#nuance exists people

[mbodyinspectr]

im begging people on tumblr to get better reading comprehension. obviously nobody is going to be perfect all the time but the amount of people I've seen completely missing the point at the verge of refusing to change their minds or believe that their world view is not the perfect one is unbelievable. Have conversations, not arguments. You'll never learn anything if you dont listen. This goes for EVERYONE, the next time you find yourself getting frustrated or angry over some comment section argument either stop arguing and leave or try and turn it into a productive conversation. The world doesnt need more anger and resentment, and if your anger and resentment isn't actually doing anything (which it often doesn't) its worthless.

[kizunatallis]

If you don’t unpack the harm done to you by your religious upbringing, the atheists you attempt to raise are just going to experience atheism through your religious trauma and that’s not fun for anyone.

Many conversations about atheism don't consider the existence of the second generation atheist, let alone more. Atheism is almost universally framed as some kind of personal rejection of one's upbringing, culture, family, and/or society, to one degree or another. There is not much widespread awareness of the fact that some atheists were raised that way.

But second generation and more atheists already exist, and as open atheists grow as a demographic, for more and more of them the answer to "Why are you an atheist?" is not going to be a long, involved story of self discovery or a bitter rejection, a principled decision or a sharp retort, but simply "Well, that's how my family was." Does your concept of atheism account for their existence?

How does the concept of children being raised by atheist parents make you feel? If it makes you feel uncomfortable, or like the children are missing out on something, you may need to unpack that. What responsibilities do you feel that atheist parents have to their children's religious education, and do you apply those same standards to religious parents? If you find yourself with a double standard, ask yourself if the higher one or the lower one is more reasonable to apply broadly.

The big question here is this: do you consider atheism to be an idea that can be held independently, or a solely reactive concept?

[cosmicredcadet]

"This fandom is so queer friendly!" This fandom literally hates, bisexual, trans, nonbinary, and aspec people but ok.

[starcurtain]

I wish everyone collectively understood aventurine’s character like you…things would be so much easier! I genuinely don’t understand how people keep getting his motivations wrong??? Could it be because some of the most popular Aven fanfics were written prior to his release? That could have contributed to some of the takes we tend to see about him…thoughts?

I struggled all day to come up with a concise way to answer this and couldn't think of one, so here, have a long-winded ramble:

I don't think early fic writers have much impact in the situation with Aventurine's character now, since most people can look at when a story was posted and go "Oh, this was before we had ____ information."

I think that Aventurine's problem is being a male character in a gacha game. Gacha game characters are designed to sell. Hoyo can sell female characters very, very easily. Give her huge tits and a visible underwear strap and you're good to go. I love all my guy friends, but I'm not gonna sugarcoat it: straight men are not the hardest audience to please. Hit a particular fetish (feet, spandex, dommy mommy), and you're gucci.

Nah, we all know why Jade's trailer is Like That.™

Male characters in gacha are harder to sell because women as consumers are a little harder to predict. Does every woman want a tall, ripped hunk? Shit, no, small cute boyish models like Aventurine are selling better now? Why?! Would a bad boy be more popular than a nice guy??? It's harder to account for women's tastes, especially because they are often (a little) less visually-oriented.

Hoyo is good at what they do though, and they've figured out that male characters sell very well when they possess at least one of two specific traits:

Endearing vulnerability/helplessness

Gay ship tease

Give a character both, like Aventurine? They might as well be printing money.

That sound you hear is Hoyo's stock prices rising.

So, from the very beginning, Hoyo is incentivized to create a character that appeals to people, a character people will want to crack their wallets open for. And they achieved this, first and foremost, by giving Aventurine traits that female players (in particular, but men too), find especially appealing: emotional and physical vulnerability.

We see Aventurine's pain. We sympathize with his grief. We identify with his struggle to make meaning of his difficult life. He's our woobie, blorbo, babygirl, whatever the hell they're calling it now.

