#tw abuse?? maybe??

[things-arent-what-they-seem66]

So about Alastor. I promised.

Lucifer is on his weekly duty again. But something is different that day.

Lucifer: Here, Ad. I made you the-

Adam, takes it quickly and is closing the door*: Thank you goodby-

Alastor: Adam? Who is it?

Lucifer: You have a-?

Adam: NO ONE! Just-just a neighbor! *Whispering to Lucifer* GO!

Lucifer: But-!

Adam: He’s leaving now!

Alastor: Adam, where are your manners? Invite him to sit with us.

Adam: Shit. *Returning to Lucifer*

Lucifer: Who is it?!

Adam: Can-can you come in?

Lucifer: Sure but-

Adam: Please do and tell him you have to go.

Lucifer: But WHY?!

Adam: I-

Alastor, coming out of nowhere: Oh, so that’s your friend.

Alastor grins at Lucifer, gripping Adam’s shoulder.

Lucifer didn’t missed the way how it scared Adam.

Alastor: Forgive my surprised state, I didn’t knew he could talk to people anymore.

Lucifer, is beyond pissed at this guy: He can. Didn’t he already talked to you before I ever happened?

Alastor: Well, yeah, but I don’t count. Do I, Addie?

Adam: He doesn’t.

Lucifer: Good to know. May I come in?

Alastor grins even wider: You may. Right?

Adam: R-right.

Lucifer steps in and holds his hand out for Alastor: Lucifer. Lucifer Morningstar.

Alastor: Pleasure to meet you. Alastor *Surname*. Adam’s cousin and helper.

Oooooh now I GOTTA know what he does to have Adam fear him like that.

Lucifer internally: Helper my ass, more like enabler.

Lucifer: Nice to meet you too. *Enters the apartment, it's cleaner than before*

Alastor: Come, sit. I didn't know Addie made a friend.

Lucifer: I moved in six months ago, we met on my first day here.

Alastor: Really?

Adam, hissed: Lucifer. Leave.

He can tell by Adams body language how stressed and anxious he is.

Lucifer: Yeah, we're buds.

Alastor: Well good, he could always use a friend

Lucifer doesn't miss the way Adam flinched or how Alastors hand never left the brunettes shoulder.

Something is very wrong.

[galaxymagitech]

Bruce’s Favorite Batkid…according to the Batkids (aka the most biased narrators possible):

Dick: “Well, Bruce adopted Jason first, and hit me over his death, so Jason, obviously.”

Tim: “Bruce nearly killed people and himself over Jason’s death…he just used me as a guilt trip.”

Jason: “Uh, the Golden Boy, obviously. *cough* KGBeast *cough*”

Steph: “I mean, he only revived one of us…so it’s gotta be Damian, right?”

Duke: “Can you guys stop competing over whose death he reacted the worst to? Anyway Barbara’s so useful with the tech and also kinda scary, so it’s gotta be her.”

Damian: “Drake is most similar to Father and inherits his company. He is clearly in the favored position.”

Barbara: “He remembers literally every problem you guys have caused; Duke just hasn’t had the chance to cause as many problems yet. No offense, Duke.”

Cass: “Me. He thinks…I am him. He is wrong.”

No one thinks Steph is the favorite.

[uncanny-tranny]

Honestly, there is a certain type of fetishizing of violence that occurs when you are the victim of abuse - wherein people talk directly to you about how much they fantasize about your abuser/s dying and being killed - "all abusers must be killed!" they say.

As a victim of prolonged abuse, I never felt cared for when people indulged that information to me. It often feels like my abuse is being exploited for others to enact their own violent fantasies and secret desires - my abuse means nothing to them in the same way that I didn't matter to my abusers. It's not support - it's just another cycle of violence.

I'm begging people to care more about victims and survivors than they do about retribution of abusers. Nowhere along the way should your focus on the abuser outweigh the people affected by their abuse. If you truly want to support abuse victims and survivors, start with us

[howlingtothevoid]

I didn't realize your reasons and I didn't know your plans, until I became the same age you were back then and it horrifies me. I wish you had done more so I could prove the world I am right, and I wish you had done nothing to me at all. Isn't it weird how it works?

[pearsfears]

happy mothers day

[uncharted-constellations]

~You were just a kid too, huh~

Again, I refuse to make adult mm link edgy sorry.

