#i truly hate partaking in the disc horse my dudes

[biillyhargroves]

the new wave of minors that have become st stans keep tweeting the dumbest hate tweets about billy and getting 10k or more likes. it's so annoying, like ive just seen someone saying he would've been an andr*w t*t* fan and it has almost 6k likes.... what show have we been watching??

I’ll be honest, I don’t really concern myself with what other fans are doing or saying re: Billy, especially when they’re younger. I was a little bitch with strong opinions and a smart mouth in high school; only difference was I didn’t have the Internet echo chamber to shout into, and when my friends didn’t agree with my takes I still had to see them in school the next day, so peace had to be kept. I know I sound old as fuck but the rise of social media and its popularity among young people + the shift of fan culture into the mainstream has changed fandom A Lot and…not always for the better.

The thing that really concerns me about all of this is the faction of young fans who like and may relate to Billy Hargrove or characters like him who are having to stay silent or risk ridicule and abuse from fans with different opinions. Fandom is supposed to be a safe space, a community, but somehow Twitter/Tumblr/TikTok etc has turned it into a morality contest. There are kids out there who may see themselves in Billy’s home life, in his parentification, in his loneliness, in his anger and they deserve a safe space to express their appreciation for the character without subjecting themselves to online violence. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be that deep! People can like or dislike characters for any reason or no reason at all and they deserve to do so in peace. There’s no reason for any of us to be so up in arms about literal works of fiction.

I could go on forever but I will end with this: when I was younger, it was an inside joke among my friends that I liked a certain ~type~ of character. A friend could hand me a piece of media and be like “X is an absolute dumpster fire of a human. The worst person imaginable. They’re gonna be your favorite.” They’d point out the bad boy characters, the morally grey ones, the most sinister villains and be like “I bet Lex loves them” and 9 times out of 10 they were right. No one looked at me differently or judged my morals based on the characters I liked. That never once happened. Not until the Internet; specifically, not until Stranger Things.