JVL
official daine visual archive
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🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
Stranger Things
if i look back, i am lost
art blog(derogatory)
Claire Keane
noise dept.
EXPECTATIONS
almost home
KIROKAZE
Xuebing Du
todays bird
Mike Driver
tannertan36
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
untitled
d e v o n
⁂
seen from United States
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seen from Paraguay
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seen from France
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seen from Iraq
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seen from Finland
@stevie-wicks
yeah, it's me, don't cream your pants
because I didn't want followers from my main to have to suffer through too many stranger things shitposts
my ao3
my main
2024 update: this blog is a Relic as of now. it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
2025 update: st5 was so ass I had to resurrect this blog to bitch about it
we need to stop pretending that billy speeding to run over the kids was not the funniest possible thing he could have done in that situation
"Hi my name is horny I mean Billy so you are king beauty they say I mean Harrington right King Steve hi I’m Billy I’m horny I mean new wanna hang out later I mean hate each other nice balls I mean ball I mean Harrington right *lick* mine."
Steve wants him to never stop talking.
(wdym this isn't how you introduce yourself as the new guy?)
Tommy is losing his mind watching these two do the dance.
Tommy, I miss you
this looks absolutely ugly but thats all i can do now (╥﹏╥)
maybe ill finish it later and reupload.
billy getting called up in english to read his poem out loud to the whole class and he's trying to get out of it but his teachers like "read the poem or fail this unit" and billy can not go home to neil with an F so... fuck him he guesses.
so he gets up in front of the class and starts reading off this poem that is all about longing and repression and forbidden desires and its super gay but in a way no one in the class is gonna understand unless they specifically know to look for it. all the girlies in the class are just on the edge of their seats fawning because "oh this is so romantic who knew billy hargrove was such a sweetheart"
meanwhile steves sitting in the back of the class not even paying attention until he starts cluing in to certain words and phrases that are weirdly specific to interactions he's had with billy so now he's sitting there like "is this fucking play about me?"
billy is SWEATING the entire time but manages to keep his cool in front of the class because you can never let them see you slipping, but the second the bell rings he's out of there. and steve's hot on his tail cuz he's gotta know what billys poems about.... surely it wasn't just coincidence when their eyes locked on the last line right? right???
I love Tommy, man. He's been feeling all kinds of feelings for his best friend, the Hawkins royalty, for years
And then Hargrove rolls into town, and Tommy follows him around like a bulldog, ready to tear apart anyone with his bared teeth if Billy merely snaps his fingers. And then the former king and the new hot dude start fooling around, in secret ..? Tommy notices. Oh, he notices a lot of things, and Tommy's what, ignored now? Forgotten?
The bile that rises up to his throat? Deadly.
A harringrove au where Tommy becomes flayed and lets out all his frustrations on the two lovebirds
I’ve read three Taylor Jenkins Reid books now, and why does Mick Riva make cameos in all her books like he’s Stan Lee or something 😭
You got to feel for Warren, man. The only normal one in the band, having the time of his life, and then the messy bitches around him up and ruin e-very-thing.
sorry why was sam claflin mouth fucking his mic in every scene in djats
Billy Dunne doing pretty much everything on stage but outright having sex with Daisy yet somehow managing to delude himself into thinking "this is fine, right on the line, just clean Christian fun, we could totally sustain this for another twenty years without anyone suspecting a thing, fucking genius". Like, there's masochism, and then there's "you're having an affair without any of the fun parts of having an affair."
Take the glory, give everything Promise to be dazzling.
How it feels accidentally saying you like a character who's a bad person to someone who only likes characters that they morally agree with
Wango tango
I want to talk about Billy & Neil Hargrove
I’ve been reading a lot of Harringrove fics in the past months, and I keep noticing a trend, which surprised me. It has to do with how Billy & Neil’s relationship is depicted.
Let me preface that I’m a firm believer you should be free to do whatever you want in your writing, no matter how different it might be from canon - either through a deliberate choice, or through interpretation. Here, I just want to talk about how surprised I was about certain lack of nuances - as if, as a collective, the fanbase chose to interpret their relationship through one angle only. Again, it is not a bad thing, but I guess I was expecting to see more diverse takes/ approaches in the amount of fic I read.
