#or jonathan or anyone at all really

[notshellstrop]

she's so stick season it makes me sick. her gaze is vulnerable and tender, like fall, like these short warm days before everything ends and dies. not even a soft blow of wind itself, but a reminder of it.

ROBIN BUCKLEY in STRANGER THINGS 4.08 | Chapter Eight: Papa

[sp0o0kylights]

Grass is green, water is wet, and Jonathan Byers does not like Steve Harrington.

These are known facts in the universe.

Computers were going to take over the world, a “mobile” phone was being invented, and Steve Harrington had lost most of his hearing.

These were unknown facts--rumors even, if you will. Eddie had never seen even a grain of truth to support any of them. 

(Well, maybe the computer thing, but only because Grant and Dustin both had made a couple of convincing arguments.) 

So he doesn’t think about it, when his freshman gang up on him. 

Doesn’t even factor the “can’t hear well” thing in, when he was tasked (demanded, whined, bitched and moaned at) with helping them explain to Steve why going to the release party of the new D&D box set, located at a hobby store only a mere 2 hour drive away, was important.

Eddie’s not even sure how the little shits got him to agree to do it until he’s standing in the parking lot in front of the former King himself. 

“The store’s leading up to the release with a handful of one-shots.” He’s explaining, unsure whether to pull out the bored act or play up his court jester persona, and thus mixing and matching on the fly. 

He does not care if Harrington doesn’t know what a one-shot is. 

“They’re releasing the set at midnight. You have to be there to get it though, you can’t have someone else pick it up for you because they only got a certain amount in.” 

Harrington’s frowning (no surprise) but it’s not until Eddie is well into his spiel about how his van is already full with the elder members of Hellfire, and thus has no room for the freshmen, that he realizes Steve isn’t quite looking at him. 

Is in fact, looking over his shoulder.

Eddie stops. Follows Harrington’s gaze.

Parked across from Steve’s Beemer, is Jonathan Byer’s barely working clunker car. 

A handful of steps in front of it, and thus nearly right behind Eddie, is the man himself.

His hands are still moving, mouth shaping words silent as he goes, his gaze locked not on Eddie or the kids--but on Steve. 

Who turns back around as Harrington’s eyes slide right back to him. 

“And this is taking place next Friday?” He says, in that sort of annoyed but resigned way parents aim at their children. “After school?” 

“I’d like to go during  school, but the freshmen insist you wouldn’t let them ditch out.” Eddie tells him. “They had two separate arguments about it.” 

Loud ones, that had interrupted the game and given Eddie a migraine. 

Once again Steve’s eyes slide away from him, to Jonathan. 

“They’re not skipping school.” He says suddenly, a glare forming and Jonathan makes an annoyed noise. 

“They argued about skipping, they’re not going to.” He says aloud, and finally steps up so that he’s next to Eddie instead of behind him. 

“Munson slow down, I can’t sign as fast as you’re talking.” He adds, in the hang-dog grumble he’s notorious for. 

Eddie stares at him. 

“Can he seriously not hear me?” 

“No.” Steve and Jonathan answer together. 

“I can kind of still hear,” Steve adds, gaze returning to Eddie’s face. “But its more loud music or noises. I can lip read, but you’re also talking too fast for that.” 

Without pausing, he turns back to Jonathan and says; “Why can’t you take them?”

“It’s Friday.” Byers deadpans. 

Eddie’s not an expert on sign language, but his hands somehow looked deadpan too. 

He’s not sure how Jonathan did that. 

“So?” Steve snarks back. 

What follows is an argument that Eddie is not, at all involved in, mostly because he’s too busy handling the fact that Jonathan Byers has learned sign language, for Steve Harrington, apparently, and given the tone the argument is taking they still don’t even like each other.  

Eventually the argument ends, Steve throwing his hands in the air and demanding that Jonathan owes him. 

(Eventually Eddie will corner the ever so quiet Will Byers and ask why the hell his brother learned sign language for someone he clearly fucking hates.

“Oh they don’t hate each other.” Baby Byers would say, in that shy, quiet way of his. “I think they’re actually friends now?” 

