#holly victor imagine
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Ω PJO DEMIGOD HEADCANONS: ✌ NIKE: Goddess of Victory 🏆
Author's note: Hello everyone! In lieu of posting the major gods demigod headcanons, here is the minor gods version!As usual these headcanons will contain what it's like being claimed and what it's like for the respective god and cabin, followed by a small story between you, the reader, and the respective demigod of that god. Thank you for reading and please like and reblog! [PJO MINOR GODS DEMIGOD HEADCANONS MASTERLIST]
Disclaimer: To new fans or strictly TV watchers of the PJO series, future spoilers for the entire PJO series books will be referenced. Read at your own risk.
When you get claimed, it’s after winning. It could be beating an arm wrestling match, winning at rock paper scissors, you get the gist.
The desire to win is so strong that it’s borderline obsessive.
Competitive is the defining word for a child of Nike.
You have the last laugh- even if you lose at that moment, you’ll find yourself winning in the end, even if you have to play the long game.
Perfection, or near perfection, is also part of your drive. It may not have to do with everything and anything, but it is there.
You’re athletic as heck as Athletics fall under her domain. If you weren’t before, well, not if Nike has something to say about it. Consider it the equivalent of Aphrodite’s blessing, where her children are blessed with perfect makeup and hair, except in your case, you have a boost in athletic skill, intelligence, and etc. Even if you have a chronic disease or disability, Nike has you covered in ways you didn’t know were possible.
If you aren’t competitive, you’ll start to feel the need to win when you see someone outpacing you. This often leads to a choking hazard when more than once, a child of Nike overheard a “Let’s see who can eat the fastest!” or something of that degree.
If one child of Nike starts doing it, then another will follow, and a chain of Nike children are shoveling food into their mouths. Then the sheer energy produced by the chain of children of Nike affects everyone else. Food competitions and food fights, especially, are banned in Camp Halfblood for these reasons. This is one of the few times Mr. D intervened with his godly power with his own, and oh boy.
In games like Truth or Dare, they will definitely commit. You can imagine what’ll happen. The Hermes cabin is banned from asking or starting a Truth or Dare game when there are children of Nike around. It was not pretty. Limits were tested and broken. Absolute truths unbearable to hear as everyone felt some emotional reaction; but mostly unbearable, intense second-hand embarrassment that some just walked out of. Impossible challenges were met and there was much, much regret. Travis and Connor Stoll are, as expected, the perpetrators of this ban.
Spite. So much Spite. You will do things out of pure spite. Being kind out of spite is also on the table. You can be even spiteful out of spite. How that works, I have no idea and only you know.
Any form of congratulatory tokens are handled by the children of Nike; especially the Laurels.
You have a natural affinity with a child of Athena, due to her connection Athena, but also children of Ares. This is mostly due to the fact of their domain of war.
The bit of having a natural affinity with a child of Athena or Ares is crucial because more likely than not, they will either enable you or they will be the ones to pull you back and give you a down to earth level. This is usually done by the children of Athena, but when an Ares’ child does it? Oh then you know, a line has been crossed.
Depending on how many Nike children there are, Chiron does his best to split you guys in the middle, and put one half in the team with the Are’s team, and the other half with the Athena’s team. This is to balance out of the gods on the behest of the Nemesis cabin due to…incidents. Very bloody and catastrophic incidents.
Likewise on never challenging a child of Nike, this also applies vise-versa. NEVER ACCEPT A CHILD OF NIKE’S CHALLENGE. YOU WILL LOSE. YOU WILL REGRET IT. A CHILD OF NIKE’S CHALLENGE IS ONE THEY KNOW THEY WILL ABSOLUTELY, GUARANTEED WIN. [Accept at your own risk and peril.]
There’s a 120% guarantee that a child of Nike will take any challenge with any sort of prize. It doesn’t matter if it’s something very minor like a cheap toy, they will do what it takes to win it. The icing on the cake? There’s a rumour that there’s an actual prize that Nike herself promised to her children that whoever wins the most by the end of the year, they will receive a prize from herself. Most people know it's a golden laurel, but there’s a rumour that they could earn a pair of golden wings much like Nike herself (of course a dumb down version but still very powerful regardless). The kicker about this? The bar is set higher every year; where the children of Nike must win at least above the minimum from the previous year. The bar is constantly moving. No one’s sure if it’ll end.
