#where the upside ends

[sp0o0kylights]

AU were getting haunted is common--but it's dependent upon the living person feeling something extreme/having unfinished business and being unable to let go, not the ghost.

Nancy is haunted by Barb.

Joyce by Bob

Max by Billy

But Eddie somehow finds himself in the rare situation of a mass haunting: multiple people can see and hear him after he dies.

He understands Wayne's regrets, but hates that he has to be the one to reassure his Uncle that none of this was his fault.

Anticipated Dustin's guilt--one of Eddie's last thoughts in the living world was the realization that he'd likely have to fix this in the after life.

Its Steve Harrington thats the fucking curveball, and Eddie can't pass on until Steve admits why exactly Eddie's haunting him.

Too bad Steve's tight lipped about it.

They both know he's playing dumb--insisting he has no idea why he can see and interact with Eddie's ghost. That it must be some overall general guilt. That Eddie will probably move on once Dustin and Wayne accept his death.

Too bad Eddie knows the truth.

The strongest thing keeping him here I'd Steve--and nothing will happen until Eddie learns why.

(Spoilers it's because Steves gay and repressing the shit out of it)

[bisexualbaker]

A Secret Fifth Method (that maybe shouldn't be secret)

That poll on taking pills and such from the other day has got people comparing notes, and apparently the information I got isn't common knowledge or whatever?

See, my mom taught me that solid pills and tablets, you tilt your head back to swallow for best results; capsules, meanwhile, float, so when you take them with a drink, you tilt your head forwards to swallow them. From my understanding, the goal is to get them as close as you can to the back of your mouth for better swallowing.

So because the two different types of meds have different swallowing methods, and I take both, I don't take all of them in one go. (I mean, I don't even take all of my solid pills together, but I used to get heartburn from taking my meds the wrong way, so I'm inclined to take it easy with them when I can.)

Anyway, it probably doesn't work for everyone, but if you have trouble with pills and the like, it might be worth a shot.

[torgawl]

i was a reading a bit more on purgatory and purgatorius ignis (cleansing fire), which is a concept that existed even before the notion that purgatory itself was a third other-world domain, similar to heaven and hell, when i suddenly remembered dante's la divina commedia and decided to revisit the story a little. and i found something interesting as i was scrolling through the wikipedia page.

so, purgatory is the second part of la divina commedia, following inferno, and is an allegory telling of the climb of dante up the mount of purgatory, guided by the roman poet virgil. alegorically, purgatorio represents the penitent christian life (and christianity, as we know, is one of the core themes of fontaine's archon quests that arlecchino was a part of). while describing the climb dante focuses a lot on the nature of sin, examples of vice and virtue, as well as moral issues in politics and in the church. what's interesting, though, is that the poem posits the theory that all sins arise from love – either perverted love directed towards others' harm, or deficient love, or the disordered or excessive love of good things.

why is this interesting, you ask? let me add here a few quotes before i contextualise it:

"she is a god with no love left for her people, nor do they have any left for her" - dainsleif about the cryo archon, the tsaritsa

"her royal highness the tsaritsa is actually a gentle soul. too gentle, in fact, and that's why she had to harden herself. likewise, she declared war against the whole world only because she dreams of peace. and because she made an enemy of the world, i now have a friend in you." - childe about the tsaritsa

"everyone praises her for her kindness and benevolence, but they forget that love is also a form of sin. what if she's just trying to compensate for something?" - wanderer about the tsaritsa

the tsaritsa, the cryo archon and the person arlecchino is devoted to, is theorised and hinted multiples times to be the god of love. yes, the love that is said to be the origin of sin in la divina commedia. we can also draw parallels between the idea of perverted love talked about in the poem and the relationship between arlecchino and others, for instance the kids of the house of the hearth.

