#but not a headcanon

[sevenmerrymagpies]

🪱Wiggly Worm Wednesday!🪱

@soaringornithopter tagged me back in July for one of these and I finally had something I want to share. If people are interested I would happily talk more about the alt season one I've imagined for this autistic Steve - all from Barb's POV.

I usually don't headcanon Steve as autistic. I like that idea for many other Stranger Things characters, and I have written Robin as explicitly autistic in a few of my fics, but for Steve, if I'm gonna make him neurodivergent, I usually don't pick autism. That doesn't mean I haven't read a lot of good fics where he is autistic, and of course, that got stuck in my head. How could Steve be autistic and be close to the character we see on screen?

Key canon characteristics that I think Steve has to have and would have to be addressed somehow would be: his popularity, his reputation with the ladies, his reputation as an asshole/bully, his athleticism, and his friendships with Tommy and Carol. 

His popularity could be explained by absent parents, good looks, and a lot of money at his disposal. To give an autistic flare, he could be naïve, a common trait. To the student body at large, that would make him either a lovable himbo or a usable idiot.

Steve was a weirdo in elementary school and probably a lot of middle school. My idea would be that he got hot early for a boy, so seventh or eighth grade. Carol probably realized he was impressionable and naïve, and she could use him as leverage on her own climb of the social ladder. Steve is not an idiot; he realizes that Carol is helping him not be a weirdo anymore. It also might explain why he is dismissive of Jonathan in the first few episodes. He was that kind of person, and he did not want to go back to that by any means necessary.

That would also explain his reputation as an asshole or even a bully. Even if he doesn't explicitly bully, if he is autistic, there's a good chance he misses a lot of the social cues of more subtle bullying done around him because he's either spacing out (thanks to the overstimulating school environment) or he is straight up missing the cue. It would also explain why he doesn't stop Tommy most of the time, but when Nancy complains, he does stop Tommy. She's giving him a cue he can understand that Tommy is overstepping. I also think hanging around Tommy and Carol would skew the cues that Steve has learned. He is meaner than he would otherwise be because he learned by watching them.

If I had to choose between hyper or hypo-sensitive to most stimuli, I would make Steve hypo-sensitive and sensory-seeking. That would potentially explain part of his love of athleticism because he's getting a lot of proprioceptive feedback through roughhousing, training, and playing in games. It also might be why he seeks out sex as much as he does in canon. Especially if you add handsome, naïve, and sensory seeking together, you get somebody who might seek out sex and get sex on the regular (caveat regular sex for a high schooler). I think someone who was hypersensitive to stimuli would not seek those experiences out as much.

Finally, I love making Steve's athleticism part of his special interests. I love that Steve was obsessed with baseball stats as a kid. That is almost cool and gets him a modicum of respect from his peers. He's not bad at sports in elementary school during PE, and maybe even talented at some things, but he doesn't have the attention span for it because he doesn't care about it at first. After he gets into the stats and they start playing baseball in PE, he discovers a love for the memorization and collection of statistics and the actual game itself. It also gets him a modicum of social approval, which he desperately desires. He got into more sports as time went on, and his special interest expanded because he learned that baseball was both fun to collect and fun to play. He expands his play as well. Because he is sensory-seeking, he also gets a lot of self-regulation from playing sports, and that helps reinforce his love for them.

In canon, he also has a reputation for being vain. I'd love to give him another special interest in his appearance. This is a guy who goes out of his way to buy fashion magazines when he goes to Chicago with his parents because that's the only place he can buy Vogue Men Italia.

I like the idea of those two special interests helping him pass.

Finally, I'd love to give him a big special interest that he keeps secret because he learned in elementary school that no one cared, and in fact, it made him weirder. Something benign but also that he could dive deep into. I kind of like astronomy, with a subsection of Greek mythology as a logical extension of learning astronomy when you are a child. He learned about the constellations and deep-dived into Greek mythology to learn what the constellations meant. But he doesn't even share this stuff with his parents because it's too weird.

Finally, it's very important to this version of Steve that he would not meet the criteria to be diagnosed as autistic in the late 60s and into the 70s. So he would have no idea why he was different, just that he was very different, and always had to keep it under wraps.

[bumblingbabooshka]

Vulcan teen on Vulcan [tiktok] saying "I have just lost track of my father in the grocery store." The camera turns to show the viewers the grocery store in which almost every single older middle-aged man has a bowlcut and long robes. Camera turns back to show the teen's face which is expressionless and yet communicates all it needs to.

