#and then it all fell apart... s3 was like not awful but very messy and like nowhere near the quality of 1 and 2. i blamed covid at the time

[random-knowone]

listening to the tua soundtrack and god seasons 1 and 2 were so fucking good what happened man. what fucking happened

[felixcatton]

I don’t think Pacey’s love for Joey was more mature than his love for Andie. Pacey and Andie had better boundaries and communication. Pacey and Joey argued all the time and couldn’t communicate. Pacey manipulated her into starting a conversation about sex, got upset at her the morning after they had sex because she didn’t say it was “great”, brought up Dawson even when it was unwarranted and humiliated her at prom. Joey spent a large chunk of S4 pining for the closeness she had with Dawson.

Pacey/Andie were PJ before PJ was a thing. They were frenemies to lovers, they inspired each other and grew while being in a relationship. Andie helped Pacey bring his grades up, she got his dad to show him affection. Joey didn’t know that the last thing Pacey would want to do is celebrate his birthday with his abusive family. The show keeps telling us that Joey was the only one who changed and helped Pacey or that she somehow did it better than Andie but I don’t buy it.

For the first few seasons PJ had similarities, they were underdogs and had bad home situations (I admit, I shipped them a lot!) But once Joey became the perfect dream girl, her relationship with Pacey became boring and nauseating. Pacey and Dawson cast Joey in the role they wanted her to play in their lives. I loved S5 PJ because Pacey didn’t use Joey as an emotional crutch. Unfortunately, in S6 he was putting her on a pedestal again: “my feelings for you were what proved to me that I could be great” (Love Bites). The triangle became one of the most frustrating parts of the show.

when it comes to s3-4 pj, i actually agree with most of this, which is very much why i believe they're much better in the later seasons than they are earlier. his love for joey withstood a lot of drama and growth and time apart, while his love for andie faded as soon as she told him she cheated (and as awful as andie/pa's s3 arc is, it's still canon, in all its messy, stupid glory). it's very easy to see why pj fell apart in s4 and it's very easy to see why they came back together later on. by the time they actually get back together for good, they're well into their 20s and have individually grown a lot since they last dated too.

one thing that i actually did find off-putting about pa, as much as i liked them and as nice as it was to see him get the support he needed, was how the relationship was imo consistently framed as if pacey was andie's project, and as you've said, this was done a bit with pj at the end of their high school relationship too, which is part of why i think they are much better together later in the show than they were earlier. that's also why i might like pa as much as pj if she'd been around long enough for them to have a relationship as adults too. like i can easily compare s2 pa to early pj because they were both teenage relationships, but it's hard to compare s2 pa to series finale pj. pa just didn't have the same level of development, and i DO think pj had a good amount of development by the series finale. all of the bad things you listed here vs. "the simple act of being in love with you is enough for me" shows a lot of growth! at that point, he definitely didn't need her and wasn't demanding that she love him back.

i also don't really think he used her as a crutch in s6 the way he did in s4; they hadn't been together in a few years (many more by the finale) and he was still working hard to make a good life for himself without her. but i also don't think that wanting to be as good a person as you can be for the person you love, which is what i would personally interpret that love bites quote to mean, is a bad thing or using them as an emotional crutch. even if that were what he were saying there, i don't see how that's worse than him needing andie's help so much in s2. i don't have exact quotes, but we were told how much andie helped him.

[serendipitous-magic]

Thoughts on badboy!Mike and/or stoner!Will ?

(Salient points bolded so you can skim through my ramblings)

I mean we see the seeds of punk in both of them in canon. (I mean the real canon, S1 and S2 only.) 

We saw Mike starting to have a rebellious phase in S2 (cursing out a teacher, graffitiing the bathroom stall, etc.). I could absolutely see that rebellious streak strengthening from middle school to high school (and to college depending on when this AU is set). Especially if Karen and Ted weren’t doing too well with their marriage. We see in S1 that Mike’s ideology seems to trend towards pacifism, and he seems like a bit of an idealist. He cares a lot about things being fair or right, and while He Will Fight You if they aren’t, he’s not usually one for actual violence. (See: how he verbally confronted Troy after Troy was laughing at the assembly.)

And, even though it’s not real Stranger Things, we see a little bit of how Mike has responded to trauma in S3. After everything that happened to him since the beginning of S1, in S3 we see Mike start to close himself off. His idealism from S1 has really faded, and we see that he’s a lot more cynical now, and he’s put up a lot of walls. (Acting like he’s “too cool” for whatever’s going on, for example.)

And not to quote my own fic but I’ve thought before about how Mike might very well turn into kind of an anarchist in high school...

-_-_-

Fuck it.

That’s been Mike’s primary mode of decision making in the past year.