SO, some facts:
The abuse (in the canon): In the show, we can see that Neil is a hard man, a strict figure buzzing with a nervous violence. We see him being violent with Billy in words and actions. Now from there, it makes sense to infer what Billy’s childhood might have been like, how it shaped into the angry teenager with a need to prove himself.
The aftermath of S3 : When Max read her letter for Billy, she says that Neil ‘’ was a mess’’, left because she thinks he ‘’ didn’t want to be here without you’’
The abuse (in the fics) : in 90% of fics I read, Neil full-on beats Billy. I’m talking bruises, cigar burns, sometimes broken bones. And it is one interpretation, but I would have expected to also find more of the psychological and threatening abuse we saw in the show.
Why I’m looking for more variation in the depiction of their relationship:
Whenever the fics go in depth in Steve’s relationship with his parents, it’s layered, psychological, touches on how abuse can be quiet and cold rather than violent an brash. And granted, it is an interesting contrast in Harringrove fics, to have them bond about their own trauma, depicted in such opposites ways. But I wish I could more fics that go into the complexity of abuse born from misplaced parental expectations and distorted love for Billy as well.
Because if we do trust the canon, Neil did love Billy (in some way at least), since he crumbled after his death. That doesn’t make him a better parent or person, but more of a fleshed-out character.
Because sometimes, I feel like we he becomes a ‘’boogeyman’’ - Neil becomes a pure villain, his only agency being to make the characters suffer. His abusive behaviour becomes ‘’just’’ a plot point used to justify Billy’s extreme behaviour. And it’s a shame! This simplification, to me, is shame, because no matter if the writer chooses to depict physical or psychological abuse, their is nothing simple about a parent abusing their child.
And that can lead to me disconnecting from the fic : in some of those cases, whenever a character learns that Billy’s being beaten, they don’t tell Hopper/the police or any adults, do not try to take Billy away, do not confront Neil. Which CAN be justified, through character motives or reasoning, but more often then not, it just isn’t . They just don’t do anything until Billy can legally leave, and that throws me off, because those characters literally fought monsters from other dimensions.
Let me say again, that in the context of the fic, it can be justified why the characters choose to not say anything - Billy threatens them not to talk, there’s only 1 month left until he can leave, he’s worried about Max, etc. But as I reader, I want to hear those reasons.
In one of the fic I read, no one told Hop until very late, and when he learns it he’s so mad - and that felt fair! The characters had their own reasoning to not talk about it, which as a reader I might not agree with, but then another character challenges their reasoning, which s a reader is nice/ interesting to see. Anyway, I'm not throwing shade to fics that don't want to explore the abuse dynamics in depth, everyone's entitled to how/ what they want to write. I just keep thinking about this as I read more and more fics, and need to write it down somewhere.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Like two days ago I was thinking about how Steve doesn't have a book for some reason, and so I thought, "wouldn't it have been cool is he and Billy got a book together set after season 2, but before the events of season 3?" So, I decided to make a little mockup of what a cover for a novel like that would look like and then got a little carried away and wrote a little synopsis of what I'd think the plot would be. 😂
Stranger Things: Rock the Casbah: Synopsis
"Summer of 1985. It’s been a while since the Starcourt mall opened, and Steve’s found himself working at Scoops Ahoy. Initially, he hated it, but as time went on, he came to genuinely like his new job, even preferring being at work over being at home. This change was largely in part because of his coworker Robin, whom he quickly grew a liking towards, with one of the first things he learned about her being that her best friend, Heather Holloway, loves coming in on her break to order ice cream, or rather, distract Robin from her job."
"One day, Heather and Steve were making small talk when she mentioned that she and her friend were thinking of getting a second job on top of their current one at the pool, so he told her about how the jazzercise place a couple of stores down was hiring. He didn’t think much of this, knowing just how thrilled Robin would be if Heather began working there; it wasn’t until two weeks later, when Steve saw Heather walking in with that blonde asshole, that he realized his mistake."
