Lately, I've been having a few conversations about normative assumptions/value frameworks/conventions within fic.
I do want to be as clear as possible, here: I am personally quite hardcore anti-censorship and strongly believe that any attempt to eliminate fics based on ethical evaluation of their narrative content does significantly more harm than good.
With that point established, I also find it absolutely fascinating to examine the ways in which certain patterns emerge! Therefore, when I had the stray thought "I feel like Steddie fandom gets weirder about virginity than other fandoms I've been in," I went—okay, let's test that feeling with data.
It was so, so much fun! I'm having a fantastic time.
Method/Approach
While logged in to my AO3 account (thus with visibility on archive-locked fics), I went through the AO3 ship tags for the most popular ships of 2024, the most recent overview available from @toastystats. Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson didn't make the cut at 23.3k in 2024, but note that that number does not include archive-locked fics.
Within each ship tag, I filtered for (individually):
#Loss of Virginity
#Virginity Kink
#Virgin [character A]
#Virgin [character B]
I did not have a hard cut-off for posting time, but I did grab everything within the span of about an hour.
I decided not to pull rating data (e.g. what percentage of fics in the fandom are labeled Explicit), because I think stories featuring virginity could hypothetically be in just about anything. If I ever do decide to do a follow-up, that's something I'd probably look at, though. Who knows, maybe there'll be some interesting correlations.
I also looked at the stats for "Uchiha Sasuke/Uzumaki Naruto" because Naruto made the biggest fandoms list and I was curious, having sort of nominally been on the fringes of that fandom in the mid-2000s; it's got 21.5k fics so I think it's a pretty reasonably-sized inclusion.
Something I did not expect to discover was the fact that "#Virgin Rey (Star Wars)" kept popping up as one of the top suggested tags whenever I typed in a "#Virgin [character]" tag, so I dipped a cautious toe into the heretofore-unknown-to-me world of Reylo. How could I not, with bait like that?
(Steve Rogers' virginity or lack thereof also seems to be of paramount interest to the good people of AO3...)
Reylo-specific Weirdness
I'm not really sure my approach was sufficient, because I discovered that "Kylo Ren/Rey" (16,748 fics) and "Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren" (31,759 fics) are listed as two separate ships. I did a quick search for any AO3 news items explaining why they're separate and didn't see anything; if anyone knows what's up with that, please let me know! I'm not saying it's wrong, I just have no idea what's going on or if it is indeed appropriate for purposes of this study to treat them as separate.
The numbers I got for those ships are also slightly off, because I decided to sum "#Virgin Kylo Ren" and "#Virgin Ben Solo" to get the "#Virgin [character]" figure, even though I could already see a ton of fics tagged with both on the first page of results. I suspect the raw sums ended up being off by about 100-200, since the lower number in both cases was ~300.
(In both ship tags, "#Virgin Rey" was still the higher of the two sums, so it didn't end up mattering at all in terms of getting a percentage range.)
Key Methodological Weaknesses
⚠️ Obviously, these tags are not comprehensive.
I poked around a bit to see if I could find any other commonly used tags; I considered including "#Sexual Inexperience" and "#First Times" as well, but felt that those were too imprecise and included a lot of e.g. first times between those particular characters. Ultimately, I decided that what I was actually interested in was references to "virginity" as a specific socially constructed concept in and of itself.
⚠️ I did not clean the datasets.
For example, these numbers include fics in which the tags refer to a different ship than the one I filtered by, such as multi-fandom anthologies and works in which the filtered-by ship is a background pairing.
I'm gonna be honest: proper cleaning sounded like a lot of work and I didn't want to do it.
⚠️ I did not account for multi-tagging.
I'm absolutely certain that many if not most of these have more than one tag applied, e.g. "#Loss of Virginity" and "#Virgin [character A]" on the same fic. Therefore, the total number of unique fics is definitely less than the sum of the tags. Which is fine, because I'm interested in looking at tag frequency, but it is a limitation that should be top-of-mind when looking at this data.
Findings
These are raw counts, which means that they're not scaled to the overall fandom sizes as indicated by the grey "Fic total" columns (scaled to right-side Y-axis, not shown).
Given all the listed methodological weaknesses, I want to emphasize yet again that this is an extremely sloppy study with a lot of holes in it, and no firm conclusions should be drawn from it. I know some of the numbers aren't really visible here and honestly I think that's appropriate, because they should be taken as relative indicators/estimates rather than precise measurements. (Actual numbers at end of post.)
Nonetheless, I found these results pretty interesting in terms of overall trends! For my purposes, getting a general range was sufficiently accurate, even if I had a hell of a time figuring out how best to visualize it within Google Sheets.
Here's a chart showing approximately how many times those four tags show up in fics for each ship, described as a minimum percentage (the highest number of any individual tag) and a maximum percentage (the sum of all four numbers). The actual number of unique fics that use at least one of those tags is definitely somewhere between the two, and probably much closer to the minimum than the maximum.
INCREDIBLE. Reylo fics tend to use at least one of those tags at a rate roughly 3-5x any other ship. I have no idea what's going on in there and I'm a little bit afraid to ask. (No, that's a lie, I am so anthropologically interested, please tell me if you know anything!!)
The other major outlier is the Miraculous Ladybug ship, Adrien Agreste/Marinette Dupain-Cheng; I know literally nothing about that fandom/canon and have no idea what's going on there either, but there are only 65 fics tagged "#Loss of Virginity" + one tagged "#Virginity Kink" (which is a multifandom anthology, so I strongly suspect it shouldn't count, but I didn't want to be inconsistent about my hands-off approach to data-cleaning) + one tagged "#virgin marinette."
So with those three (counting the two Reylo as separate) removed to make the chart a bit more legible, I got this:
Second figure included because it's closer to what I actually wanted the data visualization itself to look like but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to add the actual numbers, blech. GIVE ME BOTH.
By this point, you may have noticed that I wrote out some names in full and some in shorthand. This is purely based on my own personal convenience, because it's not like I'm going to forget what LWJ/WWX stands for, but if I shorten the BNHA characters' names I will simply never remember them again. I did, however, write out the character names instead of the ship names e.g. Johnlock because that helps me remember at a glance which one was Character A and which one was Character B.
Main Observations:
Hermione/Draco and Steve/Eddie have a VERY similar spread of around 1.4%–2.4/2.8%.
Jungkook/V (BTS RPF) also overlaps a bit, though with a lower maximum; this may be due to e.g. a fandom tendency not to use multiple of the listed tags in the same fic, though this is just an example hypothesis and further investigation is required to draw any particular conclusions.
Sherlock/John is the only other one with a min% of >1%, though Bakugou Katsuki/Midoriya Izuku (BNHA) and Harry/Louis (1D RPF) come fairly close with a ~1.3% max% for both.
I also noted some interesting patterns around tag frequency/distribution when I was pulling data:
I went with a percentage format for these data markers, but please note yet again that these are not percentages of unique fics! These percentages represent tags used, and the ratio of tag:fic is definitely not 1:1.
Main Observations:
"#Loss of Virginity" tends to be the most or second-most commonly used tag, with "#Virgin [character A/B]" also frequently used.
"#Virginity Kink" is not that commonly used overall, which I find pretty interesting in and of itself! It shows up pretty heavily in LWJ/WWX, which makes sense because they are canonically kinky (I don't remember whether the incense-burners featured virginity kink specifically? but it's definitely not too big a stretch), Dean/Sam (SPN), and of course Steve/Eddie, which has the highest actual number of tag usages (87 compared to the next-highest at 57).
Some fandoms have a pretty even split of which character gets the "#Virgin [character]" tag, and others don't.
On that last point, I wanted to take a closer look at which ships had strong discrepancies and which had a more 50/50 split.
The formula I used was basically in the format of (MAX(A1:B1)-MIN(A1:B1))/SUM(A1:B1)—in other words, the closer the number is to zero, the closer the "#Virgin [character A]" to "#Virgin [character B]" ratio is to 1:1.
I wasn't expecting these results! I'd initially thought that it might make sense that some ships include characters who have unambiguously canonically had sex, so the bulk of canon-verse fics would thus reflect a certain weighting.
However, as the second (sorted) graph shows, below the top two, the curve is pretty smooth! I don't really know what that implies except that my hypothesis was definitely wrong. There does seem to be a more jagged step-down from 0.53 to 0.41, but I'm not convinced the R-squared is out of bounds, especially when n=23.
(I've included the Reylo numbers, but here is a gentle reminder that they should definitely be higher due to fandom-specific tagging practices that I don't know enough about to resolve appropriately. The maximum end of that range would be about 0.3-0.35, for the record.)
(Lack of) Conclusion
⚠️ It would be intellectually irresponsible to come to any overarching conclusions based on this data. (This is mostly a reminder to myself!)
What I can reasonably say is this: the data does in fact seem to support the idea that Steddie fics on AO3 may have more of a tendency to use virginity-related tags than other popular ships do, particularly the "#Virginity Kink" tag.
I am not even going to try to speculate on whatever's going on in the Hermione/Draco situation, but it's utterly fascinating to me that that's the main highwater comp, especially since the overall numbers are relatively similar but the internal tag distribution looks pretty different.
And finally, because I do know it's a pain to try and read the actual numbers on the graphs, here's a cleaner table:
Ok, I went back to edit a few more graphs into this post (I tweaked the transparency on the fic-count columns in the first major graph, so it should be slightly easier to read now) and I realized I was basically starting a whole other very lengthy section on distribution, so. Please consider this a vast expansion on my first set of observations, which in retrospect were quite cursory and inadequate!
Naturally, this is almost as long as the previous post, with even more graphs/charts.
Overall Distributions and Actual Statistics on AO3 Virginity-Tagging Which I Neglected to Include Last Time, i.e. My Formal ADHD Evaluation Came Back Negative Because "Most People With ADHD Find Math Boring"
The tl;dr:
It is unusual for more than ~0.85% of fics to be tagged "#Loss of Virginity" or ~0.05% of fics to be tagged "#Virginity Kink."
It is also unusual for more than ~0.45% of fics featuring any particular character to be tagged with "#Virgin [character]," regardless of what ship they're written in.
Here are the initial stat workups:
And here is the general tag distribution:
Note that Reylo and the Miraculous Ladybug ship have already been excluded from these analyses.
What we can see with the consistently negative IQRmin values (Q1 minus 1.5*IQR) (yeah the name's not perfect, it's basically shorthand for the lower bound of a box-and-whisker plot) is that there are no lower-bound outliers in the data.
You will also notice a couple new columns on the initial stats, because I've really been puzzling over whether the character tags should be treated as one continuous dataset. In other words, do I consider "#Virgin Aziraphale" and "#Virgin Crowley" as two points on a single line? Or do I look at the characters within a ship who are more commonly V-tagged as their own set?
Here is a barely-legible distribution map of the more commonly V-tagged (#VMax) and the less commonly V-tagged (#VMin) (yes I'm aware that vmin is a BTS RPF ship name, don't come for me about my naming conventions, it's all just napkin scribbles):
As you can see, there is a fair bit of overlap! At this point, I reeeeeally could not avoid figuring out a proper way to excise outliers, lest my graphs be completely unreadable.
There are a few different ways to calculate outliers, depending on what you're looking to measure, and I decided to test both z-scores and IQRs because that sounded like fun.
Z-scores
Z-scores, which measure against the mean, are typically best used for normal distributions—which these definitely are not. But I just wanted to see what I'd get if I applied it, so here we go.
The usual cutoff is +/-3, which means the only proper outlier on these tags is Steddie on "#Virginity Kink"! 👀
That said, the Hermione/Draco "#Loss of Virginity" z-score is preeeetty close to 3, so I'd be comfortable considering it an outlier in this context. (A former stats prof once described the process of finding outliers as "vibes-based" which probably explains a lot about what I'm doing here)
Now for the character tags:
The results are in fact different depending on whether I use one dataset or split it into two, which is SO COOL!