“You think?”

“Well--you’ve seen them.” Will shrugs. “I think being mean to each other is kinda their thing.” 

‘What the hell.’ Eddie would think, right up until he stumbled across one of the kids sign language books. 

Byers the Elder, he decides, isn’t the only person who should learn sign language to chew out Harrington properly.

The pay off is immediate. 

Or at least, the pay off of watching Steve’s shocked face the first time Eddie signs something vulgar at him is, anyway.)

[ladystoneboobs]

no of fence to jon snow fans who for some reason care about his exact age, but these discussions just annoy me no end. not only bc there's no way any weirwood flashbacks bran has to rhaegar/lyanna will come with time/datestamps, but also bc there's always comments like this:

SEVERAL turns of the moon (ie, months)?! have these people never seen a human baby before or just have no concept of their ages? even if we take into account travel time from the toj to wf, meaning jon was not a newborn too fresh out the oven when catelyn and robb arrived, there's still a difference between a newborn and a 3mo and an even bigger difference between those infants and an older baby 5-7mo. there's very good reasons these lines were cut. whatever birthdates can be worked out internally for jon and robb from when they're first mentioned as 15 and 16 don't matter in the end, bc grrm doesn't care about a consistent timeline and the actual text of catelyn's pov and ned's convo with robert about cheating on her should outweigh any guesstimates about jon's official nameday wrt robb's. catelyn may not have cared for jon, but she would sure as hell have noticed his nameday if it came before robb's and made him ned's firstborn. if jon's birthday canonically came before robb's then either ned's cover story would not involve adultery (not impossible for him to sire a bastard before his wedding), or he'd just give jon a new nameday along with his new name to fit the adultery lie. it makes no sense for him to lie about one and not the other, undermining the big lie with a little public clue of his story not adding up. whatever else she was as a stepmother, cat wasn't stupid and a bastard who was actually the eldest son being raised alongside her trueborn heir could be an even bigger insult than whether he was born of adultery or not.

BUT, the unknowability of jon's true birthday is not the only reason this annoys me, it's bc this is all based on the assumption that jon must be older since rhaegar/lyanna ran off together before ned married cat, as if both boys must have been conceived asap as robb canonically was when his parents consummated their marriage. and that's not how human reproduction works! even if you don't understand how fast babies grow in the first year, you should know that people who get pregnant do so through ovulation cycles and a lucky sperm finding an egg and all that, not just immediately getting knocked up as soon as one has p-in-v sex for the first time. not unless you only know mean girls sex ed where if you have sex you will get pregnant and die. (even tho lyanna did die, there's plenty of canon examples where pregnancy did not lead straight to death. also examples of people who did not get pregnant right away and even some who are/were sexually active and childless without always having moon tea on hand.) we can't know how long lyanna was having sex before that sperm+egg match happened or even how long she was with rhaegar before losing her technical virginity. if they were married, doesn't it make sense to think they didn't consummate their relationship until the wedding night either? that's the only leverage there is to ensure a status as wife rather than just mistress.

and while i just said grrm doesn't care about exact timelines and a lot is still foggy surrounding the rebellion and esp rhaegar, there is one timemarker wrt robert's rebellion he voluntarily threw in, time and time again: that stannis was besieged at storm's end for almost a whole year. that siege, which mind you, did not match the duration of the entire war. it only started after robert won his battles at gulltown and summerhall, returned to storm's end, and then went out and lost the battle of ashford, leaving his homeland open to the reachermen. the same siege which only ended when ned made a detour there after the sack of king's landing, before going to the toj. even if lyanna may not have given birth that exact day ned found her, she could only be waiting in that bloody bed for weeks at the most, not months. so if rhaegar knocked her up the very same night he carried her off and jon was still a newborn when ned found her after the siege of storm's end had ended, wouldn't that mean lyanna was pregnant for well over a year? that's not how human pregnancy works either! so, maybe that's proof that jon and robb, whichever order they were actually born in, were actually very close in age as babies, much closer than if they were both conceived asap.