Don’t worry though, the children of Nike have (some sort of) honour in winning. Sure they might use tricks and schemes to win, but there won’t be any dirty or easy wins from them. They’ll earn their win as fairly/honourably/squarely as it can be. On the other hand, if it’s an easy win or win by default, some children of Nike might not take it.
You were coming down from the high of winning and the claim of Nike over your head. When Chiron announced who your godly parent was, you thought “Yeah that sounds about right” and as you were basking in the afterglow, you heard incessant yelling from the distance that was quickly getting louder.
People were either moving to the side, diving and pushing others to get out of the way, and those who didn’t were bouldered over by a pair of identical twin girls. They both had brown hair and were practically pushing at each others’ heads, while rushing towards you while trying to push the other away, but inevitably were knocking others around them down.
They looked around before their eyes locked on you and you froze like a deer in the headlights as they barreled over to you as they both stuck their hands out at the same time, and yelled in your face excitedly,
“Hi! I’m Holly Victor, child of Nike and cabin leader!” “Hi! I’m Laurel Victor, child of Nike and cabin leader!”
Their words sounded like you were hearing stereo and you were reeling from everything. Upon instinct, your hands both stuck out to take their hands and before you could even think of introducing yourself back, the twins snapped their heads at each other and they glowered,
“Hey I was first! No, I was! Stop copying me! I won first!” they both said and your head was spinning.
You stammered out an introduction, as helpless at it may be but they’re focus turned to you just as you finished saying, “-and who are you guys…?”
Before the two girls could even think to explain first, Chiron stepped from behind them and placed his hands on their heads to get them to stop.
“They’re Laurel and Holly Victor, twin sisters and daughters of Nike, just like you. They’re also the cabin leaders of the Nike cabin” he introduced.
“But aren’t there supposed to be one cabin leader…?”
“Normally yes, however, when deciding who would, being children of Nike, the two argued and fought for a very long time to be cabin leader before we all agreed it was better for both sisters to be cabin leaders.”
You paled at your future being at the Nike cabin as you prayed to your godly parent for strength, but remember they got this from Nike, and more importantly-
The Victor twins both grinned and shook your hands at the same time, “Welcome to the Nike cabin, new sibling!”
You just stared at them and thought, ‘This is going to redefine sibling rivalry in all history of sibling rivalry”
#percy jackson and the olympians imagines#pjo imagine#pjo imagines#pjo#pjo fanfic#pjo x reader#pjo reader insert#demigod h/cs#demigod headcanons#demigod imagines#demigod imagine#demigods#demigod reader#percy jackson x reader#percy jackon and the olympians#pjo fic#pjo spoilers#percy jackson and the olympians imagine#nike#child of nike#laurel victor#laurel victor imagine#holly victor#holly victor imagine#nike cabin#minor gods#minor gods imagines#the heroes of olympus
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On my Wheeler-Creel bullshit again because. Umm.
I'm going to be corn-plating rn but the way the Creel family are arranged in the first image always bugged me ever since I started theorizing about Virginia-Karen parallels and Virginia's possible infidelity resulting most likely in Alice's birth before Victor came back from the war (the whole Virgin Mary reference).
Because look at the way they are standing. Henry is portrayed as the odd one out in two ways. His clothing color scheme is different from the blues of the rest of his family. Not only that, Victor has his arms around Virginia and Alice, Henry is only connected to the family unit by Virginia having her arm around him. We already know Henry was most likely the outcasted family member, the one who was "different". Virginia, Victor, and Alice are a unit- Henry is left out despite the fact that Alice is most likely isn't biologically Victor's.
But that's the point of the lie that holds Virginia and Victor together because this family would not exist if they didn't aggressively pretend that they were something that they were not. And that lie involves Victor lying to himself and others about how Alice is his, how their relationship is full of trust, how Virginia isn't a cheat.
(I can't blame Henry, I too would have a joker arc if I found this shit out).
