#a girl feels guilty for letting her brother die and her marriage fall apart bc she watches and does nothing

[aroace-poly-show]

im missing half these characters why are they hard to do…..

[themikewheelers]

If you ever have the time, please tell me about your Hopper prequel headcannons.

He graduates high school in 1960, same class as Joyce and Bob. Almost immediately after he enlists in the army to go to Vietnam. It’s p canon that Hop wasn’t exactly the best behaved kid in high school, and I think he def came from a very traditional family with a lot of expectations for masculinity. His grandfather served in WW1, his father in WW2, he may have even had an uncle or brother or someone in Korea. He grew up hearing stories from war, but definitely that kinda idealized “glory days” version of it. I think he was always kinda expected to join the military and his family definitely also saw it as a way to kinda get him in line and stop the teenage messing around. And he didn’t really have any qualms with it. He joined the army and left Hawkins as a young, kinda naive kid who didn’t really understand yet what war would really be like.

Cut to a few years later, he’s out of the war and moved to New York, and he’s not the same person at all. I think Vietnam was really the start of the Hopper we know. He’s not really the immature kid he was in high school anymore, he’s a lot more serious, he’s dealing with a lot of PTSD, and he’s honestly kinda starting to fall apart. But he holds it together, he’s still young and he’s got aspirations. He certainly doesn’t want to head back to his hometown in Indiana. So he starts fresh in New York, becoming a rookie cop that’s able to climb through the ranks pretty quickly, he becomes a detective. The War on Drugs hadn’t really started yet, and he’s investigating more violent type of crimes. Definitely not the best for his PTSD, but as he said himself, they’re strangers, so he’s a bit desensitized. He’s not really all that healthy mentally, but he’s holding himself together and trying to pretend everything is fine.

Around 1970 is when he meets Diane. He falls for her quickly, and she’s really one of the most serious relationships he’s ever had. Before her, he dated around a lot, never really staying with one person for more than a few months, but he never really had a long term relationship. Diane is nothing like him at all, she’s a very well put-together person and she’s sociable and outgoing and helps Hop feel that way too. They get married in 1971, move to the suburbs, and have Sara very quickly after. And for a few years they’re really the perfect happy family. Being a dad gives Hop something he can channel himself into, he’s no longer fixated on the past or on work, and for the first time in his life he’s really happy. He’s perfectly content with his happy, normal family and feeling like the happy, normal dad.

Then Sara gets sick. And around here is when I wanna leave it kinda open-ended, because obviously there’s so much we don’t know about what happened with Sara, and David Harbour has hinted enough that there’s more to the story than just her getting cancer, and it’s a canon fact she died at Hawkins Lab. But then she dies, and Hopper is a wreck. His marriage with Diane kinda folds in on itself almost immediately too. She wants to rely on him and work through it with him, but he’s just too much of a mess. He’s isolating himself and drinking and smoking and doesn’t really ever want to go home bc every reminder of Sara is painful. He’s falling apart, and all the unresolved stuff he was able to ignore before like his trauma with the war and just a general not-so-great mental health is resurfacing and everything is amplified by Sara. For years he was able to ignore everything and pretend he was living this happy and perfect life because that’s honestly how he felt, but once Sara dies he’s just a complete wreck. Him and Diane cope with it in such different ways, and Hop doesn’t even try and keep his marriage going. They divorce around 1978.

I think somewhere within his marriage with Diane they moved to Indiana (bc again they were in Hawkins when Sara died). But they weren’t living in the town though. Maybe in Indianapolis somewhere, but then after the divorce is when Hopper moved to Hawkins for real. Part of it was because he was offered the job as chief, but I think a bigger part of it was wanting to be near Sara, while also not wanting to be near all the painful memories of where they lived before. He moved to New York to start fresh, but now he just wanted some stability and familiarity and to be where he was before the war and before Diane and before Sara and before everything.

Very quickly he makes a reputation for himself in Hawkins. A lot of people remember him, but he’s not the same Jim Hopper as he was in high school. It’s a small town and people talk, everyone knows about Sara, and everyone knows how he’s dealing with it.  

Then we get to the Hopper we knew in season 1. He’s a mess, he’s got a real drinking and smoking problem, he’s sleeping around, living in a trailer, doesn’t really have any close friends. Even Joyce he didn’t really reconnect with until the events of s1. Hawkins doesn’t really have much crime, so there’s not much for him to do as chief, and I think that kinda contributes to his spiral as well. He doesn’t really have anything to focus on so he spends all his time thinking about Sara and his failed marriage and everything that came before it. I think even before Diane and Sara came into his life, Hop was already holding himself together by the seams. He was struggling and right on the edge of falling off a cliff, but he held himself together just enough and then when Diane came along he really pulled himself together and for a few years he really was happy and stable. But then after Sara, not only is he back at square one, but he’s completely flung off the aforementioned cliff.