[voltaical-art]

urghh im just gonna post this… some Bishop lore…

[trans-axolotl]

content note: discussion of suicide.

this next monday will be the six year anniversary of losing one of my friends to suicide.

when he died, my high school barely mentioned his death, even though for other students who died by things like car crashes or illness, there were so many public expressions of grief. they believed that having any memorials for a student who died by suicide would encourage other people to die the same way. in their rush to erase the circumstances of his death, they erased the memory of his life.

there are so many things i am angry at that high school about in terms of how they treated mental health (mandatory reporting and collaborating with cops, their refusal to recognize the ways in which that system led to peer-to-peer crisis support, their refusal to recognize the ways that trying to keep each other alive through trial and error was scary and exhausting, carceral disciplinary policies, etc etc etc). but i think one of the things i am still angriest about is the way they enforced shame around his death. it felt like they were retroactively blaming him for the constellation of circumstances that made suicide an option in his life. it felt like they were blaming those of us who missed him and cared about him and wanted to grieve him. it made those of us still there who were actively suicidal feel even more scared about the reaction if we did reach out for help from one of those mythical safe adults.

as an adult now involved in psych abolition/mad liberation work, it makes me so fucking mad to see the ways in which he was discarded by people in authority positions. and the older i get, the more options i have found in my life for making sense of the world and finding healing and community and support which were never available to him because he died when he was 16 and the only things offered to him were a carceral psychiatric system that blamed him for his own fucking death. it feels so incredibly unfair.

i miss him and i think i always will; i can't remember his laugh or the sound of his voice or his favorite color any more and that aches. this grief is so heavy and it feels harder in a new way each year, when i become older than he will ever be. sometimes meeting new comrades or seeing new anticarceral suicide support models hurts because i wish so fucking bad that we had that back then. i remember how close we came to losing even more people that year and i know it is simple fucking luck that i'm still here when he's not.

i remember another letter (never sent) that i wrote to a friend while they were in an ICU bed after a suicide attempt when i didn't know if they would live or not. i have spent so much time in the past 10 years begging for anything to keep me and my friends alive, but even in that letter i knew that there is so much fucking violence that is hidden beneath psychiatric logics of cure and safety that promise a "solution" to suicide. I knew that institutionalization, coercion, and shame would not have helped build a life more liveable for him or **** or any of the people i've loved and lost since.

there needs to be more fucking options for care and support that aren't so incredibly cruel to suicidal people. i know so many people doing incredible work in alternatives, peer respite, a million different frameworks for healing and liberation. but it makes me so mad every day i have to live in a world where there are still people restrained, locked up in psych wards, having all autonomy and personhood taken away from them. knowing there are dozens of people every day getting blamed for their deaths the same way he was blamed for his.

i miss him. i cared so fucking much for him. and he died by suicide, and all of those things are true. he has been dead for 6 years and he lived before that and the people who loved him want to remember all of him; our celebrations of his life should not require hiding the way that he died.

Image description: [1000 origami cranes in all different colors and patterns that are tied together in strings of 25]

(these were the 1000 cranes we made to give to his parents, in memorial and recognition of how much he meant to us.)

[hearts401]

Tessa fucks me up dude can I just talk about her for a sec? Yeah? Yeah.

She loved those drones. She loved them because they were what she had. She felt sympathy for them when nobody else did. And I like to think there was a little bit of loneliness motivating her as well.

Her mother hated her. She was nothing to her. When her mother scolded her by saying "seems you still can't follow simple orders" her respone was "No, no no! Please!" BEGGING. Begging her mother to believe in her and be kind to her. She got chained up in her room (multiple times btw. At leas tthats implied. the hand she winced at and rubbed is the same hand the chain was on, which means shed be chained up long enough for it to rub her skin painfully. long enough to leave lasting pain.)

She is very connected to these drones, to the point where she kept all the error drones aroud because she LOVED them. She spent time digging them up. HELL SHE TOOK A FAMILY PHOTO WITH THEM DUDE...

Even when Cyn was creepy and scary, she kept her around. She'd rather lock Cyn up than get rid of her. and when n points it out, shes apologetic and hesitant. But we know WHY she did that. Even if it was kind of a sucky move, it was because she didnt wanna have to throw cyn out. and in the end that killed her.

