#this is. so fucking ungodly long skdncdnm

[lesbianrobin]

hey guys it's me again back on my bullshit <3 wanna hear my theory about how tommy created king steve? warning it’s like 2800 words long okay let's go!

So, at first glance in S1, the Steve and Tommy dynamic seems somewhat obvious: King Steve and his loyal sidekick. This post is me arguing that the only reason we really have this perception is because Steve is the more attractive of the pair (no hate to Chester Rushing, he’s very cute, but. Joe Keery) and because Tommy himself encouraged it. Tommy was actually the more “dominant” partner in the duo. I believe that it was Tommy who encouraged Steve to lean into the “King Steve” persona and who encouraged belief in this persona among their classmates, all for his own benefit.

Before we can really get into it, I have to establish something about Steve’s character, specifically that he bases his self-worth and self-image almost entirely on what others say and think about him. I’m basing this assumption off of a few key moments in the series, but I don’t want this to be insanely long so I’ll try to focus on season two where this trait is most evident.

At the Halloween party, Nancy tells Steve that they killed Barb and that their “love” is bullshit, and then later outside of the gym she insists that he isn’t being fair or reasonable in his anger with her. The next day Steve shows up to her house with roses, rehearsing an apology (”I’m sorry... what am I sorry for?) even though he doesn’t feel that he’s done anything wrong. That’s important: apologizing even though he doesn’t actually believe or understand his feelings and actions to be wrong. He’s trusting Nancy’s perception that he’s been unreasonable above his own hurt feelings and his own perception that he’s done nothing he needs to apologize for. Then, at the end of the season, he tells Nancy that he may have been a shitty boyfriend, but he’s a pretty damn good babysitter. 

Sometime between going to the Wheelers’ house with flowers to apologize and talking to Nancy at the Byers’, Steve did a pretty serious 180 from “What the hell am I sorry for, what did I even do wrong” to “I was a shitty boyfriend and you should go be with Jonathan.” The last time he interacted with Nancy was prior to the flower incident, so what happened to cause this shift in perspective? I’d like to suggest... that nothing happened! 

See, Steve is on a pretty linear emotional path in S2 after the Halloween party. At first, he’s so upset that he can’t even look at Nancy, asking Jonathan to take her home. The next day he avoids her until she confronts him, at which point he’s rather confident in his own feelings that Nancy has hurt him and doesn’t love him like she should. As time goes on, though, he loses confidence in his feelings. He buys her flowers to apologize. He isn’t remotely angry with Nancy or Jonathan once they show up together and it’s pretty clear that something’s going on between them. Finally, he calls himself a shitty boyfriend. I think that the more time passes, the less Steve believes in himself, and the more he tends to default to believing others despite his own feelings. As the anger fades, he questions himself, and since he loves and trusts Nancy, he’s inclined to believe her! Since she doesn’t love him, he must have done something wrong. Because Nancy doesn’t love him, because she wants Jonathan, because their relationship was “bullshit,” he now believes he must have been a shitty boyfriend.

Sidenote, in S3 he says a lot of shit about how he’s a loser with no future, and the way he says it indicates (to me) that it’s something he hears quite often, likely from his father. Even though it’s pretty normal to be working minimum wage the summer after you graduate high school and not have things figured out yet, even though he’s literally helped save his friends’ lives, perhaps even helped save the whole town, Steve has internalized the idea that he’s a total failure at the ripe old age of 18 (19?) and I can’t help but think that it’s because his father has told him. So. Also in S3, he says his hair is his greatest feature, and apparently people literally call him Steve “the Hair” Harrington so like, maybe he just knows he has really good hair, but he ALSO might be responding to the nickname by saying like, “Oh, okay, the hair is Objectively my best feature, okay.” Just a little bit of speculation!

I know this is a lot of my own personal opinions and speculation, but if you can get behind it, let’s keep going! If Steve is someone whose every belief about himself is a direct response to the words and feelings of those around him, if he places the opinions of others above his own feelings, it would logically follow that he might be easily emotionally manipulated.

So, let’s apply this lens to his friendship with Tommy!

Let’s run down the list. Steve cleans up after Tommy, making excuses for his shitty behavior, even wordlessly giving Carol his own food at lunch after Tommy ruined hers. He allows Tommy and Carol to have sex in his mom’s bed, and as indicated by their familiarity with the bedroom and knowledge of where the spare sheets are, this is a regular occurrence. He’s also always seen driving the two of them around. 

