“your honor, they’re queer!” i scream as i’m dragged away while everyone else insists i’m projecting onto the queer coding of these four characters
title: the duff
pairing:
Joanna Byers/Steve Harrington, Nancy Wheeler/Robin Buckley, Will Byers & Jane Hopper, Joanna Byers & Nancy Wheeler & Robin Buckley & Eddie Munson, Joyce Byers/Jim Hopper
rating: M
tags:
genderbent Jonathan Byers, modern au, high school, no supernatural elements, romantic teen comedy based on a movie with the same name, childhood friends to enemies to friends to lovers, wonder twins (willel), marijuana use
status: WIP
chapter count: 11/?
word count so far: 98k
summary:
“So your master plan is to let Steve Harrington turn you into a social butterfly?” Joanna Byers supposes so. God help her.
title: caught on film
pairing:
Jonathan Byers/Steve Harrington, Nancy Wheeler/Robin Buckley
rating: M
tags:
canon rewrite of seasons 1&2 (so far…), character study, enemies to friends to lovers, miwi, boys in love, period typical homophobia and bullying, found family and healing, grief/mourning, queer themes, money and class angst, almost confessions, getting together, will they won’t they relationships
status: WIP
chapter count: 19/?
word count so far: 205k
summary:
Jonathan Byers has always known what he is—a freak. Hawkins High made sure he never forgot it. Between a missing brother, a mother unraveling, and the weight of keeping his family from collapsing, Jonathan doesn’t have time to think about himself, much less the way his eyes linger on Steve Harrington.
can’t thank you guys enough for all the support on these works!
Most of the GA found everyone's endings to be acceptable (even El's, though a decent number of them said she should've lived).
In their minds, how would you continue or change the ending?
Assuming that the people who felt that Mike and El were zOMG sOulmAtes!!!1!! just want to see them reunited and married, what would that mean for all the rest of the characters?
Dustin goes to school ....again?
Max and Lucas are together and have a movie date ....again?
Will fucks off to some other city and talks to a guy in a bar....again?
Everyone already got their wimpy, half-assed "good" ending (I say in quotes because I don't think it's actually good).
The same thing for everyone in the audience whose only remaining wish was to see Jancy get back together and married. It's like okay, say they do. What about the story has actually changed?
I guess they're probably looking for a bottle episode that's only featuring the couple they like, so they don't care about the other characters or the overarching themes of the show.
I'm doing some #research because that book got me unreasonably invested in all the newspapers we actually see within the show, and I just found the horoscope section from Brenner's 6th September 1979 newspaper so interesting.
Most of the zodiacs are told about that they have "clever thoughts", "fantastic ideas", "ingenious plans", "originality", and "success", but caution that one should "keep the clever thoughts to themselves" as someone could "snatch them away".
But the Aries horoscope section, with the birthday starting at 21st March, meaning both Will and Henry, is extremely negative compared to all the other horoscope sections.
It literally says that an Aries may think their ideas are good, but that they've deceived themselves that their ideas are grander than they are. Aries are told to "be realistic".
Which is so interesting, if you consider that all the other zodiac sections are about how great someone's ideas are, how ingenious, how they should keep these to themselves.
But the Aries is being tricked into thinking their ideas are grander than they think and to stay in touch with reality. Hm. Sounds like somebody's speech to Will in season 5... His "Tammy"... His delusions and grand ideas... Him being told to be realistic...
It SO fascinating! Watching Dark has also inspired me to rewind these scenes with written text and slow down and read what's shown on screen, and I've found so much foreshadowing that I don't think has been flagged before? Or if it has - please send it my way!