He can't hide his suffering anymore. He's on the very edge. He's a dude in distress. He's surrounded by enemies! He misses his mama! He's been betrayed! No one understands him like you do, dear player!

The ultimate feeling evoked is: He needs to be saved.

When people talk about male power fantasies, I think they forget that women can experience them too, and "Emotionally vulnerable man that only I (or my favorite character) can fix" is actually a female power fantasy.

And from there it's really easy, right: the people who shell out cash to buy warps for their harmed-husbando feel like they've saved him; the people who are into mlm ships look for the nearest hot dude to be the savior Ratio was waiting for his time lol.

Morally and intellectually, this type of deep-down-golden-hearted, emotionally-wounded male character is very easy to digest. There is nothing to dislike about this type of character or role in the story: this character is a good guy who has just gone through so many terrible situations, whose victim status makes him endearing, and whose lack of agency means that any of the questionable or downright bad things he does are always the result of someone else forcing his hand, and never something he would have chosen himself.

His motivations are always clear and consistent: get free, heal, and live happily ever after.

Insert the Wreck-It Ralph meme: "Do people assume all your problems got solved when a big strong man showed up?" But to be fair, a big strong man did kind of solve Aventurine's problem, so--

Anyway, it's simple. It's straightforward. Morally, it's pretty cut and dry, black and white: Aventurine is our hero, which means everyone dictating the course of his miserable life is evil.

Hoyo is not remotely discouraging people from literally buying into this emotional appeal.

And trust me, I get it. I'll be the first to admit that hurt-comfort is its own entire genre in fandom because it is so appealing. People eat up Aventurine's tragic backstory like candy! The idea of watching a character go through hell at the hands of bad guys just to finally find a happy end is like the definition of everyone's favorite story.

In fact... people love Aventurine's suffering so much, they have invented whole new ways for him to suffer that aren't even in the game.

This is where we get all the headcanons that Aventurine was a sex slave, every single person he meets hates him because of his race, the Stonehearts are executioners holding knives to his throat, Jade enslaved him to the IPC with a lifelong contract, his material possessions belong to the company, the IPC is forcing him to take only the most dangerous missions where he is being required by his evil jailers to continually put his life on the line... You name it and I promise you, I can find a fanfic where Aventurine suffers from it. 😂

Bro can't even sleep in on his day off; life is so hard for this man.

Being serious: if the game is telling us that Aventurine is a victim... Why not make him the perfect victim?

Why not envision an Aventurine with no freedom, who bears no responsibility for any of the horrible situations he is in or any of the dubious things he does?

It's so natural to like that version of Aventurine, so appealing to see a totally powerless underdog use his own wits and charms to claw his way up to freedom. Or, if you're the kind who really relishes angst: It's even appealing to see Aventurine lose more. To delight in fics where he loses his wealth, where the IPC punishes him for past crimes while he's powerless to stop them... (I assure you, this is many people's cup of tea and the fanfics prove it!)

Ultimately, there's nothing wrong with liking characters who are exactly this straightforward! It's completely fine to embrace characters that are intentionally written to be morally above-board, whose primary role in the story is to generate angst by being a good person who suffers, or those characters who never show unlikable traits, bad decisions, or contradictory actions.

The problem is that that's just not who the game is telling us Aventurine is.

Hoyo may be capitalizing off people who love to envision poor Aventurine still living his life as a slave... But the game also needs to tell a complicated enough story overall to appeal to people who don't care about this specific husbando--Aventurine's role in the actual game's plot has to be interesting enough for almost everyone to appreciate it, not just Aventurine's simp squad. (Don't get mad, I'm in the simp squad with you.)

So his character doesn't stop at just being a pure-hearted victim who is still waiting to be saved.

Aventurine is not that easy to label, and I think the biggest struggle in this character's fandom right now is between people who prefer the even-more-angsty, still-a-slave Aventurine versus people who want a morally grey, self-destructive character instead.

To me personally, while I greatly understand the appeal of fanon!Aventurine and the joy of a really juicy angst fic where characters lose it all, I think that missing out on the depth that canon is suggesting would be a real loss on the fandom's part.

