#but Jonathan and Nancy do

[sapphicstoria]

I already made a post about this, but I still can’t believe someone would say Nancy being with JONATHAN would be “forced conformity.” Nancy, the rich/smart girl being with the struggling/loner boy is DEFINITELY the definition of “forced conformity” you’re soooo right. 🙃

[morganbritton132]

AU where Eddie cracks his head off the ground and temporarily gets mind reading powers. He goes to school the next day thinking that this might actually be fun, and it is for a while.

And then he hears bloodcurdling screaming - except only he hears it so, “That’s in someone’s head?”

He follows the sound out down the hall, pass his own classroom. The screaming getting louder and louder until, “Steve Harrington?”

“Yeah?” Steve blinks back into reality in the back of his history class. The screaming dims but doesn’t go away. Steve’s still got those bruises on his face but otherwise doesn’t look distressed, “…You want something, Munson?”

“Um…um, no,” He says. “I - no. Nothing.”

Steve narrows his eyes and a whisper of a voice just under the screaming thinks Eddie is fucking with him.

Eddie barely acknowledges it because he’s stuck on how Steve looks normal. Not anguished. Not tortured. But normal. Bored.

“Well, uh. Well, I’ll see you around, Harrington.”

And Eddie means that too.

[lalallalas-posts]

No this made me laugh so hard bc everyone's running and Mike

'GREETINGS MOTHER. I HAVE SORELY MISSED YOUR ABSENCE.'

[jacksaton]

byler squared

[silverliing]

“If byler were both girls nobody wou-“ yes they would! as someone who grew up sapphic I would love them even more!

@rainyydazze Ty for putting this in my brain

[menaceadored]

the way that people disregard nancy’s grief in fic is my biggest pet peeve- like she didn’t break up with steve because she wanted to be with jonathan :) she broke up with him bc she was overwhelmed with grief from the death of her closest friend and couldn’t stand the fact that barb’s family were still wondering what happened to her - even going so far as to sell their house to pay murray to look into barb’s disappearance- Nancy broke up with Steve because he wanted to bury the trauma they had experienced and pretend to be normal teenagers. Nancy wasn’t saying that Steve’s love for her was bullshit. She was saying- look at us. Look at everything we’ve been through. Pretending like none of that happened, burying the grief I feel, that is bullshit.- She didn’t go looking for Murray with Jonathan because she had feelings for him and wanted to leave Steve for him. Jonathan, he validated her feelings and was willing to go against the NDA to give Barb justice and give Barb’s family peace. (Or as much peace that can come from at least knowing that they don’t have to wonder where their daughter is any longer- to know that in the least she is no longer suffering.) That was what was most important to Nancy. And being validated in those feelings and seeing that Jonathan could truly empathize with her grief after believing he had lost his brother and that he would be there for her and support her in doing what she believed to be the most important thing she could do- that inspired romantic feelings and led them to get together.

Some of y’all write her like she’s this heartless one dimensional person who just left Steve in the dust because she wanted another guy and that is a huge disservice to her character.

[spirit-meets-the-b0ne]

I’m sorry but Nancy "I don't think my parents have ever loved each other. My mom was young. My dad was older, but he had a cushy job, money, came from a good family. So they bought a nice house at the end of the cul de sac, and started their nuclear family. Screw that." Wheeler being reduced to an end game of Stancy vs Jancy can kick rocks!!!

Nancy deserves to be an independent reporter who gets to have her career as a woman of the 90s and not give a shit about marrying and pumping out kids. Give me Nancy Wheeler writing books and ground breaking articles. Give me Nancy Wheeler breaking the cycle of her small town parents. Nancy Wheeler deserves the world!! She can have a little bit of Robin Buckley as a treat!!!

[jonathanbyersphd]

It is still very huh to me that some people don't realize that Jonathan in s4 is the most depressed we've ever seen him. Just because he has one friend in California doesn't mean he's happy by any means.

And part of why he's depressed is that despite what he says Joyce & Will need him less than ever. Joyce is working from home making a decent income and actually around (and most likely getting extra money from Owens look at the house) and Will is 15 and seemingly navigating HS pretty well.

So Jonathan, for the first time ever possibly doesn't have a role in the family. Or rather, his role has quickly shifted from parent/guardian to child. And he doesn't know what to do. He's adrift and he, as tragic as it sounds, does not know how to live for himself and what he wants. Which of COURSE is going to lead to depression and drowning that out with Weed and like his longing to go back to stay in Lenora and convince himself that eventually Joyce & Will are going to need him again which again of course they aren't.