Neither Tommy nor Carol is ever really seen doing anything kind for Steve. They tease his girlfriend, then later use his heartbreak as an excuse to graffiti some shit and make cruel jokes about Nancy and Jonathan. That’s just not the behavior of a couple hangers-on to the most popular kid in school! Neither of them ever even pretend to give a shit about Steve. It seems that Tommy and Carol were very comfortable using Steve for his big empty house and his nice car and his popularity at school because they’d been using him for years at that point, and they thought there was no way he’d ever ditch them.

I think it’s generally accepted among fans that Steve and Tommy have been close friends for years. Tommy’s familiar with Steve’s father’s infidelity, and is comfortable enough to joke and laugh about it with Steve. The two of them just... operate like people who’ve existed around each other for a long time. So, if we accept that Steve and Tommy have been friends for awhile, we can then accept three things: the two of them know each other very well, Tommy is used to having fun at Steve’s expense, and Steve is used to allowing it.

When Steve does finally stand up to Tommy and Carol, Tommy turns on him immediately. It’s an incredibly fast turn. He shoves Steve up against his car, physically threatens him, and proceeds to taunt him angrily even as he’s driving away. Specifically he yells, “That’s it, run away Stevie boy, run away! Just like you always do,” and continues to shout variations on this phrase even after Steve’s driven far enough that Tommy’s only yelling to himself. The fact that Tommy keeps shouting after Steve can’t hear him indicates that he is genuinely very upset by Steve’s standing up against him and Carol. His fury, however, as indicated by the speed with which he turned on Steve, seems to be less like that of one who feels betrayed by a friend and more like one angry at some perceived loss or threat. 

Now, let me just state the obvious: that was a really weird thing for Tommy to be yelling!

There’s no real precedent at this point (or any time) in the show for Steve “running away,” unless you count him running from the cops, which... Tommy also did, and which also happened, like, ten minutes ago, which I don’t think would really qualify for the wording “like you always do.” Tommy also suddenly calls him “Stevie boy,” which (correct me if I’m wrong) nobody has called Steve thus far. Maybe he’s just trying to mock and belittle Steve in any way he can think of, but it’s just... weirdly specific. The whole thing is a bit of a non-sequitur.

But! Remember how we established that Steve and Tommy, by virtue of having been friends for a significant period of time, know each other pretty well? Remember how Tommy is knowledgeable about Steve’s father’s infidelity, so familiar that he’s comfortable joking about it? Keep that in mind.

This phrase that Tommy shouts at Steve only makes sense in the context of some offscreen information that we the viewer are not privy to, but which Tommy and Steve are. What might that information be? Nothing in the show indicates that Steve has a history of picking fights prior to the incident with Jonathan. He’s a fairly respectable suburban kid, what is Tommy accusing him of running from? It’s my opinion that the only logical answer is that Tommy’s referencing a specific event with Steve’s “asshole” father, or a specific phrase that Steve has perhaps often heard from his father. I’m gonna ask you to sit on this assumption for a minute, and I’ll come back and support it soon.

Okay, so that’s S1 out of the way. At this point, a few things are clear: Steve has issues with his dad. Tommy knows about those issues. Steve allowed himself to be used by Tommy and Carol for some indeterminate yet significant amount of time before finally snapping and dumping them completely, something which infuriates Tommy.

Tommy is also in S2! And... all he does is tell Steve that Nancy and Jonathan are skipping school together. He never actually interacts with Nancy or Jonathan; he shows up in S2 entirely to mock Steve, to use his deepest fears and insecurities against him. 

First thing: in the S2 shower scene after basketball practice, Tommy makes it a point to shove Jonathan and Nancy’s relationship in Steve’s face. Billy doesn’t know Steve, so he attacks his basketball skills and his keg stand record, but Tommy? Tommy knows about Steve’s dad cheating on his mom, he was there for the S1 fistfight, he knows how monumental infidelity is to Steve, especially in the case of Nancy and Jonathan, and so that is what he chooses to torment Steve with, and it clearly strikes a nerve. 

Now’s where I circle back to my assertion that Tommy was referencing/quoting Steve’s father while yelling at him back in S1. S2 makes it clear that Tommy  knows Steve’s biggest insecurities, and he intentionally exploits them for his own purposes. This, combined with the way Tommy demonstrates intimate knowledge of Steve’s family situation and the fact that his words just don’t quite make sense in context, the fact that “Stevie boy” sounds like something a father may call his young son, makes me believe that at some point, Steve told Tommy about something his dad said that hurt him, and Tommy remembered that to use against him later. 

