The single came out and charted before Eddie had to go on the lam, so he probably heard it before everything went down. As the first single from 5150, Van Halen’s first album with Sammy Hagar replacing David Lee Roth as lead singer it was… a bit of a departure. More than a few fans thought that Why Can’t This Be Love? was too poppy and corporate. The B-side, Get Up, along with much of the rest of the album, sounded much more familiar to them.  Eddie, in any case, probably likes Van Halen okay because Eddie Van Halen is a hell of a guitarist, but 1973-1986 Van Halen were on the hard rock end of the spectrum whereas based on what bands he’s got on his battle jacket and in his room, Eddie’s someone who started out listening to all kinds of hard rock/heavy metal but has gravitated towards the faster, heavier stuff. Thrash metal was still so new the genre barely had a name yet but Eddie in my mind would have taken one listen to Metallica and been like yes. That.

Jack Lewis Fine Jewelry is canon - there's an ad in Dr. Brenner's paper in the flashback from S4E1.

Mitch is the guy credited as Freak, which should be obvious enough from context. I’m given to understand he has a name in Eddie’s tie-in novel but I try to work exclusively from show canon, and in any case I wrote that scene before that book came out, so Mitch it is.

Good thing I posted this update on a Wednesday and not a Saturday, huh?

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Chapter 9 is live!

The Beat Has Just Begun by ForgetTheMoon Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson Rated M, 106K

Vecna dies. So does Eddie. The world doesn't split open. In the aftermath, Steve goes home to an empty house.

Well. Almost empty.

Steve sighs, hanging his head. One more thing. Then he can go to bed.

The dirty towel can wait until later. He tosses it towards the bathtub without looking and turns to the sink, grabbing his toothbrush and toothpaste. When he looks in the mirror, Eddie’s staring back at him.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/54863449

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updated my WIP spreadsheet - I am who I am - and the total word count across documents (not counting TBHJB, which is complete even though I haven't finished posting it) is just over 55K.

mind you, I have a lot of WIPs. like, the longest one is only 10K. but that's still so many words.

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The Beat Has Just Begun - chapter 8 extras

While outing as, like, a thing people do to other people has been around as long as society’s been weird about sexual orientation, the term itself, used the way we do now, hasn’t always been. As far as I know people did not yet say “Eddie got outed” or whatever in the mid-80’s. The vocabulary available to the average person around gender & sexuality and mental health was much more limited in general.

Never heard of Mikesells potato chips? Then you probably don’t live in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky or Illinois.

Okay, so, okay, the thing is: I can’t actually confirm if Steve’s 1983 BMW 733i could have had seat warmers. It may well not have. I tried to find manuals online and everything, but no dice. What I can tell you is that seat warmers first showed up on the market in the 60's and took a while to get off the ground. I would say they were still fairly uncommon and luxury-adjacent in the mid-80’s. Point being, Steve’s car is fancy.

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Chapter 8 is live! Happy Saturday~

The Beat Has Just Begun by ForgetTheMoon Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson Rated M, 106K

Vecna dies. So does Eddie. The world doesn't split open. In the aftermath, Steve goes home to an empty house.

Well. Almost empty.

Steve sighs, hanging his head. One more thing. Then he can go to bed.

The dirty towel can wait until later. He tosses it towards the bathtub without looking and turns to the sink, grabbing his toothbrush and toothpaste. When he looks in the mirror, Eddie’s staring back at him.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/54863449

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The Beat Has Just Begun - chapter 7 extras

A lot happened in this chapter! This post is... not really about any of that. Have a grab-bag of research notes instead.

Blizzards were introduced in 1985, and were a huge hit. Here's an article I found from 1986, and here's a Reddit thread with a vintage Blizzard ad.

Baggage carousels may seem pedestrian now, but they were space-age shit in 1962 when the TWA Flight Center was built at what is now known as JFK International Airport. The TWA Flight Center was apparently not the first airport terminal to have baggage carousels - this report (PDF link) by the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission cites a 1963 article saying carousels already existed in Montreal and San Francisco - but they were still a very new idea.  Before baggage carousels you had to search for your bag in a baggage rack. Like you know how you get those little trucks with a train of baggage carts behind them on the runway? Imagine trying to find your bag in that mess. Anyway, by the time Steve and his mom flew TWA from IND to JFK sometime in the mid-70’s there was probably also a baggage carousel at the airport in Indiana, but Steve would have encountered the one at JFK first. Sure, it’d been around for at least a decade by then, but that really isn’t such a long time, and kids are easily impressed. It may also have been the only time Steve’s ever been on an airplane, despite being a rich kid. Air travel is a lot cheaper and more accessible than it used to be.

Park Slope in Brooklyn was indeed full of lesbians in the 60's and 70's (and beyond). I did a lot of googling when trying to pick a home for Aunt Mary and Daisy, and, well, can’t go wrong with a place some in the community affectionately called ‘Dyke Slope’.

I spent a lot of effort looking for prescription drugs that had both a period-accurate street name and the right kind of pharmacological effects for Steve's case. I eventually settled on Demmies/Demerol (generic name pethidine/meperidine) and confirmed that the slang term existed at the time through Google Books. (If the link doesn't work it was supposed to go to a list on page 375 of a book called Clinical Diagnosis and Management by Laboratory Methods from 1984. Fic research: serious business.)

Smoking is bad for wound healing, score one for Steve.

I don’t specify in the story because Steve’s not likely to notice or care, but in my head Erica is reading Sweet Valley High #2, published 1983.