What the above chart means, basically, is that when each individual character is considered equally hypothetically likely to be V-tagged independent of who they're shipped with, Eddie Munson and Sherlock Holmes are VERY disproportionately V-tagged. The rest of the characters are pretty tightly clustered within about +/-1, except Hermione Granger at 1.80.
However, if we make the assumption that any given ship is likely to have one character V-tagged more than the other*, Eddie is flirting with that upper bound there but only Draco Malfoy really breaks it—as the less-tagged partner.
*Should probably have mentioned this earlier but all of the top listed ships have 2 characters, so I'm not considering polyships as part of this analysis.
Also, while Steve Harrington is slightly more likely to be V-tagged than most characters on the VMin side, John Watson is slightly less. Neither breaks +/-1, which I hadn't expected!
Interquartile Ranges (IQRs)
As mentioned earlier, the lower-bound IQR can be ignored as we don't really have outliers on that end. Here are the upper-bound outliers, sorted by min%:
Again, we do get slightly different results depending on whether the characters are treated as individual or as participating in an oppositional binary, but this time the difference is pretty trivial.
To summarize the non-character tags first: Hermione/Draco has a slightly higher percentage of "#Loss of Virginity" tags than most (Jungkook/V is also creeping up there); LWJ/WWX has a slightly higher percentages of "#Virginity Kink" than most (with Dean/Sam literally right on that line); and Steve/Eddie has about 2.5x the "#Virginity Kink" IQRmax, which I would classify as EXTREMELY HIGH, HOLY SHIT.
As for the character tags: unsurprisingly, the top three VMax entries on this list all clock in as outliers. However, the only real difference is that Draco is marked as an outlier for a VMin.
Conclusion Regarding Outliers
Given all of the above results, I think it's pretty fair to say that Hermione/Draco, Steve/Eddie, and Sherlock/John are outliers adn should not have been counted.
So what happens if we remove them from the distribution? (As well as the two other "#Virginity Kink" outliers)
Now that looks like a pretty reasonable distribution all around. The n is rather too low to expect normality, but it does seem like these could be representative sample populations. (I'm not even including the exact data labels because these specific charts were created to check for clustering or other weirdness, and thus the exact data labels don't matter.)
(NOTE: The above image has been updated! I uploaded an incorrect/outdated screenshot earlier! Sorry about that! It doesn't change the analysis though!)
In the end, I did write out some of the characters' full names and marked which ships they belong to so I could make more detailed comparative charts. As you can see in the above charts, there is a TON of overlap.
(Note that Steve Rogers is V-tagged at approximately the same rate whether he's paired with Bucky or Tony, which I personally think is hilarious! Fandom consensus, truly. I'm slightly curious whether comics!Cap is treated differently from MCU!Cap, but that is a project for another day.)
Statistical Summary Revisited
(NOTE: The above image has been updated! I uploaded an incorrect/outdated screenshot earlier! Sorry about that! It doesn't change the analysis though!)
With the outliers removed, this is the statistical summary I came up with. I'd like to test it against bigger datasets, but it feels about right to me.
I feel fairly confident in saying that based on this data/analysis, most popular ships feature 0.2-0.6% fics tagged "#Loss of Virginity" and 0.01-0.03% fics tagged "#Virginity Kink."
It also appears to be completely within the bounds of a normal distribution to have zero fics with virginity-related tags, which means I should maybe have left the Miraculous Ladybug ship in, whoops.
And here we get to the actual, real conclusion of this extremely long journey! If you forgot the tl;dr before the cut, here it is again:
It is unusual for more than ~0.85% of fics to be tagged "#Loss of Virginity" or ~0.05% of fics to be tagged "#Virginity Kink."
It is also unusual for more than ~0.45% of fics featuring any particular character to be tagged with "#Virgin [character]," regardless of what ship they're written in.
So back to my animating research question...
Is Steddie fandom relatively weird about virginity?
As I've said many times throughout these posts, I can't and shouldn't make any conclusive statements based on this data.
Nonetheless, the data I've examined has not disproven my hypothesis. And that's not nothing! It's a bunch of double negatives, sure, but sometimes that's what you get.
Steddie joins Johnlock and Dramione in this presumptive preoccupation with virginity, although it's much more similar to Johnlock in that it is primarily concerned with the virginity of one character (a twenty-year-old musician and drug dealer) in particular. Steddie fandom is, however, MUCH more likely to tag it as kink, and is actually pretty normal about tagging "#Loss of Virginity." "#Virgin Steve Harrington" also shows up on the sliiightly high side of average, but is actually also very normal.
Potential Future Research Directions
First and foremost, it would be cool to check these stats against a bigger dataset; maybe the top 100 ships or something like that.
I'd like to check the co-tagging/multi-tagging: what's the prevalence of fics with both "#Virgin [character A]" and "#Virgin [character B]" tagged? What are the most common tag combos?
It would also be interesting to do a comparison of M/M and M/F ships (and F/F, I suppose, but I strongly suspect F/F ships tend to be less attached to the concept of virginity—though maybe that's another assumption worth testing). I was actually quite surprised to see that both Reylo and Dramione have relatively low discrepancies between "Virgin [character]" tags, and I'm curious whether that's characteristic of M/F ships in general.
I'd like to see how "#Anal Virgin [character]" tags play out relative to the ones I checked. They did pop up quite a bit in my data-gathering, but I decided they were out of bounds for this particular study.
I'm curious about two other tags I'd decided were out of bounds, too:"#Sexual Inexperience" and "#First Times." I do wonder if they change the numbers at all!
I have no idea whether this would be fruitful or not, but it'd be neat to check for any potential correlations (or inverse correlations) with omegaverse tags.
This is a bit tougher to study, but I'd like to investigate cultural differences around fics tagged for virginity. One imperfect proxy would be using the language the fic was published in, but I feel like I'd need a couple other variables to really start getting meaningful data. Maybe looking at e.g. C-dramas in their own category?
Thank you everyone who's been engaging with my silly project!! I will respond to stuff later but I just wanted to make a ⚠️VERY IMPORTANT ERRATA ANNOUNCEMENT⚠️ that I pulled the final stat numbers based on an incorrect VMax/VMin sort! I glanced at the graph again and went "wait....that doesn't make sense," and realized that I'd messed up a filter formula to sort the individual character values; basically, I wasn't correctly marking which characters were VMax and which characters were VMin, so OBVIOUSLY there weren't large-scale differences between the two datasets.
The figures have been corrected now in the original post! It doesn't impact the overall analysis, though it does suggest slightly more of a binary-oppositional dynamic taking place in general, and does suggest that separating out VMax and VMin characters may indeed have some analytical value in future research, when I had previously been like "oh I guess it's not that important after all!" It's not a massive difference and there is still some overlap, but imo it's definitely worth hanging onto as an analytical lens.
Here are the revised stats:
Ok, I'm running late for an appointment! I am very excited to respond to stuff when I get back!
ETA RIP I forgot to take the outliers out from the revised charts. Look, I have a formal report saying that I don't have ADHD, this is apparently just my typical inability to focus and remember shit. Anyway I fixed the chart above, with the relevant columns highlighted, and I'm going to go update the distribution graphs now!
Lately, I've been having a few conversations about normative assumptions/value frameworks/conventions within fic.
I do want to be as clear as possible, here: I am personally quite hardcore anti-censorship and strongly believe that any attempt to eliminate fics based on ethical evaluation of their narrative content does significantly more harm than good.
With that point established, I also find it absolutely fascinating to examine the ways in which certain patterns emerge! Therefore, when I had the stray thought "I feel like Steddie fandom gets weirder about virginity than other fandoms I've been in," I went—okay, let's test that feeling with data.
It was so, so much fun! I'm having a fantastic time.
Method/Approach
While logged in to my AO3 account (thus with visibility on archive-locked fics), I went through the AO3 ship tags for the most popular ships of 2024, the most recent overview available from @toastystats. Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson didn't make the cut at 23.3k in 2024, but note that that number does not include archive-locked fics.
Within each ship tag, I filtered for (individually):
#Loss of Virginity
#Virginity Kink
#Virgin [character A]
#Virgin [character B]
I did not have a hard cut-off for posting time, but I did grab everything within the span of about an hour.
I decided not to pull rating data (e.g. what percentage of fics in the fandom are labeled Explicit), because I think stories featuring virginity could hypothetically be in just about anything. If I ever do decide to do a follow-up, that's something I'd probably look at, though. Who knows, maybe there'll be some interesting correlations.
I also looked at the stats for "Uchiha Sasuke/Uzumaki Naruto" because Naruto made the biggest fandoms list and I was curious, having sort of nominally been on the fringes of that fandom in the mid-2000s; it's got 21.5k fics so I think it's a pretty reasonably-sized inclusion.
Something I did not expect to discover was the fact that "#Virgin Rey (Star Wars)" kept popping up as one of the top suggested tags whenever I typed in a "#Virgin [character]" tag, so I dipped a cautious toe into the heretofore-unknown-to-me world of Reylo. How could I not, with bait like that?
(Steve Rogers' virginity or lack thereof also seems to be of paramount interest to the good people of AO3...)
Reylo-specific Weirdness
I'm not really sure my approach was sufficient, because I discovered that "Kylo Ren/Rey" (16,748 fics) and "Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren" (31,759 fics) are listed as two separate ships. I did a quick search for any AO3 news items explaining why they're separate and didn't see anything; if anyone knows what's up with that, please let me know! I'm not saying it's wrong, I just have no idea what's going on or if it is indeed appropriate for purposes of this study to treat them as separate.
The numbers I got for those ships are also slightly off, because I decided to sum "#Virgin Kylo Ren" and "#Virgin Ben Solo" to get the "#Virgin [character]" figure, even though I could already see a ton of fics tagged with both on the first page of results. I suspect the raw sums ended up being off by about 100-200, since the lower number in both cases was ~300.
(In both ship tags, "#Virgin Rey" was still the higher of the two sums, so it didn't end up mattering at all in terms of getting a percentage range.)
Key Methodological Weaknesses
⚠️ Obviously, these tags are not comprehensive.
I poked around a bit to see if I could find any other commonly used tags; I considered including "#Sexual Inexperience" and "#First Times" as well, but felt that those were too imprecise and included a lot of e.g. first times between those particular characters. Ultimately, I decided that what I was actually interested in was references to "virginity" as a specific socially constructed concept in and of itself.
⚠️ I did not clean the datasets.
For example, these numbers include fics in which the tags refer to a different ship than the one I filtered by, such as multi-fandom anthologies and works in which the filtered-by ship is a background pairing.
I'm gonna be honest: proper cleaning sounded like a lot of work and I didn't want to do it.
⚠️ I did not account for multi-tagging.
I'm absolutely certain that many if not most of these have more than one tag applied, e.g. "#Loss of Virginity" and "#Virgin [character A]" on the same fic. Therefore, the total number of unique fics is definitely less than the sum of the tags. Which is fine, because I'm interested in looking at tag frequency, but it is a limitation that should be top-of-mind when looking at this data.
Findings
These are raw counts, which means that they're not scaled to the overall fandom sizes as indicated by the grey "Fic total" columns (scaled to right-side Y-axis, not shown).
Given all the listed methodological weaknesses, I want to emphasize yet again that this is an extremely sloppy study with a lot of holes in it, and no firm conclusions should be drawn from it. I know some of the numbers aren't really visible here and honestly I think that's appropriate, because they should be taken as relative indicators/estimates rather than precise measurements. (Actual numbers at end of post.)
Nonetheless, I found these results pretty interesting in terms of overall trends! For my purposes, getting a general range was sufficiently accurate, even if I had a hell of a time figuring out how best to visualize it within Google Sheets.
Here's a chart showing approximately how many times those four tags show up in fics for each ship, described as a minimum percentage (the highest number of any individual tag) and a maximum percentage (the sum of all four numbers). The actual number of unique fics that use at least one of those tags is definitely somewhere between the two, and probably much closer to the minimum than the maximum.
