I Want Joyce Byers To Bitchsmack All The Creepy Hawkins Moms For Having The Damn Nerves To Ogle At Billy,

A rant (kinda?)

Billy's story was told based on his importance to the overall plot of Stranger Things rather than the importance of the issues the story brought up and I'm still kinda pissed about that. Obviously, each character can only get so much time. But if you know from the start that you're only going to give a certain character a small amount of screen time, you shouldn't add elements as huge and complicated as parental abuse/abandonment. Or, if you do, you should also consider devoting a very large portion of that character's on-screen time to those things or giving the character more time.

Because I'm just really sick and tired of posts where Billy is erased or censored or called irredeemably evil. It's really not fair to fans of his with abuse in their pasts who related to him. It's not right that what people seem to have taken from his storyline is that there is a right and wrong way to be a teenage victim of child abuse, and that if your anger at your home situation causes you to lash out (generally in ways that you would need a fairly high level of emotional maturity not to), you're not worth anyone's time.

And it sucks that parallels were drawn and then dropped in ways that encouraged the fandom to compare Billy to other characters in different (currently non-abusive) situations and with different levels of support, and find him lacking. Because it inevitably places a lot of really unfair blame on a victim (why didn't he just make friends like Eleven did that could have helped him? Why didn't he reject his father's violence like Jonathan (apparently single-handedly) did? Why wasn't he able to still be gentle like Will?). Especially because the situations of all of those characters are drastically different than Billy's was.

Billy wasn't his abuse, but the abuse was an inescapable part of him. Much like a plant choked by weeds isn't defined by the weeds but is massively affected by them. And you can't expect a plant still covered by weeds to be anything like a formerly choked plant that has been moved to empty soil and given water and a clear path to the sun's light. You can't expect it to be anything like a plant that's been properly cared for all its life. If the choked plant happens to have enormous reserves of strength and resilience and manages to bloom as brightly as the other plants despite the weeds, that's wonderful, but it's never something that should be expected without help. Ever. And I wish Stranger Things had been clearer on that.

Au where Severus accidentally walks in on his mother and Fleamont Potter in bed.

New headcanon: As a way to make amends with Max for how he behaved at the Byers’, he would give her and the party rides to the arcade whenever needed 🥹

I'll never get over the fact the year book implies Billy used to drop off a bunch of the kids at the arcade

Is this someone questioning whether or not their brother should be saved or a teenage girl forced to watch her brother die because there is no way in stopping what's killing him?

things max kept from billy

okay, so @meowmeowbilly​ ‘s post about the little belt/decor in billy’s door, now on max’s door, ignited my curiosity about what other things that once belonged to billy were still around max and susan’s trailer. here are the little things i found!

this little suitcase that used to be in the shelves in billy’s room

his bedside table clock

his headphones

and this little candle (or glass)

Is it weird that I haven’t really been a fan of Stranger Things proper in years? Like, I consider myself:

1. Abused Rat Bastard Public Defender

2. Hapless Romantic for the Chaos and Complexity of Harringrove, Mungrove, Argilly, and Other Trash Rat Pairings

3. Fascinated Theorist of the Woefully Under-Explored Hargrove-Mayfield Family

…

…

9999999. Actual Fan of the Show

I feel like an old-timey prospector trying to divine gold nuggets from dirt. Because there are some truly interesting, worthwhile elements scattered around the place that I’ve seen other writers spin into incredible stories.

But overall… whatever the show has ultimately become doesn’t really do it for me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

argyle being an older brother to billy when

“I think that maybe a part of me died that day too”