The Amoco brand name dates back to the 1920’s, and from what I can tell there were gas stations by that name in America until 2001, and then the brand name was reintroduced in 2017? That’s what Wikipedia would have me believe, anyway. Hawkins, like the small town I'm low-key drawing on when I write it, is about 60% gas stations by volume.

Is any of this interesting to anyone? I hope so. I'll keep on typing it up either way, because I can't help it.

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Chapter 7 is live!

The Beat Has Just Begun by ForgetTheMoon Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson Rated M, 106K

Vecna dies. So does Eddie. The world doesn't split open. In the aftermath, Steve goes home to an empty house.

Well. Almost empty.

Steve sighs, hanging his head. One more thing. Then he can go to bed.

The dirty towel can wait until later. He tosses it towards the bathtub without looking and turns to the sink, grabbing his toothbrush and toothpaste. When he looks in the mirror, Eddie’s staring back at him.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/54863449

[strangermoons]

Chapter 6 is live!

The Beat Has Just Begun by ForgetTheMoon Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson Rated M, 106K

Vecna dies. So does Eddie. The world doesn't split open. In the aftermath, Steve goes home to an empty house.

Well. Almost empty.

Steve sighs, hanging his head. One more thing. Then he can go to bed.

The dirty towel can wait until later. He tosses it towards the bathtub without looking and turns to the sink, grabbing his toothbrush and toothpaste. When he looks in the mirror, Eddie’s staring back at him.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/54863449

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The Beat Has Just Begun, Chapter 6 extras

Eddie has definitely never heard of a chakra. The 80's really were a different time.

There's a lot I could blather about when it comes to this chapter but I feel like I can't talk about most of it until the story's complete. I will say the conversation between Steve and Max at the hospital is one I put a lot of thought into. In the show, the two of them don't interact much, but I feel their personalities complement each other in interesting ways. Max is so prickly, and Steve can be kind of prickly too, but he's also very quick to accept people as "his". I don't actually get mom vibes from him at all but he's desperate to become a big brother; he needs both the space to call you a butthead and the sense of permanence associated with familial ties. He wants to be connected! He wants to belong! He will bring home any stray who's willing to roll their eyes at him! And that's what I love about him.

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The Beat Has Just Begun: chapter 5 extras

Happy birthday to this story! We've come a long way, baby. First fic I ever wrote that made it past the 5K mark, and only the second one I've finished.

I don't have anything research-related to say about this chapter so instead I'll ramble behind the cut about my general approach to the geography of Hawkins.

There is, to my knowledge, no official map of Hawkins. There are prop maps, but they differ from season to season. I found a reddit post that tried to place on-screen locations on a map based on various clues given in the show, and that generated a map unlike any of the prop maps I've found. What, then, is a literal-minded pedantic little nerd to do?

Well, I ended up taking the season 3 prop map that Hopper steals from the mayor's house in episode 4 (mostly because I found a nice scan of it early on when writing this story) and built my own version of Hawkins on top of it which I try to keep consistent. During my note-taking rewatch I made sure to note down every mentioned address and every legible street sign, and jotted down the name and approximate location of every business that appeared on-screen. I then reconciled this with the prop map, where possible.

I ran into issues pretty early on; for one thing, the route to Hopper's cabin goes from “take Denfield, then you’ll see a large oak tree. You’re gonna swing a right. That road is gonna dead-end. And it’s about a 5-minute walk from there.” in S2E9 to Hopper driving right up to the porch in S3E2. The Mayfield-Hargrove home mysteriously relocates from Old Cherry Road (S2E2) to 4819 Cherry Lane (S3E8). In S2E9 Hopper meets up with Sam Owens at a diner - or is it a bar? there are pool tables - called The Hideaway, but in S4E1 Eddie's extremely improbable* Corroded Coffin gigs are at a dive bar called The Hideout. Now, it's not impossible that two establishments in a small town would have such similar names, but it does seem a bit silly. If they're both supposed to be the same establishment it's kind of a sloppy mistake.

And then there are things like: Forest Hills trailer park is apparently seven miles away from the Wheelers' home on Maple Street. How big is Hawkins even supposed to be?

In the end I figured the most important thing was to have an internally consistent version of the town in my head that I could draw on when I'm writing, just so I don't end up making something a 10-minute walk in one scene and a 20-minute drive in another. I've tried to use street names from either the show or the prop map where possible, and supplemented by googling "Indiana native trees" and "Indiana historical figures" when necessary. When it comes to state-level geography I've plopped Hawkins more or less on top of Muncie because it's just easier to drop a pin in a real location and get google maps to spit out how long it would take to drive to Cincinnati, or whatever. Also, the S3 prop map has a little dot giving an approximate location in the state of Indiana that more or less lines up with where Muncie is and the throwaway WJRB 9 news report at the end of S4E9 where they say “the quaint town of Hawkins, 80 miles outside of Indianapolis.”

If this all seems like a lot of work: I don't know what to tell you. It feels necessary to my process? Like, you should see the spreadsheets. I have one that's just a list of all the tertiary characters that've appeared in my stories, with notes on whether they're canon (or canon-based) or full-on OCs, their approximate age, which stories they've appeared in, first or last names I've assigned canon characters that don't have them, relationships with other characters and any other relevant details. I have another one that's got a sheet with the timeline of TBHJB complete with which day of the week it is and notes on what happened when, and a separate sheet with a rough shift schedule for Family Video spanning several weeks. I honestly don't know that I could write anything at all without using these documents.

If you read this far: Wow, really? Thanks for reading 💀

*Corroded Coffin is a high school band, why on earth would they have a weekly standing gig? They don't even draw a crowd! The bar has zero incentive to let them keep playing!