#he's probably mad she didn't tell him abt the bullies bc in his fantasyland he would've saved her from them

[apatheticlexicographer]

i just had an "oh fuck it all makes sense" moment about the m!levelogue™, specifically the line “my life started the day we found you in the woods”, and why it makes me so uncomfortable in particular.

like, obviously we know it isn’t true, but it is to a degree. the day mike found el wasn’t the day his life started, but it was the day he moved from the fishpond to the sea. all of a sudden his boring suburban reality is swept up in superpowers, monsters, other worlds and shady government organizations. for a nerdy little kid like him, it's quite literally like seeing his daydreams take form.

the thing is, though, that has absolutely nothing to do with el as a person. she's the catalyst, in that everything that happened was a chain of dominoes she tipped over when she found the demogorgon in her mindscape, but that was just her action as a tool. that was eleven, the experiment, and hawkins national laboratory, and the upside down. brenner and henry creel had more agency in that string of events than she did.

none of that has anything to do with el, the person. her appearing in mike's life wasn't what caused it to "really start", it was everything else that came by association.

if somebody told me that in a love confession i'd be pissed too.