It's Fucked Up We Don't Know Argyle's Last Name

A rant (kinda?)

Billy's story was told based on his importance to the overall plot of Stranger Things rather than the importance of the issues the story brought up and I'm still kinda pissed about that. Obviously, each character can only get so much time. But if you know from the start that you're only going to give a certain character a small amount of screen time, you shouldn't add elements as huge and complicated as parental abuse/abandonment. Or, if you do, you should also consider devoting a very large portion of that character's on-screen time to those things or giving the character more time.

Because I'm just really sick and tired of posts where Billy is erased or censored or called irredeemably evil. It's really not fair to fans of his with abuse in their pasts who related to him. It's not right that what people seem to have taken from his storyline is that there is a right and wrong way to be a teenage victim of child abuse, and that if your anger at your home situation causes you to lash out (generally in ways that you would need a fairly high level of emotional maturity not to), you're not worth anyone's time.

And it sucks that parallels were drawn and then dropped in ways that encouraged the fandom to compare Billy to other characters in different (currently non-abusive) situations and with different levels of support, and find him lacking. Because it inevitably places a lot of really unfair blame on a victim (why didn't he just make friends like Eleven did that could have helped him? Why didn't he reject his father's violence like Jonathan (apparently single-handedly) did? Why wasn't he able to still be gentle like Will?). Especially because the situations of all of those characters are drastically different than Billy's was.

Billy wasn't his abuse, but the abuse was an inescapable part of him. Much like a plant choked by weeds isn't defined by the weeds but is massively affected by them. And you can't expect a plant still covered by weeds to be anything like a formerly choked plant that has been moved to empty soil and given water and a clear path to the sun's light. You can't expect it to be anything like a plant that's been properly cared for all its life. If the choked plant happens to have enormous reserves of strength and resilience and manages to bloom as brightly as the other plants despite the weeds, that's wonderful, but it's never something that should be expected without help. Ever. And I wish Stranger Things had been clearer on that.

Stranger Things stans went on a mission to make everyone hate Grace Van Dien and instead earned themselves the title of most toxic and annoying fanbase on any social media platform and helped Grace earn even more defenders while everyone (even people outside the fandom) started to call them out on their shit, as they should.

Your shit backfired.

Cosmo: So, are you the little spoon or the big spoon?

Anti-Cosmo: I’m a knife you ignorant boob!

Anti-Wanda, across the room, eating a sandwich: He’s the lil’ spoon.

A fun fact about me is that I utterly loathe Stranger Things as a clumsy narrative and as a pop culture megalith—except in the areas where it concerns the 5-ish characters that were written with some genuine depth or pizazz and thus too good for the series to effectively explore.

argyle being an older brother to billy when

//Tw For Abuse, Suicide and other extensive childhood traumas, also long post of pouring my heart out cause I take fictional characters to my poor traumatized heart

Can we really talk about the S4 Vol2 Speech, though?

I can understand Max’s mixed feelings about her brother. I have some of my own about my sister, who behaved a lot like him and hurt me in some ways, even if she didn’t always mean to.

First, I want to talk about the fact that Max HAD TO KNOW that Billy was abused, to some degree.

Not because she was living in the same house as him for years, but because she continues the cycle. After she sedates Billy in the fight at the Byers’, she threatens him—

“Say you understand! Say it!”

A few scenes before this, his father says nearly the exact same thing— “Do you understand? Say it.” (Maybe not exactly but using most of those words.)

So Max would’ve had to have heard it used before, because it would mean she knew that’s how you get Billy to “agree” with something. And Max— Max is a good person. She’s good-natured, funny, and clever.

So you really expect me to think that Max, knowing her brother was abused and didn’t have a mother for some reason, after he sacrificed himself for all of her friends and very nearly the world crying and apologizing over and over in front of her, DIDN’T THINK HE DESERVED TO BE SAVED? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

I can understand the idea that he was the greatest “normal-world” terror in her life. My sister didn’t affect me directly, but her problems were a full time job and distracted my parents from me while I was still very young. On top of that, her and my other sister liked to gang up on and bully me. So trust me, I get it.

Let’s take a look at what Billy did.

He grabbed Max, threatened to hit her friends with his car, yelled at her a few times, made a vague comment against Lucas after seeing Max fight with him (which there’s a lot to say about this but I’ll keep it at the fact that Dacre has said this wasn’t racist and that the Dxffers refuse to deal with any issues whatsoever), pushed Lucas up against a wall, and fought with Steve. I’m not including the Vecna/Mind Flayer bs in this because he did it against his will, not to mention the reason he did half this shit.

Yes, I can understand how that could be scary, especially for a thirteen year old. Using my sister as an example yet again, she died at 18, right when she was “starting to get better.” Billy was doing the same, as he and Max seemed to have a truce in between S2/S3. She even said in her book that she wasn’t scared of him, but that’s largely considered “non-canon.” To summarize, she understood he was abused and was even on level terms with him.