arlecchino's drip marketing including an excerpt where the scene goes from a gentle warm environment, seemingly mistaken as a loving family home full of innocent looking children, that quickly shifts into a somber and dark atmosphere under her authority - the children answering instantly, without hesitation and completely obedient -, is the perfect illustration of the duality within her character. there's an obvious exploitative and manipulative system making use of the house of the hearth and the orphans under its roof, where arlecchino (as the one running the orphanage) is the provider and the kids are brought up to be dependable and further dispatched as fatui soldiers when "potential" is recognised. and we can deduce that there's ways that their education is done from a very young age so it prevents or punishes any sort of dissent, something not hard to imagine when we know from freminet that arlecchino doesn't like when the kids cry or show emotional vulnerability, something she sees as weakness, for example. but if there's this dark side to her, there's also certain attitudes that demonstrate her care for the children or even her care for the world around her. arlecchino helping freminet get closure on his mother's death, the reformation of the house of the hearth (which we know used to have a much more punishitive and strict leader before arlecchino took over) or even her devotion and deep respect towards the tsaritsa are some examples of the way she shows care for other people. now, we can theorise that these good deeds directed towards the orphans under her care are very much purposeful to better manipulate them, but i think that's exactly what the notion of perverted love in la divina commedia tries to hint at.

besides this concept, there's something else that peaked my interest in dante's poem. dante pictures purgatory as an island at the antipodes of jerusalem, pushed up, in an otherwise empty sea, by the displacement caused by the fall of satan, which left him fixed at the central point of the earth. it's a cone-shaped island that has seven terraces on which souls are cleansed from the seven deadly sins or capital vices as they ascend. at the summit is the garden of eden, from where the souls, cleansed of evil tendencies and made perfect, are taken to heaven.

as we know, arlecchino is being introduced in fontaine, her homeland, and the idea of purgatory as an island in the sea leading its way to heaven caused by the fall of a sinful being sort of reminded me of remuria. remuria was the civilization in fontaine which directly preceded the previous hydro archon egeria's rule. its downfall occurred as a result of remus' attempt to avert its predicted destruction, and in particular, by his act of sharing his power and authority — reserved only for gods — with the four human harmosts he appointed to govern his cities. remuria eventually ended up being sunken into the abyss, devouring everything including the people and remus himself. we know there's still a region in fontaine's map that wasn't yet released, so how odd would it be that the last part to be revealed in fontaine might just be the land that was once sunken? after the little note about the samsara cycles near the tower of the narzissenkreuz ordo, which referenced a cycle called remuria, i would not be surprised at all. it's also particularly funny that fontaine is directly below celestia. yes, the floating island in the sky above teyvat which is the residence of the gods, the same gods that made remuria fall. as the contemporary philosophers of our time have said, that's sus!!!

i don't want to get too ahead of myself because i don't have a theory about what's going to happen or what role arlecchino will play exactly but i don't think it would be shocking if we got to know more about remuria during her release. and still in the purgatory idea, i think the angel of death (azreal) might be an interesting parallel to make with arlecchino. azrael's role is seen as benevolent, transporting souls after death. it fits perfectly well with the idea of purgatorius ignis, that signifies transformation. in different cultural and religious contexts, fire can also symbolize destruction renewal and even rebirth so i'm very very curious to see what arlecchino's story will be like.

[corrodedcoughin]

A selection of pick up lines that Steve has used on Eddie and have unfortunately worked with resounding success

Are you Smaug? Because it looks like you have treasure in your cave (Eddie decided to not think about this one before acting on it)

Are you from Mordor? Because you are melting my precious (met with a confused eyebrow raise and a sigh but still got the job done)

Your lack of nudity disturbs me (definitely Steves favourite and the one he is most proud of which made it even more deadly with his ‘ehh??? Ehh?? Good right???’ After he said it)

Steves pick up lines: 3

Eddie’s composure: 0

[jaybren]

I Believe...Steddie

I normally don't mind angst (though I avoid drama fics in general). Miscommunication is the biggest trope in romance, so I'm all for it, but for some reason Steve x Eddie fics / drabbles where Eddie still thinks of Steve as Steve THE KING Harrington always sit weirdly for me. Sometimes, if the Upside Down didn't happen (AUs in general) or pre-UD setting, maybe -- sure, then that could work. But close to canon fics where Eddie lives and Steve legit confesses to him? Always just -- strikes me as wrong.

Finally realized why -- it's literally the antithesis of canon Eddie. Canon! Eddie is quick to acknowledge Steve has changed. He literally runs up to him in the Upside Down while a bunch of madness is happening and where he has every right to be consumed by his own shit-tastic situation, but instead, he's telling Steve how he is a great guy and has changed.

Can Eddie be bitchy and prejudice? Yes.

Does Eddie have grudges against jocks / the popular crowd? Yes.

But he also goes full on bowing gentlemen for cheerleaders (going out of his way to help Chrissy and make her smile) and he's quick to acknowledge Steve's not that same popular AH anymore.

With Steve's bitchiness not aimed at him, Eddie would be eating his Honeycomb and snickering when old habits popped back up, and maybe he'd feel conflicted about jocky Steve, complaining about going to games or something until somebody smacked some sense into him. Totally believe tension and disbelief about one liking the other or some bias about things, but I just can't see Steve proclaiming his love or whatever and Eddie assuming it is a trap or trick or prank or something.

Maybe he'd think Steve was confused. Maybe he'd assume they were doomed, but I can't see him blaming Steve for that or blowing up their relationship IF Eddie accepted the confession and they started dating. Eddie's way more down on himself.

If someone can explain how it makes sense, please do. I'd love to enjoy all Steddie tropes, and that one seems popular lately, but where my brain sees so many problems with them getting to the confession point or even a number of big arguments that could happen afterward due to outside aspects, those two strike me as highly tactile, highly clingy romantics who would be convinced they were the height of discrete while practically fused, constantly touching and being snide little judgy dudes together.

[badpanduhmemes]

This was the very first attempt at this. Scrapped for better content and jokes that land harder. Jibongi the original. I promise I won't rant about Larry in the tags this time. I promise.

[maxgicalgirl]

Archive 81 tv show made Melody Pendras straight we cannot trust podcasts in the hands of mainstream media !!!!!!!

[givehimthemedicine]

why did the mothergate open where it did?

[ updated excerpt from my Dec '22 big analysis post ]

ok so. when Vecna opens gates, they all form on the exact spot directly above/below the victim's body, right?

just like both other times El opened gates - they formed smack dab on her "victims". on the chalkboard right behind the demogorgon and the wall right behind One.

but with the mothergate, El taps the demogorgon on the shoulder, screams, and a gate forms... on a random wall across the room?

are we all just accepting that?

shouldn't the mothergate have opened at the demogorgon's location?

if El was the opener, that would make the demogorgon the "victim" (not that that dynamic applies but I'm sticking with it), so according to the pattern of all others, the gate should've opened right where it was standing at the moment El "contacted it".

how do I know a gate didn't open on the demogorgon? well, besides that we saw where it did open, and it wasn't there - that isn't how gates work.

gates don't connect the victim's location to the opener's location. the opener's location doesn't seem to be affected at all, as far as I can tell.

plus, we're shown the exact spot where the demogorgon was in UD Hawkins before the gate opened. if Joyce or Hopper noticed a gate in the ground, they sure don't point it out.

so am I saying we've got it backwards? that the demogorgon was the opener and El was actually the victim because the gate opened near her?

that doesn't satisfy me either, because it didn't form right ON her. with El as the victim, we should have seen the floor crack apart right under her water tank.

neither El nor the demogorgon fit as the victim.

so we must choose whether to believe the mothergate, for reasons unknown, behaves differently from every other gate in that regard.

let's say it doesn't.

what if, just like every other gate, the mothergate formed exactly where the victim was. the real one.

picture: One - Vecna? is he Vecna yet in 83? Onevecbrenhenward? whatever tf I'm supposed to be calling this guy - in the Upside Down lab during El's water tank experiment. right up against that wall where that crack opens.

even lacking supernatural ways he could know what's going on, we know the RU can simply be overheard from the UD.

either way, he knows El will be in a state of extra psychic receptiveness while in her tank and that it would be a perfect opportunity to intercept her (if this isn't just Brenner's whole real objective in the first place).

if he thinks that El created the RR gate in '79 with extreme negative emotion, it's a reasonable plan to try to reconnect with her and scare the shit out of her in hopes that it'll create another gate.

look where exactly that gate formed. look how low the crack started. not even just "at accessible human height" (as opposed to lifted a bit off the ground like in '79) but lower. at sitting human height.

isn't it kinda giving...

no, really, clock the potential similarities between what I'm proposing and the soteria basement scene.

bro is on an underground floor of the lab. seated, back up against a wall, to brace for a major life changing event - more specifically, the undoing of a prior major event, which was certainly not a pleasant experience the first time - relying on Eleven to free him. literal escape hole in the room. same could all apply, no? they even gave the lab basement blue lighting like the Upside Down, which is not merely how they portray all unlit interiors.

this would also be consistent with the pattern of El only making horizontal gates, while One makes vertical gates (if he really was sitting there, the gate could just as easily have formed under him as opposed to behind him. not sure what this means, just saying)

and if true, this would mean that One isn't the demogorgon - at least, not that demogorgon at that moment, in a bodily, shapeshifting way - because that demogorgon is near Castle Byers at the moment the mothergate opened, not ten feet away against the lab wall.

"but we know El opened the mothergate by making contact with the demogorgon! they told us so right on the show!"

that's what Dustin and Lucas think, because that's how El explained it to them, because that was her best idea of how it worked back then.

"but it was the demogorgon she tapped on the shoulder! we saw it happen! it was clearly him!"

the way I think that could still work is: even if that demogorgon isn't One, like in a shapeshifting or Kali-vision way, it is under One's control, like in a Will/Billy/hive way. in other words, maybe it can be psychically One without being physically One.

and if you make psychic contact with somebody/something who is actually under another entity's psychic control, wouldn't it probably be the controlling entity you'll actually be contacting? like when Joyce tried to talk to possessed Will and it was clearly not him at the controls anymore?

again, whoever El truly achieved "psychic contact" with was not whatever was by Castle Byers, or else the gate should've formed there, right?

so then what happened after the gate opened?

I'm too unsure about this part to make real claims, but there are a few facts we have for a framework.

seems like the show wants us to think the demogorgon came through the mothergate practically immediately, but this is almost certainly not the case. I just did a post explaining the evidence, but tldr; some time greater than mere moments actually passed (I'm feeling at least many minutes, up to several hours) between these events.

and we know that at the moment the gate opened, the demogorgon was by Castle Byers.

and we know that the Byers live a little under 2 miles from the lab.

so even a demogorgon immediately summoned at a full sprint would need a little time to travel ~2 miles from the Byers' area to HNL to climb through the gate. I'm not saying I'm all in on that idea (the demogorgon's supposed path through Hawkins that night is wack), but I am saying it fits with the fact that there was a delay between the gate opening and something coming in through it.

since I'm proposing One was right there on the other side of the gate from the moment it formed, why would he not just step through? not sure about that.

is he able to?

back to my point about possible tank room parallels to the soteria scene, and there being a literal escape hole in the room - that was a hole One himself couldn't actually go through. he opened it to send someone else through. so if the parallel holds true, there's some basis there for him not being able to bodily pass through the mothergate either.

if he really couldn't come through, why not? was he so changed that the RU has become toxic to him now? did the gate opening process dematerialize him again? would his presence in the RU screw up a timeline in a way he doesn't want? idk.

if he did come through - like, in the form of the/a demogorgon or something else - why did he wait a while first?

anyway. this needs some work but you can pry the mothergate location problem from my cold dead hands

[skunkes]

its wit deep sadness that i announce that despite me weighing it down with heavy items several ways every night before i sleeps my Sticker Filled journal is once again already becoming really bulky and difficult to write on to the edge of the page and its only July

[esterigermaine]

Sometimes I wonder about the limits of vampire spawn healing and then I remember Cazador and get really sad for all of his spawn.

[sp0o0kylights]

Okay so this is killing me but you have a fic summary in ur pinned post but no link and I’m begging for it. Unless you haven’t written it yet idk but it’s very important that I get it please 😭

“Whumpverse: Eddie finds a drunk and bloody Steve Harrington in a bathtub at Tina’s party three days after Starcourt. He incorrectly comes to the conclusion Steve is in an abusive BDSM relationship”

Ahhh yes, my other brainchild that I ignore all the time. I feel like the joke title for that one was F*ck Around F*nd Out lol.

I have a lot of bits and pieces of that one written, but I made the decision to focus on the soulmate AU I've got running on A03 (and now Adopt a Jock and the BB fic lol) because it's gonna be another one with super long chapters and I'm having enough fun attempting to wrangle the fifth chapter of the Soulmate AU (it's become its own damn novel at this point but so help me that fic will only be six chapters if I have to FORCE it to be six chapters!) So what I have linked under it is what's been posted thus far, and nothings on A03.

Once the Soulmate AU's finished, it's gonna be my next Big Fucker in terms of fics, so it'll get there! Not sure when, but it will get there!

[lupinuslepidus]

last couple of weeks of fieldwork happened but were filled with chaos that included a crew of interns, hiring nonsense, permitting nonsense, and extreme weather including both a record-breaking heat wave and thunderstorms. we were bouncing up and down the east side of the sierra (at one point we crossed the CA/NV border, like, six times over the span of two days because the mountains we were in were very precisely bisected by it.) the epic highs & lows of fieldwork included:

sampling in Death Valley National Park during the heat wave. this was actually less bad than when we were sampling across the way from Death Valley, because 8000 feet vs. 5000 feet of elevation is a very noticeable difference when it's over ninety degrees out.

we had a team of interns who were remarkably good sports and helped tide us over when our crew was briefly down to just 2 people!

i later found out that the interns had been, uh, maybe misled about how much work they'd be doing, which went a long way to explaining why they had a chronically exhausted air about them. that's academia for you i guess

got to see the ancient bristlecone pine forest on our days off!

ditched some gear in the field at one point bc i didn't feel like carrying a long metal thingy through an Active Thunderstorm while we were a couple hundred feet off a mountain peak

ditched our camp overnight bc didn't feel like taking the car back up a muddy road following an Active Thunderstorm, since the tires had real bad traction on mud

got told by a motel manager the night that we ditched camp that i? smell like pine? which. was not the worst thing. and makes sense given my constant layer of pine sap residue. but sure was an interaction that happened

got to swim in alpine lakes on our days off!

stopped taking my lunch breaks because it was the only way to even slightly keep up once our crew was back up to 4 people

and by 'keep up' i mean i was still consistently finishing 30 minutes behind the other

i don't. recommend this

a couple nights in various spots, we heard coyote packs yipping somewhere around our camp, which is a haunting and unexpectedly lovely experience. genuinely highly recommend waking up to the sound of coyotes at three a.m.

[keeps-ache]

[curled into a ball on the floor] i am dealing with the failure in a healthy, rational way do not mind me

[silverislander]

not to be negative bc i am EXTREMELY excited abt s2. but i cannot fucking believe even arcane couldnt escape the 2 season lesbian show curse

[lifesliced]

im ngl and say i wouldn't also passed out in the mines

[cosmicswritings]

so more reproductive but also body hate hcs for starscream. so he is a seeker, and seekers were created to be strong grade military bots, and when it comes to reproduction they were specifically created to sire. seekers themselves were not actually made to carry, they were seen as 'sires on demand' and it would be something that was expected of them because a sparkling sired by a seeker has extremely capable flight abilities and agility, but is also strong and sturdy.

starscream didn't like that, he didn't ever have the desire to be a sire or use his spike, but it was always something that was expected of him. so the whole thought that, due to his body type he had to be a certain way and it was expected of him, even by some romantic partners, made him really sick and it makes it difficult for him to get in romantic relationships or talk about starting a family. starscream only wants to exclusively carry but not a lot of people want that from him or expect that of him. he also had to go through procedures to get it done as well, to be able to carry and to completely remove siring capabilities/protocols from his system.

one of the many reasons he likes to change his body around so that he isn't associated with a seeker frame type when he gets into relationships.