INCREDIBLE. Reylo fics tend to use at least one of those tags at a rate roughly 3-5x any other ship. I have no idea what's going on in there and I'm a little bit afraid to ask. (No, that's a lie, I am so anthropologically interested, please tell me if you know anything!!)
The other major outlier is the Miraculous Ladybug ship, Adrien Agreste/Marinette Dupain-Cheng; I know literally nothing about that fandom/canon and have no idea what's going on there either, but there are only 65 fics tagged "#Loss of Virginity" + one tagged "#Virginity Kink" (which is a multifandom anthology, so I strongly suspect it shouldn't count, but I didn't want to be inconsistent about my hands-off approach to data-cleaning) + one tagged "#virgin marinette."
So with those three (counting the two Reylo as separate) removed to make the chart a bit more legible, I got this:
Second figure included because it's closer to what I actually wanted the data visualization itself to look like but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to add the actual numbers, blech. GIVE ME BOTH.
By this point, you may have noticed that I wrote out some names in full and some in shorthand. This is purely based on my own personal convenience, because it's not like I'm going to forget what LWJ/WWX stands for, but if I shorten the BNHA characters' names I will simply never remember them again. I did, however, write out the character names instead of the ship names e.g. Johnlock because that helps me remember at a glance which one was Character A and which one was Character B.
Main Observations:
Hermione/Draco and Steve/Eddie have a VERY similar spread of around 1.4%–2.4/2.8%.
Jungkook/V (BTS RPF) also overlaps a bit, though with a lower maximum; this may be due to e.g. a fandom tendency not to use multiple of the listed tags in the same fic, though this is just an example hypothesis and further investigation is required to draw any particular conclusions.
Sherlock/John is the only other one with a min% of >1%, though Bakugou Katsuki/Midoriya Izuku (BNHA) and Harry/Louis (1D RPF) come fairly close with a ~1.3% max% for both.
I also noted some interesting patterns around tag frequency/distribution when I was pulling data:
I went with a percentage format for these data markers, but please note yet again that these are not percentages of unique fics! These percentages represent tags used, and the ratio of tag:fic is definitely not 1:1.
Main Observations:
"#Loss of Virginity" tends to be the most or second-most commonly used tag, with "#Virgin [character A/B]" also frequently used.
"#Virginity Kink" is not that commonly used overall, which I find pretty interesting in and of itself! It shows up pretty heavily in LWJ/WWX, which makes sense because they are canonically kinky (I don't remember whether the incense-burners featured virginity kink specifically? but it's definitely not too big a stretch), Dean/Sam (SPN), and of course Steve/Eddie, which has the highest actual number of tag usages (87 compared to the next-highest at 57).
Some fandoms have a pretty even split of which character gets the "#Virgin [character]" tag, and others don't.
On that last point, I wanted to take a closer look at which ships had strong discrepancies and which had a more 50/50 split.
The formula I used was basically in the format of (MAX(A1:B1)-MIN(A1:B1))/SUM(A1:B1)—in other words, the closer the number is to zero, the closer the "#Virgin [character A]" to "#Virgin [character B]" ratio is to 1:1.
I wasn't expecting these results! I'd initially thought that it might make sense that some ships include characters who have unambiguously canonically had sex, so the bulk of canon-verse fics would thus reflect a certain weighting.
However, as the second (sorted) graph shows, below the top two, the curve is pretty smooth! I don't really know what that implies except that my hypothesis was definitely wrong. There does seem to be a more jagged step-down from 0.53 to 0.41, but I'm not convinced the R-squared is out of bounds, especially when n=23.
(I've included the Reylo numbers, but here is a gentle reminder that they should definitely be higher due to fandom-specific tagging practices that I don't know enough about to resolve appropriately. The maximum end of that range would be about 0.3-0.35, for the record.)
(Lack of) Conclusion
⚠️ It would be intellectually irresponsible to come to any overarching conclusions based on this data. (This is mostly a reminder to myself!)
What I can reasonably say is this: the data does in fact seem to support the idea that Steddie fics on AO3 may have more of a tendency to use virginity-related tags than other popular ships do, particularly the "#Virginity Kink" tag.
I am not even going to try to speculate on whatever's going on in the Hermione/Draco situation, but it's utterly fascinating to me that that's the main highwater comp, especially since the overall numbers are relatively similar but the internal tag distribution looks pretty different.
And finally, because I do know it's a pain to try and read the actual numbers on the graphs, here's a cleaner table:
Ok, I went back to edit a few more graphs into this post (I tweaked the transparency on the fic-count columns in the first major graph, so it should be slightly easier to read now) and I realized I was basically starting a whole other very lengthy section on distribution, so. Please consider this a vast expansion on my first set of observations, which in retrospect were quite cursory and inadequate!
Naturally, this is almost as long as the previous post, with even more graphs/charts.
Overall Distributions and Actual Statistics on AO3 Virginity-Tagging Which I Neglected to Include Last Time, i.e. My Formal ADHD Evaluation Came Back Negative Because "Most People With ADHD Find Math Boring"
The tl;dr:
It is unusual for more than ~0.85% of fics to be tagged "#Loss of Virginity" or ~0.05% of fics to be tagged "#Virginity Kink."
It is also unusual for more than ~0.45% of fics featuring any particular character to be tagged with "#Virgin [character]," regardless of what ship they're written in.
Here are the initial stat workups:
And here is the general tag distribution:
Note that Reylo and the Miraculous Ladybug ship have already been excluded from these analyses.
What we can see with the consistently negative IQRmin values (Q1 minus 1.5*IQR) (yeah the name's not perfect, it's basically shorthand for the lower bound of a box-and-whisker plot) is that there are no lower-bound outliers in the data.
You will also notice a couple new columns on the initial stats, because I've really been puzzling over whether the character tags should be treated as one continuous dataset. In other words, do I consider "#Virgin Aziraphale" and "#Virgin Crowley" as two points on a single line? Or do I look at the characters within a ship who are more commonly V-tagged as their own set?
Here is a barely-legible distribution map of the more commonly V-tagged (#VMax) and the less commonly V-tagged (#VMin) (yes I'm aware that vmin is a BTS RPF ship name, don't come for me about my naming conventions, it's all just napkin scribbles):
As you can see, there is a fair bit of overlap! At this point, I reeeeeally could not avoid figuring out a proper way to excise outliers, lest my graphs be completely unreadable.
There are a few different ways to calculate outliers, depending on what you're looking to measure, and I decided to test both z-scores and IQRs because that sounded like fun.
Z-scores
Z-scores, which measure against the mean, are typically best used for normal distributions—which these definitely are not. But I just wanted to see what I'd get if I applied it, so here we go.
The usual cutoff is +/-3, which means the only proper outlier on these tags is Steddie on "#Virginity Kink"! 👀
That said, the Hermione/Draco "#Loss of Virginity" z-score is preeeetty close to 3, so I'd be comfortable considering it an outlier in this context. (A former stats prof once described the process of finding outliers as "vibes-based" which probably explains a lot about what I'm doing here)
Now for the character tags:
The results are in fact different depending on whether I use one dataset or split it into two, which is SO COOL!
What the above chart means, basically, is that when each individual character is considered equally hypothetically likely to be V-tagged independent of who they're shipped with, Eddie Munson and Sherlock Holmes are VERY disproportionately V-tagged. The rest of the characters are pretty tightly clustered within about +/-1, except Hermione Granger at 1.80.
However, if we make the assumption that any given ship is likely to have one character V-tagged more than the other*, Eddie is flirting with that upper bound there but only Draco Malfoy really breaks it—as the less-tagged partner.
*Should probably have mentioned this earlier but all of the top listed ships have 2 characters, so I'm not considering polyships as part of this analysis.
Also, while Steve Harrington is slightly more likely to be V-tagged than most characters on the VMin side, John Watson is slightly less. Neither breaks +/-1, which I hadn't expected!
Interquartile Ranges (IQRs)
As mentioned earlier, the lower-bound IQR can be ignored as we don't really have outliers on that end. Here are the upper-bound outliers, sorted by min%:
Again, we do get slightly different results depending on whether the characters are treated as individual or as participating in an oppositional binary, but this time the difference is pretty trivial.
To summarize the non-character tags first: Hermione/Draco has a slightly higher percentage of "#Loss of Virginity" tags than most (Jungkook/V is also creeping up there); LWJ/WWX has a slightly higher percentages of "#Virginity Kink" than most (with Dean/Sam literally right on that line); and Steve/Eddie has about 2.5x the "#Virginity Kink" IQRmax, which I would classify as EXTREMELY HIGH, HOLY SHIT.
As for the character tags: unsurprisingly, the top three VMax entries on this list all clock in as outliers. However, the only real difference is that Draco is marked as an outlier for a VMin.
Conclusion Regarding Outliers
Given all of the above results, I think it's pretty fair to say that Hermione/Draco, Steve/Eddie, and Sherlock/John are outliers adn should not have been counted.
So what happens if we remove them from the distribution? (As well as the two other "#Virginity Kink" outliers)
Now that looks like a pretty reasonable distribution all around. The n is rather too low to expect normality, but it does seem like these could be representative sample populations. (I'm not even including the exact data labels because these specific charts were created to check for clustering or other weirdness, and thus the exact data labels don't matter.)
(NOTE: The above image has been updated! I uploaded an incorrect/outdated screenshot earlier! Sorry about that! It doesn't change the analysis though!)
In the end, I did write out some of the characters' full names and marked which ships they belong to so I could make more detailed comparative charts. As you can see in the above charts, there is a TON of overlap.
(Note that Steve Rogers is V-tagged at approximately the same rate whether he's paired with Bucky or Tony, which I personally think is hilarious! Fandom consensus, truly. I'm slightly curious whether comics!Cap is treated differently from MCU!Cap, but that is a project for another day.)
Statistical Summary Revisited
(NOTE: The above image has been updated! I uploaded an incorrect/outdated screenshot earlier! Sorry about that! It doesn't change the analysis though!)
With the outliers removed, this is the statistical summary I came up with. I'd like to test it against bigger datasets, but it feels about right to me.
I feel fairly confident in saying that based on this data/analysis, most popular ships feature 0.2-0.6% fics tagged "#Loss of Virginity" and 0.01-0.03% fics tagged "#Virginity Kink."
It also appears to be completely within the bounds of a normal distribution to have zero fics with virginity-related tags, which means I should maybe have left the Miraculous Ladybug ship in, whoops.
And here we get to the actual, real conclusion of this extremely long journey! If you forgot the tl;dr before the cut, here it is again:
It is unusual for more than ~0.85% of fics to be tagged "#Loss of Virginity" or ~0.05% of fics to be tagged "#Virginity Kink."
It is also unusual for more than ~0.45% of fics featuring any particular character to be tagged with "#Virgin [character]," regardless of what ship they're written in.
So back to my animating research question...
Is Steddie fandom relatively weird about virginity?
As I've said many times throughout these posts, I can't and shouldn't make any conclusive statements based on this data.
Nonetheless, the data I've examined has not disproven my hypothesis. And that's not nothing! It's a bunch of double negatives, sure, but sometimes that's what you get.
Steddie joins Johnlock and Dramione in this presumptive preoccupation with virginity, although it's much more similar to Johnlock in that it is primarily concerned with the virginity of one character (a twenty-year-old musician and drug dealer) in particular. Steddie fandom is, however, MUCH more likely to tag it as kink, and is actually pretty normal about tagging "#Loss of Virginity." "#Virgin Steve Harrington" also shows up on the sliiightly high side of average, but is actually also very normal.
Potential Future Research Directions
First and foremost, it would be cool to check these stats against a bigger dataset; maybe the top 100 ships or something like that.
I'd like to check the co-tagging/multi-tagging: what's the prevalence of fics with both "#Virgin [character A]" and "#Virgin [character B]" tagged? What are the most common tag combos?