The character motivations that Aventurine shows in the game are complicated. They cancel each other out. They're basically self-harm! He makes almost every situation he's in worse for himself--on purpose.

He is a good person, but also a person who has done unspeakable things. He does have morals, but he's not above allowing those who don't have them to use him to their advantage.

He's both the victim and the victor. He's his own worst enemy. He's a lost little boy who's been making terrible decisions for himself since he was like eight years old, and a grown ass man who is barely managing to fake his way through an existence that destiny is not letting him quit.

This kind of character is a lot harder to embrace. He's done things that most people would find appalling--like willingly joining up with the organization that let his entire race be massacred. He's invented a whole new peacock persona to frivolously flaunt riches he doesn't even care about (Poison Dart Frog Self-Defense 101). He actively plays into racist stereotypes about his people to manipulate others through their preconceived expectations. He's made a mockery of his mother's and sister's hopes and dreams by endlessly trying to throw his own life away.

He has flaws! He bet everything he had on a ploy without doing his homework to find out if the people he was risking his life for were even still around. (Maybe he already knew, and couldn't bear to admit it, even to himself.) He's intentionally off-putting and obnoxious to everyone he meets (Poison Dart Frog Self-Defense 102). He terrifies everyone who gets close to him by (seemingly) carelessly throwing himself into the jaws of death without the slightest provocation.

He knowingly allows the IPC to exploit his power and talents for profit. Did everyone forget that his role in the Strategic Investment Department is asset liquidation?! Like, his actual day-to-day job is ruining people's lives. Canonically, Aventurine kills people when his deals go bad.

His motivations change off-screen in two lines of story text. We're told in one line that his biggest reason for joining the IPC was to make money to save the Avgin, then in the next line we find out that's impossible. And... then what? What motivations does he even have now? The whole point of his character arc from 2.0-2.1 is that he was on the edge of giving in to utter despair and nihilism because he couldn't even perceive a single reason to stay alive. He has no purpose in life before Penacony, and that didn't start with the Stonehearts at all??

People keep saying Aventurine was held in the IPC by golden handcuffs, but how do you tie down someone for whom profit is meaningless? What can you offer to a man whose only desire is to bring back something already lost forever? How do you imprison someone whose only definition of freedom is, canonically, death?

Working for the Stonehearts is obviously not healthy. But that's why Aventurine was doing it--because taking dangerous missions allowed him to put himself at risk. The job that he originally pursued hoping to save his people became a direct means to self-harm, and the IPC's only real role in that was just happily profiting off the results.

The journal entries for Aventurine's quests are there deliberately to tell the player what is on his mind, and none of it has to do with escaping from his job:

Like... Work is the least of this man's problems.

At really the risk of rambling on too long now, he's also just a massive walking contradiction:

Aventurine is among the most explicitly religious characters in the game, yet he's one of the only people in the entire game that we have ever seen actively question his people's aeon.

You might be tempted to think Aventurine's risky gambles with his life as an adult are a result of giving up after finding out about the Avgin massacre... Butttt no, Hoyo makes sure to tell us that even at knee-high in the Sigonian desert, Kakavasha was already willing to risk himself in a fight to the death against monsters because even back then he found his own life to have less value than a single memento.

He's the "chosen one" who will lead his people to prosperity... except they're all dead.

He's explicitly suicidal... andddd also a pathstrider of Preservation.

He wants to die... He doesn't want to die. He wants to make it end, yet goes to staggering lengths to continually survive. (Every plan risks his life on purpose--but every plan's win condition is also to live.) He life is the chip tossed down, but his hand is trembling beneath the table. When faced with an otherwise unsurvivable situation, Aventurine literally became a winner of the Hunger Games. He beat other innocent people to death with his own chain-bound hands just to come out alive.

He knows the IPC failed the Avgin and left them to die... and he still willingly sought out a position of power in their organization. Maybe he really is after revenge... but maybe not.

