bentonbadger
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Latest Posts by bentonbadger
an absolute fuckton of people at pride rn
STOP! before you decide you are irretrievably doomed, try one of the following options:
transition
bdsm
iron supplements
Been meaning to make this for over a year; felt appropriate that it's my first project of 2025.
What a magnificent life to live
This man's an expert
another deranged drawing from my demented mind
Let's Talk About Noah Schnapp
In light of everything that's happened in the last few days—namely Netflix releasing its first teaser for Stranger Things Season 5—many are returning to Stranger Things spaces online here and elsewhere for the first time in months. Maybe years. So, it's time to have this conversation again, because many people weren't here when some of us were having this conversation in the lull between content; and we're due for an update.
Buckle up—this is going to be long. I intend for this to be a mega post on the whole situation in so far as I can cover it, with receipts and screenshots.
The Conversation Around Noah
Put bluntly—the vitriol around Noah Schnapp has become dangerously insane. It's been that way for 2 years, but the renewed spotlight on Stranger Things, especially as Noah is set to take center stage in a Will Byers-centric season, has revived some of the worst elements of the conversation.
"What do you mean?", you may be asking. Well, I think it might just be better to show you:
This is just a sampling. If I showed you every tweet — every post — every video I've seen with this rhetoric, I'd need another medium to do it. A tumblr blog alone couldn't contain it all. But I take it you see my point now.
How Did Things Get This Way?
There are people on this app and on #that app who will say this behavior/treatment is warranted. They'll tell you that Noah is a "genocide supporter." That he "cheered for the deaths of Palestinian babies." That he "celebrated as people were being murdered." But none of this is true.
As a reminder, this was what Noah actually said—his very first comments on the matter—right after the Hamas attack that happened on October 7, 2023:
Important to note:
"...we will hope and pray for safety, justice, liberation, and self determination in Palestine."
and
"...we will say a Jewish prayer for peace for all Israelis and Palestinians."
That is the literal antithesis of support for a genocide or the wholesale slaughter of anyone.
The very next thing to happen was the infamous "sticker video" about which the most lies have been told, so let's debunk them one by one:
He did not make the stickers.
He did not wear the stickers.
He did not hand out the stickers.
He did not hold up the stickers.
He did not even touch the stickers.
He did not post the video on any social anywhere.
I've posted a pair of screenshots here that give you the gist in lieu of the video itself, but you can Google the video and watch the entire thing to see that I'm telling the truth.
What actually happened was that Noah was taken to a restaurant by a pair of influencers who were his guides while on a school-sponsored trip to Israel. Both were significantly older than him, were responsible for the video in question, were the only ones in it (aside from the waitress) to actually touch the stickers in question... and yet? Noah bore the brunt of the hate that ensued. When the backlash came, they abandoned him and left him to the wolves. (And perhaps because of that, he no longer associates with either one of them, nor follows any related social media accounts—all of which he was required to follow in the first place as terms of going on the trip through his school.)
Noah had just come out of the closet earlier that year and was 18 years-old. He would only turn 19 years-old in the ensuing weeks.
He has addressed these events several times. Most famous was the TikTok that he made explaining his actual position (that he doesn't want anyone, Palestinian or Israeli, to die). Less famous were remarks he made to fans on Snapchat:
I'll post his remarks here for those who can't read the text:
Hey guys! I appreciate you reaching out. To give you context, I did not post this language or this sticker. I was at breakfast with friends, it happened to be an Israeli cafe, and a girl was handing out stickers. Someone photographed me and posted and tagged me. As you guys know better than most people, social media can be used however people want to use it. I understand the weight of the situation and take it very seriously. I have friends of friends who are currently being held hostage in Gaza right now. My friends kids were killed in the massacre at the Israeli music festival. Standing up against this terrorism is important to me and why I made my statement after the attack. As one of the only few Jewish people with a platform, I absolutely think it's important to share my message about hatred for Jews around the world right now. However, everyone online is obviously twisting everything and saying I support genocide and am Islamophobic which is obviously entirely false and never have I stated either of those things. Seeing what is happening to the innocent people in Palestine pains me so much and I wish it would stop. I fully support everyone in Palestine as I said in my post on Instagram. One of my best friends in college is Palestinian and we talk about this issue allllll the time and agree on most things. I think people on social media are just animalistic right now so it's hard to even chime in because they just rip me apart so now I'm staying out of it.