Also she knows J well enough to know what sets her off (enough to. bite the shit out of a chain). She knows them. and she loves them.

I wish we'd gotten to know more about her an N. why is he so clearly her favorite? but thats not relevant ig

also her saying "I've only ever yakked to robots, J!" She has NO human friends. she has nobody to support her other than these robots. these robots who get treated like garbage by her family.

and then she has to watch these robots turn on her. Not just THESE ROBOTS but the three that she loved most. (also im going off what wouldve happened in ep 5 WITHOUT uzi, where n doesnt get out of the swamp, and nobody goes down to the basement)

V first, then Cyn, then J. And we KNOW she loved these three+N especially bc she took a family photo w them, interacted with them more often, and generally just seemed much closer with them.

and what does she get for it? killed. And also its implied by this screenshot that she wasnt ACTUALLY killed by cyn right then

(the scientists, the sword beside her, the footprints, the way shes sitting against the wall, the expression she has. she totally just saw all that shit)

and she cant have been skyn bc the scientists wouldve known. the skinsuit wasnt exactly. hm. pretty.

which means she DID see her whole family+more slaughtered in front of her while she was powerless to stop it. She DID see J violently kill everyone around her. She DID see Cyn kill everyone. And she just has to. Deal with that. And despite all her efforts, the solver took over and cyn killed her. (im assuming tessa died somewhere around when n's mineshaft flashback was like i mentioned b4)

and all the while she was convinced shed lose N, id assume. based on the state of the other drone out there.

And honestly, i think what she got was worse.

also i am team "N knew Tessa wasn't the same Tessa he knew back on Earth"

The way he looked at her, and the way he was suspicious of her. He knew HIS Tessa would never treat a drone like this. Cyn has been known to have relatively shitty recreations of people at times (like Thad in episode two) But even so there was no way he could believe it was someone else (like. who would it be? he saw her blood he heard her voice like...) which is why he was so stressed after killing her (when he leaned on his sword and was breathing heavy, yk?)

he loved her and she loved him and now shes dead. just like everyone else he loved.

this isnt about n but like. idk if tessa could see him now i think shed cry. she loved him and all of them

[jaladdin]

thinks so incredibly hard about the implication of these combined. the morgana described here wouldn't be anything but an abusive parent (which is nothing new for descendants characters) + morgie's desperation to please uliana who is also a powerful dark sorceress just screams abuse victim who knows he'll never gain his mothers approval and seeks it through similar surrogates instead. maybe if he obtains uliana's approval he will be able to rest.

to which i just flop on the ground thinking about the deleted mid credits scene in which he obtains the spellbook because it implies that in this new timeline, without uliana to seek approval from, morgie chose not to go through with it when on his own.

[mother-of-houseplants-2]

fiona gallagher // the angry man in the house

[aphidclan-clangen]

Ollie how are you ALIVE??.

boy has so much mental illness it’s insane

[batwynn]

As an autistic kid in preschool I really did not understand why me biting someone who was bullying me was treated like I Murdered Them and seen as a million times worse than anything they did to physically hurt me.

Actually, as an adult I don’t really get it either? It’s not like I broke the skin or gave them one of those hideous bite infections. I had worse bruises from the shit they did to me, but the teacher paraded me in front of the class, yanking my arm up above my head and shouted about what I did. They held a whole preschool seminar on how evil kids are who bite other kids are, and sent a Very Serious Letters home to my mom like I’d killed the pope himself. To which my mom as also like?? ‘Don’t bite people’ but also ‘Where was all this when that kid tried to bash my kid’s skull in with a heavy, metal toy truck?’

Like. What was all that? Did I miss a secret memo sent out at 4 years old that had a list of the worst things you can do to another person and biting was #1?

[pinkeoni]

WillEl Narrative Mirroring: Presenting Themes of Sexuality

If we consider powers as a means to present themes of sexuality, then looking at Will & El and how they mirror each other in narrative can reveal different angles on this topic and how the two sides of the coin come together to create a balanced whole.

Very very lengthy discussion of sex, sexuality, sexual assault, and child sexual abuse below the cut.

Will and El being different genders is important to their narrative mirroring, because they are displaying the difference between expectations in regards to male and female sexuality. Let's start with El and what her story says about female sexuality.

