#eddie only confronts his biases after chrissy

[dreamofbecoming]

i feel like we as a fandom don’t talk enough about the fact that steve’s redemption arc had nothing to do with the upside down

like, yes, he grows pretty steadily as a person over the course of the entire show, and yes, his relationships with dustin and robin specifically are a big part of that growth and both those relationships are rooted in UD shenanigans, but that isn’t where it started. and it wasn’t nancy either

he has that whole speech in s4 about how he needs to get conked on the head to start moving in the right direction, and maybe that’s true to an extent, but the wallop he got wasn’t “monsters are real” and it wasn’t “ough pretty girl,” it was him, completely on his own, wanting to change

because the death of king steve is 100% a choice steve makes, voluntarily, before he knows about the UD, totally separate from his desire to be with nancy. he realizes fully independently that he isn’t proud of being a bully and he wants to do better. that’s entirely steve deciding that for himself

he goes to jonathan first. he doesn’t apologize to nancy first, he’s not trying to get back on her good side, he’s not trying to get ahead of any story and convince her to take him back. he still even actively thinks jonathan is sleeping with her, at this point

he has every logical reason to believe that jonathan 1) violated him sexually (and publicly!) and 2) fucked his girlfriend. he has every reason to think his girlfriend cheated on him! his anger with jonathan (and nancy!) is, from steve’s pov, given the information he has, completely justified, and steve still, with no reason at all to like jonathan or forgive nancy, with no reason to go against tommy and carol (given that they’re his lifelong best friends and have seemingly just been proven right about hating his gf), decides completely independently that the things he said to jonathan were out of line

he has literally no reason to be kind to this dude, and he’s working against a pretty engrained habit of teenage cruelty, and he still makes that call all by himself. for no other reason than that his conscience demands it. that’s an astonishingly humble and selfless act from any 17 year old, but especially one who was raised on money and popularity and has no real reason to go against that upbringing (and has never done so before!). the moral fortitude that takes is incredible

i couldn’t have made that apology at 17, i was way too caught up in myself and far too scared of feeling any kind of shame or social consequences. i would have focused on the things that fueled my anger, that made me feel justified. i wouldn’t have been capable of seriously reflecting on the ways i might be in the wrong. but steve does. he makes that call completely unprompted. he chooses to not only acknowledge that what he said to jonathan was fucked up, as was what he and tommy did to nancy (even when, again, his anger, if not his actions, was fully justified), but to apologize to jonathan first (risking him convincing nancy that steve isn’t worth forgiving, and he still thinks this is the guy fucking his girlfriend, and this is the guy who never apologized for the creepshots!) and to abandon his social safety net to do it (horrifically difficult to do at that age)

and then the poor guy gets attacked by a monster and the first thing he does is save the asshole who took naked pics of him and basically risked showing the whole school, and the girlfriend he has every reason to believe is fucking him.

steve harrington is a fucking saint and we don’t talk about it enough.