Karen and Ted most likely had Holly as a means to save their marriage. She's often placed in between them in the fair scenes almost as if she's the "glue" who holds them together. More obviously, Karen chooses not to go with Billy because she sees Ted and Holly cuddling on the lay z boy. But as we know, that rarely ever works out, and as we see from s1 all throughout s4 their marriage is not saved. If anything, having a baby exacerbates the issues a marriage has.
Also if you look closely the clothing Virginia and Victor wear are very similar to Karen and Ted. The ribbon Alice has on her hat are similar to the ribbons on Holly's dress (shoulders).
I don't think it's a conincidence that Holly and Alice look very similar either.
Like Alice, Holly is representative of that "lie" Karen and Ted tell themselves about their marriage. Having Holly didn't fix their marriage, them aggressively pretending to be a happy couple with their young daughter isn't working.
#anyways imagine being henry and finding out that not only your sister is your half sister#your mom who abuses you and always hated you is actually a cheat#and the father for which youre actually biologically related lets said cheat abuse you for the sake of maintaining their image#all three of them acting like henry is the odd one out when actually they chose to be horrible. henry never chose to be different#(well alice did nothing wrong by being born lol. but she was most likely favored and scorned henry)#henry creel#ted wheeler#karen wheeler#victor creel#holly wheeler#virginia creel#alice creel
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The demogorgon wasn’t real
Or at least the one Joyce saw wasn’t.
Something that has never made sense to me was how the demogorgon would come through the wall every time Will talked to Joyce through the lights. Now that we know how the light communication works, Will and the demogorgon would’ve been in the same room when he flickered the lights. Why would the demogorgon go after Joyce instead of Will? Especially when you consider how Joyce wasn't bleeding and we know the real demogorgon is attracted to blood. Well… it wasn't the demogorgon, it was a Vecna vision.
How do I know? It kept giving up. The creature would push through the wall until Joyce ran away and it would just stop. That doesn't sound like normal demogorgon behavior that we see later, does it? The demogorgons we see throughout the show are blood thirsty and don't just give up when their prey runs away.
It also stopped when Joyce and Karen walked into the room as Holly was seeing it come through the wall. Why would a demogorgon care that adults were in the room?
And the wall is perfectly fine after each demogate opens. Every other gate in the show leaves a crack for at least a few minutes before it disappears. The second picture is seconds after Holly sees it and there's nothing there. The wall has no cracks. The gate the demogorgon left in the school at the end was huge and didn't just disappear!
Look at this one. Joyce ran on foot down the street and it didn't follow her? And the wall wasn't damaged at all despite the demogorgon ripping through the wallpaper.
Speaking of Holly, why would Will lead her to his room if he knew that she would be attacked by a demogorgon? Or Joyce for that matter? He would know if the creature was nearby, so it's not like it was an accident. Will would never endanger someone else like that, especially not his mom or a child. But Vecna would!
Even more proof is the similarities between Joyce's situation and Victor Creel's visions. The radio "randomly" turned on, the lights flickered, and then they start to see something horrific!
But why? Why would Vecna choose to haunt Joyce at the times he did? He was intercepting her communications with Will. Joyce kept getting too close to the truth when Will would talk to her and Vecna needed to stop that to preserve whatever plans he had for Will.
Ok but why the demogorgon? Why not a regular Vecna vision? The demogorgon likely represents Lonnie (inspired by pinkeoni's post about the lonniegorgon!) Notice how both the demogorgon and Will stop trying to get to Joyce the minute Lonnie shows up. That's because the monster was already in their home. I think Vecna was taunting Joyce about how she "allowed" Lonnie to come into her home to hurt her and her children (obviously it's not her fault, but I imagine she has some guilt over Lonnie's abuse and Vecna is trying to convince her it's her fault).
It's really difficult to tell what's Will and what's someone else communicating with Joyce in s1, but I think it's safe to say that there was Vecna meddling mixed in there to stop Will from being saved.
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"The Hollywood Theatre"
Duke of Holly (Thomas Hunt) x Lady Alexandra Spencer (Alex Spencer)
Thomas Hunt, the Duke of Holly, returns to England after years living abroad.