It would also be interesting to do a comparison of M/M and M/F ships (and F/F, I suppose, but I strongly suspect F/F ships tend to be less attached to the concept of virginity—though maybe that's another assumption worth testing). I was actually quite surprised to see that both Reylo and Dramione have relatively low discrepancies between "Virgin [character]" tags, and I'm curious whether that's characteristic of M/F ships in general.
I'd like to see how "#Anal Virgin [character]" tags play out relative to the ones I checked. They did pop up quite a bit in my data-gathering, but I decided they were out of bounds for this particular study.
I'm curious about two other tags I'd decided were out of bounds, too:"#Sexual Inexperience" and "#First Times." I do wonder if they change the numbers at all!
I have no idea whether this would be fruitful or not, but it'd be neat to check for any potential correlations (or inverse correlations) with omegaverse tags.
This is a bit tougher to study, but I'd like to investigate cultural differences around fics tagged for virginity. One imperfect proxy would be using the language the fic was published in, but I feel like I'd need a couple other variables to really start getting meaningful data. Maybe looking at e.g. C-dramas in their own category?
Lately, I've been having a few conversations about normative assumptions/value frameworks/conventions within fic.
I do want to be as clear as possible, here: I am personally quite hardcore anti-censorship and strongly believe that any attempt to eliminate fics based on ethical evaluation of their narrative content does significantly more harm than good.
With that point established, I also find it absolutely fascinating to examine the ways in which certain patterns emerge! Therefore, when I had the stray thought "I feel like Steddie fandom gets weirder about virginity than other fandoms I've been in," I went—okay, let's test that feeling with data.
It was so, so much fun! I'm having a fantastic time.
Method/Approach
While logged in to my AO3 account (thus with visibility on archive-locked fics), I went through the AO3 ship tags for the most popular ships of 2024, the most recent overview available from @toastystats. Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson didn't make the cut at 23.3k in 2024, but note that that number does not include archive-locked fics.
Within each ship tag, I filtered for (individually):
#Loss of Virginity
#Virginity Kink
#Virgin [character A]
#Virgin [character B]
I did not have a hard cut-off for posting time, but I did grab everything within the span of about an hour.
I decided not to pull rating data (e.g. what percentage of fics in the fandom are labeled Explicit), because I think stories featuring virginity could hypothetically be in just about anything. If I ever do decide to do a follow-up, that's something I'd probably look at, though. Who knows, maybe there'll be some interesting correlations.
I also looked at the stats for "Uchiha Sasuke/Uzumaki Naruto" because Naruto made the biggest fandoms list and I was curious, having sort of nominally been on the fringes of that fandom in the mid-2000s; it's got 21.5k fics so I think it's a pretty reasonably-sized inclusion.
Something I did not expect to discover was the fact that "#Virgin Rey (Star Wars)" kept popping up as one of the top suggested tags whenever I typed in a "#Virgin [character]" tag, so I dipped a cautious toe into the heretofore-unknown-to-me world of Reylo. How could I not, with bait like that?
(Steve Rogers' virginity or lack thereof also seems to be of paramount interest to the good people of AO3...)
Reylo-specific Weirdness
I'm not really sure my approach was sufficient, because I discovered that "Kylo Ren/Rey" (16,748 fics) and "Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren" (31,759 fics) are listed as two separate ships. I did a quick search for any AO3 news items explaining why they're separate and didn't see anything; if anyone knows what's up with that, please let me know! I'm not saying it's wrong, I just have no idea what's going on or if it is indeed appropriate for purposes of this study to treat them as separate.
The numbers I got for those ships are also slightly off, because I decided to sum "#Virgin Kylo Ren" and "#Virgin Ben Solo" to get the "#Virgin [character]" figure, even though I could already see a ton of fics tagged with both on the first page of results. I suspect the raw sums ended up being off by about 100-200, since the lower number in both cases was ~300.
(In both ship tags, "#Virgin Rey" was still the higher of the two sums, so it didn't end up mattering at all in terms of getting a percentage range.)
Key Methodological Weaknesses
⚠️ Obviously, these tags are not comprehensive.
I poked around a bit to see if I could find any other commonly used tags; I considered including "#Sexual Inexperience" and "#First Times" as well, but felt that those were too imprecise and included a lot of e.g. first times between those particular characters. Ultimately, I decided that what I was actually interested in was references to "virginity" as a specific socially constructed concept in and of itself.
⚠️ I did not clean the datasets.
For example, these numbers include fics in which the tags refer to a different ship than the one I filtered by, such as multi-fandom anthologies and works in which the filtered-by ship is a background pairing.
I'm gonna be honest: proper cleaning sounded like a lot of work and I didn't want to do it.
⚠️ I did not account for multi-tagging.
I'm absolutely certain that many if not most of these have more than one tag applied, e.g. "#Loss of Virginity" and "#Virgin [character A]" on the same fic. Therefore, the total number of unique fics is definitely less than the sum of the tags. Which is fine, because I'm interested in looking at tag frequency, but it is a limitation that should be top-of-mind when looking at this data.
Findings
These are raw counts, which means that they're not scaled to the overall fandom sizes as indicated by the grey "Fic total" columns (scaled to right-side Y-axis, not shown).
Given all the listed methodological weaknesses, I want to emphasize yet again that this is an extremely sloppy study with a lot of holes in it, and no firm conclusions should be drawn from it. I know some of the numbers aren't really visible here and honestly I think that's appropriate, because they should be taken as relative indicators/estimates rather than precise measurements. (Actual numbers at end of post.)
Nonetheless, I found these results pretty interesting in terms of overall trends! For my purposes, getting a general range was sufficiently accurate, even if I had a hell of a time figuring out how best to visualize it within Google Sheets.
Here's a chart showing approximately how many times those four tags show up in fics for each ship, described as a minimum percentage (the highest number of any individual tag) and a maximum percentage (the sum of all four numbers). The actual number of unique fics that use at least one of those tags is definitely somewhere between the two, and probably much closer to the minimum than the maximum.
INCREDIBLE. Reylo fics tend to use at least one of those tags at a rate roughly 3-5x any other ship. I have no idea what's going on in there and I'm a little bit afraid to ask. (No, that's a lie, I am so anthropologically interested, please tell me if you know anything!!)
The other major outlier is the Miraculous Ladybug ship, Adrien Agreste/Marinette Dupain-Cheng; I know literally nothing about that fandom/canon and have no idea what's going on there either, but there are only 65 fics tagged "#Loss of Virginity" + one tagged "#Virginity Kink" (which is a multifandom anthology, so I strongly suspect it shouldn't count, but I didn't want to be inconsistent about my hands-off approach to data-cleaning) + one tagged "#virgin marinette."
So with those three (counting the two Reylo as separate) removed to make the chart a bit more legible, I got this:
Second figure included because it's closer to what I actually wanted the data visualization itself to look like but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to add the actual numbers, blech. GIVE ME BOTH.
By this point, you may have noticed that I wrote out some names in full and some in shorthand. This is purely based on my own personal convenience, because it's not like I'm going to forget what LWJ/WWX stands for, but if I shorten the BNHA characters' names I will simply never remember them again. I did, however, write out the character names instead of the ship names e.g. Johnlock because that helps me remember at a glance which one was Character A and which one was Character B.
Main Observations:
Hermione/Draco and Steve/Eddie have a VERY similar spread of around 1.4%–2.4/2.8%.
Jungkook/V (BTS RPF) also overlaps a bit, though with a lower maximum; this may be due to e.g. a fandom tendency not to use multiple of the listed tags in the same fic, though this is just an example hypothesis and further investigation is required to draw any particular conclusions.
Sherlock/John is the only other one with a min% of >1%, though Bakugou Katsuki/Midoriya Izuku (BNHA) and Harry/Louis (1D RPF) come fairly close with a ~1.3% max% for both.
I also noted some interesting patterns around tag frequency/distribution when I was pulling data:
I went with a percentage format for these data markers, but please note yet again that these are not percentages of unique fics! These percentages represent tags used, and the ratio of tag:fic is definitely not 1:1.
Main Observations:
"#Loss of Virginity" tends to be the most or second-most commonly used tag, with "#Virgin [character A/B]" also frequently used.
"#Virginity Kink" is not that commonly used overall, which I find pretty interesting in and of itself! It shows up pretty heavily in LWJ/WWX, which makes sense because they are canonically kinky (I don't remember whether the incense-burners featured virginity kink specifically? but it's definitely not too big a stretch), Dean/Sam (SPN), and of course Steve/Eddie, which has the highest actual number of tag usages (87 compared to the next-highest at 57).
Some fandoms have a pretty even split of which character gets the "#Virgin [character]" tag, and others don't.
On that last point, I wanted to take a closer look at which ships had strong discrepancies and which had a more 50/50 split.
The formula I used was basically in the format of (MAX(A1:B1)-MIN(A1:B1))/SUM(A1:B1)—in other words, the closer the number is to zero, the closer the "#Virgin [character A]" to "#Virgin [character B]" ratio is to 1:1.
I wasn't expecting these results! I'd initially thought that it might make sense that some ships include characters who have unambiguously canonically had sex, so the bulk of canon-verse fics would thus reflect a certain weighting.
However, as the second (sorted) graph shows, below the top two, the curve is pretty smooth! I don't really know what that implies except that my hypothesis was definitely wrong. There does seem to be a more jagged step-down from 0.53 to 0.41, but I'm not convinced the R-squared is out of bounds, especially when n=23.
(I've included the Reylo numbers, but here is a gentle reminder that they should definitely be higher due to fandom-specific tagging practices that I don't know enough about to resolve appropriately. The maximum end of that range would be about 0.3-0.35, for the record.)
(Lack of) Conclusion
⚠️ It would be intellectually irresponsible to come to any overarching conclusions based on this data. (This is mostly a reminder to myself!)
What I can reasonably say is this: the data does in fact seem to support the idea that Steddie fics on AO3 may have more of a tendency to use virginity-related tags than other popular ships do, particularly the "#Virginity Kink" tag.
I am not even going to try to speculate on whatever's going on in the Hermione/Draco situation, but it's utterly fascinating to me that that's the main highwater comp, especially since the overall numbers are relatively similar but the internal tag distribution looks pretty different.
And finally, because I do know it's a pain to try and read the actual numbers on the graphs, here's a cleaner table:
Part 2 of the mer!Kas fic, featuring a POV switch and a narrator wholly and inaccurately convinced of his own emotional stability! This is what happens when I read Louise Hegarty's Fair Play directly after Julia Armfield's Our Wives Under the Sea, I guess.
Note that this one goes heavy on the unresolved grief/anger and is still very much not a romance.
There was only one true dividing line running through Dustin’s life: the time before Eddie died, and the time after.
Years ago, he’d thought of the main turning-point event of his life as that time Will went missing and we all thought he was dead, except that he’d never really thought that Will was dead, he’d always known. Scientifically and objectively speaking there was no way to know, not really, but there also hadn’t been any hard evidence for the D-word, so as a matter of fact, it was everyone else’s fault for jumping to completely unscientific and subjective conclusions.
It had all worked out in the end, more or less. And Dustin was a man of science, but he’d also been a fucking child, so at some level, the garbage lesson his child-brain had taken was that it would always work out, more or less, if he could just be brave enough and smart enough to follow the facts. People, grown-ups, didn’t want to see things that were right in front of their nose, and all he had to do was ignore the stupid grown-ups telling him to ignore what he could plainly see. It was like magic, like a cheat code, if you just had the nerve to question what you were told.
He was never going to be that naïve again. He was probably less of a child than anyone on this stupid fucking station, because his boss Dr. Dey sure as hell hadn’t ever watched the light go out of his friend’s eyes, hadn’t ever had to stand up covered in blood and walk away from the thing, the inanimate object, that used to—that Eddie was—
Eddie had been—
Anyway, Eddie was gone, and Dustin was left with stupid Steve Harrington following him under the water even though Dustin had told him not to. It’s not like Steve was trying to make nice with Dustin or anything; he was being a pretty shitty friend in general, actually, and he’d always talked shit about Eddie anyway, so Dustin had no idea why Steve was following him around like a dog. Maybe Steve just didn’t have anything better to do.