[brionysea]

nancy being like 'what do you mean I broke into someone's house and ignored my boss so I'm losing my job that's not fair' and mike being like 'what do you mean el publicly assaulted someone so she's getting arrested that's insane' I love this stupid family and their inability to conceive of real world consequences

[emily-mooon]

You know I actually wonder if Mike’s conversation with hopper is about everything that has happened

Final seasons supposed to be like a war right? There’s going to be a lot of death that can’t be prevented. Hawkins won’t be the same after that. Lots of people who were farmers, bankers, teachers, librarians, auto mechanics, store owners, etc. are going to die and those deaths will be felt

Mike is going to see all of that death. Heck he’ll probably come across dead bodies lying on the ground that can’t be picked up unless the person wants to try and lose a hand. There’s going to be trauma added on top of the ones he already has. It’ll be hard for him (and even many of the other characters) to get back to the life they had before the upside down

Then you have Hopper who has been through war before. He has seen the effects of it on people and has experienced it himself. He knows how hard it can be to go back to life after the battles have been finished

Mike must be struggling to get back to that life. Two years have passed and peace still doesn’t feel real. Everyone else can easily go back to the lives they had before the upside down but he can’t. He saw all of the death, destruction and pain it had caused. He can’t pretend and go on like nothing happened

Having Hopper, who has been through both this and actual war, come and comfort Mike and share his own experiences, tell him it’s ok to feel the way he is feeling cause it is hard to go back to peace when you’ve spent years in fear of you and other people you love dying is really good. It would be a great way to close off their character arcs

Mike has always bottled his own feelings up and Hopper has done the same. So having these two talk about what they’ve gone through in such an open manner, is a really great way to show how far they’ve come

Sure, it could be about a death of someone’s close to them both, I wouldn’t put it past them cause even I am a bit suspicious about certain characters dying (and also very worried). But we should also try and have some hope. We haven’t even gotten a trailer for s5 yet, so why assume a character is going to die just based on leaked bts photos of a conversation we haven’t even seen?

But whatever that conversation is about, I think it’s going to be a really good one. Hopper-Mike father-son moments have always been good

[fallstaticexit]

10 year old Jonathan Landgraab & 8 year old Malcolm Landgraab

[morganbritton132]

Eddie is observant the way that only an outcast can be. He’s always existed on the periphery of the student body and when no one wants to even make eye contact with you half the time, it’s easy to be invisible. It’s easy to watch.

Because of this, he knows too much about people. And because of his great big crush, he knows wayyyy too much about Steve.

It’s a problem.

He’s bad about dropping lore that no one else knows because Steve has never mentioned it before. He’s getting increasingly weird looks that all comes to a head at Family Videos one evening.

Eddie there, listening to Robin and Dustin debate what they think Steve’s favorite movie is when he casually says, “It’s Romancing the Stone.”

Steve raises an eyebrow, “…I’ve never told anybody that. How do you know that?”

Eddie’s not going to say that he saw Steve buy tickets for the movie on four separate occasions when he was sneaking into The Hawk. No. He’s going to say something worse like, “My friend, Gareth. He told me. He likes to… watch you.”

That is, you know, weird and Steve says that. He also lets it go because it doesn’t even crack the top 10 weirdest things to happen this year. He’s actually impressed by how much Gareth knows because, “I don’t even think my parents know that, wow.”

Eddie and Steve become better friends, get closer, and it’s smooth sailing. Steve doesn’t even mentioned Gareth’s ‘stalker’ habits when Eddie invites him to watch the band practice.

And then Gareth brings out cookies with cinnamon in them and didn’t mention it even though he “knows” that Steve is allergic so now Steve thinks Gareth wants him to die.

[cameronscavefordoodles]

[jacksaton]

WIP

[californiaboytoybilly]

[queenofshenanigans]

(Cross-posted, with a few minor edits, from bsky)

A post there reminded me of my headcanon (stolen from my own childhood) of single kid Steve who played board games on his own, with rules only he knew then, and only he remembers now.

He gets so confused playing board games with everyone later on, because they don't know stuff like when you go to jail in Monopoly you can't get out Until you've freed all your pawns from Start in Sorry. If you go bankrupt in Monopoly before then, you can challenge the Banker to a speed round of Uno (if you play a Draw 4 on the first round, you take over the Bank and automatically get Boardwalk + any hotels or houses Boardwalk).

There are more, more complicated rules that include different combinations of board games, but no one seems to understand, and tell him he's making things needlessly complicated (which is HYSTERICAL coming from Eddie & the rest of Hellfire after they made Steve sit through a 30 minute lecture on THACO and backstab rules, not to mention why he couldn't do a fireball as a fighter, the one time he played D&D with them).

Robin gets most of the rules, but her attention span for board games is worse than his is for movies, so they rarely play any, and Nancy refuses 'your twisted idea of Game Night' after that time they play TwisterOfLife: TroublePursuit Ed. when they'd 1st been dating.

It's not until Jon and Argyle finally make it to a Game Night that Steve finds his match. You see, Argyle is also an only child with his own rules for board games, and unlike the other only children in the group, he understands on a soul level what Steve does: the fun of board games was in combining them into the most chaotic versions of themselves, and then using them to crush your friends, enemies, and stuffed animals into defeat.

The rest of the party, who to this point has only ever seen the most chill version of Argyle, watches as the two of them engag in all-out warfare that leaves the Harrington house in shambles by the time it's done almost twenty hours later.

The winner?

Steve's old stuffed bear, fished out from the attic.

Steve maintains, as he had in the fateful Coup of 1976, that Snuggles had cheated. Argyle agrees.