#fanon steve

[every-dayiwakeup]

If canon Steve were to talk to fanon Steve he'd be like:

The only thing different we do about Billy is actually give him support and a safe home. I'd even argue that fanon Billy is the Billy we only see glimpses of in canon... when he's not on edge.

Which gets this fandom all hot and unbothered for some reason 🤷‍♂️

[blessyouhawkeye]

the thing about steve harrington is that he's one of the most compelling characters of all time. he starts the show an extremely popular jock and now he's got two friends: a girl he had a crush on that turned out to be a lesbian and a fourteen year old. the only fight he's ever won in his life was against a soviet spy. he keeps a bat full of nails in his car. he barely graduated high school. he beat up a racist. he's terrible at flirting. he has daddy issues. he spends an entire season wearing a little sailor outfit, hat included. and he's even bisexual

[oobbbear]

They’re stupid babies

[saveyoursunshine]

i love when artists explicitly write/draw eddie and steve with very noticeable, maybe even deforming scars. i love when they dont fail to mention the repercussions the things they've been through have left on their bodies. because yes, we talk a lot about ptsd and horrible nightmares and all the psychoemotional issues, but we should totally talk more about the physical side of it.

eddie with a scar on his jaw that tugs when he smiles and aches after a long effusive rant. having to use mobility aides like a crutch or a walking stick because the muscles on his leg never fully recovered and the scars on his abdomen hurt if he tries to tighten his core too hard.

steve with awful migranes and early onset hearing loss and complex vision problems and slight trouble breathing because his head/face got fucked up one too many times. the scars on his back that got infected because no one gave them notice, that are now scars that twinge when he moves his arms and hurt after a day of running around with the kids. the scars on his abdomen that restrict his range of motion. that raspiness in his voice that never went away after a bat tried to crush his windpipe.

i don't know where i'm going with this i just... we constantly recognize their heroic deeds, but i think it's also important to remember that they are not heroes. they are just teenagers who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. they were doomed by the narrative, literally cannon fodder, and their bodies tell the history of that, and of how they're still here despite it all.

[c-is-for-circinate]

It feels like there's this narrative that fandom keeps wanting to explore, with Steve Harrington, about this very specific type of martyrdom where self-sacrifice is an expression of a lack of self-worth. And, like, yes, write the narrative that's meaningful to you, and yes ok Steve does admittedly get beaten up a lot, but -- legitimately I do not think this narrative is actually Steve's story.

Like, without gendering things too much, there is something in the Steve fanon that I keep seeing that's so reflective of the specific kind of sacrifice and societal pressures exerted on girls, specifically -- this story of 'you make yourself worthy and worthwhile by carving pieces out of yourself', of believing that you must always give and never receive to justify the space you take up in the world. Yes, boys can experience this same pressure (and obviously trans and nb people of all genders run into it as well! sometimes a lot!), but especially in the mid-1980s cultural context where Stranger Things takes place, it's just...really not likely to be a dominant narrative for Steve to be operating under? It doesn't even really match the Steve we see on screen -- who is happy to make sacrifices for the sake of others, yeah, when needed, but who's not particularly kind or giving unless somebody asks first.

And Steve does get hurt a lot on other people's behalf! And this is a problem! It's just a completely different problem than the one fandom keeps writing.

Steve, and I'm going to say this forever, is a story about toxic masculinity, which the show may or may not even know it's writing. The archetypes influencing Steve's character as it shows up on the screen (and the stories and messages that Steve would actually be surrounded by in his actual life) are not deconstructions of suffering heroes who never should have had to fight in the first place and were destroyed by it. That's the Buffy the Vampire Slayer story. Steve's not Buffy. Steve's cultural context is Indiana Jones.

Steve is The Guy! And part of being The Guy is that you're expected to take the hits -- not because Steve is less important than the women-and-children he's supposed to protect, but because, the story says, he will get less hurt. Why should Steve get in between Billy and Lucas? Because Steve is an eighteen-year-old athlete and Lucas is in middle school, and of the two of them, Steve actually stands a chance. (And yes, Steve got badly hurt there, and Max had to save him -- but if Lucas, if Max had taken that beating they would not have been running through those tunnels later.) Was somebody else better-qualified to dive down to the uncertain bottom of a cold lake in the middle of the night? Steve doesn't list his credentials there as a way of justifying some ideal of martyrdom; he is literally the most likely person on the boat not to drown.

And make no mistake: when Steve's pulled into the Upside-Down, he survives the bats long enough for backup to get there. Realistic or not, he's apparently tough enough that he's physically capable of hiking barefoot through hell without much slowing down. Steve is the tank for the same reason as any tank: because he literally has been shown to have the most hit points in the group. You cannot honestly engage with Steve in this context without dealing with the fact that he's right.