and really, jon's actual birthdate does not matter imho, when he was raised not just as the bastard to robb's trueborn heir, but with robb also known by catelyn and the world as ned's firstborn (which he was, in any case, as jon was ned's nephew by birth). what difference could a birthdate before robb's make (even were there some means of discovery) after ned, cat, and robb are all dead? if one is looking only at his birth parents then he's only a firstborn child on lyanna's side, but definitely a second son on rhaegar's side. maybe he was always meant to be a second son with a not much older half-brother! even if the aegon fka young griff is not in fact rhaegar's son, he'll still be known as aegon vi targaryen, meaning jon will never be known as any father's elder son. if i may reference mean girls again, it's not going to happen.

[dwobbitfromtheshire]

So, after season one, Nancy and Steve don't get back together for like a month, right? Okay, what if they reconciled by Steve approaching her and telling her that he wanted to give her space, that he didn't want to push her, but he wanted to make sure she was alright after Barb. He told her how he wished he had gotten to know her, and if she was up for it, then maybe she could tell him about Barb. I have a hard time believing that no one acknowledged Nancy and her grief for Barb. (I mean, did Hopper even think to check on her?) To me, I think that this would explain why she was holding on to Steve for so long even though she had feelings for someone else. In her darkest moment, Steve was so sweet to her. Jonathan was busy with his own family, and that's understandable, but you're telling me that he couldn't pick up the phone? I think it's also why Steve went to the dinners because he did feel guilty, and he did feel guilty about not getting to know Barb. I think if she and Jonathan hadn't gotten together in that moment, then she would have found her way to actually talk to Steve about Barb to get closure. It's one of the things that annoys me about Jancy. That and the photographs. I wish they had written Jonathan better. Anyway, I just wonder how they reconciled after that month, and I think this is it.

[jonathanbyersphd]

Me @ the Duffers: GIVE ME JONATHAN PLEASE I COULD MAKE HIS S4 STORYLINE SO MUCH MORE FUCKED UP

[clown-eating-pig]

S1 Jon squinting all the time to disguise the fact that he has big beautiful brown cow eyes.

[jonathan-s-kent]

I really wish tumblr supported Kryptonian

It would make my life easier

[yourbodymyarchive]

i actually really like the jonelias dynamic that i have made up in my mind where it has the potential to turn into such a twisted and wicked relationship where its only driving force is desire. fucked up desire, but desire nonetheless. elias sculpted jon into exactly what he wanted, a god to be worshipped and heralded as the most important being in the universe. he made him into that. and jon will rest his head on elias's thigh and feel love coursing through them. is it for each other? they can't say. but it feels good.

if the cards had fallen a different way, i don't know. maybe jon wouldn't have resisted so much. maybe he would grow to enjoy it. another one of my made up desires: a jon sims who is just utterly accepting of the monstrosity that made him "other" in the eyes of his friends. he doesn't care. he'll take from people whatever he wants. he'll enjoy the act of feeding. which also goes hand in hand with the kind of pseudo cannibalism that tma had going on when jon was feeding on people's statements. the dangers of consumption. consuming another person and their fear. scarring them for the rest of their life. is it really so bad to feed and be healthy? jon didn't want to stop, not really. he felt bad, sure. but. it feels bad at first and then it doesn't. maybe, he only needed one more person to take the leap into a never-ending hunger. i wanted to see that.

so much potential here! jonelias on their knees for each other. jon is kneeling so that he can be praised, worshipped, loved for his monstrosity, not despite. elias is kneeling because jon is the closest thing he will ever get to god and he is beautiful and one day, he'll bring the beauty in fear out of the dark and everyone will see.

[skycladcoyote]

Okay so I know that some people are bothered by stoner-Jonathan's characterization in season 4.. but at the same time, it makes a whole lot of heartbreaking sense (if the writing is at all aware of this of course):

Jonathan has had to handle undertaking the responsibility of an adult and parent, as well as struggling with poverty and low-key neglect throughout his entire childhood. When someone adapts to function under a constant sense of stress and outside pressure, their brain and nervous system gets wired around it. Chronic stress becomes their 'normal' baseline. The sudden removal of pressure and stress alone isn't an instant relief and healing to them, it can be totally disorienting and distressing because they can't magically readjust to that new environment they didn't evolve in.