I'll let that stand on it's own. I think it provides the context behind his remarks, the situation with the video/stickers, and his actual views versus how social media portrays his views. It also explains why he hasn't said anything else in almost 2 years.
The key takeaway: He was speaking out against antisemitism and the attack on Jewish people on October 7 and he supports an end to what is happening in Gaza and fully supports Palestinians. He literally says it.
And this support, by the way, has been corroborated by his own actions and the word of mouth from Palestinian organizations he has contributed to:
What Has Happened Since?
It would be easier to list the things that haven't happened; but I'll try anyways:
Noah has been called antisemitic slurs; gay slurs and targeted with gay stereotypes; been compared to antisemitic caricatures; he's been threatened with death and had posts go viral fantasizing about his brutal murder; his family has been threatened; he's been threatened with rape and sexual abuse; there are massive accounts on Twitter that doxxed his location while he was filming Season 5—particularly targeting him when he was alone; he's been hacked, had personal pictures leaked; he's had lies spread about his treatment of his cast mates (all of whom have spoken out and said that they've loved him at some point since, making these claims unequivocally false.
Here are a few examples:
Again, I can only post a sample. I hope that sample is enough to get the message across.
It's hard to overstate how cataclysmic this has been. Obviously, he's recovered and healed a lot since the initial incident; but the damage done needs to be acknowledged. These attacks drove him into a dark place by his own admission. He talked about needing therapy on his (now deleted) private spam TikTok account. And they are starting up yet again.
And Then There's the Fandom
The Stranger Things fandom in the wake of all this has been an irritating place to be. Not just because of the above behavior but because of the blanket hypocrisy.
The shipping sub-fandoms in particular have been rank with antisemitism and homophobia—even the Byler fandom, which is predominantly queer. People have:
A) Taken pre-Stranger Things photos—like his baby pictures or pictures with his family—to use as part of their content, their profile pictures, their banners, their fan art, their fan edits, etc.—violating his and his family's privacy for "Will" all while calling him "ugly," a "fag," and lobbing the above-listed threats at him. B) Tried to recast him with a fan cast. These fan casts are almost never Jewish actors, you'll notice. In fact, there's someone on this very app that recast Will Byers as himself. This is gross and absurd. Will Byers is intrinsically tied to Noah Schnapp. Tied to his identities as a Jewish person and a gay man. Tied to his experiences being a character he helped bring to life during his formative years. C) Persist in stanning or support his cast mates despite the fact that they continue to associate with him. This, in particular, is gross hypocrisy. If you're going to be mad at Noah Schnapp for being in a restaurant around stickers you object to—guilt by proximity/association, in other words—those SAME standards should apply to his cast mates, who continue to hang out with him outside of work, state that they love him, and post him on their social medias. I have a whole post about that here.
Instead, the cast is continually afforded blanket immunity while he is singularly targeted for continued abuse and harassment.
It should give the fandom some pause that openly pro-Palestine actors like Maya Hawke not only continue to hang out with him; but in her Instagram story, even stated that she misses it (check the link above for a screenshot of said story). She wouldn't do that if she thought he somehow supported mass-murder; and she knows him way better than any one reading this blog. That goes for the rest of them, too.
They know him better than you. They know his moral compass and what he believes. And they haven't abandoned him and obviously aren't going to. So, are you going to stick to your guns and apply your anger evenly; or maybe consider that you don't have the full picture?
So, Why Care?
I get this in my Asks so often. "Why do you care?" "He's a celebrity." "He don't know you." "He's not your pookie."
I know. It's not about that.
Yes, full disclosure, I am obviously a fan of Noah's. Have been since the show started. And no it's not because I'm gay and he's gay or because he plays my favorite character in Stranger Things.
Like many of his fans, I've spent the last decade seeing his lives on Instagram and TikTok, seeing his fan interactions, watching his vlogs and videos, and I've come to respect him as a human being quite apart from Will Byers or his role as an actor. Fundamentally, I really believe he is a kind and caring human being. The word of mouth from everyone who knows or has met him bares this out—and, yes, he's even been kind to me in the few conversations we've had.
This is only one example from Instagram during The First Shadow premiere this year; but I think it encapsulates what I like about Noah most. He's kind. He goes out of his way to be kind. He does things he doesn't have to do, contractually or just in general, for the sake of being kind. He always has been.
He's also stood up for a plethora of causes. Black Lives Matters, trans rights, the rights of women. He's known to be his cast mates' biggest supporter—and they'll tell you as much, too.
But quite apart from my personal feelings about him and more importantly: this is wrong.