Sirius dragging first year Regulus to his compartment to meet James, Remus and Peter. Regulus takes one look at them all sitting there smiling and looks to Sirius with wide eyes whispering way too loudly, "Sirius, you didn't tell me they were poor."
my predictions for who we can’t trust if conformitygate is real and the epilogue is an illusion
(sorry in advance)
okay, i read this post from @nightnut and it got me thinking. she pointed out some concerning parallels and foreshadowing we have with dustin and hopper:
now to add to that.
okay guys i’m sorry, but i genuinely think steve, dustin, and hopper are the most at risk right now. i don’t think we can trust any of them anymore. they were genuinely the most jarring characters in the epilogue, so here’s what stood out to me the most on rewatch: (because apparently this blog runs on self-inflicted pain)
steve: sanitized growth or scripted ideal?
i’m sorry, but that is not my steve harrington.
the tone is off. the body language is off. it feels like someone performing “babysitter steve” instead of actually steve. his arc has always been growth through insecurity. the epilogue removes the insecurity.
steve panics every season when he’s in charge of the kids. yes, he loves them. yes, he tries to understand/protect them. but he struggles and doubts himself constantly. even in season 5 he’s still human about it, still imperfect with dustin.
the “six little nuggets” speech in season 4 was aspirational. it wasn’t proof of arrival. it was a twenty-year-old clinging to a comforting image of the future while the world was ending. it was fantasy coping.
epilogue steve, by contrast, is frictionless. confident. thriving. every kid adores him. there’s no awkwardness. no exasperated muttering. no nervous humor.
he feels like an idealised version of himself, following a script. that’s not growth, even if it comes after two years (that we didn’t get to see). that’s sanitization.
(credit to @howtobeanerd101)
dustin: false closure and wish fulfillment
the scene with his mom is beautiful but almost suspiciously perfect.
she’s teary. proud. he reassures her he’s only a day’s drive away. he promises to call so much she’ll have to change numbers. they exchange i love you’s.
it plays like emotional resolution, but if the epilogue is artificial, this is exactly the kind of scene you’d construct: clean closure between mother and son, reassurance that nothing is truly lost. on rewatch, it feels eerie, like narrative anesthesia, the kind designed to soothe us before they pull the plug.
the graduation speech pushes this further.
earlier in the same episode, lucas sarcastically says to dustin, “great job keeping morale up” in the abyss. by the epilogue, dustin is doing exactly that, flawlessly, in front of the entire school. (vecna took that literally lmao)
the same school that ostracized him for five seasons now cheers. they follow his lead in “rebelling” against principal higgins. confetti rains down. dustin throws his cap before everyone else. lucas gleefully mentions higgins “shitting his pants.”
it’s too neat.
he’s wearing a gray shirt instead of the original hellfire shirt (after this season deliberately made us pay attention to color continuity with holly and max). stacy, who hasn’t been relevant since season 2, invites him to a party. suzie isn’t acknowledged. dustin is suddenly the universally adored class hero, and even some of the dnd references in his speech (as others have pointed out) don’t cleanly align with established lore.
that is not my dustin henderson and it doesn’t feel like earned triumph. it feels like wish fulfillment: dustin being granted a fantasy ending.
hopper: thematic erosion
hopper is the one that tipped me from “hmm weird” to “hmm weird.”
this man is defined by unresolved grief over sarah and by the terror of losing el as well. we watched him choose to sacrifice himself this season rather than risk losing her.
now he’s… composed. suspiciously at peace. dreaming about a future with joyce after losing his daughter again.
he tells mike he has “two roads,” but that directly contradicts a theme the show hammered home this season through max: death, acceptance, escape. narrowing that to two feels intentional, like he’s closing off possibility. the repetition of “three waterfalls” in this scene is supposed to foreshadow the end of the epilogue: we see el in iceland and the waterfalls are two as well.
three doors -> two. three waterfalls -> two.
also, he’s walking around hawkins freely as chief after the whole town believed he was dead. no one reacts. no one comments.
then enzo’s. the whole order is wrong from the one he gave in season 4, but hopper asking for caviar was the real “wait, what?” moment for me (not my jim hopper). suddenly he’s offering joyce the exact “let’s leave hawkins and start over” speech that bob gave her in season 2, and joyce, who hesitated before, is suddenly receptive now.