Practically overnight, Jonathan gets uprooted to California, his mom has a better income and Will is older and more independent. This massive drop in expectations, purpose and pressure is destabilizing as hell. Jonathan never got to learn how to simply exist without that pressure, how to be self-motivated without urgency and survival instinct firing him up. Meanwhile, everyone around him are moving on and yet he still has nobody actually guiding and helping him through the metric ton of needs he's ever had which were never addressed or met. As always it is assumed that he can just quietly carry on and roll into actual adulthood after basically raising himself and, largely, his family.

It's absolutely no wonder that he'd start self-medicating with weed, trying to feel at peace and relaxed instead of lost, aimless and like everything feels hollow and unmotivating for no apparent reason.

(That said, what I will lose my shit about is if they have Nancy get all aw I'm not into you anymore because you're not 'ambitious' enough without the story addressing the fact that he can't just walk off all that shit alone after putting everyone's needs above his own for fucking years. I mean she has the right to break any relationship off, but framing it like it's his failure or character flaw and giving him nothing for it would be SO fucking WRONG.. But they've had great compassion for their characters so far so I still trust they couldn't fail that horribly)

[wiseatom]

anyway you can literally pry mike and will sw*ftie agenda from my cold, lifeless hands

[mariathechosen1]

Was Anyone But You a good Much Ado About Nothing adaptation? No, not at all, but fuck it was fun!

[totally-not-an-awkward-okapi]

Autopsy of one of the two bodies found somewhere else.

[violentlyshiftingfandoms]

Fractured Faith

Just as a note: This is a very short piece of a larger project I intended to do, but never finished. I decided to post it because I love the final sentence. The project itself was basically supposed to be Jonathan, in the future when he was no longer Scarecrow, writing stuff about his life as he remembered it, kind of like an autobiography he was never going to publish. Anyway, here's the actual ficlet; although, it's more like a paragraph.

I remember the first time I really started questioning the religion I was raised on. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but in my great-grandmother’s eyes, I had committed one of the worst sins imaginable. She had caught me alone with a girl at church, and she had assumed the worst. Genuinely nothing happened between us; I had never even been interested in girls (that is another story entirely), but when she looked at me at that moment all she could see was my mother. She grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me to the pastor. I was yet again forced into another baptism. When I got home that night Great Granny had me pick my own switch. She skinned my hide until I bled. When she was finished, I ran out into the cornfield, far away from that cursed house and that wretched woman. I would’ve run out of that town if I could. The cool night air stung my back. I looked up. I stared into the night sky, teary-eyed as I searched for a God that had forsaken me for a sin that was not mine.

[abcdeception]

One take I’ve seen which sort of annoys me is this idea that if Jonathan really wanted to leave the show after Sebastian died, he could’ve just told Cam so & then he would’ve been free to live his life as he saw fit. Beyond the fact that we know he did tell Cameron he wanted to stop performing, or at least that he voiced some kind of protest about performing certain shows (from the final episode, Transposition), there’s the point that it’s really fucking difficult to say no to the people you care about.

(^ from Transposition, ~38:54)

From this scene alone we know that Cam had to talk Johnny into continuing to perform after their father passed; it’s obvious that Johnny values his freedom, though, so why did he ever agree to it? Primarily, because his brother asked him to, and he loves Cameron more than he wants to be free (this is true, at least, at the beginning of the show). It’s not as simple as just saying “No”. If that’s the line of logic we’re following, then Jonathan can’t carry any blame for asking Dina to retrieve the files that the FBI were hiding — she simply could’ve refused, right? Cameron, at the very least (and I do mean very least, because their father treated him like shit), got to go out and connect with people as himself. Johnny only ever had Cameron, so to deny his brother anything must’ve seemed impossible. I don’t want to start speculating about how that conversation must’ve gone because it’s counterintuitive to the point I’m trying to make, but I just think this idea (that all Jonathan had to do is tell Cameron he didn’t want to perform) is reductive, and also does a massive disservice to the really complex character dynamics at play in the show

[killmebythebeach]

Gertrude is dead, and Elias has a PHENOMENAL idea.