[animentality]

[doodleswithangie]

headcanon that stan hates wearing glasses (for many reasons) and went without them for years until he really needed them

[Image Description: Comic of a younger Stanley Pines from "Gravity Falls." Alt text is provided and copied below the cut. End ID]

A younger Stan squints at his blurry reflection in the mirror, leaning in really close to see himself clearly. He sighs and grabs a pair of Ford's glasses on the dresser. Putting them on, he stares at his reflection. "Welp," he says, "this is unsettling."

He turns away from the mirror to adjust his tie, saying, "But it can't be helped." His reflection is now a disheveled Ford, mirroring Stan.

[mountainshroom]

If she has no fans call the ambulance cause I am dead

[fckbatmanhiskidsareminenow]

multilingual batkids. they learn each others languages so they can mix and match. for example:

tim in french: have you figured out how we’re gonna tell b we’re not going to that gala yet?

damian in arabic: no i thought that was thomas’ job?

duke french: me? no jason said he’d do something

jason in arabic: hey don’t drag me into this!

dick in romani: i’m gonna kill him i really i am

steph in russian: who are we killing?

dick in english: ah! nobody! wait i didn’t know you spoke romani

tim in greek: you’re an asshole

jason in english: wait my greek is rusty say it again slowly

tim in greek: you’re an asshole

jason: …. you motherfucker

cass signing: nice drawing

damian in chinese: thank you

dick yelling at bruce about something he did

jason in spanish: what language is he speaking right now?

tim also in spanish: uh all of them i think

jason: does bruce even know-

tim: no he doesn’t

[heart-locket-musicboxless]

There are three kinds of LGBT headcanons:

Actual queer coding / metaphors ("Nimona is trans because her creator made her as a way to express his feelings as a trans person")

Vibes ("Link is genderless because I said so")

It's funny ("Phoenix Wright is asexual because he's the Ace Attorney")

[chic-beyond-the-wall]

More medieval dyes for y'all!

[ahfrickenfrick]

vicki vale: and what do you have to say about the rumors that Bruce Wayne and Batman are the same person?

12 year old, newly appointed robin, jason todd: ??? that would be really weird cause i’ve literally seen them kiss before??

bruce: *in the Wayne tower, popping up from his paperwork* …something just happened��

[bats-and-the-birds]

Situation where Clark has formed a tentative working relationship with Batman, but somewhere in that time, Batman acquired Robin and, naturally, didn't tell him.

Clark finds out about Robin's existence when a ten year old Dick Grayson in full Robin gear breaks into his apartment at two in the morning and shakes him awake because Batman's missing and Alfred's away and Bruce taught him that, in the case of emergency, Superman was one of the only people he could trust. Bruce just didn't think to tell Clark that he was, by all means, his son's emergency contact.

Clark: -wakes up to a small boy that he's never seen or heard of before in a cape and a mask with lenses that reflect light like a cat's perched on the edge of his bed in a pitch black room-

Dick, calmly: Hey, Batman's -- stop screaming -- Batman's missing. I need help.

[incorrectbatfam]

The only acceptable trans Tim headcanon would be Tim introducing himself to the batfam as a boy from the get-go with such confidence that no one questions him. Then, his first solo case as Robin is investigating the disappearance of Jack and Janet Drake's "daughter," so he pretends to have a twin sister by forging a bunch of documents and photoshopping family pictures. He then fabricates evidence of her death, committing multiple crimes in the process, and holds a fake funeral at the end. Because if his previous name is dead to him, he's gonna kill it the Tim Drake way

[violent138]

Clark absolutely plays it up when he meets little kids dressed like Batman in Metropolis, referring to them as his old friend and making them ecstatic. He also has a habit of helping any little Robins he finds do flips.

Batman runs into little Supermans in Gotham and sends Clark photos of them from his lenses captioned with things like, "On the job for six years and already better than you" or answering questions about Supes like "Yes I am his boss."

[damianwaynerocks]

saw someone say months ago that the best cover story for jason coming back to life in the public eye is to say he was in witness protection. and i agree with that! but id like to add: jason would make a public statement saying that the reason he was in witness protection is “i saw joker kill robin”

[applecidersstuff]

Percy Jackson is against bullying.

He is however very sad that neither Annabeth, Clarrise or Drew had met Octavian in camp Jupiter, because as much as he frowns on it he would pay any kind of money to see those three tear him a new one for acting like a little bitch he is.

[ramen8008]

Percy listens to those whale noises that people use to sleep but he just listens to them like a podcast.

And any time he hears someone like Annabeth listening to them he's like "Wow Daphne is really something else. Honestly I can't believe she would do that"

And Annabeths's like "what?"

And Percy just translates the entire thing to her and instead of calming sounds to help her concentrate she now has Percy tell her all the whale drama which she is oddly immersed with.