if hopper were truly alive and el were truly gone, he wouldn’t be this stable. we know him. we’ve watched his grief over sarah, and we’ve watched him fight el’s sacrifice. that contradiction in the epilogue feels deliberate, so deliberate i feel like it’s a direct reversal: el is alive. hopper is dead.
dustin in the dnd scene
dustin is the only one we see die in-game, the others die off screen (lol). dustin is also the only one who lacks an exit sign compared to the others. his road trip with steve, which mike calls an “adventure,” feels like thematic foreshadowing. traveling together. leaving together.
if this is an illusion, it’s curated.
steve gets an ideal career path for him.
dustin gets the school’s admiration.
hopper gets grief erased.
that’s not healing, just a script from the antagonist’s limited knowledge. the epilogue removes their struggle, and if vecna doesn’t have access to their minds anymore, i have to wonder why.
I feel like this is a detail that people gloss over completely and I honestly feel like it was important to Mike's coding as a queer character.
I know it is technically considered a stereotype about gay men that only they can be interested in wearing make up and not straight men, but I feel like context and time period matters here.
Mike is a 12 year old boy in the early 1980s living in the suburban Midwest of America.
Yes, I get that he has a big sister so maybe he just knows because he likes to snoop around or whatever. But it feels like an incredibly specific choice to insinuate that he not only knows where Nancy keeps her makeup in her room, but that he knows exactly what is what. He knew the proper applicators for blush and knew what the blush looked like and how to use it.
Then he silently critiques "his work" and just kind of makes an "eh, it'll do" reaction and seems satisfied enough.
But shouldn't her putting on a dress and long wig do the trick to make her look more like a girl or "normal"? All he does is put blush and Chapstick on her anyway.
Why give us details that Mike knows how to do makeup. Almost like...he's been interested in it before? Whether it's watching his sister and mom do it while he was younger, or even interested in playing with it himself? 👀
Mike Wheeler has been queer-coded since the very first season. (This is not the only example, I just wanted to make a post about this specific one).
Im crying bruh, Nancy insulted Jonathan’s music taste and he said she doesn’t know ball immediately. Can’t believe he was supposed to sassy, even near death. Why would they take this away from me?
jonathan who took photos for hawkins yearbook cause they would lend the photographers the cameras and one day in california will is complaining he never gets to practice figure drawing when he remembers jonathan was the sports photographer cause he was the best at school so he goes through jonathan's backlogs of unused photos looking for references only to find out his brother must've had the BIGGEST fucking crush on steve harrington
yes, this is unashamed self-promo to my genderbent jonathan fic, but i loved writing this exchange in the new chapter because it’s entirely dependent on jonathan’s gender. flip joanna back into jonathan and robin and eddie’s reactions reverse perfectly!
dan erickson actually told me that every time someone says a negative word against helly r he writes another character leaving their spouse for her. so you know…watch your mouth.
Pansy’s earned the mantle of best mate. There was no one else on Merlin’s green earth that would listen to Draco Malfoy prattle on and on – and fucking on – about Potter.
When they were 12-years-old, Mr Malfoy had bribed the Slytherin Quidditch team with broomsticks, just to stop Draco from whinging on and on about Harry bloody Potter’s broomstick.
Now they are 18, but it seems the passing of time has only made Draco’s affliction worse.
(But now Mr Malfoy is in Azkaban.)
Draco stares at Potter forlornly across the Great Hall to where Potter is smiling at Weasley – the hot, female one.
“Darling.” Pansy grasps Draco’s chin to force his gaze on her. Lowering her voice, she says, “Preserve your modesty. You are gawking.”
Flushing, Draco scoffs. “I don’t even want to know what you’re implying.”
“Dear Diary.” Pansy gestures with her fork and raises her voice “Potter has new glasses. He looked so dreamy testifying for me at the Ministry. Is he fucking the She-Weasel?”
“Quiet, you wench!” Draco yells, placing his hand over her mouth.
After taking a sip of tea, Draco returns to looking at Potter.
(What Draco doesn’t see is Potter looking away just in time.)
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