people who don't like billy have this weird hyperindividualistic assumption that he should've just pulled himself up by his bootstraps and been better through sheer power of will and the only one ever responsible for his action is him himself, completely disregarding that his situation is systemic and how completely stuck he is where he is. this is a guy who's mother abandoned him, who's learnt from that that no one will ever come to save him, who's had an ideal of masculinity violently imposed on him (much of which revolves around not being a weak, gay pussy) that he gets beaten for not adhering to, who, for all these reasons, never learnt how to reach out for help. in addition to that he's been uprooted from his home in california where he might've had people to even reach out to and was instead brought into some shit town in the middle of nowhere where no one knows him and he knows no one except the people keeping him stuck.
he doesn't cope in the healthiest of ways, fucking obviously, and given his situation yeah, he wouldn't be.
thing is now he's got all these internalised ideas that it's his normal. and he's not given a reason to question his normal. you cannot expect someone who's only ever learnt that problems are being solved with violence to not solve problems with violence. it's a strange assumption to just go "um well, why didn't he wake up one day and just realise that the things he did were wrong?" because 1) that's not how it works and 2) if he's learnt that doing wrong things gets him punished, then he'd have all the more reason to cover up and push those wrong things aside to avoid punishment.
point is, and why i brought up the word hyperindividualistic in this context, is that he's been failed by pretty much everyone around him. he's been failed by his father who abuses him in the first place, failed by his mother who abandoned him aka the parents who are, like, the primary people obligated to take care of and protect him. he's been failed by other adults like the women who ogle him for his looks but never question why a teenager would flirt with someone so much older than himself. not that it is ever brought up but presumably he's been failed by teachers as well which can only be excused by billy keeping up facades of everything being alright. even max kind of fails him by continuing to lie to him (when being lied to is clearly established as the catalyst for pretty much all his angry outbursts that we see in the show), thereby leaving him entirely defenseless when the mind flayer takes over. yet somehow he is solely responsible to get himself out of that situation, a situation he had no control over even getting into. a big part of his tragedy is that no one ever cared enough to recognise that.
even WHEN he is repentant and begging for help the show continues to punish him and neither sees another way out of his situation than death. and his death is even made so much worse considering that FINALLY someone DID reach out to him and was gentle with him (el) and it touches him so much it breaks the mind control and he sacrifices his life for her and the others.
makes it so much more atrocious and mean-spirited how the s2 finale at the byers' house is handled with max using drugs and threats of violence to make billy follow her demands. the intention of the show might have been to have it be a mirror moment to how he's treated her in earlier scenes, using the same/similar wordings ("say it") and how he's getting a taste of his own medicine and how this is a moment of empowerment for max who's found courage through her new friends to fight back at all, wow you go girlboss. but really she's just perpetuating the cycle of abuse here. the method of blackmailing with violence is the same his father uses on billy, billy uses on max, and max uses back on billy.
it becomes especially weird in a show about how strangers, especially the "freaks and outcasts" come together in love and friendship to defeat a big evil. these are allegedly all people who've been isolated and outcast for their non-conformity and/or undesirability one way or another and find community and belonging with one another, find people to reach out to and who reach out to them. and it's tragic because apparently the power of love and friendship can defeat interdimensional smoke and goo monsters but it cannot save your problematic step-brother.
titsay
tangentwithtanner
pixelskylines
gummygunk
