compiling all of my stancy fics/prompt fills in one post since they're kind of all over the place between here and AO3 (organization with a side of shameless self-promo!). hopefully helpful if you’re looking for some light reading before/after the conclusion of s5?
AO3 WORKS:
sweet dreams and flying machines - Nancy takes the future into her own hands (because when you want something done right, sometimes you just gotta do it yourself). (Rating: M)
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i’m coming out (i want the world to know) - Vignettes, 1986-1987. Or, how Nancy gets her groove (and the guy) back. (Rating: M overall, E for last two chapters)
(prequel to sweet dreams and flying machines)
PROMPT FILLS:
a long cold war - Nancy, Barb's funeral, and a past that can't quite be outpaced or outgunned.
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the only thing we share [is this small town] - It's the summer of 1985, and Nancy is definitely not thinking about her ex. She isn't. She's not. She's trying not to.
~*~*~
i’ll be alright (it’s just a thousand cuts) - It's the summer of 1985, and Steve Harrington is in the absolute worst shooting slump of his entire life.
(not a prompt fill, but a Steve POV companion to one - the only thing we share [is this small town])
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can’t let you slide through my hands - Some low-stakes breaking up (not really) and making up schmoop, featuring Steve and Nancy's first major fight and reconciliation after getting back together post s4. (Rating: M)
YOU ARE MY HERO for spearheading the stancy fic repository!!! i remember the tag being sooo daunting to me when i first checked it out back in 2019 and i only ever got to read stancy fics through recommendations since then, and now i can maybe finally check out some underrated hidden gems in the tag so a million a billion thank yous for that!!!
but also seeing as you've gone through hundreds of stancy fics, i was wondering if you would share some of your favorites?
<3 <3 <3 i'm so glad it's helpful!!!! there's still some tag clutter and other things i want to clean up (at some point my chapter formula got broken, fml, i think i fixed most of it) BUT so glad it is serving its intended purpose!!!
i've sorted through a bunch of stancy fic but i definitely have not read anywhere close to all of it. not even a quarter of it. i have a bunch on my TBR (loaded on my kobo iykyk) and more that'll find its way there. so, massive disclaimers all around that this is not exhaustive, i'm not an authority, etc. etc. but these have been some of my favorites so far (i'll try to stick with complete fics for now):
I'm such a TolkienGirl (@thelonelybrilliance) fangirl it's probably embarrassing, and I think reading her fic really lit the fire in my brain to want to do it myself for this fandom because there's so much good stuff there to play with. Gotta rec The Figurehead, obviously, but the second hand unwinds also changed my brain chemistry, and everything else she writes but you already knew that!!
the good, the bad, the ugly by the_passionate_sun (@mwritesarchived) I love nancy wheeler and her textbook avoidant attachment so much, every day, it's my personal catnip and this is such a good exploration of that. also we met in VM fandom probably circa 2013 and have stayed in touch all of these years only to realize we have the same brainrot now <3 and i think that's beautiful!!!!!!
i'm coming out (i want the world to know) by literocracy (@scoopertrouper) when i tell you i was kicking my feet, kobo in one hand and frantically trying to pull up the ao3 comment sections in another to effectively convey my enthusiasm. i would laugh at my lil screen, my husband would be like "what's so funny", and i'd just dissolve. incredible.
i'll find signs for you and i by crackers4jenn (@crackers4jenn) I WANT TO GO TO THERE. that's how i feel about this fic. steve and nancy are so in character and lived in and GUH. can i just live here????
a crowded room, friends with tired eyes by maplemood (@mapleymood) the dialogue is so good (and if you know me you know i am a sucker for dialogue) and just. THE BUZZ THIS GIVES ME. the voice is just so real and good and GUHHHH
who else decodes you by juneblooom (@juneblooom) ripped through this in pretty much one night which tells you i was down bad given this is the equivalent of something like 600 pages (I WAS FED!!!) of steve the yearner harrington and nancy doing her best. delicious, would go again, wonderful.
this is not exhaustive and also i can't emphasize enough that i have not read everything, i have more to read, and i am excited to have some 1:1 time with my kobo (kobo/heroesfading collab when?) and dig into all of the goodness that's out there. so much high quality stuff, and i feel like a kid in a candy store trying to read as much as i can.
i also use my bookmarks page pretty heavily, so that'll get updated as i read more.
Now that I'm finally caught up on updating about a decade's worth of Steve/Nancy fics, we're now officially rolling out @stancyfic!