Layering the subtext behind supernatural elements is both practical and ethical, and I honestly applaud the Duffs for choosing to go this route rather than making it more explicit from the start, and instead sewing in details along the way. It helps keep the story digestible, allowing for a story like this to be shared to a wider audience while also not forcing their incredibly young actors to portray potentially very traumatizing circumstances.

I'm not the first nor will I be the last person to talk about all of the csa coding regarding El, Brenner, and the lab, especially here on tumblr. I was actually sent an anon awhile back linking a blog post back from 2016 that analyzed this exact thing.

"Eleven's interactions with 'Papa' are laden with coercive, coded language, intentionally leading viewers to make sexual abuse connections beneath the surface of the experiments we are shown. Eleven, vulnerable in a thin hospital gown, is told to "go deeper" and to ignore the men watching her perform. She is told the monster wants her, to go farther, "not to turn away from it." This language is intentionally loaded."

Girls are often forced into their sexuality at a young age, usually for the gratification of men

Young El, in hardly a hospital gown, is being forced to utilize her powers for the sake of Papa Brenner and other men in the lab. The sexuality/power connection is being established very early on.

And even once El has escaped the clutches of the lab and seems to find safety—

And before I have fingers pointed at me, no I am not trying to vilify Mike for this moment nor any of the boys for wanting to use El's powers to find Will. It's more complicated than that. The boys were young, their friend was missing and in danger, and they were excited by the prospect of a real life superhero being able to save their friend. I'll also get into how Mike is a victim of this forced heteronormative relationship much later in the post.

But still, even without meaning to, the boys are reinforcing the role that El is expected to fulfill, which is to use her powers and sexuality in service to the men in her life

Something impressive about that blogpost I linked earlier is the rightful calling out of how gross miIeven is way back in 2016, when the two were considered America's cutest couple by the general public.

"Crucially, in the climax, after Eleven's body is once again used for others, Mike promises her a home, and Eleven shows a glimpse of light, is almost comforted. She'll have a family, she'll have safety. Promise? No, Mike says. She'll have their mother, but while she's wearing his sister's dress he explains she won't be a sister, that he wants Eleven to meet his desire for a girlfriend. How could he possibly understand that more boundaries and a boyfriend is the opposite of what she needs?"

Girls oftentimes do not see many options outside of their sexuality

Starting in season 2 El has two modes of thinking: girlfriend or superhero. Her line of thinking isn't helped much by Hopper, who keeps her isolated from outside world. And like the boys, this is a complicated situation. Hopper is keeping El inside for the sake of her safety, lest the government catch her and lock her up again, and either use her or kill her. Still, this isn't good for her personal development.

Whereas Brenner was the sexually abusive dad who forced his daughter into adult roles at a young age, Hopper is playing the role of the overprotective dad who doesn't want to see his little girl grow up, something that continues in season 3. In his eyes, he is keeping El protected from the men of the outside world who are likely to want to take advantage of her, and keeping her locked in is his way of preventing that. But doing so is damaging to El's psyche in ways he may not realize.

So El is kept locked inside with some of her few windows to the outside world being spying on the boy who wanted her to be his girlfriend, and spending the entire day on the couch watching romantic soaps. Her options regarding freedom are skewed.

When El gets her first taste of freedom and leaves the cabin, she's in girlfriend mode. We know this when we see her go to Mike and she misreads and becomes jealous of his interaction with Max. Now I won't deny that El and Mike do have genuine care for each other, but here she ditches a boy that she hasn't seen in almost a year because he seems to have found another girl to fill that girlfriend role.

Having been hung up on in the void and replaced, El changes trajectory: superhero.

I do want to point out and emphasize the importance of El going to see Terry before this moment. El is not a robot that is programmed for sex and powers. She is very much human, and we see her desires for family and the life she could have lived, which is her motivation to seek both Mama and Kali.

Kali, another woman with powers who had been mistreated like her, offers El an alternative— use her powers against the men that have hurt her. When El sees that Kali is seeking her power as a means to use them, El leaves to save her friends and family.

I once again want to reiterate again El's humanity and her heart. El isn't returning to Hawkins simply as a means to become Mike's girlfriend and to become a superhero. She is doing so because she wants to save the people that she loves. Still, El's resolve for the season isn't super ideal given her overall arc. She is effectively fulfilling the roles that have been charted for her since the beginning. She learns that she can be a superhero and a girlfriend! Yay!