He starts his journey in the IPC with a truly noble goal in mind: to help his people using his newfound wealth and power. He's a good guy who did genuinely want to save the Avgin and repay all those who helped him. But once it became clear he was too late, once it was obvious he would have no use at all for that monetary wealth and power he risked his life to get... What did he do with it? Unlike Jade, we don't see him over here donating to orphanages. (I'm not that heartless; I'm sure he does actually do a lot of good things with his money on the side, but the point is that the game does not show us that--it shows us, over and over again, Aventurine putting on a wasteful, over-indulgent persona toward wealth. We've supposed to feel how meaningless money is to him, how meaningless everything is becoming to him.)

He outright refuses to use underhanded tactics or to cheat at gambles, which is meant to show us that's he's more morally upright than his coworkers. There's an entire exchange where he says that he'll never stoop to using manipulation the way Opal does. But... he doesn't have any issue fulfilling Opal's exact agenda. He was never remotely morally conflicted about denying the Penaconians their freedom by dragging Penacony back under IPC control.

He's willing to risk his own life, which is one thing--but he's also willing to risk other people's well-being. Topaz accuses him of constantly egging their clients on into dangerous situations; we've actively seen him shove a gun into Ratio's hands and pull the trigger with no care for how Ratio would feel about that on their very first meeting... Dragging the Astral Express crew into the entire Penacony plan in the first place was exceedingly dangerous...

To me, I just think it's vital to understand his character through the lens of these contradictions because they demonstrate the extreme polarity of Aventurine's life: from rags to riches, from powerless to empowered by multiple aeons, from willing to kill to survive to killing himself... He has quite literally lived a life of "all or nothing," and while he is the victim of many terrible situations out of his control, his arc as a character involves facing the truth of himself and the future his own actions are hurtling him toward.

Frankly, the Aventurine that canon is suggesting is a little annoying. You want to grab him by the shoulders, shake him, and say "Why are you like this?!" And he won't even have an answer for you, because he doesn't even know why he's still alive.

In the end, to me, this is so, so much more interesting. I can read an endless supply of hurt-comfort fics where Aventurine escapes the evil IPC and Ratio is there to fill the void in his life with the power of love and catcakes and be a perfectly happy clam online, but I want canon to continue to serve us this incredible mess of a man who constantly takes one step forward and two steps back.

Who is fully aware of his role as a cog in the grotesque profit-wheel of cosmic capitalism and still manages to say he never changed from the rags-wearing desert rat of the Sigonian wastes.

Who over and over again flirts with nihility but, ultimately, even if he has to wrest it from the grip of the gods themselves with bloody, chain-bound hands, chooses life.

[sukibenders]

The Arcane fandom, especially on TikTok is never beating the allegations because why, now, some fans act like it's too inconceivable to imagine that Ambessa was, not only, pregnant twice but gave birth twice as well? And their reasoning for this is "She looks like the type to get a man pregnant instead" or "She's too tough for that, I just can't see someone like her going through that." There are layers to these statements because, for one, just because someone, especially a woman, is a dominant force doesn't mean that they can't get/don't want to become pregnant (do you believe overtly dominant men can't be fathers?) It's also very weird because the undertones of misogyny and misogynoir and the overt masculinization of black women are there because, not only are they viewing pregnancy and giving birth, in general, to be viewed as something "weak" (even though it's grueling hours of labor that results in tearing the body apart, sometimes even death) but also attempts to strip Ambessa of her nuance. Yes, she is strong and very dominant, but she also deeply loved her children, who she birthed, and when one was taken away from her it changed her deeply. It's very gross to view a character like her in this way because it also reflects how you view dominant women in real life, pregnancy, and childbirth as a whole. Like how are you going to praise Arcane for having such a wide and diverse ensemble of female characters, but then have misogynistic takes like this? Make it make sense.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

about that one lan qiren & jin guangshan art: .....does that mean wen ruohan has both or is he as flat as a board on the opposite? XD

Mans so flat they rotated him 90 degrees and he disappeared from the narrative.

