#like do yall really think that steve bullied a 14 yr old so bad that now theyre like

[grandwretch]

been thinking a lot about those hcs about steve bullying eddie and i'm pretty sure the math just does not check out on any level

like okay so first of all, steve absolutely would not be bullying someone older than him in his freshman and sophomore years, especially because in the way puberty hits teen boys, there is no way eddie wasn't probably taller and bigger than him in those years.

and like, yeah, he was more of an asshole in his junior year, but he was only a junior for four months before the demogorgon. so that means that everything you want steve to be responsible for vis a vis eddie's trauma has to be within that four months.

it's especially egregious when the only person we actually see steve bully is jonathan, who is a sophomore at the time. a sophomore who kicked steve's ass, btw. which probably means steve wasn't physically bullying seniors and escaping unscathed.

also it seems to be an equally popular trope that steve bullied gareth and gareth hates steve the most out of all eddie's friends, which is like... okay, gareth is, i think, a junior at the time of s4? which means he would have been a freshman in steve's junior year. which, yeah, sets him in steve's prime bullying demographic, but can i just remind everyone that steve wasn't even with that crowd for his entire first semester of junior year?

it seems incredibly unlikely that gareth got bullied by steve personally in fall '83 and then held on to that grudge for the rest of high school, especially after seeing firsthand steve's fall from popularity and then spending almost a whole year in school without him.