Antisemitism is wrong. Homophobia is wrong. Both kill. Still, to this day. As I am sitting in my kitchen writing this, the news just broke that an Indigenous gay man and a celebrity was shot dead in front of his husband—after having his home burned down and dogs burned alive—in the United States. Yesterday, news broke that a gathering of peaceful Jewish protesters (which included children and the elderly) demanding the release of hostages still held by Hamas was firebombed in Colorado. Luckily, they all survived, but six people were injured in that attack.
Violence and bigotry are ascendent everywhere right now. Minority communities are being targeted. Normalizing the behavior I've described and shown above kills marginalized people. Regardless of your feeling about Noah as a person or celebrity, normalizing the violent and bigoted remarks, tweets, and behavior towards him harms Jewish and LGBTQIA+ people—all of us.
And just as an example of that, I give you the treatment Finn Wolfhard is now receiving just for the "crime" of shaving his head and being deemed no longer conventionally attractive by the fandom:
Yes, the general audience found out about Finn's Jewish heritage and now he's a target, too.
And this fandom is at fault for it.
You cannot normalize bigotry towards one person and expect it to stay contained to that one person. It will always harm everyone in that community. Finn Wolfhard—or any other actor/actress—being your favorite is not going to spare him from the consequences of a discourse you started.
ALL antisemitism and ALL homophobia needs to be called out. The people who insist it's okay that they do that for ANY reason—regardless of if they themselves are LGBTQIA+ or not—need to be ejected from the fandom and never let back in.
Noah Schnapp is a human being. He does not deserve this treatment. No one does. No one is saying you have to like him or even care about him. But you SHOULD care that this is how he's being treated and the impact it is having on others. The impact on Jewish people. The impact on queer people. Standing up and saying that does not mean you support genocide or murder or bigotry of any kind. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I am a person with left-leaning values. I'm tired of those values being spat on and dragged through the mud by people who think THIS is activism or is in any way helping a cause. It's not. All it is doing is perpetuating harm on a real person and real communities—queer and Jewish alike. And it needs to stop.
Related Blogs:
I've compiled some related blogs that expand on other elements of the situation that I've mentioned above in greater detail. This post was already long enough. I'll be updating this as more content comes out.
Examples of Noah’s Support for Gaza and Palestine (by @nymphus-fan-account)
The Evolution of a Lie
No, the Stranger Things Cast Does Not Hate Noah Schnapp
Lyric Vault’s Obsession with Noah Schnapp
i ❤️ my phone so i made it a bedroom to go to sleep in when i want to reduce my screen time
It’s 2025. BBC Sherlock ended 8 years ago. The last season was so bad the fans didn’t even want to talk about it when it came out. Occasionally a post resurfaces where we all laugh at struggling to plug our phones in and being called alcoholics. Every time, there are more and more people in the comments who don’t get the joke. There are two currently airing Sherlock Holmes audio dramas that both portray a queer Holmes (as well as several other excellent queer characters), and one of them now has Holmes and Watson in a canonical romantic relationship. There’s an adorable crowdfunded short film where Watson plans Holmes’ birthday party and they flirt with each other, share a bed, plan their retirement, and kiss on the mouth. A video game about retired beekeeper Holmes just released where he arranges a romantic picnic so he can finally tell Watson how he feels. A popular graphic novelist just released the first part of a queer comic book retelling of the complete Holmes canon and had to do several rounds of preorders because she kept selling out too fast. Sherlock is garbage and here’s why has 15 million views on YouTube. Nature is healing. ❤️🐝
Edit bc I forgot to drop the names: The podcasts are Sherlock & Co and Fawx & Stallion aka @224bbaker (the one with the canon gay relationship.) The short film is called The Adventure of the Furtive Festivity and it's on youtube. The video game is @beekeeperspicnic and it's on Steam. The graphic novel series is by Molly Knox Ostertag, aka @contact-guy) Please feel free to drop any other queer Holmes adaptations I may be missing.
Former Minnesota Vikings punter, Chris Kluwe, who was blacklisted from the league for standing up for marriage equality, speaks at a city council meeting where he calls Trump a Nazi. He is subsequently arrested and carried out by police.
Btw, this is how conservatives keep getting to claim that trans people are a new thing no one has ever heard, because our history and existences have continually been erased or obscured systematically through out history.
The most famous example was 92 years when the Nazis raided the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the medical practice where the term transsexual was first coined and the first gender affirming surgery was performed in in 1931.