He is outrageously rich and fairly handsome, despite having already passed the thirty-year-old barrier. Among the ton was a universally accepted truth that a man of his wealth and status should look for a wife. The ton tried to tempt him; however, neither debutantes nor spinsters nor widows seemed to please him. In fact, he rarely appears at social events.
According to gossip, the fault lay with a French opera singer named Yvonne, whom he had followed all over the world and who broke his heart by marrying an American merchant.
Only one thing seemed to spark any kind of passion in him: the opera.
In a great declaration of love for that art, he buys the old "Wood Theatre" in London, restoring it. The newspapers dubbed it "The Hollywood Theatre".
Determined to make his theatre a reflection of "The Palais Garnier", the duke hires artists from all over the world, administering it with rigour and discipline. Of all the rules, there's one he's especially strict about: romance, only on stage. Falling in love behind the scenes was a cardinal sin for him.
However, his biggest dream was not yet fulfilled. He had been composing an opera for years - "The Last Duchess". It was finally ready, but there was a major problem - none of the singers he had met so far were the "Duchess" he had imagined on those many sleepless nights.
Despite being told that his criteria were impossible to meet, Thomas was determined to find her, even if it was the last thing he did in his life.
Escaping an arranged marriage and family expectations, Lady Alexandra Spencer arrives in London with a single dream - to become the prima donna.
When she read in the newspaper that "The Hollywood Theatre" was looking for new singers, Alexandra felt it was a sign.
After two days in line, it was finally her turn. Despite being a mess, exhausted from the waiting and the nerves, Alexandra took a leap of faith and changed her repertoire at the last minute, risking everything with “Armide”
Immediately recognizing the opera, Thomas was about to order her to stop. That was a very difficult opera. A girl like her would never make it. It was blasphemy. Notwithstanding, contrary to his first instinct, the Duke listened to her until the end.
She made some mistakes, had some mistakes typical of a beginner, but she sang with an emotion and intensity that touched his soul.
So, to the astonishment of everyone at the theatre, Thomas not only hired her but also gave her the role of the 'Duchess'.
Despite her natural talent, Alexandra lacked the refinement of a diva that the Duke of Holly idealized. Because of her stubbornness in correcting certain so-called "defects", Thomas took charge of the mission to become Alexandra the perfect prima dona.
However, as he learns about Lady Alexandra, or 'Alex' as she insists on being called (despite him finding it a ridiculous name), the Duke of Holly realizes that they are precisely her apparent flaws that make her unique and special among all other singers... and among all other women.
During the intensive months of rehearsals, Alex discovered that behind the mask of the demanding and rational man, there is a sweet and kind heart that rivals any romantic protagonist in operas.
Refusing to be just Thomas' platonic love, Alex prepares to leave London and move to Paris at the invitation of the new director of the " The Palais Garnier", Victor Montmartre.
Will the Duke of Holly follow his heart? Or will he play it safe and spend the rest of his days just living the loves sung in operas?
Dear, @storyofmychoices
I hope you like these silly Thomas and Alex AU headcanons.
They are incredible, and I never get tired of hearing from them. Only someone as special as you could have created them.
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Some random things I want in st5:
Lucas in the spotlight. Give that boy more screen time please! Let other characters support him (like Mike) for once.
Victor and Henry reuniting. Dunno how, but just imagine!
Joyce connecting more with Jonathan, and talking about how she has been unintentionally neglecting him.
Nancy being protective over Mike.
Ted, Karen, and Holly connecting more to the supernatural plot. Would love to see Ted’s reactions to everything.
More moments with the original party. (I want the four of them on their own for a while.)
Steve and Jonathan friendship.
Argyle making a reappearance (I need to see him interact with other characters!!!)