Maybe Steve thought that he could just take Eddie’s place in Dustin’s life. If he did, he was doing a fucking awful job. There was only one Eddie Munson, and there wasn’t anything anyone could do to fix the gap he’d left in the world.
When the acceptance letter came in, Dustin had really seriously thought about not accepting the internship. He’d applied months and months ago, before everything. Before Eddie—or, no, Eddie had been there to say huh, sounds pretty cool, so that was during Eddie. Mid-Eddie. The Eddie chapter of Dustin’s life, which he’d thought would be so much longer than it ended up being.
Anyway his mom had tried talking to him again about seeing a, a fucking grief counselor of all things, like that would bring Eddie back, so he’d booked a flight and moved under the sea where nobody would try to talk to him about Eddie or about his fucking feelings anymore. All anyone on the station cared about was science, which was how things should be, always. Science was straightforward.
Living in the station turned out to be a lot easier than living at home. Hawkins was full of unexpected booby traps, treasure chests that turned out to be mimics, like when he’d walked into the library to pick up his weekly stack of holds, and realized that one of the books was something Eddie’d recommended specially. Eddie had said, “Henderson, this is gonna blow your mind, trust me.” The cover had not one but two dragons, which was objectively awesome, and he couldn’t look directly at it.
He’d had to turn around and leave. His feet had made the decision before his brain could kick in. The librarian had shouted after him, but he’d left his library card and the books right there on the counter and he hadn’t been back. He couldn’t ever go back there again.
He’d brought one normal-sized backpack to the station, bought new, with nothing lurking in the seams to remind him of anything. It had been working out okay, but Steve was the fly in his goddamn ointment. He’s sure he’d have been having a great time, or at least a productive time, if Steve fucking Harrington hadn’t decided to tag along.
It was sort of funny, but not in the ha-ha kind of way, that Dustin could remember with agonizingly shameful clarity how he used to be the one tagging along after Steve. Maybe Steve could only ever really be friends with kids, because that was just how far his brain had developed. Dustin was just gritting his teeth and counting down to the inevitable future moment he snapped and told Steve exactly what was running through his head whenever they bumped into each other: I’ve outgrown you. I grew up, and you didn’t.
Steve had been seventeen when they met. Dustin’s age, now. He doubted they’d have been friends at all, if they’d been born in the same year. The Henderson-Harrington Theory of Relativity: two people moving at different speeds, happening to sync up at one improbable moment, but never again.
Dustin Henderson, seventeen years old, knew you had to grab things while they were there, because even if everyone was trying their best and nobody wanted to leave, people left anyway, and then you were somehow way more alone than you were before they showed up in the first place. Even if sometimes they were still hanging around, sniping at you and being a pain in the ass.
Science would stay, though. Science had his back. Dr. Dey liked him because he worked late and didn’t fuck around like some of the other interns, so he’d already received some pretty strong hints that there’d be a place waiting for him at Dr. Dey’s lab in Oxford, and that was his future taken care of. Dustin would get a couple degrees, make some modest discoveries, get published in some journals, and live the rest of his life, a life that would never have Eddie in it again.
Happy still-technically-Mermay, have a completely disconnected fic snippet! I was doodling some merfolk based on predatory deep-sea animals and started thinking about what kind of worldbuilding would be needed to support a mer!Kas. Just a heads-up, the vibe here is more light horror sci-fi than romance.
The cafeteria at night was fucking creepy. Robin tried not to admit it, though, because that would be letting Steve win, which was never to be endured. So every time he bitched about the way light seemed to disappear too fast beyond the glass, or the way sound seemed to go dead, words thudding from their mouths like cotton-wrapped weights, she’d roll her eyes and say it’s not like it’s any different than the daytime down here.
They both needed her to lie a little bit, she thought, just like they both needed Steve to complain in the first place.
Anyway, they were probably the least-qualified people on the station, so he knew as well as she did that they always got the worst shifts and would keep on getting the worst shifts, maybe for their whole contract as long as they were under the water.
Steve Harrington was the most grounded person she knew, which was why she wanted him with her. Not the only reason, obviously, but there was some part of her that was convinced that as long as Steve was nearby, she’d always be able to see land. There’d always been something very earthbound about Steve, when Robin was prone to floating away. He tethered her.
It’s funny how gravity works underwater, though. Things sink, up to a point, but the water is reluctant to let them settle, and tugs them sideways and around and even back up again. Not like air, which mostly leaves things be. It might wick away the corners and smooth over sharp edges over time, but it doesn’t seize the great bulk of whales just the same as the plastic-bag insubstantiality of jellyfish to hurl about. It’s funny, because water on land is always only ever running downwards. It’s how you find the lowest point of something: pour a little bit of water on it, and it will relentlessly seek depth. Water knows where it belongs.
In their little soap bubble—the vast, sprawling shielded research station clamped tight onto a rock shelf at the boundary of the twilight, with reinforced glass as thick as her arm—gravity worked pretty much like it did on land. Robin had thought at first that it would be basically exactly the same. Recycled air, sure, but all the basic things were there. She’d thought she could close her eyes and feel the same as she did on the surface.
It was different right away. She would know the difference with her eyes closed and her nose pinched and earplugs stuffed in her ears. It felt so wholly and immediately obvious to her that the station with its gravity was alien to its surroundings; that they had carved out a fragile world, an inverted tide pool.
Steve was never bothered by that kind of thing, which is why his insistence on the creepiness of the cafeteria at nighttime was so nonsensical. It was nice to be able to remind him of that, loudly and repeatedly.
She couldn’t really be blamed, she decided afterwards, for making fun of him the first time he said he’d seen something weird and creepy outside the glass.
“Yeah, dingus. Weird and creepy is kind of the default around here. That’s what all those super-fancy monitors and cameras and stuff are for, remember?”
“Jesus christ, Robin, I mean like—creepy, creepy. Not normal-creepy.”
She’d leaned forward to ruffle his hair before he slapped her hands away, and cooed: “Aw, did Stevie see a big scary fishie and get spooked?”
“It wasn’t…” He’d scowled, trailing off, and left it at that.
There was no such thing as an empty ocean. Fish were almost always around, though usually they were sweeps of tiny silver-blue-black things shimmering iridescently in the reddish light of the station exterior. Sometimes, Robin could see squid, jellies, even dolphins and sharks. At the very least, she knew there were tiny translucent zooplankton living their tiny translucent lives in every drop of water.
The mammals were the easiest to read: sometimes they’d nose around curiously, and Robin felt a fierce kinship with their quizzical expressions, warmblood muscles tugging their faces into familiar shapes. What are you doing here? their almost-human eyes seemed to say. This isn’t a place that creatures like us can stay for long.
Like the whales and dolphins and seals, the humans surfaced every so often. The contracts called it shore leave, but really it was to stop them going funny in the head. Robin and Steve were in total agreement that one weekend every two months wasn’t actually enough to keep the funnies at bay, and if anyone needed proof, they just had to look at the official regulations: nobody was allowed to skip more than one shore leave in a row, which meant there’ve been people who tried to spend more than four months below the surface.
You had to be at least a little bit not-normal to begin with, to sign up for something like this. But after everything had gone down the way it had, Dustin Henderson had gotten it into his head that grief was best processed hundreds of fathoms away from fresh air and unfiltered sunlight, and Steve had had the bone-headed idea to follow him down. To keep an eye out, Steve had said, though it seemed like every time he and Dustin crossed paths on the station, one or both of them ended up yelling and upset. Nowadays they mostly steered clear of each other.
But it wasn’t like they’d had a whole lot left to keep them on land, and anyway Vickie Dunne had posted that she’d been accepted to a research fellowship on that same station, so Robin had reasoned that at least they’d know somebody else, a friend, and Steve could shut his mockery hole about anything else, thank you very much. It would be an adventure with her best friend and his weird annoying friend and Vickie Dunne, whose (ex?-)boyfriend was definitely not going with her. Anything could happen on an adventure like that.
❥ tagged by the inimitable @greenlikethesea! ty <3
❥ last song: This admittedly does not reflect super well on me as a person but in the spirit of complete honesty, I was in fact most recently hate-listening to the Chess soundtrack to confirm that One Night in Bangkok does not deserve the hype.
(Look, the soundtrack itself is mostly basically fine although imo unexceptional. The show, on the other hand…I saw it with a friend last December, and ever since then, our chats have been heavily seeded with ongoing intermittent mockery for the costuming, the set, the "Russian" accents, the choreo, the gender politics, and the absolutely shocking dearth of chemistry between ANY of the leads despite their obvious vocal abilities.)
❥ currently watching: I have just binge-watched both seasons of The Pitt, and while I will not be joining the fandom (took a quick peek at prevailing takes/overall vibe and. no thank u 💖), I really enjoyed the show! Eternal appreciation for @andwhatyousaid being willing to ramble on with me about character dynamics~
❥ current obsession: I recently came to the belated and dangerous realization that I can install third-party mods on Inscryption, a game I had already spent 200+ hours on.
❥ currently reading: I LOVED Asako Yuzuki's Butter when I read it earlier this year and have been saving Yuzuki's newly-translated Hooked as a special treat because I knew I would love it too. And I did!
(I do prefer Butter and would recommend reading that first, as I think it has a more nuanced, precise voice and is better-paced and better-scoped overall. Nonetheless, both novels are definitely in my top 10 reads of the year so far.)
❥ currently working on: I've been sort of messing around with a light-horror mermay ficlet after reading Julia Armfield's Our Wives Under the Sea, though who knows if it will ever see the light of day. I've always been very into predatory merfolk and deep-sea horror, and thought it'd be fun to try my hand at a mer!Kas narrative.
❥ last google search: abyssal spiderfish (related to the mermay thing mentioned above—but unfortunately it looks relatively normal for something named "abyssal spiderfish" so I don't think I'll use it. Just tragically unfreakish.)
The prompt included "lines you wrote (or drew)", so technically the last page of my digital sketchbook is from yesterday when I watched Sister Midnight at a friend's—it's a PHENOMENAL and visually stunning monster movie (not at all about "the pressures of arranged marriage"?? wtf. don't read summaries they're incorrect.) and Radhika Apte is such an incredible physical actor, especially with her facial expressions.
I'm not sure how legible this is; I literally was just doodling while watching because it's a habit of mine.
I did also doodle a very rough ST thumbnail, because I have recently learned that radio DJs are/were nicknamed "jocks" which I think is very cute. Steve and Robin: jocks of WSQK!
In terms of fic, everything I've written lately has been from the very end of my set your fields afire WIP so it feels a little weird to share it, but I sent these DMs to @andwhatyousaid about a week ago with regards to Steve hypothetically visiting Jonathan in NYC:
Steve would be the worst New Yorker of all time
FULLY trying to make small talk with every barista. stopping in the middle of times square with his hands on his hips. priority #1 is a picture of the statue of liberty and a slice of Authentic New York Pizza TM
god I can SEE him squinting at the board and going "hey, yeah, uh...how's it going, man? busy day today, huh! wow! yeah! new york, crazy. don't know how you guys do it. I'd go totally nuts out here. so, yeah, can I get....hm..." while the tension in the deli ratchets up to glass-breaking frequencies
and frankly I am still amused by the vision of nice midwestern boy Steve Harrington in the big city, so maybe some of y'all will find it amusing too.
Tagged by @greenlikethesea—thanks for giving me the opportunity to gush about media, my most beloved activity!
Currently reading: Just reread Yang Shuang-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue, which was probably my favorite new read of 2025. But also, for ST fic purposes: Mothers Against AIDS in Kokomo, Indiana by Nancy Brown (Indiana Magazine of History).
Last series: I'm about 2/3 through Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born, and I'm vaguely aware that people have Some Feelings about the ending, but so far I'm enjoying it a lot! The performances are stunning! I'm learning about a new art form! There's a toxic butch/femme celesbian couple waging proxy war instead of getting a divorce!