What did the Nazis do after raiding the library on May 6th, 1933? You may be familiar with these images
It is happening again.
a good way to inspire yourself to do more is to see yourself as the wacky sitcom B plot character in your friends lives, "wouldnt it be funny to tell the friends in my phone about it." has gotten me to do anything from going to a festival (excelent) to wild camping (it went badly) (coastguard called) to trying to get the train to stonehenge (stonehenge costs money so i ended up just getting lunch in sailsbury, it was okay.) i bought a bicycle today and 20% of my reasoning was "itd be funny to surprise my roommate by coming home with a whole bike." . life is for living. and baby i live for the bit.
Reblog daily for health and prosperity
Seven months of searching for her lost son brought Bettersten Wade to a dirt road leading into the woods, past an empty horse stable and a scrapyard. The last time she’d seen her middle child, Dexter Wade, 37, was on the night of March 5, as he left home with a friend. She reported him missing, and Jackson police told her they’d been unable to find him, she said. It wasn’t until 172 excruciating days after his disappearance that Bettersten learned the truth: Dexter had been killed less than an hour after he’d left home, struck by a Jackson police car as he crossed a nearby interstate highway. Police had known Dexter’s name, and hers, but failed to contact her, instead letting his body go unclaimed for months in the county morgue.
GEE I WONDER IF THESE ARE RELATED
The decision to call the police was difficult for Bettersten. She did not trust them. In 2019, her 62-year-old brother died after a Jackson officer slammed him to the ground. The officer was convicted of manslaughter but is appealing. Her family filed a wrongful death lawsuit accusing Jackson officers of excessive force and attempting to cover up their actions, and accusing the city of failing to properly train and supervise the officers. The city has denied the claims and said it isn’t liable for what happened. The officers’ lawyer said they acted responsibly and lawfully. A federal judge dismissed some of Bettersten’s claims; others remain pending in state court. Bettersten said her mother advised her not to call the police about Dexter.
The whole thing is worth reading, its not that long. But other key points: the coroner IDed Dexter within a few days and gave the info to the police to notify the family. After months of no info, officer in charge of missing persons retired. Within two weeks, the replacement officer notified her of the death and took her to fetch the body from a paupers field where coroner buried unclaimed bodies.
amazing double dance by hao ruoqi ( in blue)and wang xuerou(in red)
You own the home you live in. The last owners painted the walls of your bedroom a horrible off white.
You fucking hate it. Every day you wake up to off-white walls and off-white ceilings and pass through your off-white door to get to the rest of the house. You feel like you've been locked up in a padded room. It makes you want to die.
So what is there to do? Well, you own the home. Go out and get some paint, a roller or two, and a drop cloth. If the color makes you want to kill yourself, you should obviously change it.
But what if you didn't hate it. What if it just mildly perturbed you? Or maybe what if you didn't, like, reeeeeally mind it all that much, but you knew that another color would make you a lot happier? Does the decision that you come to change?
Sure, it's work moving the furniture out, setting up, painting, making sure you get the edges, cleaning up, letting it all dry, etc, but isn't adding joy to your life worth the effort? Don't you owe it to yourself to subtract mediocrity and add happiness? Do you need to be miserable to envision a better life?
i know it's hard. but i so firmly believe the strongest antidote to loneliness is reaching out first. and continuing to reach out. again and again and again. excise any scrap of shame you hold about being the person who texts first or pitches the plan or asks to get lunch. everyone is tired and busy and struggling. and afraid of feeling unwanted and unimportant. don't let the people you love feel that way. reach out first. don't be a ghost in your own life.
Tweet of the year imo
Description: Tiktok from user theomasters stitching user jascoombs. The first video shows a girl with a text to speech voice saying "apparently you're meant to look like your boyfriend's fave disney princess." It cuts to a nonbinary person sitting at a computer and the guy behind the camera says "Emma who's your favorite disney princess?" Emma says "Chicken little." The camera flips around to reveal a guy with short red hair and round glasses. He pauses for a second and then wheezes.
I want to do cute little embroidery on some jeans but idk what to do and I don't have many colors of thread
Start
Sometimes I think about lesbian icon renée vivien lauging so hard she had to leave a lecture bc the man was talking about how a book of anonymously published love poetry was the pinnacle depiction of a young man’s desire towards women…… but it was her book. She wrote it. About her girlfriend.
I wish i had big claws to dig a little burrow in the dirt and sleep in it i think it would solve all my problems