[bigskydreaming]

Imagine looking at a character whose entire premise is that in every stage of his life, he's made every version of himself into someone that inspires people to such a degree that EVERY SINGLE VERSION OF HIM has people wanting to literally follow in his footsteps in some way or another.....

And coming to the conclusion that like.....the most important things about him are the sum of all his trappings. His entirely homemade developed from scratch could not exist if not for what he already was and brought with him BEFORE crafting this newest version of himself trappings, with his greatest trait throughout all of it being his adaptability; his ability and willingness to roll with the punches and not try to simply weather any opposition or changes to his life but instead reshape himself as needed to better fit INTO whatever new shape his life and the world around him takes. All while managing to carry the most innate, fundamental and necessary aspects of himself from one version to the next. Thus every single version of himself is different but simultaneously every single version of himself is also undeniably the same person.

The strength of this character, to me, will always be that he can be so many versions of himself, he can become so many things, all without ever actually losing or discarding any of the aspects of himself he considers most essential, the things he's not willing to lose or give up just to keep going. Finding that road not taken by most, usually because most never even think to look for it as an option. But one that he's always able to find because the one trick he's mastered in his tumultuous life is threading that needle of not just digging in his heels in an unproductive way but rather being selective about when and where he makes a stand and decides "this is not a thing I'm willing to compromise about" but here are places and ways I can and will change and evolve and adapt in order to make it possible for me to hold onto these parts and keep them as they are.

And that's why its always so mind-boggling to me that so many writers can't seem to think of anything else to do with Dick Grayson other than invent some new reason for him to just....not be that person, or to like just take the character whose most basic fundamental trait he's NOT about to compromise on is willingly giving up his spot in the driver's seat of his own life.....and make him just a passenger in his own life and stories.

Dick Grayson at age nine....at age nineteen...at age twenty nine....the one core thread running through all versions of him is the only way he's standing back and letting you call the shots for him or putting him on the sidelines in some way is over his dead body.

HOW he goes about that, what that looks like, who he becomes and what aspects of himself he plays up at some times and what traits he lets fall by the wayside at other times when they offer less in service to his primary goal here....that changes constantly. He changes constantly.

But those changes are almost always (or at least they used to be/should be IN MY OPINION) made with the intention of keeping certain things about him or his life as consistent as possible.

That's the duality of Dick Grayson that I'm here for. The inherent contradiction of him that COULD allow for endless conflict and breaking new narrative ground in all sorts of ways if mined properly:

His eternal willingness to compromise....but only ever in pursuit of doubling down on the ways he's not willing to compromise.

Forever walking that tightrope in ways that only a kid born and raised in a circus could ever hope to.

[jewreallythinkthat]

The most moderate, nuanced and productive people I have discussed the Israel-Hamas war with have been Jews, Israelis, and people with Palestinian family. Everyone directly affected by this just wants it to stop and to have peace and safety in the region in a way that minimises the casualty count.

The most extreme and performative and vile things I've been told are by people who have no connection to this and like to think they are experts because they have covered adjacent topics during learning, or read stuff online.

If all the randos in the west would just shut up for ten minutes and let those of us actually affected, with an understanding of the history of the land and the culture and the generational trauma experienced by Jews and Palestinians alike talk, we might actually have a chance to salvage this and stop it spiraling

[kirkwallguy]

once again getting annoyed at da twitter discourse but people on there aren't liking that someone pointed out the crows do slavery. luckily for them the writers have forgotten zevran so they're getting the nuanced sexy assassins they want ig

[slightlycomicobsessed]

"we need more complex and irredemable female characters!" yall couldn't even handle Natasha Romanoff