Fuck it, fuck everything, fuck the whole world. All those angsty singers were right: society is a garbage fire, the world is broken, nothing is fair, and very few things are right. They should be. They could be. But they aren’t.

His parents mutter about phases and teenage rebellion when they think he can’t hear them over the TV. Well, if realizing that society is bullshit makes him a rebel, then fuck it. He’s a rebel.

Fuck it.

It started about a year ago.

Well, if he’s being honest, it started several years ago. The whole great mess of it. If he’s really really honest with himself - which he’d rather not be, most of the time, not about this - it started with the Upside Down. When the world turned on its head and his best friend was gone, and then dead, and then miraculously alive again, and there were monsters, and other worlds, and a girl that could do magic, and secret government agencies, and secrets upon secrets upon secrets. He was twelve years old, and the world was not the safe, stable, rules-abiding place he had always been told. And that’s where the seed was planted.

And then he was thirteen, increasingly sullen as he glared at the floor and listened to teachers and parents tell him all about how “This isn’t like you,” and “You’re smarter than this,” and, “You’ve got to shape up your act, or you’ll be facing the consequences.”

First it was graffitiing the bathroom stall, cussing out a teacher, feeling a strange flutter somewhere deep in his diaphragm when he grabbed Will’s hand that day in the Byers’ paper-strewn house.

Then he was fourteen, and it was all happening again, and he was trying so hard to do what he was supposed to do. To shape up his act. He straightened his hair, he doted on his girlfriend, he rolled his eyes at things that weren’t cool.

And then fifteen. And he hated it. All of it. He let his hair grow out shaggy and messy and curlier than ever, and those seeds planted years before came to life. He was a rebel again, and this time he refused to back down. “Shaping up” hadn’t worked, so fuck it.

It was the only thing that kept him sane as his life both fell apart thread by thread and, at the same time, settled into a suffocating, crushing normality. His sister left for college - left him alone. His parents fought more, and then less, and less was worse. Less fighting meant days-long icy silences, tension that even Holly picked up on. Bad news in the papers, on TV, in hearsay. And Mike took to burying himself in fiction to get away from it all. He carried a Sharpie marker with him and started scrawling his favorite controversial quotes in places they’d be seen. He argued with everyone, about everything. He broke up with his girlfriend, after two years of slowly realizing that romance wasn’t right for them. He got detention frequently - and then less frequently, as he learned to be stealthy. He snuck out. He went to parties with friends he had made in Drama. He ranted and vented to his best friend, and they frequently ended up on the roof outside his bedroom window, watching the stars as they talked about life, the universe, and everything. He briefly considered getting a piercing or tattoo. He bought a big, square, three-year calendar and meticulously counted down the exact number of days until graduation.

-_-_-

... all that to say, I think Mike could very well end up turning to a kind of “bad boy” persona to help cope with things, even if this is an Upside-Down-less AU and all he’s coping with is more normal teenage stuff like his parents and realizing how awful the world can be. He’s got a rebellious streak anyway, we’ve seen that he tends to put up walls and put up this kind of Cool and Distant act to cope with things, and he cares so much about fairness and justice (and the world is so unjust) that I could very easily see him eventually Fully Rebelling and lashing out at the world.

As for Will, well, I feel like the fandom has kind of collectively agreed that Will would have a punk phase. (Just me?) Partly because there’s a lot of overlap with growing up gay in the 80s. (You know - you have to have a certain mindset of “fuck you, fuck society, fuck everything, I am who I am and anyone who thinks that’s not okay can suck it.”) And (not to get on a soapbox real quick but) punk isn’t about mohawks and spiky jackets, it’s about questioning structures of power and authority and being yourself despite society telling you not to. 

I don’t have as good of an analysis for Will, and honestly @the-angry-pixie has explained this better than I could because she’s given it more thought, but can I see Will in college going kind of art-punk? I absolutely can.

As far as specifically stoner!Will when it comes to weed smoking, I don’t have as much to say. Despite living in The Weed State 🙃 (god I want to move lmao), I never really got into that, so I don’t have much to say that would actually be accurate or interesting,

However, if we’re talking stoner!Will as far as the attitude more than the actual smoking? Like, 70s-throwback “nothing matters, okay? Just chill out a little bit and paint or something, the universe is more complex than we could ever imagine and our tiny human arguments shouldn’t matter that much.” Tapestries hung up on bedroom walls, staying up late listening to music and thinking about Life, The Universe, and Everything, deep conversations with friends, making art, etc. etc...

I could be convinced.

So badboy!Mike and stoner/art-punk!Will? Good concept. And I could see this happening either post-canon or in an AU where the UD didn’t happen or where byeler doesn’t meet until college or something.