With danger out of sight, El seems to be spending her time doing the only other thing she thinks she can do, kissing Mike in her room. An activity which is described by Hopper and the rest of the party as being "unhealthy" and "bullshit."

So what is the solution? Completely remove her sexuality as Hopper aims to do?

We now come to my favorite friendship in the whole show, as well as the most important character in El's arc—

Max doesn't suppress El's sexuality or enforce it onto her, but rather is the first person who allows El to explore what she wants, offering her assistance but allowing El to lead the way. Brenner, Kali, Hopper, and Mike have all wanted to shape El into what they wanted her to be. For Brenner, a weapon. Kali, an avenger. Hopper, the perfect daughter. Mike, the perfect girlfriend. Max wants El to be whatever El wants to be. (God I love the elmax friendship so much)

Like I said before, Max does not aim to strip away El's sexuality like Hopper does. Hell, I wouldn't even say that she wanted to keep El from Mike. Hell, Max was even asking El if Mike was a good kisser after El had dumped him. Max is the one who offers to give El her moms Cosmo magazines. She isn't keeping El in the dark about sex and sexuality, but offering her a road map and actual information in order for El to come to her own conclusion about what she wants from it. El can look at pictures of Ralph Macchio and use her powers to spy but also enjoy shopping, listening to Madonna and reading comics.

When El is pushing her powers to find Billy, something that El choses to do of her own volition, it's the girls in her life (Nancy and Max) who advocate for her to lead the way while Mike is the one who wants to control her. And yes, once again the situation is complicated, Mike isn't doing this to be an asshole but out of concern for her safety, but needless to say he isn't beating the controlling boyfriend allegations. And this displays another facet of female sexuality—

Men often feel insecure when women exhibit ownership over their sexuality

Mike, who previously advocated for El to use her powers if it meant helping someone, is now actively pushing against it when it's El in the driver's seat and not him. And maybe Mike was right and El was pushing herself too far. And maybe he was concerned out of guilt for pushing her the first time, but would it also be too out of left field to say that Mike equates his part of his self worth on how much El needs him?

So maybe now I’ll talk about Mike

Mike really isn’t trying to be this malicious, manipulative guy who is using El for sex. Really, he’s not. Mike instead is a young boy who is going through some rather tough internal struggles of his own, and unfortunately brings El into it with him.

Mike is enforcing the heteronormative relationship onto himself just as much as he is doing it to El

I personally read Mike as gay and that plays into this analysis. Mike found a girl that he cared a lot for and everyone around him assumed that he must have feelings for her, so he played the role of the straight boyfriend. When I see Mike making out with El in her bedroom, I see a gay boy constantly trying to become attracted to his own girlfriend. Maybe if he keeps kissing her, maybe it’ll do something for him.

Keep in mind that Mike believes that that’s what El wants him to be, he’s not forcing onto her something that he doesn’t think she doesn’t want. He may have kissed her first, but then El was the one who tried to kissed him at the Byers house. Mike is mistaking El’s own confused feelings for genuine ones.

Being El’s boyfriend was Mike’s way of giving El what she needed, a way to be useful while simultaneously giving him a way to be normal. But what happens when his true feelings are starting to become harder to ignore?

Remember that Mike wasn’t writing “Love, Mike” when he believed that El was doing okay on her own in Lenora and making new friends. It almost makes me wonder if Mike would have said “I love you” to El if she had told Mike she was in distress.

But then again, we do see El in distress in front of Mike and yet Mike still can’t bring himself to say it. It isn’t until El is quite literally on her deathbed that Mike finally works up the courage.

In season four we have El regressing into her superhero or girlfriend mindset, with a third option added— monster.

A pinkeoni analysis that mentions El’s superhero/monster dichotomy???? SHOCKER!!

When girls are not seen as sexually desirable, they oftentimes feel monstrous as a result

El doesn’t have her powers anymore, and Mike no longer sees her as worthy of being a girlfriend, which means that she must a monster. This is a thought that is reaffirmed through El’s treatment from her classmates, and later El’s intrusive memories regarding the massacre. The only way El knows to escape this monster label is to regain her powers using NINA. This is what El knows, how to become a superhero. This is how she becomes desirable again.