I'm also following the D20 Gladlands series. I admit it took a little while for me to warm up to it, but the new History Heap episode came for my fucking throat; when Brennan articulated part of the History Heap's mindset in the last Adventuring Party as "if it's important, then it's okay that I feel this insane amount of pressure to do it right"—yeah okay we can stop perceiving me now please and thank you!!
Last film: Tampopo, a delightfully weird 1985 "ramen Western"—two separate friends have told me it made them think of me, so I have absolutely no idea what kind of vibes I’m putting out into the world.
Last song: I’ve been on a real Mal Blum kick over the last few months; their latest release has been populating my playlists for a minute now. It’s an A+ breakup album, particularly "I’m So Bored."
Coffee or tea: I love both very, very much! I don’t have much of a palate overall, but I’ve got a particular weakness for decent decaf black tea; the amount of black tea I wish to consume and the amount of caffeine I wish to consume are WILDLY disproportionate, so I'm always looking for good decaf options. (Tisanes are not teas and I won't die on this hill but I will get lightly injured upon it)
I don’t know whom this is for, because I don't even feel like it's for me, but I wrote it anyway.
This is a Jason Carver second-person POV canon-compliant missing-scene ~1k one-shot. It is non-shippy except in a weird obsessive one-sided Jason/Chrissy way; it’s mostly just hardcore religious trauma twisting Jason’s grief.
Content notes: This would be rated T mostly for language, but I am actually going to say that despite the lack of sex, onscreen violence, gore, noncon/dubcon, erotic cannibalism, etc. in this fic, it's probably the most fundamentally fucked-up thing I've written, and listing stuff out would really just...miss the point. So:
AUTHOR CHOSE NOT TO USE WARNINGS
You are now responsible for your own reading experience.
This is a horror story.
Holy, holy, holy. Lord God Almighty. Deliver us from evil, if that is Thy will.
There are devils that walk among us in human guise. There are devils in the daylight, that profane the very air around them; they are a consequence of the Fall. They were responsible for the Fall. They are the reason we’re here, in this imperfect bitch of an earth, this temporary clay.
The Kingdom of the Lord will come again, and the faithful will be rewarded. Those who are true and walk in His light will be taken into His kingdom, forever and ever, amen.
Those who walk with the devils will perish. Do not let your loved ones perish. Don’t let her go into the dark.
You can save her. Your beloved, your queen, your angel. She looks just like Mary in the painting your mother hung at the top of the stairs, skin like milk and a golden halo of hair hanging so sweetly. A virginal, childlike spirit with the endless love and compassion of a mother. When she sat across from you on your first date and giggled at something you said, you knew what it was to be blessed. It’s not a blasphemy. You see the Lord in the purity of her love for you, in the strength of your love for her. Base urges have never felt like this, and you know this to be a sign that the Lord has set her aside for you.
She is holy.
You meet the Devil later on. People say he was there all along, but you think you would have remembered; you would not have been deceived. You find him in your own domain, Hawkins High; a reminder that the serpent nestles in the bosom. You had gotten too comfortable, too pleased with your new love, too caught up in the things of this world. The Lord saw fit to remind you, and so permitted the Devil to enter Hawkins.
You are not ashamed to admit that the Devil struck some fear into your weak and fallible human heart. You had been warned many times before that the Devil attacks the servants of God through fear, but you had not yet had enough practice in girding your heart against weakness. You had been so foolish, drowsing and distracted in the hard pews instead of reaching back towards the bountiful strength the Lord offers to His faithful. Foolish, and a child.
But you will not falter again. How can you? If you are ever to be worthy of her, your angel, your perfect helpmeet, you must prove yourself no longer a child but a man of God. You were not there to carry out your duty and protect her from being seduced by the Devil, and now you are paying for your failure. You are Job, being tested beyond what an unbeliever might be able to endure, to burn away the impure weakness in your soul.
Few have been tested so, but few, you know, are so worthy to be tested. You would not be fit to join her in the presence of the Lord, if you do not do this—if you do not climb these creaking stairs like you’re descending backwards into the mouth of Hell. You will not be a Doubting Thomas, hesitating and arrogant enough to demand proof, whining about the clumsy and unjust laws of a world overrun by sin. You know full well that there is only one higher power, and it is not the United States government, for all that people have fought tooth and nail to keep this a Christian nation. Your trust is in the Lord alone, and the Lord will deliver you, because you are a soldier of Christ.
The Lord will deliver her, too. You know it in your heart, sure as a bright sword. She may be lost to you in this world, in this life, but you will be reunited in the life beyond, the eternal one. This world is shadow and ash only, but you're not going to lose her for real. You can still save her if you are pure of heart and humble yourself as a servant of the Lord.
The thing in your hand is nothing more an instrument that the Lord may act through if He so chooses. You are an instrument just the same, enacting your part, because all that happens in this world is the will of God.
She is gone, for now, only for now, and it must have been God's will to teach you a lesson. But she is yours; she will be yours; and you will become worthy of her by ripping this corruption out at the root. Even if the people of Hawkins, those poor stupid drug-addled wretches who reject His love—even they do not deserve the Devil poisoning their souls. They are as blind, naked children scrabbling in the dirt, and you must protect them even as they squall in their ingratitude.
You do this for her, and you do this to be worthy of her, but you do this because you know in your heart that it is the bright and shining path, the path of righteousness, the path of angels. You are David, you are Moses, you are Joseph, you are making a stalwart stand against the callous and corrupt heathen masses who would let a wolf loose among the flock. Even though every hand is turned against you, you will not falter in your duty.
Though you walk through the valley of death, up these rickety wooden stairs, careful to muffle the sound of your footfalls as best you can from the dark mass of enemies ready to rend you limb from limb with all the unnatural might of Satan’s power, you are not alone. She is with you here. You can feel her presence, just as you feel the presence of the Lord, and the last whisper of doubt finally slips from your heart as you surrender entirely. Lord God Almighty, Lamb of the Cross, Our Father, deliver us. Let us be delivered. Thine the Kingdom. Thine the glory.
for the tuesday prompts, I'm going old school: huddling for warmth! Dealer's choice for the pairing <3
Nancy hadn't realized she was shivering until something warm, thick, and blanket-like drapes itself across her shoulders, a familiar, earthy scent wafting up—like soft ground ripe for planting. She glances up sharply from the junk drawer she was searching through for matches.
Robin looks sheepish, caught red-handed. She's distinctly missing her leather jacket. "Sorry," she says, not sounding very sorry, "Just figured it's a long night ahead, you know?"
“Oh!” says Nancy. “No, you should keep it, Robin, you’ll get cold. Don’t worry about me.”
“Pfft,” Robin shrugs, squinching up her eyes in an exaggerated grimace as she reaches out to straighten the collar with a twitch of her slim, clever fingers. “Nah, I run hot. I’m like a total furnace, Steve always bitches about it.”
“Oh, still platonic with a capital P, huh?” Nancy smiles at her, just like she’s supposed to. It’s a little stiff in the cold, but she knows how to do this—girl talk.
Robin doesn’t take the bait, though, eyes cutting away. “Still platonic with a capital P, for permanent. If that’s something you’d, ah...if that's, you know, relevant information to you.”
Nancy likes to think she’s pretty good at reading people by now, but Robin’s face is a blank page.
“Okay.” Nancy’s thawing under the warm leather, the ghost of Robin’s body heat wrapping around her, little pinpricks along her skin like she’s waking up all over. She tucks it a little tighter around herself. “Thanks. For the jacket.”
I'm so down but ONLY☝️! if Robin is still dating Vickie at the start and has a lot of really awful guilty confusing feelings about it which she handles extremely badly!
for the tuesday prompts, I'm going old school: huddling for warmth! Dealer's choice for the pairing <3
Nancy hadn't realized she was shivering until something warm, thick, and blanket-like drapes itself across her shoulders, a familiar, earthy scent wafting up—like soft ground ripe for planting. She glances up sharply from the junk drawer she was searching through for matches.
Robin looks sheepish, caught red-handed. She's distinctly missing her leather jacket. "Sorry," she says, not sounding very sorry, "Just figured it's a long night ahead, you know?"
“Oh!” says Nancy. “No, you should keep it, Robin, you’ll get cold. Don’t worry about me.”
“Pfft,” Robin shrugs, squinching up her eyes in an exaggerated grimace as she reaches out to straighten the collar with a twitch of her slim, clever fingers. “Nah, I run hot. I’m like a total furnace, Steve always bitches about it.”
“Oh, still platonic with a capital P, huh?” Nancy smiles at her, just like she’s supposed to. It’s a little stiff in the cold, but she knows how to do this—girl talk.
Robin doesn’t take the bait, though, eyes cutting away. “Still platonic with a capital P, for permanent. If that’s something you’d, ah...if that's, you know, relevant information to you.”
Nancy likes to think she’s pretty good at reading people by now, but Robin’s face is a blank page.
“Okay.” Nancy’s thawing under the warm leather, the ghost of Robin’s body heat wrapping around her, little pinpricks along her skin like she’s waking up all over. She tucks it a little tighter around herself. “Thanks. For the jacket.”
start your fields afire on AO3 · Chapter 3: Part 1
Content notes: just a lot of heteronormativity and sexual frustration in this one, I think.
There’ve been a couple times when he’s come home to find Nancy and Eddie hanging out. She doesn’t stay for dinner, and he thinks that could be on purpose. He thinks she might be keeping her distance from Steve for a reason.
It’s not fair, because it’s not like he even ever said anything, and it’s not exactly like he’s planning to say anything now, but there’s no way to explain all of that, so he doesn’t.
If Nancy gets together with Eddie, Steve’s going to fucking lose his shit.
They’re pretty together, like a matching set of china. Eddie’s not even all that bulked-up, but Nancy looks so tiny and delicate next to him when their heads bend close, dark curls swaying. She laughs a lot when she’s around him. He seems to like making her laugh, or maybe it’s just that he’s a funny guy. They look like they could fit together on a Christmas card.
Eddie could probably do her better than Jonathan did, Steve thinks. He looks like he’d be good in bed. Kind of sweet, kind of mean, you know? Girls like that stuff. Jonathan might’ve gotten in a few lucky hits, back in the day, but Steve can’t really picture him being an animal in bed. He probably weeps gently to the tender strains of The Smiths. Eddie, on the other hand, is—he’s easy to picture. It’s basically Steve’s main hobby these days, picturing.
He tries not to picture Eddie and Nancy together. It happens just a couple times by accident, and it sends a wrong kind of shiver through his limbs, like tweaking a nerve.
It's not like Eddie’s given him all that much to work with, in terms of what he likes in bed. Steve hasn’t spent much time around another guy his age in a while, but even at high school kickbacks, he’d expect at least a little friendly chit-chat about preferences, fantasies, experiences, that kind of thing.
It doesn’t seem likely that Eddie’s a virgin. Steve’s pretty sure he’s seen some of the girls giggling over him, back when all Steve knew about Eddie “the Freak” Munson was that all the teachers and all the parents hated him, which meant that some girls with a screw loose had thought he was hot shit.
Not the popular girls, mostly, although back in junior year, Kathy Jacobson once swore up and down she’d heard the head cheerleader’s best friend saying she would. Everyone had given her shit for it, because everyone had known that Eddie was bad news.
It’s hard to remember that guy sometimes: Eddie “the Freak” Munson. Before they’d even ever crossed paths, it had been all over the middle school that the Freak had gone crazy on some kid’s ass, screaming like he’d been possessed, scratching and biting like a critter that had nothing left to lose. By high school, everyone knew that the Freak was a loser, but the kind of warped sicko loser that might set your dog on fire if you pissed him off.
They hadn’t known anything about him at all. When he’s bouncing around in the afternoons, full of energy, he talks a mile a minute about whatever’s on his mind, fingers brushing Steve’s shirtsleeve and pulling away. If he’s on a rant about something, Steve sometimes has to steer him away from the stove in case he knocks a pan over. It’s happened once or twice. In the mornings, Eddie’s even worse; he’ll trip over his own feet and slump into Steve’s shoulder, too zonked out to notice Steve’s not rushing to push him away. Late at night, Eddie’s thoughtful and calm, with a habit of talking the conversation around to the universe, the meaning of life, destiny, the stars, that kind of thing.