[sainteclectic]

and btw since I'm posting a lot of wholesoul content (intended as platonic but still), i do want to make it clear: my analysis of whole as a character is purely within the narrative of the story! while i am aware that behind the metaphors is whole is cj himself, that's never what i'm writing whole as in my work. basically I'm using the internal logic of the fiction (whole as viewed by the characters in the album) rather than the reason for the fiction existing (as a fictionalized version of chonny's mental state), just like i do with all the other characters. it's important to make that distinction when you're dealing with a piece of fiction so heavily based on the creator i think. I'll never use cj as a basis for how I write whole because I find that a little off putting tbh ^^;

basically I'm playing with touys. ok? play touys with me

[straycalamities]

the fixation of fandom these days on there always being a Black and a White. A Right and a Wrong. A Villain and a Victim. is soooo fucking tragic and frankly REALLY DAMN ANNOYING

especially in stuff where like..if THAT'S your priority? you've missed the entire damn point. and yet it always is. so loudly.

look beyond your blorbo. your kintype. your CC. your f/o. look beyond your otp. look beyond your found family dynamic and actually absorb what's going on with the other characters. i'm begging.

honestly do a study on the characters you hate most or care about the least. take a half an hour to put yourself in their shoes

no this isn't an anti-shipping, anti-kinning, anti-selfship, or anti-blorboing post, because i don't think those are the things that inherently ruin characters or tags or whatever other ppl think. but if you do do that, it'll make it even better if you look at a larger scope beyond that as well I promise

[pjharvey]

sometimes i feel like i spend too much time thinking about my own relationship with gender when i literally like tried out different pronouns and a more androgynous name and all of that and didn't like it but the thing is that when ur so gnc af that your friend's transphobic brother STILL called you they by default and ur friends have a recurring joke one of your friends' boyfriends looks exactly like you and you call yourself a guy in conversations a lot it's like. well it raises some questions.

[twobellsilence]

people straight up saying curly let jimmy crash the ship on purpose is Absolutely Baffling to me like did you Not notice the fact that Curly Never Once Thought jimmy actually meant the bad shit he said. which is Literally an important part of his character and relationship with Jimmy (not realizing the cartoon horses line was inappropriate as fuck and not a regular joke, anyone?). and also the fact that he was spiraling and literally froze and took A Moment after Jim pushed all the blame onto him mere moments before sabotaging their trajectory. he was literally having An Episode brought on by stress and lack of sleep and the fact that Jimmy had been fucking with his brain for days and Jimmy took this opportunity, this moment when Curly was too overwhelmed to even move, to crash the ship. Like did you not hear his breathing when the screen went black or clicked on Jimmy while running to the cockpit and saw Curly yell at him asking him what the fuck he just did. He LITERALLY ran into the cockpit to try and fix it like that is not the behavior of someone who wanted this to happen. Did we even play the same game

[fromtheseventhhell]

"It's normal for siblings to fight" Okay well it's not normal to be extremely classist and look down on your sister for being non-conforming. Or to go to the woman who ordered the death of your pet to tell her about your father's plans, when he specifically warned you against doing so, because you want to marry the boy you saw attack your sister and her friend (contributing partially to said father's death and your sister being unable to escape on the ship he chartered). Or to think of your sibling as unsatisfactory in comparison to another when you believe her to be dead. I notice that none of the "Sansa and Arya are going to reunite and instantly have no issues" crowd ever acknowledge any of this, which makes it seem like they don't actually believe what they say about their relationship being normal and easily reconciled. People wanting them to have no issues simply because they're siblings is another example of how fandom likes to flatten complex characters and relationships. They get reduced to being bickering siblings when their conflict runs deeper than that. If the author is telling you that they have "deep issues" to work out [X], I don't understand being so adamant about ignoring said issues. I also get the sense it's about ignoring the capacity for a certain character to be flawed, but that isn't going to change the fact that her "slip of the tongue" is very likely to be revealed and a source of further conflict 🤷🏾‍♀️

[pinkeoni]

The Great Jonathan Byers Conspiracy

(Or, Jonathan was framed and I'm going to prove it)

So I started a rewatch of the show and I'm on episode two of s1. I get to the part towards the end where Jonathan is taking photos of Nancy. So I think "Okay. This is the part where we see Jonathan take a photo of Nancy topless, right? We see him notice Nancy take her top off and then raise the camera to take another photo, right?"