I think that Max’s distance from El is a good contributing factor. Not the only one, but a main one for sure. El no longer has that guiding force, and there isn’t a girl in Lenora that understands her disposition and seems willing to take her under her wing. Sure she has her new mom Joyce, who is usually on the phone. Or her new brother Jonathan, who is usually stoned. And her new brother Will, whom we see try an give El support only for her to shut him down with “friends don’t lie.”

So El goes through NINA, gets her powers back, learns she isn’t the monster after all, oh and her boyfriend can say “I love you” now. And yet, as El realizes at the end, it’s not enough.

I promise this post is also about Will too

Now is the part of the post where we shift gears and finally talk about Will. El has more screen time than him, so there’s more to cover. I also felt like discussing her first laid some important groundwork in regards to how Will mirrors her narrative.

El showcased a lot of facets regarding female sexuality. Will covers aspects of male sexuality, but specifically gay male sexuality, which is an important distinction.

What does Hawkins feel about gay men?

Yeah, it’s not looking good.

Gay men are oftentimes perceived as predatory and dangerous

Will’s sexuality is practically an open secret. Will goes missing, and the town’s first thought is that he was taken by another gay man. Troy doesn’t say it directly, but the implication behind his words is that Will was raped and then killed, thus feeling the need to clarify that the man behind it was “another queer.” Gay men rape little boys and throw them into quarries, or so the town thinks.

The eighties is also such an important set piece for this narrative because the entire show takes place right in the midst of the Reagan Administration and the AIDS epidemic. A young gay boy dies and its suspected that another gay man killed him. The government is eager to sweep under the rug what actually did it. The anniversary of Will's kidnapping is Reagan's 1984 reelection date to the day.

Heterosexual men are treated differently on the basis of their sexuality

Well, duh. But I did want to highlight the differences between gay Will and his evil-straight-name-twin, Billy.

Billy wears his sexuality proud and openly. Based on Max's dialogue in season 3 we know that he has sex with girls often. In his introduction we are immediately shown girls ogling him. He arrives in town and is instantly liked and regarded. He catches the eyes of the hot moms in town and he's liked by the other guys.

Oh, and he's racist, violent, abusive, and overall a total sack of shit.

We see Billy's sudden rise to popularity in the same season that we see Will's incessant bullying and him being branded "Zombie Boy" by what seems to be the entire town. Even Billy who's been in town for like a day is already calling him "the freak." Will is sweet, kind, friendly, wouldn't hurt a fly, but he's the weird homo whereas Billy is the cool straight guy with the nice butt.

Gay men's sexualities are often suppressed

So now we get to the part that exhibits the WillEl mirroring, as well as some “Will has powers” theoretics. I guess your willingness as a reader to continue forward may depend on your feelings toward Will with powers. I may lose some of you, or maybe I may even swing some skeptics with my explanation. As I say in most of my posts: bare with me.

If El's sexuality and powers are being forced upon her, then Will's sexuality and powers are being forcefully snuffed out.

Let's take a look at Lonnie Byers, in many ways similar to Papa Brenner and in many ways his antithesis. Both abusive fathers with silver hair, Brenner is the obsessive parent who wants his fingers all over his daughter while Lonnie is the distant parent who wants nothing to do with his gay son. Joyce's dialogue "Lonnie said he was queer. Called him a fag." indicates that his homophobia probably has something to do with his distancing. Lonnie's verbal abuse of Will was likely a method of trying to snuff out his queerness. And when that didn't work, he left.

(and if you wanna get theoretical you could say that he had connections to the lab, knew about Will's powers and was trying to get rid of them, but that's just speculative)

A big part of season one is the fact that the entire time, Will was in his own house. He was spending his time running and hiding from the monster that was in his own home, the one that wanted to kill him. And the only time he ever expressed himself, the only time he ever used his powers—

—was when his loving and supportive mother encouraged him.

But also keep in mind that almost every time Will tries to speak with his mother through the lights, express more of himself and use more of his powers, it usually attracts the presence of the monster. Will continues his cycle of running and hiding until it doesn't work anymore, and we get what is perhaps the most overt sexual assault imagery in the show that even little fifteen year old Robin Pinkeoni picked up on in 2016.