Diane remarried soon too. Within only a year or two of the divorce, and then she has another baby pretty quickly too. That does not help Hop at all. The one thing really holding him together before was knowing that at least there was someone else going through this with him, even if they didn’t speak much and Hop feels guilty knowing he wasn’t the best husband. But once he starts to feel like Diane is moving on, it makes everything ten thousand times worse for him. His only real way to cope is to deny everything, making drunken calls to Diane and talking about Sara like she’s still around, but of course that only hurts. And not only is he dealing with a ton of grief and unresolved trauma, but he feels very meaningless as well. There’s nothing for him to do as chief really, and he doesn’t have anyone close to him in his life. And I think that’s why everything that happens in the show really helps turn him around. Right off the bat, he has something to do, some meaning to help others. There’s a missing child, and he’s the one responsible for finding him. But even more than that, Will being missing helps him to reconnect with Joyce, and he discovers this whole conspiracy behind the lab.

But then at the end there really is only one decision for him, he can sell out Eleven and save Will, or let Will die in the Upside Down. So he makes a rash decision that ultimately he feels so guilty for and tells the lab where El is hiding, and it’s not until everything is over that he realizes the severity of what he’s done. The lab is putting him in charge of keeping everything hushed up, but now he has to deal with people like the Hollands coming after him when he can’t just tell them the truth, there’s people like Murray coming up with conspiracies. Even Joyce originally was trying to expose the lab for everything if you look at the “The Boy Who Came Back To Life” newspaper article. And then on top of all the stress, he’s got the guilt weighing on him that there’s this little girl that could be dead for all he knows all because he chose Will’s life over hers. So he starts searching for her. Probably talked to Mike or someone about her, found out where they met her, found out her favorite food, found out as much as he could. Mike probably told him about seeing her the night the lab interrogated him, so Hop hoped she wasn’t in the Upside Down.

He puts the crate with food out in the woods by Mirkwood as a shot in the dark that she may see it. I don’t think he expected much out of it, and the first time he saw the food missing he probably assumed it was an animal or something, but he kept doing it every day because it helped him feel like he was doing something and helped to pacify some of his guilt, plus it’s all he knew he could do. Likewise he also probably was the one to help set up Will’s therapy sessions with Owens, and came with Joyce every time to bring him there.

Then one day he actually finds El. He does the only thing he can think of, brings her to his grandfather’s hunting cabin, and starts to make some home for her. And I think it’s important to note that when Hop took El in, he wasn’t immediately thinking about adopting her or becoming her dad or any of that, he wasn’t even thinking that far ahead, he just knew there was this little girl here he needed to protect. And they weren’t immediately family right away, they were strangers who honestly didn’t really know or trust each other. But over time they’re together so much and they begin to bond. Even if it still takes a while for El to really be his daughter, both emotionally and legally, she starts to become family for Hop, and I think she kinda helps him in the same way Sara once did.

He has some newfound meaning in his life, he has someone to love and protect and take care of. We start to see him acting more like a dad again, he’s more domestic. He’s not, ya know, the mess he was in season 1. Instead of waking up and getting drunk before heading to work, he’s making french toast and waking her up and talking to her. And obviously their relationship is very rocky for a while but I do think overall they’re happy and for a while El is able to keep her frustrations about the cabin under the surface. And of course El and Sara helped Hop in different ways, but I think where Sara and Diane gave Hopper this feeling of normalcy that gave him some temporary happiness, I think El was actually able to help him heal. That’s what I love so much about Hopper and El’s dynamic. They’re both extremely messy people, both dealing with their own cocktail of trauma and mental health, but they both kinda accept the other as they are and help the other not to really cope per se, but to feel supported and accepted. Hop knows he’s never really going to be the person he was before Sara, who was super happy and healthy and perfect, and he knows that him and El aren’t exactly a normal family, but he accepts that. And I think one of the overall themes on this show is about not feeling normal but accepting it, and everything with Hop kinda shows that. He’s not the same person he was before Sara, but deep down he knows even then he wasn’t perfect and he had a lot of other issues he just kept below the surface. But then with El he’s actually able to find some meaning again and work through his grief and guilt and accept his life for what it is now, and their whole arc together in s2 really is so monumental for Hop’s whole character.