This paragraph is just speculation on what Tommy might be referring to, so skip if you want, it’s entirely my own opinion. We know that Steve’s parents sleep in separate bedrooms and his father can’t be trusted not to cheat, and thus we might assume that they argue a lot. Maybe his parents get into lots of arguments, and whenever Steve chooses to remove himself from the situation, he’s accused of running away. Maybe Steve runs off whenever he gets in trouble with his father. There’s a lot of possibilities, but either way, “run away, Stevie boy, run away just like you always do” just... sounds too personal and specific to be something random and meaningless that Tommy came up with on the spot.

Now, in S2, Tommy also appears to have latched onto Billy rather quickly after Billy’s arrival in town. Coincidentally, Billy is kind of obsessed with Steve and taking him down, despite the fact that Steve never sought him out or challenged him in any way. Steve has been minding his own business! When they later end up in a fistfight, Billy says that he’s “been dying to meet this King Steve” that people have been telling him about, and I can’t help but think... who would make it their priority to talk to Billy about Steve Harrington? Like, new guy from California moves to my small Indiana town, I don’t want to tell him about some popular guy at school who’s gotten kinda lame and quiet lately, I want to ask him about himself, or tell him what we do for fun around here, right? So who might be incentivized to talk Steve up to a guy who’s clearly itching for a fight, a guy dying to prove that he’s top dog? Who did we see hanging out with Billy a couple of times?

Did you say Tommy? Because it’s Tommy! It certainly seems to me as though Tommy saw an opportunity in Billy. The opportunity to befriend someone with a certain social power (much like with Steve), but also the opportunity to torment or get back at Steve in some way. I think that Tommy intentionally inflated the character of “King Steve” to Billy in the hopes that Billy would pick a fight with Steve and Steve would get his ass kicked without Tommy having to get his hands dirty.

Which makes me wonder... what if Tommy played up that King Steve image to people besides Billy? Other kids at Hawkins High... or perhaps Steve himself. Remember how Steve internalizes things? Believes that he must be whatever others see in him? Yeah.

Let’s say you’re an asshole teenage boy who wants it all. You want to be popular. You want to have a spot to hang out with your girlfriend with no parents around. You want to feel strong and powerful. You meet a kid who could give you all of that, and all he wants in return is friendship. He doesn’t even seem to care if that friendship is genuine or not! All you have to do is hang around and make him feel like a cool kid. Convince him to throw a small party, you and your girlfriend get free reign of his nice big house. Make sure he knows that he’s got Prom King potential, that he’s the top dog, and you get to be one of the popular guys, too. It’s a pretty sweet deal if you can recognize the opportunity for what it is.

One last thing: Actual Steve is nothing like he seems around Tommy and Carol in the start of S1. Making friends with Dustin and coming up with a goofy handshake, singing to cheer Robin up in S3, singing into the bat to try and cheer Nancy up in S1, holding her hand during their first time, unabashedly telling her she’s beautiful and that he missed her even if only an hour had passed... Steve is a very emotional, dorky guy, and we never really got to see that side of him when he was around Tommy. I just find that interesting in light of the fact that Steve and Tommy seem to be otherwise rather close. Steve was clearly playing a part to some degree while around them, and in S3 he explicitly says that he behaved the way he did in high school because he was concerned about what others would think of him, about losing his popularity. Even prior to their argument, Steve was wary around Tommy, concerned about losing his friendship despite the fact that Tommy was a pretty objectively shitty friend.

So, here’s what we know. Tommy knows a lot about Steve, including his private family issues, and he isn’t above using that knowledge to hurt or manipulate Steve. In fact, he seems to be really good at it. Tommy benefitted from Steve’s popularity, from him throwing parties and living up to the “King Steve” image. Steve followed Tommy’s lead in their friendship, cleaned up after him, made excuses for him, and let him get away with just about anything. He masked aspects of his personality that didn’t fit the image that he and Tommy aimed for. He was desperate to retain Tommy’s friendship and afraid of letting the mask fall. Tommy was furious when Steve rejected him, taunted Steve with deeply personal jabs, and a year later he latched onto the new “top dog” in town with record speed. Steve is a completely different person when he’s around Tommy versus when he’s around Nancy, Robin, and the kids. Most importantly, we know that Steve has a tendency to construct himself in the image provided by others. 

Taking all of this into account, I think that Tommy Hagan met sad, rich, handsome little Steve Harrington, saw just how lonely and desperate he was to feel a sense of belonging, and used that to nudge Steve into striving to be the person that Tommy wanted him to be: King Steve.