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no because I feel so bad for younger henry, like. all of the shit he dealt with. and realizing tonight that the scene of victor holding henry’s seemingly dead body is the only scene we see of Henry’s parents displaying any kind of actual affection towards him. we see both of them comfort alice when she has a nightmare. but neither of them show comfort/affection towards henry. literally, victor was only able to comfort his son once he thought his son was dead. as soon as his son isn’t conscious to experience that love, he’s able to give it. he’s still stealing that love and affection away from henry, it’s really just salt in the wound, because it’s one thing to never give that affection that henry wants- it’s another thing to only be able to give it as SOON as henry isn’t there to receive/experience it. like imagine realizing that your father seemingly thought so little of you that displaying affection towards you was so shameful that he couldn’t bear the idea anyone else, including YOU being there to witness it. and sure, in reality, it’s less about henry’s lack of worth/not being worthy of love and more about victor’s own issues and inability to express affection in general (even though he DOES express a small bit of it to alice during her nightmare and he DOES comfort virginia after he vision), but being a kid, you don’t understand that you’re not the problem. you can’t fully comprehend and rationalize your parents’ behaviours and traumas. you feel responsible, you feel unworthy, you feel inferior and broken. you feel like the idea of loving you is so shameful and horrible that anyone committing such a heinous act must first be certain that there’s no witnesses to it, including yourself.
great now reread this and replace victor with ted and henry with mike because it’s the same dynamic. we never see ted display affection towards mike or comfort him. and if the henry-wheeler parallels continue, then that means that ted’s only going to be able to display affection towards mike as soon as mike’s- GUNSHOTS
like we DO see ted express affection towards holly, even in tiny ways, when he adjusts her sleeve on the Ferris wheel, for example. but we never see that between ted and mike. and how mike is often scapegoated in the family and made to feel like things are his fault when they AREN’T, and made to feel like HE’S the problem, like he’s worthless, like he’s broken. like loving HIM is such a heinous act that it has to be done without witnesses which is why karen only tries to approach him nicely one-on-one and never defends him at the dinner table and chastises him instead and even when she does try to comfort him one-on-one it’s still more about HER feelings.
mike, who kept closing the door in spite of hopper’s 3 inch rule, because not only does he have his own shame to deal with, the shame that comes every time he kisses El and that part of him rears up and reminds him of how he doesn’t like girls, reminds him of how he’s supposed to feel about kissing her and how he doesn’t feel that that, but he also figures El must have her own shame too, the shame of being around him, the shame that comes innately with his existence and presence, the shame and embarrassment that caused her to stop his singing- she must not want any witnesses for the act of loving mike wheeler either, and honestly, he can’t blame her. that must be why she doesn’t protest when he shuts the door in spite of hopper’s rule, right? even though mike knows she doesn’t like having doors all the way shut, hopper’s rules aside. the act of loving/caring about/being around mike wheeler must be something so shameful and awful that El would be able to overcome her fear simply so that there isn’t any witnesses to such an act.
#stranger things#byler#henry creel#victor creel#henry creel analysis#creel family#mike wheeler#mike wheeler analysis#milkvan
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Whispers of a Ghost
Summary: You were Billy Hargrove's twin sister.
After recently being released from jail for a crime you didn't commit, your family moves to Hawkins wanting a fresh start.
However, you never imagined that your fresh start would involve monsters and alternate dimensions. But, the most surprising thing of all was finding yourself falling for popular, rich boy, Steve Harrington.
Pairing: Steve Harrington x Fem!Reader
Word Count: 3.1k
Warnings: language,
Previous Chapter
Chapter 21-
Nancy wasn't cursed for very long. Thank goodness because Eddie's music in his trailer definitely would not have worked for her, that was for sure.
The group of you were now safely out the Upside Down and huddled inside your trailer across the road while Nancy explained everything.
You sat on the couch between Steve and Eddie, Nancy sitting in the single seat opposite you while she spoke, telling you how Vecna was actually Victor Creels son, Henry. Who also happened to be like El, but he was 001.
"He showed me things that haven't even happened yet. The most awful things. I saw a dark cloud spreading over Hawkins. Downtown on fire. Dead soldiers. And this... giant creature with a gaping mouth. And this creature wasn't alone. There were so many more monsters. An army. And they were coming into Hawkins. Into our neighborhoods. Our homes. And then..."
Nancy voice cracked as she spoke, silent tears trickling down her face and you had to look away.
Vecna hadn't cursed her like he did with Max. Vecna showed Nancy the future. He showed her what he was going to do. Vecna was going to take over Hawkins.
"...he showed me my mum. And Holly. Mike. And they..." She couldn't finish the sentence, but you all knew what she was going to say.
She saw her family dead.