Season one ends with Will experiencing sexual violence, and in season two we see how this trauma is encroaching on his everyday life, as well as being stalked by the same man that took him and shoved a vine down his throat for the sake of reproduction. He follows Will to the arcade. He follows him while he's trick-or-treating with friends. He finds Will at home. Eventually, he finds Will after hours at school where he's able to reenter his body in the second most overt sexual assault imagery in the show.

Where El's sexuality was suppressed in season 2, Will's sexuality was being forced upon

Will is feeling the effects of this assault for the rest of the season. He's finding it hard to sleep, and constantly feels the presence of the man who attacked him, everywhere.

Vecna is possessing Will because he wants to use him as a vessel to control help control his army, and for whatever other powers Will may have. If El never closed the gate, if Vecna had completely taken over Will's body as he originally planned, what would he have done from that point on? Would he have just discarded Will's body, or was there something special about him that he needed?

Will begins to believe that everything people say about gay men is true about him

Keep in mind that at this point Will's only experience and exposure to gay sex is being assaulted twice, all while his father and the whole town is bullying him and telling him that gay men are predators. Will isn't a predator. He isn't dangerous and we know this about him. And yet Will uses the freak label in a negative way.

So it's no surprise given the internal and external that Will is suppressing his sexuality even further.

In season 3 El begins her journey of self-discovery and likes what she finds. Will knows exactly who he is

and he hates it.

Will fucking hates himself bro. He knows he gay. And he accepts it. But he also accepts all of the labels and restrictions that it comes with. I am gay. My sexual desires are dangerous. I can never express and experience love and sex the way I want to.

And maybe there is a glimmer inside of him that sees that what he is is a wonderful thing, that maybe he does deserve better than all the abuse he's endured just for being who was.

And maybe these feelings were easier to pack away when he was younger. Maybe it was easier to say "I'm not gonna fall in love" when you're fourteen, but as you get older and grow into your teenage years...

...maybe your desires are getting harder to ignore.

What happens when you don't die innocent, and you grow up instead?

So we bring it around to season 5

El is a superhero and a girlfriend again. But it's not enough. Something is missing and she isn't fulfilled. Max is missing, and El is going to have to face and overcome her biggest challenge yet, which is completing her journey of self-discovery that started in season 3. She's going to have to put aside the expectations that many have for her and decide what she wants.

Will Byers is back in town. How has the climate surrounding gay men changed since then?

Oh! It's worse now!

Remember, the town believes that the same sodomizing Satanists are the ones behind the recent murders and earthquake. It's gonna be really bad for Will when he gets back.

So now Will is tasked with a challenge that is harder here in Hawkins than it might have been in Southern California. Maybe Will can't change the minds of these religious townsfolk but maybe he can somehow find a way to shift his own way of thinking. Embrace who he is, embrace his powers, and realize that he deserves more than the hand he's been dealt.

So that was... a lot

Analysis mostly over. Here are some of my concluding thoughts.

I know that this is probably one of my longest posts ever. I know that a lot of it feels like reiterating plot points, but that really felt like the best way for me to articulate all of my thoughts on this. A lot of it needs to be backed up with evidence from the show.

Also, sometimes when I sit down to make a new analysis, sometimes I don't make it because I think I have all of the answers, but I make it as a way to try and find answers. To talk through some of my long and complicated thoughts and open the floor to discussion. Even with the length of this post, there is waaaaaaaaay more that can be discussed regarding this topic (some that has already been discussed).

To wrap everything up, I wanna share this screenshot from Reddit, which low-key inspired this entire thing. For context, this was in response to a question asking if people expected to see a Will coming-out scene in season 5.

So, hopefully with this long ass post, I've proven that maybe the show is about the complex effects of one's sexuality in the 80's, actually.

[gtbutterfly]

my view of giant characters in pet trope stories:

doesn't do anything about the tinies being sold as pets: bad

buys a tiny as a pet to own them as a pet: evil

buys a tiny as a pet to free them and be nice to them: okish, (i mean, you still gave money to the human traffickers. they're still gonna but and sell more tinys, you haven't really done anything to stop them)

beats the living hell out of the guy selling sentient beings and frees all of them: good, epic, amazing, based

(should probably make a post about my over all thoughts on the pet trope soon)

[meow-parties]

I've got my eye on the prize,

My beady eyes are alight!

(Please, no tags implying ship.)