AND THIS IS A PROBLEM! This is still a problem! But it's not the same problem that fandom seems to expect. It's not an expression of caretaking or the need for self-sacrifice; it's not an issue with Steve valuing himself less. It's an issue of toxic masculinity so ingrained that Steve doesn't even recognize he's suffering from it, because one of the tenets of toxic masculinity is that Big Strong Guys don't suffer. It's just a concussion, it's fine, he'll walk it off. It's not that Steve thinks he deserves to get hurt, or even that he's less deserving of safety than the others. It's that absolutely nothing in his cultural context allows him to admit that he can be hurt in a significant way.

There's still so much tension that can be gotten out of this situation, I swear. There's so much that can be explored in writing! Hell, the show itself is deconstructing some of this trope, believe it or not, by giving us a Steve who absolutely can take all the hits thrown his direction but still doesn't know what the fuck he's doing with his life. It turns out that doing his job as The Guy is only mildly helpful in horror movie situations (mostly by buying time for smarter, squishier people to do the damage from behind him), and somewhere a little worse than useless in everyday life.

But Steve does not go out of his way to self-sacrifice, he really doesn't. He just does his job. He's The Guy. Of course he's not going to let a kid or a girl or some scared skinny nerd who just learned about monsters yesterday take the hits. Of course Steve's got this.

[knightmarebug]

STEVE IS CANON NOW???

AINT NO WAY WE GONNA HAVE STEVE IN THIS MOVIE

This is so unreal, because if the creators of this movie learned/knew enough to throw Steve in as a character, what else could they possibly have thrown in for us fans????

Less than a month to go, the hype is real.

[harveyverse]

steve randle they could never make me hate you. two-bit matthews they could never make me reduce you to comedic relief. dallas winston they could never make me see you as the villian. johnny cade they could never make me see you as a baby. soda curtis they could never make me think of you as dumb. darry curtis they could never make me hate you. cherry valance they could never make me hate you. ponyboy curtis they could never make rely on your narration (see what i did there)

[randomuzerthelozer]

I can't be the only one who thoguht of this

Link to og Tad Strange fanart:

[stardryad]

In which I drew Steve (worgen) and Eddie (night elf) as their characters in World of Warcraft 🤲 Inspired by @stevespookington's fic i couldn't see (you were always right beside me)!!

[asbealthgn]

I genuinely think it would be so funny if we meet steve’s parents in s5 and they end up being the nicest people and it turns out he was just being a dramatic bitch every time he called his dad an asshole

[friendcrumbs]

every time people hate on steve's polos an angel dies 💔

[frankenstein-ate-my-left-shoe]

EVERYBODY FREEZE

...we gotta go deeper

[steveharrington]

ted wheeler honestly being a well written and realistic depiction of an oblivious father who loves his family but doesn’t really understand them as people and then somehow having his fanon characterization turned into this abusive monster who actively antagonizes his children and leaves them with lifelong trauma like. hello. nancy literally complains that her parents are boring and cookie cutter and they don’t really love each other but they’re complacent enough to just keep on living their little suburbia life. and yet somehow it’s such a common characterization to have ted be like Evil. it’s just so silly to me. esp on the evil dad show where characters like el or jonathan or max have actually been explicitly shown to have faced abuse from their father figures

[bigskyandthecoldgun]

i find it so interesting that in rebel robin, robin seems confident that her parents will be cool with her being a lesbian whenever she decides to come out to them (they’re major hippies), and that angle isn’t really explored in fanon works all that much

like yes i also love the headcanon that wayne would be like. very chill about all that and the trailer is where the older kids come to hang out and be openly queer without worry but !! i also think the buckley household being a safe space is such an interesting idea that nobody really explores !!

[stellariumcircus]

my unpopular st opinion is that in canon most of the characters are not queer

this is why characters like will, robin, and mike feel so isolated

because while they have people who love and care for them, they don't fully understand them and they are different

[gizurrr]

headcanon that Ford was a ceremonial magician (à la Aleister Crowley, or more accurately in the scientist case, Jack Parsons) during his time working with Bill Cipher cuz like,, c'mon

bro was literally doing yogic exercises (which ceremonial magicians appropriated from tantric practitioners in India and Tibet in the late 19th/early 20th century but that's a tangent for another day)

meanwhile, Fiddleford, being from hillbilly roots and thus probably from a devoutly conservative Christian background*, was def unnerved by how they approached their research cuz after all, chanting interdimensional mantras and then yammering about ingesting ground up baby bones or whatever effed up things while having weird eyes is def a sign of demon possession. and Ford seemed okay with it??? and actually enjoyed it, setting up shrines to this "muse"????

but "oh, Fiddleford is a stupid superstitious redneck bum who's scared of his own shadow" Ford would conclude under the influence of Bill

tl;dr: i love the correlation between scientists and the occult/esotericism in history and i think Ford def fits in that correlation