"Before he knew it, Billy became a regular in his life, always coming by on his breaks to mess with him, and if that wasn’t bad enough, Robin actually began finding his antics funny, even teasing Steve about how needy his “boyfriend” was. As if. Steve hated Billy ever since the fight at the Byers house; by all means, the only reason he tolerated him was because he’s Heather’s best friend… boyfriend? Fuck buddy? Steve wasn’t really sure what they were to each other. Now, do they have some things in common? Yeah. And has Billy managed to make him chuckle a couple of times during their banter? Yes. And sure, sometimes he felt a little excitement when he saw Billy sauntering into the parlor… But it’s just for Robin and Heather’s sake, nothing more."
"Besides that, things were fine, great even, until Steve heard a rumor that one of the stores in the mall had a couple of items seemingly vanished the night before. Now this wasn’t anything new; kids pocket shit all the time. But then it kept happening; more stores began finding items disappearing without a trace, until one day Steve clocked into work only to find the majority of utensils and three tubs of ice cream from the freezer gone; on top of that, he’d later learn that multiple pieces of workout gear had also been taken from the Jazzercise studio that same night."
"But despite it being the fourth week in a row that several stores had been robbed, the police haven’t been called once, with the newspaper not even making as much as an off-handed comment toward this string of robberies. Meanwhile, their bosses seemed almost apathetic towards it all, only telling them that they were looking into it before asking them to not mention this to anyone outside of the mall. Now, Robin and the others just chalked this up to the owners not wanting any bad publicity within the mall’s first year, but Steve knows when there’s a cover-up of any kind in Hawkins, there’s never a simple reason for it."
"His first thought was to go to Nancy or the party, but while he was sure that there was something more to this, a part of him couldn’t help but doubt his intuition. The idea of getting everyone worked up about a new strange happening, only for it to turn out that there was a perfectly normal, non-multi-dimensional reason for it, just makes him cringe; Steve already has enough people questioning or mocking his intelligence as it is, and he really doesn’t want to add fuel to the fire."
"So, he started looking into it himself, planning on only telling the others if he finds anything damning, but despite his best efforts, Steve repeatedly comes up short, and as the thefts continue, he begins to second-guess his plan; maybe he just wasn’t capable of something like this on his own. That was until Robin found out and insisted on helping him, with Steve reluctantly agreeing on the one condition that she doesn’t tell anyone. Needless to say, Heather and Billy also found out, but soon enough the four ended up discovering a major secret lying beneath Starcourt’s floor."
"This most recent adventure finds Steve questioning his own capabilities while dealing with some other issues he’s been burying deep down for longer than he’d like to admit. But in order to keep both himself and the others safe, he’ll have to push past his insecurities and rise to the occasion, maybe even finding solace in someone unexpected along the way."
So... Yeah.
I should say, I have no intentions to actually write this, at least not now, but of course, here Billy and Heather wouldn't have been flayed and instead joined the party.
I'd also like to mention that since the Nancy and Robin book was (I'm assuming) named after the song "One Way or Another" I also wanted this to be named after a popular song from the time. "Rock You Like A Hurricane," for obvious reasons, and admittedly I chose "Rock The Casbah" because I began associating it with Harringrove after reading "Cabin 28" by @flayedintheusa on ao3. (Read it, it's great!)
I'm leaning towards "Rock The Casbah," as the name since, hypothetically if this were real, while Billy would definitely be the secondary main character, Steve would be the main main character. Idk, "Rock You Like A Hurricane" would probably be used for a book where Billy's the main character; maybe it would even be the sequel to this book set in season 4, since he'd still be alive in this timeline.
I also tried to make a version that featured Robin and Heather, but couldn't figure out how to fit them in properly. I might try to make another cover with all four of them sometime.
Lastly, I also created a less, bright/purple version of the cover. I wanted for Steve and Billy to be more purple because that's what red and blue make, and I'm not sure whether I'm entirely happy with it or not.
Comparison:
Personality I do prefer the brighter version of the cover, but I'd be interested if people like the darker one more. (Also I'm not an editor by any means, I did this in a couple hours on my phone, so apologies if anything looks jankie)
