Okay so these are super totally useless headcanons, but they’re what I have regarding Stephen’s family and his history with them. And I’ve been meaning to post them for approximately ever because I deviate slightly from comic canon but in a lot of ways that are important for understanding where my Stephen’s personality traits come from. So I’m going to finally buckle down and get them all out.
So for my purposes, Eugene and Beverly Strange were barely married when Stephen was born in 1977 in Philadelphia. Eugene had been out in Philadelphia for several years, taking college courses to prepare to take over the Strange family farm back in Nebraska. At the time Eugene had several younger siblings still living on the farm and assisting his parents, which was what allowed him his short absence given his promise to return. He met Beverly Tilea at a friend’s party while in Philadelphia, where the unlikely couple started their somewhat torrid - at least by Nebraskan standards - romance. Beverly, at that point in her life, had been traveling around the country with friends, establishing her artistic freedoms and passion for music. One dance was apparently all it took for Eugene to fall for her. The two continued to date for another year and a half before Beverly got pregnant. During their time together their plans for the future ranged from settling anew in Los Angeles to finding some flat in New Orleans together. But when word got round to Eugene’s family and the pressure of returning to the farm began to come from his father, along with the threat of an oncoming child, the couple agreed to marry, settle out Eugene’s last year at college, and return to the farm in Nebraska.
This was the first moment in their relationship where dreams between the parents began to degrade. Eugene still deeply loved Beverly, but the bohemian woman he married came from a world he would never be able to enter or understand. And likewise Beverly cared for Eugene, and believed that at least insofar as raising a child was concerned, even the somewhat back-water stability of a Nebraska farm was beneficial, but knew going in that she would never perfectly fit into that world. They were married in August, and stayed on long enough to deliver Stephen in November of 1977, and returned to Plattsmouth NE in April of the following year. By this time Eugene’s younger siblings were preparing for college themselves, and Alwert Strange, Eugene’s father, needing to move toward retirement for the sake of his health. For Beverly it was a trial-by-brimstone transition, but for as much as Eugene was a more traditional man, his experiences in Philadelphia and his love for Beverly allowed her to at least carve a space for her artistic soul in their home, though the community was much slower on the uptake.
Stephen’s childhood was spent in the baking heat of the Strange family farmhouse, caught somewhere between the esteem of his family in the community and the outsider stigma the community had against his mother. (Until she began vengefully participating in local farmers markets and baking competitions, at which point her esteem was grudgingly allowed.) Stephen was also always a step above the intellect of his classmates and fellow children, a talent actively encouraged by his mother but also used against him in social situations. Eugene, as an eldest child himself, was more concerned with training Stephen the means to take on the farm himself one day, which was yet another separation between the parents. Eugene was not abusive to Stephen, but as Stephen grew older, the amount that the two could relate to one another decreased. The one place where Stephen and his father agreed, by the time he was a teenager, was the care and upkeep of the younger Stranges. Stephen was an adamant tease to his younger siblings, and also their greatest champion. Much like his mother’s fearful reputation among the community dames, even as a gangly teen Stephen took on a sincere factor of menace as far as the treatment of his younger siblings was concerned. Teaching them everything he knew and everything he could became his greatest hobby, and he was exceedingly close with both Victor and Donna. Between Eugene’s pragmatism and Beverly’s artistry, the Strange household did for a long while have its own balance, even while having the usual familial flaws.
Stephen was sixteen when tragedy finally came home to roost. Losing Donna, and the way in which he lost her, was the single worst event Stephen never wanted to have to live with. Regardless of the event not being his fault, Stephen internalized the blame, which became a nearly inevitable response when his relationship with Victor and his parents began to spiral thereafter. This was also a point at which the rift between his parents became increasingly obvious to Stephen, and their long years of disparate hopes and expectations began to fester. Beverly, who had maintained her color and vivacity for her children, began to resent all that she had put behind her for the sake of keeping the farm, and though not abusive, withdrew to an emotional distance that wounded both of her sons immeasurably. Eugene, sensing this same withdrawal and finding it untimely and selfish of his wife, took to overworking himself and his children to compensate and try to re-establish a sense of normalcy. Victor, too young to properly process the concurrent traumas, cleaved to the normalcy his father offered, as he’d always been closer to the idea of taking on the farm than Stephen or Donna.
The year before Stephen was due to graduate from high school, Beverly Strange passed away, seemingly from grief, though Stephen has never spoken to even his closest confidants about what precisely occurred. At this point in his life, Stephen was bearing the brunt of Eugene’s pressure to take on the farm, the loss of his mother, and his trauma regarding being unable to save his sister. During these times he was more often to be found sleeping off a hangover in the bed of his truck than at home, in spite of having accrued enough course grades to graduate from high school a year early. He filed a series of desperate and extensive college applications, one of his mother’s few final requests, and was accepted to Columbia University at the age of seventeen. With only enough of his possessions as he could pack in a night while his father and brother were up in Omaha trading at harvest, he left for New York. He never returned to Plattsmouth, or to the Strange family farm again.
Two years later, when Stephen was a sophomore at Columbia and all but starving to scrape together enough money to live off campus, he got word from the one uncle who hadn’t since disowned him - Eugene’s youngest brother Lawrence Strange, then moved to Philadelphia himself - that Eugene’s health was beginning to fail. Eugene didn’t expressly request Stephen’s presence, but Victor did. Victor was so insistent on Stephen’s coming to see their father that he went to Manhattan to pressure him in person, but that failed to entice Stephen to go and reconcile with their father. Victor made it back to Nebraska, but irate - and not uncommonly intoxicated - on the drive home, was in a seemingly fatal accident on the same night Eugene passed away. The will Eugene left was in flux given the passing of Victor, and for the next two years Stephen had to remain in contact with family in Nebraska who resented his decision to remain away, trying to process the sale and taxation of the farm and farmland.
Needless to say by the time it was all said and done, Stephen walked away with little more than a truck worth of possessions, and no desire to ever see the plains of Nebraska again. He remained in contact with his uncle Lawrence and his maternal grandmother Dumitra, but otherwise threw himself into his life in New York, eager to bury and never re-excavate everything left behind him.
