It feels like there's this narrative that fandom keeps wanting to explore, with Steve Harrington, about this very specific type of martyrdom where self-sacrifice is an expression of a lack of self-worth. And, like, yes, write the narrative that's meaningful to you, and yes ok Steve does admittedly get beaten up a lot, but -- legitimately I do not think this narrative is actually Steve's story.

Like, without gendering things too much, there is something in the Steve fanon that I keep seeing that's so reflective of the specific kind of sacrifice and societal pressures exerted on girls, specifically -- this story of 'you make yourself worthy and worthwhile by carving pieces out of yourself', of believing that you must always give and never receive to justify the space you take up in the world. Yes, boys can experience this same pressure (and obviously trans and nb people of all genders run into it as well! sometimes a lot!), but especially in the mid-1980s cultural context where Stranger Things takes place, it's just...really not likely to be a dominant narrative for Steve to be operating under? It doesn't even really match the Steve we see on screen -- who is happy to make sacrifices for the sake of others, yeah, when needed, but who's not particularly kind or giving unless somebody asks first.

And Steve does get hurt a lot on other people's behalf! And this is a problem! It's just a completely different problem than the one fandom keeps writing.

Steve, and I'm going to say this forever, is a story about toxic masculinity, which the show may or may not even know it's writing. The archetypes influencing Steve's character as it shows up on the screen (and the stories and messages that Steve would actually be surrounded by in his actual life) are not deconstructions of suffering heroes who never should have had to fight in the first place and were destroyed by it. That's the Buffy the Vampire Slayer story. Steve's not Buffy. Steve's cultural context is Indiana Jones.

Steve is The Guy! And part of being The Guy is that you're expected to take the hits -- not because Steve is less important than the women-and-children he's supposed to protect, but because, the story says, he will get less hurt. Why should Steve get in between Billy and Lucas? Because Steve is an eighteen-year-old athlete and Lucas is in middle school, and of the two of them, Steve actually stands a chance. (And yes, Steve got badly hurt there, and Max had to save him -- but if Lucas, if Max had taken that beating they would not have been running through those tunnels later.) Was somebody else better-qualified to dive down to the uncertain bottom of a cold lake in the middle of the night? Steve doesn't list his credentials there as a way of justifying some ideal of martyrdom; he is literally the most likely person on the boat not to drown.

And make no mistake: when Steve's pulled into the Upside-Down, he survives the bats long enough for backup to get there. Realistic or not, he's apparently tough enough that he's physically capable of hiking barefoot through hell without much slowing down. Steve is the tank for the same reason as any tank: because he literally has been shown to have the most hit points in the group. You cannot honestly engage with Steve in this context without dealing with the fact that he's right.

AND THIS IS A PROBLEM! This is still a problem! But it's not the same problem that fandom seems to expect. It's not an expression of caretaking or the need for self-sacrifice; it's not an issue with Steve valuing himself less. It's an issue of toxic masculinity so ingrained that Steve doesn't even recognize he's suffering from it, because one of the tenets of toxic masculinity is that Big Strong Guys don't suffer. It's just a concussion, it's fine, he'll walk it off. It's not that Steve thinks he deserves to get hurt, or even that he's less deserving of safety than the others. It's that absolutely nothing in his cultural context allows him to admit that he can be hurt in a significant way.

There's still so much tension that can be gotten out of this situation, I swear. There's so much that can be explored in writing! Hell, the show itself is deconstructing some of this trope, believe it or not, by giving us a Steve who absolutely can take all the hits thrown his direction but still doesn't know what the fuck he's doing with his life. It turns out that doing his job as The Guy is only mildly helpful in horror movie situations (mostly by buying time for smarter, squishier people to do the damage from behind him), and somewhere a little worse than useless in everyday life.

But Steve does not go out of his way to self-sacrifice, he really doesn't. He just does his job. He's The Guy. Of course he's not going to let a kid or a girl or some scared skinny nerd who just learned about monsters yesterday take the hits. Of course Steve's got this.

when people act like the only problems kon ever has are a) tim dating bernard and b) lex luthor

did this MONTHS ago but lost hero character lineup!! before casting comes out for pjo s2 and i have to redo my thalia/jason designs lol

(click for better quality/details!! ik tumblrs gonna eat it)

Figured I’d bitch about it here too, it’s really annoying

Is being critical of Sabine’s force sensitivity ‘gatekeeping’ the force or it is about how it undermines the established magic system and was not well written?

I’ll give you a clue it’s the second one.

To fanfiction authors: Please learn what Dead Dove means. There has been a trend, especially will all the new people who have joined over the last few years, to tag fics which are no where close to Dead Dove as Dead Dove. Just cause the fic contains topics which aren't allowed on tiktok or which they think are bad, like Major Character Death, Violence and so one. Which exists as seperate warnings on ao3. A fic is not automatically Dead Dove just cause it deals with those topics.

The overuse of the Dead Dove tag will make the tag utterly useless in the long run and will lead to an increase of censoring from the outside as new people and everyone else will think that everything they do not like is Dead Dove and therefore bad.

robert and penelope from that one game

Since I’m still trying to learn DC lore before i do anything wild for DCXDP.... and my main fandom is DCMK......

Squish the new blorbos and old blorbos together? Yes.

I might make more of these later, I have a few more sets of 1 character from each i wanna squish together. For now 5 feels like a good number though.

this is stupid.

Sitting in a restaraunt, it becomes apparent that this is the ideal, dysfunctional family. Maybe not nuclear but definitely radioactive.

EveryWitchHYBRID (2010 - 2018)

FANTASIA SQUAD MATCHING ICONS !!

Please like/rb if you use/save ^^

Happy April Fools :D

ok friends time for some very professional tumblr science:

dana terrace knows how fandoms work. she knows if you show ppl even the barest hint of an m/f couple, especially one involving an angsty white boy, ppl will jump on that shit like rabid dogs and itll completely overshadow whatever queer rep you want ppl to actually pay attention to. that’s why she introduced hunter the way she did. first they have an episode where luz gets kissed by a girl and it’s made clear to the audience that they’re on track to be each others love interests. and only then does she introduce hunter’s angsty blond YA love interest looking ass.

and even then they tried SUPER hard to hammer in how much hunter is NOT luz’s love interest. they make luz lean in as if she was going to kiss him and then smack him to show that she isn’t going to. and then they do that thing where hunter licks luz’s hand and luz wipes it on his face. which is something that has been memed to death with siblings. just so the audience immediately understands what kind of dynamic the show wants these two to have. if they skipped any of these steps they were worried the fandom would see luz have a close relationship with a conventionally attractive white boy and start foaming at the mouth for this ship to replace lumity. maybe if disney saw a boy and a girl who aren’t immediately sibling coded they’d also start foaming at the mouth for it to replace lumity. so the crew had to play it safe.

anyway my point is i hope the crew also knows what they’re doing with the huntlow ship. idk what they’re setting up but if the huntlow ship gets together and it’s not wedged between a full 10 minute clip of the raeda wedding and a full 10 minute clip of a sappy slice of life lumity date then every toh related tag is going to be INSUFFERABLE and i hope dana knows it.

Happy winter to those who practice!

Pitting Junao vs Jalter is stupid because they shouldn't fight.

They should kiss.

they could collab