This is a fic repository for Steve/Nancy fics on AO3 (and maybe eventually elsewhere) that essentially serves as a whitelist for all genuine, pre-vetted fics that have Steve/Nancy as a central focus. Isn't this the point of the AO3 tag, you ask?
To give you an idea, the Steve/Nancy tag on AO3 has approximately 3,000 fics. You filter out the Steve/Billy, Steve/Eddie, Steve/OCs, Jonathan/Nancy, etc. and you end up with something like 1,000 works. You sort through those (background Steve/Nancy rather than central focus, temporary Steve/Nancy, and a bunch of others that can only be plucked out manually) and you end up with the contents of this blog, which at the time of posting is around 540 fics.
So, truly Steve/Nancy centric fics only make up about 18% of their own tag on AO3. It’s rough out here. But here's your 18%!
Feel free to reblog a fic to rec it, explore the tags, and share some love. This blog should work on mobile just fine, but the best browsing experience will be found on the desktop site. You'll find the most common tags pinned to the top of the blog.
the thing about the duffers/st writers is that while I believe they’re way too contrarian to actually change major story beats based on internet feedback (a good thing), I do also think they’re chronically online and desperate to look like they’re in on the joke (not always a good thing).
so while it can be fun to see the showrunners and characters echoing the talking points we’ve been shouting about for years re trauma bonds forming a terrible basis for a lasting, healthy relationship, it also sometimes means they treat previous character beats as disposable and/or unserious in an effort to seem self-aware.
like. THEY were the ones who decided to insert a meta nudge-wink joke about Steve wanting six children into a serious, emotionally vulnerable moment in s4. it didn’t, in general, get taken the way they intended, so now they’re backtracking a bit and shoehorning in some “ha ha wow that WAS really weird! 😅” Reddit thread dialogue that feels like it cheapens what was an otherwise beautiful moment of connection/character development from the previous season.
the good news is I think/hope bringing it up again also makes it way more likely to be addressed and clarified in the finale between the two parties who had the conversation in the first place - Steve and Nancy - to close the loop. but, uh, I guess we’ll see?
Let's play "Dawson's Creek or Stranger Things love triangle?"
Narratively framed "main love interest", dreams of studying film/photography in NY, needlessly cruel during disagreements, gets jealous and clings to Love Interest in an "if I'm miserable, so's everyone else" way, one-sided competition with the Other Guy (who he shit talks and talks down to), can-do-no-wrong Golden Child, zero character growth, disillusioned = full of resentment
Studious and ambitious, had to grow up fast/too early, independent and self-reliant, go-getter, doesn't want to end up like their parents/caregiver, waffles back-and-forth between two guys for basically the entire run of the series, goes off to Boston for college, girlboss™, feelings for the Other Guy framed as naivety and a mistake
Other Guy! aka the Comedic Relief, became way more popular with the audience than the Main Guy, low academic effort, "the simple act of being in love with you is enough for me" / "end of the day, I'd rather have her as a friend than nothing at all", selfless in his love vs the selfishness of the Main Guy, can't see a life for themselves outside their hometown but knows their Love Interest is destined for bigger and better, in love but doesn't actually pursue, True Love sailboat / "you've always been there" RV
Sooo in 5 years time when jancy has aged as well as Dawson/Joey has and Steve is still clearly the Pacey, what then?
Steve’s apology to Dustin shows the same generosity that Steve showed in the "it's okay Nance" moment of season 2.
It's totally right and appropriate for him to apologize for the things he said in the lab, but a. He goes beyond that in his apology in a way that he didnt necessarily need to by apologizing for not having more patience and empathy for Dustin when it really does seem like he had a lot and b. He does it all without expectation of a reciprocal apology from Dustin even though Dustin absolutely needs to apologize to him because Dustin picked that fight just like he picked the fight with the bullies, and it's clear that he'd been gunning for that fight for days if not months and Steve had been trying to deflect and get distance and Dustin just kept getting more and more openly hostile and insulting (and insults directed at a partciularly vulnerable spot for Steve)
And this isn't an anti Dustin post because he DOES rise to the moment and apologize and I know why he behaved the way he did. But just, the grace and generosity that Steve offered.
I have so many feelings right now, but something that just royally pisses me off is how underutilized most of the cast was in the finale? Most of them were just walking in the desert, and then they had the anticlimactic Mind Flayer fight. Most characters didn't get their big hero moments, most of them didn't get satisfying interpersonal resolutions, it just felt like a lot of characters spent so much of the episode doing nothing.