"Okay, but... he's just trying to scare you, Nance. Right? I mean, it's not real." Steve said, speaking up for the first time.
"Not yet. But there... there was something else. He showed me gates. Four gates. Spreading across Hawkins. And these gates, they looked like the one outside of Eddie's trailer, but... they didn't stop growing. And this wasn't the Upside Down Hawkins. This was our Hawkins. Our home."
"Four chimes." Max suddenly said from across the room. "Vecna's clock. It always chimes four times. Four exactly. He's been telling us his plan this whole time."
"Four kills. Four gates. End of the world." Lucas said in realisation.
"If that's true, he's only one kill away." Dustin replied and shit he was right.
The kids were right.
Vecna just needed to kill one more person to open one more gate and then it was all over. The vision he had shown Nancy would come true.
"Oh Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ." Eddie mumbled, covering his face with his hands.
"Try them again. Try them again." Steve instructed looking over at Max as she grabbed the phone to dial the Byers house phone number in California.
But, as you all suspected, the call did not connect. Their phone had been busy for the past three days apparently and although Joyce uses the phone for her new Telemarketer job, something wasn't right.
"Whatever's happening in Lenora is connected to all of this. I'm sure of it." Nancy said, now up off the chair and looking out the window of your trailer. "But Vecna can't hurt them. Not if he's dead. We have to go back in there. Back to the Upside Down."
"Whoa, no, no, no. What?" Steve questioned in shock while you and Eddie shook your heads.
"Nope. Nope." You both said, staring at Nancy.
No way in hell were you going back down there. Not a chance.
"Let's just think this through." Steve said calmly, standing up and walking over to her. "We barely made it out there in one piece."
"Yeah, because we weren't prepared. But this time, we will be. We'll get weapons and protection. We'll go through the gate, we'll find his lair, and we'll kill him." Nancy explained, but Steve shook his head.
"Or he'll kill us. The only reason you survived is because he wanted you to. He's not scared of us."
"And for good reason." Robin added, standing up from her spot on the floor. "We were wrong about Vecna. Henry. One. Sorry, what are we calling him now?"
"One." Dustin and Lucas answered.
"Vecna." Said Erica.
"Henry." Nancy added all at the same time.
"Fucking hell." You mumbled, leaning back on the couch and rubbing your face with your hands. "It doesn't matter what we call him. We are not going back down there. Steve nearly died!"
"She's right." Robin said, backing you up. "We've learned something new about Vecna/Henry/One. He's a number like Eleven, only a sick, evil, male, child-murdering version of her with really bad skin. But my-my point is, he's super powerful. He could turn us inside out with a snap of his fingers. It's not a fair fight"
"Then why fight fair?" Dustin asked. "You're right. He's like Eleven. But that gives us an upper hand. We know Eleven's strengths. And weaknesses."
"Weakness?" Erica asked in disbelief.
Yeah, did El even have any weaknesses?
"When El remote-travels, she goes into this sort of trance-like state. I bet the same is true of Vecna."
"That would explain what he was doing in that attic." Lucas said and suddenly it all made sense.
Back when you were all scoping our Victor Creel's house, you followed the lights up to the attic. Vecna did his killing in the Upside Down in his old house.
"Exactly. When he attacks his next victim, I'll bet you he's back in that attic, physical body defenseless." Dustin added.
"Defenseless? What about the army of bats?" Steve asked, motioning towards the bruise around his neck.
"True. We'll have to find a way past them. Distract them somehow."
"And, uh, how do we do that exactly?" Eddie asked, standing up slowly from the couch.
"No idea." Dustin answered causing Eddie to plonk back down beside you while Dustin continued talking. "But, once they're gone, he doesn't stand a chance. It'll be like slaying sleeping Dracula in his coffin."
"Okay, Dustin, I like it. But, we don't know who Vecna is going to kill next. There's no pattern. We don't even know when his next attack will be let alone who-" You started to say before Max cut you off.
"Yeah, we do. I can still feel him. I'm still marked... cursed. I ditch Kate Bush, I draw his focus back to me."
"Hell no. That's not happening." You responded, standing up from the couch. "I'm not letting you do that."
"Your sister's right. He will kill you." Lucas said.
