@willel @joycebyerslesbian your fanon Will is way better than canon Will and I love all your hcs from the bottom of my heart. thank you for writing them and saving my sanity after this sad excuse for a third season. ❣️
The metas I’ve read from you both have made me think more about how El’s isolation in the cabin should’ve actually been addressed in season 3 but wasn’t. It was a huge issue in season 2 and El actually got to have an opinion about it and do something about it. But in season 3 it was like, oh she has Mike in the cabin, and that’s all that matters, and it doesn’t matter how that affected her relationships with any other character. At all. She had no friendships. Mike was it. I get they addressed them spending too much time together, but El being forcefully isolated and not having anything outside of Mike was not addressed and that’s disgusting.
So I think I’ll just continue imagining a pre-s3 au where El actually invited the others to the cabin regularly, but there was a rule that it could only be two at a time. So first she invited Mike a lot, because duh. But then she invited Mike and Will together. And then she invited Will by himself, and they started to bond a lot over what they’d been through, what they had in common (WILL HAVING POWERS that he’s been afraid to talk about, but he finally confides in El at the cabin one day in late December).
Then she invites Lucas and Mike, and then Lucas by himself. And it’s LUCAS who convinces El to give Max a chance, on this cold January day. He brings over one of Max’s comics that Max had let Lucas borrow, and he tells El how cool Max is and how El would love a lot of the same things Max loves (bc Max is his girlfriend and he loves her and also sees a lot of El in Max bc of course he does). So eventually El decides to invite Lucas AND Max. And they watch a movie together, the three of them, and El follows Max into the kitchen on a break and Max ends up teaching El how to make popcorn on the stove. And they end up talking about Wonder Woman bc El brings up the comic Lucas let her borrow. Max is invited over a lot more after that.
And of course El invites Lucas and Dustin, Mike and Dustin, Dustin and Will, Lucas and Will, and they spend so many weekends playing improvised versions of dnd, El learning more about what being a mage means in the context of dnd because Dustin, Will, and Lucas are the best teachers. (Mike is too busy making cow-eyes at her to teach much.) Of course Dustin brings his Atari over for El to borrow for a few weeks, saying he’ll just go to the Byers’ to play Will’s when he wants to. El is absolutely fascinated by video games, and loves the story of how Max first became part of the party, by beating Dustin’s top score on Dig Dug.
And then the day finally comes when she invites Will and Max. And the gay power trio is born. I stand by my hc that Will comes out to El first, and she of course keeps his secret after he makes her understand the gravity of the situation. But after a couple months of knowing Will, and seeing him around El, Max starts to have suspicions, but doesn’t bring them up for a long time (and when she does it’s in a really touching scene with Will, bc of course Max is bisexual and has trouble accepting her same sex attraction bc of all the homophobic shit she’s heard from Neil).
Of course by March of ‘85 El is breaking the rules a bit by inviting 3 or 4 party members over at once but having them arrive at different times so Hopper never catches on.
Hopper started catching on in May but let it keep happening.
The first time the entire party got to go to the cabin, it was Mike’s birthday in June and El actually threw him a surprise party with mostly Max’s and Dustin’s help.