He’s just not the guy everyone ever thinks he is.
———
“Hey, you ever get any, like…groupies, before?” Steve asks. “When you were playing shows, and all that stuff.”
“Harrington, you might be overselling the Hideout as a venue ju-u-ust a smidge,” drawls Eddie. “You probably saw more action from all your little basketball groupies. What do they call them, ball bunnies?”
“What, no,” says Steve automatically. He’s not sure exactly what he’s saying no to, but it seems like a pretty safe bet.
“C’mon, I’ve been in the general vicinity of a game once or twice in my long and storied tenure at Hawkins High. You’re telling me you never used your superstar throwing-balls-into-laundry-baskets skills to pick up a starry-eyed ingenue?”
Obviously Steve can’t say that, but he’s not sure what he’s supposed to say instead. If Eddie were a girl, he’d know where the lines are, but he’s never met any girl who’d talk about this kind of thing like this. Well, other than Robin, but he thinks she probably doesn’t count because she’d be trying to pick up babes too if she weren’t so locked in with Vickie.
If Eddie were a girl, all of this would be so much easier, and he can’t even act like he doesn’t know what all of this is.
“I mean,” he says. “Ball bunnies? Where do you even get this shit, man? No, but hey, you—you never said. You’ve never had metal chicks coming up to you after a show all, like…ooh, I was so into all the noise you made up there, it’s so, uh…loud. Definitely doesn’t make my ears bleed. Super sexy.”
Eddie’s eyes narrow and he steeples his fingers. “Okay. I know you listen to some Dokken, Harrington, I’ve seen you bopping along to Shout at the Devil and Perfect Strangers, which means that right now, you…are being a little shit on purpose.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.” Steve sits back, grinning, and pops the cap on a Corona. “I’m just saying. Some total babe comes up to you, wants a private concert, you’re not gonna…strum a few chords?”
“Total babe, huh?” Eddie snorts.
“Yeah, you know…” Steve sketches a shape vaguely in the air. “Big hair, ripped denim, great legs…”
He’s seen them in the halls, smoking out by the football field, driving around town. Hawkins isn’t huge, but it’s big enough to have at least a handful of girls who look like they could be in a Whitesnake video: hair teased out into a massive mane, miniskirts and denim jackets with pins and patches. The kinds of girls that guys like Eddie drool over.
Eddie snorts. “Sounds like you’re trying to pitch a porno, man. I mean, certainly, I’ve had a respectable share of, ah, offers around the Hideout, but…I don’t think whatever you’re picturing up there—” he wiggles his fingers in Steve’s general direction— “is the high-fidelity documentary cut. Sorry to disappoint, but my life is no Penthouse letter.”
“Hey.” Steve clinks his bottle against Eddie’s. “No Penthouse letter…yet. Never say never, my guy.”
Eddie huffs out a dry laugh. “Yeah, I’m drowning in it over here, Harrington.”
“No, c’mon. You’ll be back on stage before you know it, with a crowd of babes throwing their underwear at you, all—I never thought it would happen to me…”
Steve pulls a fake-shocked face, and Eddie sputters into his drink. The little crease in the middle of his forehead is gone, though.
“When you make it big, you should totally keep me around to fend off all the girls trying to get backstage, man. I’ll save you from all the hotties who want a piece of Eddie Munson, badass rockstar and handsome devil. I’ll be, like, a personal bodyguard.”
He kind of likes that idea: following Eddie around on tour, handing him water and throwing a friendly arm around his shoulders as he leaves the stage. He’s seen Eddie playing enough by now, even just in his bedroom, to know how Eddie gets when he really gets into it. He can practically see the scene unfolding in front of him, with Eddie tearing offstage while the crowd roars for another encore, jumping onto Steve’s back like a monkey, a little rough and careless with all his buzzing energy let loose. Maybe he’d let Steve twist to set him gently on the ground, Steve’s hands lingering on his waist. Just to steady him.
Steve’s not so jazzed about the other scene that shows up a second later: Eddie in a hotel hallway, pressed up against some girl in heavy eyeliner and ripped stockings who’s totally gagging for it, detaching for a second to rasp see you in the morning, Harrington with his hungry grin. That’s not real either, though.
The real Eddie’s still looking away, but Steve can see a dimple anyway. “You are something else, Steve Harrington,” says Eddie quietly.
start your fields afire on AO3 (this picks up immediately after the posted chapters!)
Content notes: Steve's still on a journey through internalized homophobia! More confused than self-hating, and nothing super overt, but definitely some stuff to work through.
Maybe a year or two ago, he’d have already talked to Robin about this stuff by now. He can’t pretend anymore like there’s nothing to say, but it’s not like he actually knows how to bring this shit up.
He tries, though.
“Hey,” he starts while they’re packing up after a Rockin’ Robin shift at the Squawk. Then he panics, and swerves. “How’s Vickie doing?”
“Good,” says Robin. “I mean. I don’t know. She’s a little pissed at me. I keep having to cancel date nights for stupid Upside Down shit, which is so not my fault, but I have to keep giving her all these shitty excuses. It’s not like we ever find anything, anyway.”
“Yeah, that’s—that’s gotta suck.”
Robin tips her head back and groans. “I know I can’t tell her. I know! She wouldn’t even believe me, because she’s, y’know, normal!”
“Yeah, I mean, you’re just trying to protect her, right?”
“Exactly! She doesn’t get that it’s for her own good, so monsters don’t claw her beautiful face off!”
Steve nods. It’s weirdly unsettling, to hear Robin admit that her picture-perfect relationship might have a couple cracks in it. Obviously he cares about her and wants her to be happy, because they’re friends, but there’s a sick vindictive swoop in his belly that’s going I told you I told you I told you.
“Look, Robin…don’t worry about it, okay? We’ll kill Vecna ASAP and you’ll be back to regular date nights before you know it, no more monster mishaps to worry about.”
“I guess,” sighs Robin as she shoulders her bag. “I just think…what if she’s it for me, like what if she’s…you know, it?”
Steve’s mouth is dry. “You, uh. You think she might be...it?”
“Maybe! I don’t know! Yes? No? Maybe? But if by some mind-boggling chance she is, then…what if our whole life together is just built around a lie? Like, do I just never tell her this huge secret thing about me until we’re roommates in a nursing home and she already thinks I’m senile?”
“Jeez, Robin. You gotta stop worrying about all that stuff so much. I mean, if she’s it, does it really matter if she knows all the details of this shit? If you love someone, then—then, I mean, I think it’s fine to have a couple of secrets for their own good. In ten years it’s not even gonna matter, you know?”
They push through the doors of the station into the mellow, calm autumn dusk. Steve leans against the wall while Robin unchains her bike.
Before he knows he’s going to say it, he says: “Hey, you want to hang out tonight?”
“Shit. I would, Steve, but—I already blew Vickie off once this week, I can-not do it again or I’m gonna be in the doghouse for real.” She rubs her face. “I mean…maybe I can call her and reschedule for tomorrow?”
“Dude, no, don’t—c’mon, man, I’m not gonna cockblock you. Or, uh, whatever.”
“Next time, I swear, dingus. I know right now you’re…” Robin waves her hands around, face screwed up in distress, and Steve thinks—he doesn't know what it means for sure, but he thinks maybe she’s caught on to him, at least a little bit. “And I’m really really sorry!”
“Buckley, it’s the end of the world,” Steve tells her. He doesn't really want to have this conversation after all, anyway. “You should go. Have something nice. I’ll be fine, it’s no big deal.”
———
The way he feels about Eddie, the way he knows he feels now, it can’t be right. He knows it can’t be, because it’s like it’s got him in its teeth now, scruffed. He’s dragged around by the feeling, and it’s all he can do to stumble along without losing his feet.
He comes down to the kitchen in the mornings, to Eddie, and suddenly he’s having to white-knuckle the counter just to stop himself from reaching out. He hadn’t known exactly why he’d wanted to reach out at first, but then he’d thought very specifically about what might happen after he did, on the super slim chance Eddie wouldn’t be going to cuss him out or kick his ass. Now, every fucking morning’s like a highlight reel behind his eyelids, his busted brain sending out technicolor surround-sound suggestion after suggestion.
Eddie’s wrist arches as he pours his morning coffee, and Steve wants to lick the little knob of bone.
Eddie throws his head back to laugh, and Steve wants to leave bite marks like a collar around his neck.
Eddie belly-flops onto the couch, and Steve thinks about crawling on top of him and holding him down, just for a minute, to feel him startle and buck.
Eddie leans over Steve to grab something, and Steve starts to get some brand goddamn new ideas about what it might feel like if he held Steve down instead, which isn’t—it wouldn’t be—
Eddie definitely knows something’s up, and he’s been getting pretty fidgety about it. Steve guesses that if you’re cooped up all day and only really see one guy day-in and day-out, you’re probably going to be tuned in when he suddenly starts acting like a freak.
He can’t stop. It’s horrible. It’s like he doesn’t have any kind of say over the shit he does, how he acts, what he says. Eddie gets up in his space like usual, and all his body wants to do suddenly is throw a punch. He’s not a violent guy at heart, but this thing’s got all his wires crossed, like all his instincts are getting shuffled around. But it’s obviously not like he can just haul off and hit Eddie for no reason, that’s insane.
Steve’s feeling pretty insane these days, he guesses. He starts getting up earlier and coming home later, which sucks, actually, because it turns out that that’s a pretty effective way to see a lot less of Eddie, and it also turns out that Steve doesn’t really want to do that after all. So in the end, he puts up with it, because all his choices are bad: either he comes home to a dark, quiet house and pulls leftovers from the fridge, or he comes home and has a whole fucking second shift trying not to be too weird around Eddie, which is a losing play from the get-go.
“Um. Little personal space, Harrington?” says Eddie, when Steve accidentally backs him into a corner because he was darting between the pantry and the stove, grabbing and forgetting and discarding one thing after another, until Steve’s brain completely blows a fuse for a second and his body intercepts Eddie’s path to crowd him against the countertop.
“Man, stop fucking—zooming back and forth, you’re making me dizzy,” Steve says, instead of apologizing. They’re not touching at all, but his hands are flat on the countertop on either side of Eddie’s hips, keeping him there.
“Okay, okay, okay,” laughs Eddie. “Sor-ry, officer, didn’t realize this kitchen had a speed limit posted.”