With my sister, I was not. I relate to Billy myself, but I largely relate Billy to my sisters, mainly my oldest sister (I really mean this. She acted out and got the attention of older people and went in and out of mental hospitals and was suicidal and got in a fist fight with my mother once, etc etc etc) Like I said before, my sisters bullied me (my parents and grandparents have admitted to me that they even knew they were outright nasty) and my sisters’ problems were largely the cause of one of my biggest issues. My sisters both acted out, distracted my parents from me, my whole family trauma dumped on very young me, etc etc etc. Really, that time of my life was a huge mess. And then my sister died, and even more trauma dumped on me from that (emotional abuse and neglect, divorce trauma, the fact that my sister was fucking dead and never coming back never never never how can someone just disappear, Etc). So we rarely got along and the rest of the time we were mostly neutral.

I’m not going to lie. I don’t really do it anymore, but when I was younger I’d curl up and cry about how I was all alone because my parents were to busy with them. I blamed them. I still do, but not in a how-could-you-do-that-to-me way and more of a these-events-caused-you-pain-and-got-you-attention-and-I-suffered-in-silence-for-multiple-reasons-that-aren’t-your-fault way.

You know what I don’t do? Say she didn’t deserve to be saved. Cause she did. She really fucking did. She could be mean and horrible and cold and she wasn’t even close to me but she was only eighteen, only for a couple of months (like Billy), and she was still a baby, she wasn’t even old enough to drink. She was small, she was always small, she’s just a kid. She was getting better and learning how to cope and being nicer to me and she was finding a purpose and getting a handle on herself and then she was just—

Gone. I still don’t understand how someone can just stop existing. Me and my sister still talk about how we expect her to just walk through the door, smack us on the back of the head, and laugh at us for believing it— that anything could ever kill her, of all people. That it was some big joke and we were dumbasses for believing it. It’s been years now, but I still break down at night crying over her. My sister and I have this bone-deep understanding of each other now that I can’t explain— it’s so genuine and whole that it kinda scares me. We call each other after nightmares and share dreams with her in them. My sister blames all of the “paranormal” activity in her house on her and tells me about it. Every time I see a bug (her nickname) or a rainbow I send it to her. When I was younger, I used to wish something would happen, either to her or to me, just so something would change. Do you know what I think every day? How she deserved better. How it should’ve been me or someone else. How she deserved to be saved.

Because “inconvenient” abuse victims deserve to be saved. People who’ve been broken and beaten and discarded and ignored and assaulted their whole lives aren’t irremediable and they deserved to be saved. My sisters deserved to be saved and I deserved to be saved and people like us, people like Billy, deserved to be saved too.

In short, fuck the Duffle Bag Bitches. I’m keeping this eccentric rat fucker close to my fucking heart and I’ll redeem and defend him eight thousand times if it means someone like me, like us, like Billy gets even a glimmer of hope to keep going.

Me when I saw Black Doom’s squid eye in the new SonicXShadow Generations trailer:

I just want Dacre, Eduardo, and Grace to know they’re loved and appreciated. Do they know?? It keeps me up at night not knowing if they know that

I really love the changes the Avatar Live Action Series does to the Bumi storyline

Warning Spoilers

So I've been weeding into the discussion about the Netflix Avatar series, and I'm seeing a lot of people talk about how they don't like the changes done to Bumi's storyline and character; when I think it is one of the strongest changes, and really hits home what Aang's role in the world is

First off, I want to say, over a decade since I've been introduced to the series, it never clicked to me that Bumi, being over a hundred years old, has been alive and been fighting the war against the Fire Nation the entire time Aang was frozen. We don't know necessarily how he came to power as King (I don't get the feeling he was born royalty?); but we can maybe assume that he was forced into power at a young age, or at the very least forced to take responsibility and grow up very early and very fast. And that weighs on him, the sacrifices, the choices; something that Iroh in his storyline brings up, the dehumanization that results from war. Both to others and yourself. And when Aang shows up again, young and happy and just the same as he was before the war, Bumi is bitter. And every time he says "You abandoned us" the unspoken thing is "You abandoned me." More than needing the Avatar to fight battles, Bumi needed his friend.

So when Aang shows up again, he decides to teach him a lesson. To toughen him up like he was toughened up. To teach him he was to harden himself, to grow up, to sacrifice others, to not trust his friends, to be ruthless, to kill or be killed. Because that has to be what the Avatar is to win the war.

And Aang says NO

Aang refused, just like in the animated series when everyone tells him he has to kill Ozai and he says he will find another way. He refuses to cut off his feelings. He refuses to become heartless. He refuses to sacrifice others or let his friends die. And what happens? He remains strong and together with his friends, pointedly a bender of another nation and a non-bender, they find another way save everyone; to remind Bumi of their friendship, of what life was like before the war. That there is more than just hate and war and despair.

Bumi is not the teacher. Aang is

Because Aang the Avatar is more than just the most powerful bender. He is a symbol of hope. He is a rejection of everything Ozai says this season: that compassion is weakness, that sacrifice is a part of war, that you must give up the weak to be strong. We see Aang's return brings hope to the Earth Kingdom, the Water Tribes, and the Fire Nation dissidents. He represents and shows them that there is a different way. That they can work together, that they can find joy, find happiness, that the war can be won.

I want Joyce Byers to bitchsmack all the creepy Hawkins moms for having the damn nerves to ogle at Billy, a barely legally aged boy while he’s doing his job. Except for Karen.

I want her to throw a chair at her.