Like, I was just expecting more, you know? Considering that Hawkins was almost a non-entity in the finale (not even the upside down or the abyss), I don't know I thought that there would be more with Erica and Mr. Clarke, Vickie, hell even Robin and Steve were barely characters. Lucas and Dustin were just kind of there, Nancy had her badass moment but it wasn't satisfying because there was little emotional catharsis...
yeah if i had to pick one word to describe how i felt about the finale, it would be...whelmed. not over, not under. just whelmed.
i've talked about this before, but so much of the finale (and the final season in general) felt less like a well-planned story and more like a bunch of moments the production thought would be super cool to squeeze into the last season, strung together by some semblance of a plot that was somehow both boring and narratively incoherent?
i thought the final battle was genuinely terrible, and frankly i'm annoyed they were so married to the concept. like this show didn't need its avengers endgame moment. that's not what it is. the reason the mind flayer was so scary to start wasn't because it was a giant godzilla desert spider (that in the end wasn't even that difficult to take down).
I actively cringe every time I watch that "you fucked with the wrong family" scene. it was so artificial. i know people liked it and i guess i'm glad they got what they were meant to from it (and i'm glad they finally decided to give SOMETHING to Joyce this season besides dumb plans and fretting), but it is actively crazy to me that the only way to dispatch a demogorgon in season 1 was a suicidal psychic 1v1, and now apparently any old axe will do against Vecna, the "great evil" of the series (who was, btw, genuinely scary in S4). and, yes, i think it was a mistake to not have a Hawkins component to the whole thing.
from a cinematographic standpoint it also just LOOKED so much worse than prior seasons - weirdly vivid and clownish and so obviously shot on green screen at points. i even thought some of the needle drops were lackluster. it was insane they couldn't find space for the actually great queen remix they featured in the trailer and then just never used again.
like i can't believe i'm saying this - but from a stancy standpoint i'm actually GRATEFUL, in retrospect, that they didn't give them a conversation (I know this is probably an unpopular opinion). Because i have no doubt it would have been atrociously handled and made me feel worse than i already did. like i am GLAD they didn't do the thing that would make narrative sense because i didn't trust them to handle it with any kind of grace or sensitivity to what was set up in S4.
there's so much more i could say, about how lucas was ultimately reduced to a love interest (look, i LOVE lumax, but he was as smart as any of them so to imply that they just moved somewhere else and settled down feels kind of crazy), about how Nancy was done absolutely dirty, about how irritating it was that they finally cemented Jon as their self-insert, and about how so many of the small, grounding character moments they used to find space for onscreen were totally ignored. etc., etc.
but I told myself after I watched the first time that the only amount of brainspace I would devote to the season/finale would be what was necessary to write semi-compliant fanfic. this ask is already giving it more than i meant to lol.
the final thing i'll say is this: maya hawke implied that the four young adults were given a LOT of latitude in deciding what their epilogue moment should be on the rooftop, and while that's nice in theory, that's WHY it felt so discordant and narratively unsound: we were seeing joe, natalia, maya and charlie up there, not steve, nancy, robin and jonathan. never, at any point, were we shown on screen any sign that these characters ever operated as a friendly foursome. that's all their actors. and i'm happy for them that they feel like they got that moment, but it doesn't say anything good about the overall ambivalence with which the duffers approach how their characters are built and portrayed.
idk. tl;dr it is still not actually the WORST finale i have ever seen (that crown goes to HIMYM, which i still refuse to touch with a 10-foot pole), but it did damage/dilute my enjoyment of the series overall.
I’d just like to say that I am so grateful for sweet dreams/i’m coming out…I remember the first time I read them just absolutely falling in love, and also thinking, “well, no matter what happens, these pieces will be here.” And now, post-finale, I can say that they’re canon as far as I’m concerned. Glad someone out there actually understood the characters and gave them a future they deserve! ❤️
this is so kind. thank you. <333 i'm honestly kind of surprised people still revisit two stories i wrote in a fugue state like 3 years ago but i appreciate it, and i'm so glad they fill a void!
if there is one (1) thing i'm thankful to the finale for, it's that it's added tons of fuel to the creative fires of all the excellent writers throughout this niche fandom.
I am sorry but you will never convince me that there is a universe in which both Robin and Nancy live in the same State, and Steve isn't already there updating his drivers licence.
this silly conformitygate business is reminding me that there are people watching stranger things who are young enough for this to be their first experience investing a decade’s worth of emotional capital into a show only to have it absolutely flub the landing. 😭