“Yeah, well, now you know,” says Steve, and steps back.
i'm attempting again to process the steve and dustin fight in chapter 5 "shock jock" of season 5, and having lots of steve harrington characterization thoughts. read at your own risk and also don't read too deeply into this—i am truly just processing. plus, this got long.
one of the things about the argument is that it's an argument about selfishness and responsibility. so juicy. like, steve's anger is predicated on the fact that dustin won't admit he was wrong, and they're actually in agreement, i think, that being right is less important than fulfilling your obligation and responsibility (for steve) or doing the right thing (for dustin, i think).
i mean, the scene opens with steve defensively saying, "i'm just following orders," because dustin told him to stay there and play with toys and that's exactly what he's doing. okay, let's just hold that in mind: following orders. don't blame me, i am just following orders. hold that.
the obligation and responsibility thing—it's there with the "we finally find hop and el and you promptly ditch them to pursue your bullshit theory" line, which is about what? that community is more important than your need to be right?
the "you didn't show up because YOU wanted a fight" line. you wanted a fight! YOU wanted a fight! OUCH. you wanted a fight is like—your grief? your anger? your pain? is more important to you than showing up for the rest of us. you're supposed to put all that aside? one friend's loss doesn't mean we should all lose (you)? OOF. we're all hurting here, that doesn't mean the world stops just for you? it is a PRIVILEGE and CHOICE to get to indulge in the expression of your pain.
then that emphasis on eddie got himSELF killed. he got HIMSELF killed. it could've been prevented but it wasn't and he's to blame for his own death because he didn't FOLLOW ORDERS. oooof. oof. oof. oof. this is HOT, by which i mean stove-hot. like—"i can't deal with the regret so i'm blaming him for burdening me with the regret to begin with, for burdening me with the grief to begin with." meanwhile, I'M alive because i stuck to the plan? I STUCK TO THE PLAN—the same plan that PREVENTED ME from rescuing anyone (eddie) because I HAD TO DO SOMETHING because that was THE PLAN? that we ALL AGREED ON? and how UNFAIR that YOU CHOSE to DEVIATE from THE PLAN after we ALL AGREED? oh, the GUILT. and also: if you just follow THE PLAN than things DON'T DEVIATE? things don't deviate and the outcome is controlled, and, therefore, this was all avoidable. the way to prevent pain is to stick to the PLAN. you keep your head down and you follow the plan. what an exemption from responsibility! the fallacy of control. the illusion of it. the frustration with the losing battle of it.
aauuuughhhh. this is just so deliciously interesting to me. i think steve is often represented as the self-sacrificer. this reads to me more like he judges the self-sacrificer. he judges the HELL out of the self-sacrificer. he's pissed at the self-sacrificer. he has no empathy for the martyr. he wants the martyr to say it's not worth it, to admit they were wrong, to take responsibility. because that person leaves him alone and leaves him to clean up the mess. that person makes it harder for everyone else. HE'S the one who has to deal with dustin, heart-broken, grieving, hurting, and where's eddie? dead? what a cop-out. what a way to leave steve picking up the fucking pieces, right? where is he now—when dustin (steve) really needs him?
it's a little like: your individual choice to try to do it all alone = selfishness. individuation is selfish? you're selfish if you're isolating? it is YOUR responsibility to ask for help?
especially interesting to think about in the context of team-oriented behavior and future coaching as a career. and where does this frustration and this lesson that steve's internalized come from—the no one thanks you for your dead body in sacrifice, you just hurt other people with it, so you have to take care of yourself, you have to put your own feelings aside, you have to put on the brave face. that's taking care of others—putting them first. there isn't time to care about each individual feeling you have; if we stopped for that, we'd never get anything done. you have to keep moving. this is impossible to reconcile! what an impossible task to reconcile this: sacrificing yourself for others IS taking care of them but it is also selfish because then you leave them.
what's so slippery about this mentality is that it presents as authentic while, simultaneously, it tucks real feelings away. it avoids a real display of vulnerability, a real commitment to feeling. a real depth of pain without mitigation, without displacement. (steve loves to displace blame, oh boy; remember him yelling at dustin in chapter two "would you just admit that you're wrong? that you screwed up?" like imagine who that's really aimed at.) but this mentality resents real feeling. it RESENTS it (e.g. don't make me take this on, don't make me feel this).
and that type of avoidance and resentment is actually a selfishness, too: it never lets someone in. not really. because to really let them in, you'd have to admit the bad stuff, and you'd have to make it about yourself. and you cannot risk what's perceived as individuation. you cannot fall out of line. you cannot make a wrong choice. you have to control it. you have to control yourself. (thinking, also, of all the moments with steve that are like "why'd you have to go do that" in response to something bad happening ((re: the illusion of control)), and also thinking of the like, "come on just help me out" vibe when he can't understand or do something independently; it's very like don't embarrass me, you know i need help, you should know, you'd know if you were paying attention? that's how i know you care about me? don't make me feel humiliated, i.e. vulnerable? like, that's part of it too, the horrible fear and humiliation of being wrong, and any and everything to avoid that, to displace blame so completely and neatly because to admit blame is to admit to wrongness.) control IS selfish.
and what's so great about this being expressed through a display of anger is that anger FEELS so out of control. steve says, "the reason you're so goddamn pissed about it," when HE'S the one who's pissed. who's in control now?
EDDIE!!!!! because he's the SOURCE of it because he's the selfish one who DIED. do you see what i mean. i'm LOSING IT.
Ohhh my god this is SUCH delicious analysis, and I am going to be thinking over the responsibility thing for a while! A few things that I want to messily underline/enthusiastically co-sign/witter on about under the cut—note that I am writing and posting this while fully on the clock in my office and have not rewatched the S5E5 scene, so grain of salt etc etc.
"the way to prevent pain is to stick to the PLAN. you keep your head down and you follow the plan."
So so so true especially in this context and ALSO: this is Steve's big-picture perspective on Stancy to me in a nutshell. Follow the plan; marry your first love/high school sweetheart; work for your dad; six little nuggets. That's what success means to Steve! That's how you avoid pain/failure!
Nancy kept trying to deviate from the script, and that's explicitly what their breakup was about. Steve couldn't understand why she kept pushing back against the script that he was/is CONVINCED would lead to a happy ending when he was about 16. He wants to be (emphasis on the active BE, enact, embody) stupid teenagers for a night because that's the Correct role for them. That's the positionality that Steve and Nancy have been assigned, but she wasn't playing along because she'd already rejected (and been primed to reject) conventional social scripts as a source of morality/safety. Steve's made a ton of strides and grown a lot, but I think we can still see the foundational roots of his worldview so clearly in this conversation, which did feel like a slight characterization rollback to earlier-seasons!Steve to me. I think the Watsonian explanation I favor would be that he's regressing under stress and without as much ongoing emotional support from Robin, because it would make some sense if this is how he lashes out.
"he has no empathy for the martyr"
YES this is absolutely crucial to me, in understanding Steve Harrington! A very cool and good take!
I actually do wonder how much of the left-field self-sacrificer characterization is tied into the sometimes-quite-jarring fanon!Steve feminization—the endless and PROFOUNDLY gendered jokes about him being a mom rely on specific cultural narratives about motherhood and sacrifice. It's quite interesting to me that the heteronormatively corresponding "dad Eddie" thing doesn't get a ton of jokes etc., except in the context of "mom Steve": childrearing and caretaking seem to be inextricable from the concept of motherhood. The "justification" I've seen for "dad Eddie" has mostly been around him NOT being soft with the kids, which...Steve isn't either? They're certainly both kind/accepting/nice, but neither is especially gentle or nurturing. Steve in particular is not the Giving Tree! I don't think I have great visibility on larger fandom trends in general though, so I am hoping the fanon is not quite as dire as the discourse icebergs that float into my peripheral vision might imply.
"[Eddie's] to blame for his own death because he didn't FOLLOW ORDERS"
Absolutely perishing over this, god. Yes. This exactly. If it's Eddie's FAULT according to a clear-cut framework, then anger is an acceptable Big Emotion to feel about this, and of course Steve's going to reach for that! Anger isn't vulnerable or unmasculine! If he's not angry, he might actually have to sit with his grief and Steve Harrington DOES NOT DO THAT EVER.
Steve always, always, always wants to displace negative feelings. This is also related to all the other points, because he has extremely low emotional distress tolerance, and the way he copes is by jumping into action...or if action is not an option, relocating blame away from himself. "the exemption from responsibility" is exactly right! He DOES NOT WANT responsibility. He does not want to be the one holding the bag. He wants clear orders and instruction, and he wants to be successful in a highly knowable/scoped way at following those instructions/the PLAN.
All of that also has to do with the distinction he holds between control and consequences, I think! He is SO willing to give up control and follow someone else's lead throughout the entire show, but he's more than willing to bring up external authority/forces/constraints in the story he tells about consequences. Which—yeah, translates to "control is selfish." That's the schema he's working from.
(Obligatory Doylist note that it would probably read as super obnoxious if the most conventional-seeming white-guy jock archetype were constantly pushing for control in a nerd-heavy ensemble, but...that's a super boring take.)
Steve's the sheepdog, not the shepherd. He worries and yips and expects/wants/hopes for his middle-management authority to be respected, but he doesn't actually have a lot of interest in the bird's-eye-view leadership role. He's really not the strategy guy and doesn't have any ambition to become the strategy guy. He takes his responsibilities very seriously, but he doesn't seek out a high-responsiblity spotlight-type role in the same way that e.g. Eddie does (Hellfire, Corroded Coffin, all the little ways he makes himself the leader of various packs). Even the much-cited "King Steve" stuff was a title thrust upon him, and not one he's ever really shown intentionally chasing or leaning on.
"the horrible fear and humiliation of being wrong"
Loooove this. I'm still turning it over in my head and I don't have any real comment/conclusion/point here but I think humiliation is such an interesting shade of emotional response for Steve, a character who has actually taken pretty consistent Ls on the chin throughout the series. Like, what does it mean for Steve to be humiliated? How does that feel for him, and what does he "count" as humiliation?
"it is a PRIVILEGE and CHOICE to indulge in the expression of your pain"
I would actually...not push back, exactly, but maybe pull out another topnote to this piece! Because I don't think this is wrong, it's just not the first interpretive orientation I reach for here.
My interp tends to be more along the lines of Steve thinking that it's childish/immature to indulge in the expression of your pain, which makes it extra interesting that Dustin keeps accusing him of being childlike/immature; iirc Steve doesn't really directly refute that at any point, which I read as him not taking that accusation/insult particularly seriously. To Dustin, that's the worst possible thing he could say about Steve, but...Steve actually doesn't seem genuinely bothered at all by the constant mean-spirited cracks about his intelligence! He brushes it off pretty casually, and I think it fits pretty well if he just doesn't internalize that stuff because he has such a completely different internal schema for maturity, which Dustin is currently failing by centering individual feelings. One could certainly read it as Steve hiding how much he's hurt by Dustin's cracks, but I'm not necessarily seeing that in the text itself—Dustin's snide comments don't actually seem to meaningfully ramp up the tension in the conversational flow the way I would expect if that were the intended subtext.
So I think that to Steve, expressing individual pain isn't necessarily a privilege per se, or at least that's not necessarily the primary operational logic driving his negative emotional reaction. It's bad not because it's an indulgence, but because it's not correctly following the rules of adulthood/maturity/morality(/masculinity). This part is less textual, but I do connect that attitude very deeply to the culture of masculinity in white midwestern USA, as Steve's character is ultimately and essentially in dialogue with that particular strain of masculinity.
(Tangentially, I find "babygirl Steve" such an interesting invention from an anthropological standpoint. There's probably something to say about blorbo fanonization reflecting contemporary sexual mores here...but also, it's a way to just not deal with Steve's masculinity. That's also why I personally am always quite interested in bringing a gendered lens to analysis!)
Misc. additional thoughts:
I have also started thinking a little bit about the team sports aspect of this, which is frankly not going to be a very productive line of thinking for me, someone who has always been highly allergic to the basic concept of team sports. (I did a week of T-ball when I was like 6 and my tiny autistic ass was like "why does everyone care about running in a circle tho. I'm already here. why should I move." and then the coach got real mad and then my parents signed me up for karate instead. yes I was dx'd with oppositional defiance at an extremely young age.)
But I think it's potentially interesting how Steve does seem to see teamwork and leadership differently from the Party, with their explicitly TTRPG-derived adventuring party dynamics. I am probably not the right person to follow this down the rabbit hole but there's SOMETHING there!
There's also something I'm not quite managing to articulate about Steve's moral framework in all this, and what he thinks of as goodness/correctness. Like, what are Steve's ethics? What are his guiding principles?
I think "sacrificing yourself for others IS taking care of them but it is also selfish because then you leave them" gets at a really important flaw in the foundations of Steve's moral framework. I also think he has not articulated those principles in his head, and does not consciously think of them as belief pillars. He does not like feeling guilty, and that is always going to warp a worldview; he does not lean into the flinch. That's why the "knock on the head" is such a big deal, because that's Steve being brave and choosing growth.
And so I'm still left wondering—what is it that Steve believes, and equally importantly, what does he THINK he believes?
Anyway. Very very good thoughts, thank you for thinking & sharing & enabling me to continue mentally gnawing on Steve Harrington for enrichment!