But that's not what happened

The scene happens as follows. We see Jonathan snap a photo of Nancy— with her shirt on— before the scene cuts inside of Steve's room.

Nancy then removes her top. Nancy and Steve start making out and we cut back to Jonathan who lowers his camera.

This is the part where I expected Jonathan to lift his camera up and start taking more pictures. That's how I remember it happening. But no, we instead see Jonathan focus his attention back to the pool and snap a picture of Barb instead.

So what the hell? Am I being gaslit?

I remember so distinctly a moment where we see Jonathan consciously raise the camera to take another picture of her topless, and yet it's not there. I do still want to clarify however, that the topless photo of Nancy does still exist. We see it clearly in the following episode. So yes, Jonathan did still take a photo of Nancy topless, we just don't see him take it.

But according to a lot of people online, we did see it, the Duffer Brothers just removed it.

I remember hearing about this when it first cropped up, which was partially prompted by the Duffers joking to "George Lucas" Will's birthday in season 2, which they never ended up doing anyway. They also stated on Twitter that no scene had ever been digitally edited, and didn't plan to in the future.

So the Duffers must be lying, right? Otherwise why how would so many people remember seeing that scene? I guess there’s no way to be sure without a DVD or Blu-Ray of the show.

But wait, I have a DVD of season one. I got it for Christmas! But I’m staying at my parents house and I don’t feel like driving three hours just to prove a point. I guess all is lost for the moment.

Unless…

It was at this part of my spiraling that I sent a crazed two minute voice memo at 11:00 at night to my roommate and good friend @lemonsoured filling him in on my conspiracy, and then leaving instructions to go downstairs, locate my season one DVD on the living room shelf, put the DVD into my PS4, go to the end of episode two and take a phone recording of the scene in question.

And lo and behold, the scene of Jonathan taking pictures of Nancy, exactly as it appears on Netflix.

So I am aware that in the video there isn’t much to indicate that this is in fact a recording of the DVD and not a recording of the Netflix version, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. But still, ask any DVD or Blu-Ray owner for what is on their disk, and I can garuntee that they’ll all give the same answer.

Because the shot of Jonathan taking the photo of Nancy never existed. The Duffers aren’t lying. The masses collectively lied to themeselves.

But how did this happen? How did a massive audience full of people, including myself, come to believe that there was a moment of Jonathan consciously taking that photo?

I’ll tell you why. It was a psyop to defame character!

Usually when a new season of Stranger Things rolls around, there comes the flow of comments on twitter saying “Hey, remember when Jonathan took a photo of Nancy changing and now she’s in a relationship with him?” which is usually done in the name of trying to bring down Jonathan and build up Steve.

And I’m not doing this to try to claim that Jonathan is a completely innocent baby who actually did nothing wrong. After all, the topless photo does still exist and as @notmybabies pointed out in the replies of one of posts, Jonathan chose to go through the process of developing it anyway. So he’s not completely off the hook. If the Duffers did want to eradicate Jonathan’s faults, then they would have digitally edited the topless Nancy photo to a different one, something that would have been possible.

But you ever notice how it’s always “Jonathan is a creep” and never “Steve called Nancy a slut and Jonathan a queer?”

I adore Steve, but what I’m trying to see is people seem to try and diminish the depth and complications of both of these characters, and it usually results in fans making Jonathan out to be a sex depraved pervert who has always had it out for Nancy, while Steve is their angel who could do no wrong. Steve couldn’t have had a good redemption arc if there wasn’t a place for him to grow from!

They never want to acknowledge that Jonathan was a lonely kid who made a bad mistake which he apologized for while looking for his brother and that Steve was a different person before he decided to change. Eliminating these character’s depths is eliminating what makes them interesting characters! Neither are completely pure and neither are completely evil!!

So in conclusion: