#you’ve had sensory issues since you were a kid but thats just a you thing I THINK ITS A PROBLEM

[eld-red]

me when my mom tells me “you’re not autistic in my eyes” mother i can taste every texture and minute flavor in my food more than usual and every sound is making me want to cry and punch a wall

[yourprayer]

Pop Culture owns my entire heart!! Idk if you’ve answered this before but do you have explanations as to why you chose the powers you did for the losers? :)

i haven’t and you have no idea how excited i am to answer this (:

this post contains spoilers about the direction of pop culture so if u don’t wanna know don’t read this!!!!! 

+im tagging everyone on the pop culture tagslist just in case they do wanna see this and get this good info! 

okay so basically the theme i have running is that all of their powers are based in their fears, basically my weird take on the pennywise/fear based concepts of the story. there’s no pennywise in the pop culture universe, but i did really want to play around with the loser’s fears and insecurities because they’re very interesting story plots and i love studying these characters! some of them are more straightforward than others but yeah here’s the rundown;

richie - richie develops the power to turn himself invisible at will, at first with excruciating pain but over time that goes away as he gains control. i chose this power for richie because in my opinion of his characterization his greatest fear is becoming invisible, having everyone forget or not see him. he struggles endlessly with feeling ignored or unnoticed; now he can become exactly that. his secondary power is going to be astral projection. this stems from, in my characterization of him, a constant fear of being unable to be where he’s needed. i think for someone like richie it’s hard to not be there for his friends, hard to be kept away from helping someone. his projections help him be there to witness, but not to act, which to him is a little worse.

mike - mike has pyrokinesis. it’s an easy conclusion to say it stems from his fear of fire, as his family died in a fire, but in the pop culture universe it was not his parents that died, but instead it was his grandfather, and it was from a fire that mike accidentally set. he blames himself for what happened, and fears the lack of control he has over fire and over other things. coming to terms with his power is very hard for him because he sees it as a curse he deserves. 

stan - stan develops telekinesis, which is a direct manifestation of his mind power. stan is definitively the loser with the most intuition out of the group and an incredibly sharp person, but because of this he is also more acutely aware than he wants to be of the world around him and some of the shittier things it contains. it’s also an homage to the theory that stephen king wrote the losers as possibly possessing the powers of the shining.(i know matpat’s kind of annoying but tbh this video changed my life and i firmly adhere to it’s logic.) i chose telekinesis over telepathy because i wanted to lmao.

ben - ben becomes a weather manipulator, in a way that’s directly tied to his emotions. the biggest things i got out of reading ben’s sections in the book were that he was pretty devastated by his relationship with his father as a child, and that he had issues expressing his feelings in front of others. to me ben is a wonderful, kindhearted man who is always what others need him to be, but struggles immensely with being honest about what’s going on in his own heart. the idea that the weather changes as he feels makes him terrified because when people see the sky cloud over, they know exactly how he’s feeling, and he’s scared to be that open. the rapidly changing weather is also a reference to the fact that his childhood was so turbulent and things changed constantly.

bev - beverly is both clairvoyant and has psychic visions. she occasionally gets visions that are symbolic of experiences and powers the other kids are dealing with. they’re mostly for story purposes (foreshadowing and hints and whatnot) but are, as mentioned in a previous chapter, something she used to experience as a small child. i for one kind of believe these things can happen (i have a friend who’s family believed she was prophetic as a child and from what they’ve told me i think it’s true) so i included it. her clairvoyance is of a specific kind, basically she can touch people and see their thoughts/memories/intentions if she wants to. the first few times its on accident of course but once she learns control she can use it at free will. these were chosen because i believe bev approaches a lot of her trauma by burying it, and that being confronted with things prevalent from her childhood would deeply frighten her, like the sudden return of her visions. her clairvoyance upsets her because she frankly does not want to know what other people are thinking, since she spent so long in her childhood being told things like the line in the 2017 film “i know exactly what’s in those boys’ minds…” you all know what i’m gettin at.

eddie - eddie is able to manipulate plants/plant life and has extra sensory perception (esp). both are manifested mostly in plant life responding to his anger or distress, again tied to his emotions, and the esp is represented by a heightened sense of panic when danger is present. he can basically sense danger just before it’s supposed to happen, and his body gets a huge rush of adrenaline because of the sensation. this combined with his already heightened sense of general fear appears to most as an extreme panic disorder, which it basically is. there’s also a concept to do with bev’s vision in the newer chapter and the colors. when eddie has a sense that something is about to happen, it comes with a color that is tied to a person, so he knows who is in danger. all i’ll give away so far is that the bowers gang is red. this power upsets him because his biggest fear is his own fear, and the idea that it could get in the way of him being able to do anything when danger comes. the plant manipulation power is a representation of his need to grow, and his ingrained belief he’ll never be able to because of the stifling hands of his mother. he also kind of doesn’t want to grow, or face what comes with that.

bill - bill is a shapeshifter here, which is probably the power i’ll have the hardest time defending. it was largely chosen cause i thought it was cool lmao. but for bill its rooted in his desire to be the person everyone wants him to be, and the fact that that ideal person is constantly shifting and changing. georgie is alive in this au, and bill’s family life is a lot more whole. but bill feels an intense need to be strong for them, and the losers, and be the kind of man and leader they want. he is also struggling immensely with the transition from childhood to adulthood and what that means for his identity in the world. he feels himself so constantly shifting and changing out of distress and desire to be ‘the right thing’. 

the powers of the bowers gang are based on mutual fears of the group as a whole towards the bullies, and are as follows;

henry - the power to absorb energy (think kevin bacon in xmfc) because the losers all fear that any effort to overcome their suffering at his hands is futile

patrick - shadow manipulation because the losers all fear the shadowy places in life, knowing the bullies could be waiting anywhere

victor - teleportation, for a similar reason, that idea that the bullies can be anywhere and everywhere

belch - creating copies of himself (think multiple man) because to the losers it always seems like there’s just too fucking many of them 

(big thanks to hannah @reddiesetrichie  for being a great sounding board for the bullies powers, i rlly needed help picking those

anyways yeah thats the lowdown on who has what and why!!! thank u for letting me ramble about this and i hope it gets yall jazzed up for whats to come

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