It's simple really, multiple Archivists means he doesn't have to restart his plans if one dies. As well as it will provide more opportunities to get any one of them marked. Plus with the mess Gertrude left behind... he'd probably need multiple anyway to make a DENT in the archives. And he has four perfect candidates.

That's right! S1 archives crew au where all four of them are the Archivist!

Would this canonically be possible? Probably not, but the idea is funny.

Tim for his mark from the Stranger and his drive for revenge, one Elias can easily manipulate into stopping rituals and getting the job done. As long as he stays under his control, he'll be a powerful asset for Elias.

Martin, for his Lonely and Web tendencies. He has yet to be marked, but he has no idea what he's doing because he lied about all his degrees. Either way, he'll wander into trouble eventually, and there's a way Martin makes himself look so unimportant... he could probably get himself out of any encounter by posing as such a non-threat.

Sasha isn't connected to any entities (yet) but she is too curious for her own good, wanting answers before wanting safety, and she's very efficient at gathering information. Plus, she's probably going to be the ring leader for the actual archiving part of the job.

And Jon for his mark with the Web. He has the same self destructive curiosity as Sasha, so easy to mark, as well as his fear of... almost anything. Plus, the others might need someone to ground them back to reality in their own escapades (even if Elias does end up way overestimating how down to earth Jon is).

This means all the og archival crew survive, yay! There are certain things that can't happen to Archivists (I'm ignoring canon a little sorry), for example the Notthem can't actually kill Sasha for some reason, so for s2 Sasha is trapped in the tunnels in a coma while the impersonator walks upstairs (making her the first to become fully realized when she wakes up!). So both her and Jon are framed for "[sounds of brutal pipe murder]", and can tag team talking to the avatars while they hide at Georgie's.

And while Sasha, Melanie, and Martin get dirt on Elias, Tim and Jon both go into their comas, waking up with the help of Oliver, as well as getting them their End marks. And of course with Elias in jail, Peter comes along.

So Sasha, Martin, Melanie, and Basira are left to maintain order in the archives. Sasha always leaving to go butt heads with Peter as the only realized Archivist, Melanie riddled with the Slaughter, Basira still mourning Daisy, Martin is the only peacekeeper, making him the one who has to go along with Peter to keep him in check.

And tensions run HIGH when Tim and Jon wake up. Them and Sasha are always toe to toe, fighting over statements and getting what is essentially feedback noise by having too many Eye avatars in a room. With them distracted, Martin has to do impromptu surgery on Melanie and get Daisy out of the coffin (without Peter knowing) while the other three run off to stop the Dark, trying to show eachother up.

In the pits of despair, not really knowing how to become an Archivist with how hes being pushed out of the ecosystem, it's easy for Martin to get caught up in the Lonely. When the others go in to save him, they are easily placated by Peter, having their "enemies" right next to them in the rescue. This is when Martin realizes, and smites the fuck out of Peter like he deserves.

Martin and Jon go to Daisy's safe house, Tim going to another and Sasha a different one as well when all four get the same statement delivered to them. The Eye opens.

Scattered, all four must walk through the apocalypse (Martin and Jon still together fortunately, that way he can show him the ropes of being an avatar) as they all collectively decide on their own to beat up Elias. Martin and Jon take their usual route, while Tim takes the long way to smite as many avatars as he can on his own. Sasha makes it to Basira first though, helping her in her hunt for Daisy.

Cue a messy reunion with the four Archivists in the tunnels with Georgie and Melanie, a plan to destroy the Panopticon, and one of the Archivists sneaking out for part of the plan early...

And in his anger, guilt, and grief, Tim becomes the Eye's Pupil in the Panopticon. If any of the others kill him they'll just take his place, so they all have to stab eachother at the same time as the place explodes, sending them to either their deaths or somewhere else.

[thebirdandhersong]

There's a lot that can be analysed in The Outlaws Scarlett & Browne about eugenics, actually