"I survived before. I can survive again."
"You are not going to be the bait. We'll think of something." You said, folding your arms across your chest.
This was not going to happen. Max might be strong, but after seeing her levitate in the cemetery you were not going to let her do that again. No fucking way.
"I just need to keep him busy long enough so that you guys can get into that attic. Then you can chop off his head off. Stab him in the heart. Blow him up with some explosive Dustin cooks up. I honestly really don't care how you put this asshole in his grave. Just... whatever it is... whatever you do... try not to miss."
You shook your head, ignoring how your hands were now trembling at just the thought of Max going through that again. She couldn't. You wouldn't let her.
"We will find another way-"
"Y/N, it's our only choice." Max insisted.
"No!" You snapped, hot tears burning in the back of your eyes. "No. I don't care. This isn't happening. I am not losing you, Max. I already lost, Billy... I-I can't... I can't lose you too."
If you lost Max after everything... you weren't sure if you could keep going. Billy was your world, the only reason you kept fighting after he died was because of Max and Steve, but if Max... no, you couldn't even think about that. It wasn't happening.
"It's not your choice. It's mine." Max simply said, not backing down.
You shook your head, silent tears now falling down your face before you turned and walked out the room.
"Princess, wait." Eddie called out, but you ignored him and slammed your bedroom door closed behind you.
"It's okay. I got her." You heard Steve say from the main room.
You sat down on the edge of your bed, fiddling with Billy's pendant around your neck with trembling fingers. Billy's screams echoed through your mind and you closed your eyes, trying to ignore them.
Suddenly, a pair of hands were on your knees and you opened your eyes to find Steve kneeling down in front of you before you looked away, not wanting him to see you on the verge of a breakdown.
"Hey." He whispered, squeezing your knees gently as tears continued to fall down your face. "Hey, look at me. Baby, look at me."
Reluctantly, you glanced back at him, your watery eyes locking with his worried brown ones.
"She's... she's all I have left. I can't-" Your voice broke as you tried to talk and you buried your face with your hands. "I can't lose her like Billy."
Steve didn't say anything as he stood up and sat down beside you on the bed, his hand reaching for yours and you let him as he intertwined his fingers with your own.
"I know." He said gently. "I know. And I hate this idea, I really do. But... it's our only choice and Max... it's her choice."
"She's just a kid." You whispered, staring down your hands.
"We all are."
You sighed, wiping the tears from your face with your free hand. He was right. Max was right. They were all right because if you didn't at least try and kill Vecna, Hawkins will be destroyed and you'll all probably die anyway.
This was the only choice.
"Come here." Steve said, letting go of your hand and wrapping his arm around your shoulders, pulling you inside his side.
He didn't try and reassure you that everything would be okay because you both knew that would be bullshit. He couldn't promise you that and you didn't want him to lie about it. This was risky. This was dangerous, but you had to try.
Steve kissed the top of your head as you leant against him taking in a few deep breaths to calm yourself before the two of you walked back out to the others.
Eddie caught your eye from where he was now standing by the kitchen table and mouthed the words, 'you okay?'
You simply nodded, but he frowned a little at you, knowing that was a plain lie, but before he could press it any further, Nancy started talking.
"Eddie said that he had an idea. He was waiting for you two to get back before he told us."
Your best friend sighed, his eyes never leaving yours as he gave you a questioning look. He didn't want to say his idea unless he knew that you were okay and on board with this plan and you smiled sadly at him.
"What's the plan, Munson?" You asked and that was all he needed before he grabbed the opened phone book and put it down on the table.
"Check this our. The War Zone." He said, pointing at the ad in the bottom corner.
The group of you all walked over to him, looking down at what he was pointing at while he explained.
"I've been there once. It's huge. They got everything you need for, uh, well, killing things, basically."
"You think fake Rambo has enough guns there? Is that a grenade?" Robin asked, pointing at the picture. "I mean, how is any of this legal?"
"Well, lucky for us it is, so... This place is just far enough outside of Hawkins. As long as we steer clear of main roads, we ought to be able to avoid cops and, uh, angry hicks."
"If we're trying to avoid angry hicks, maybe we shouldn't go to some store called The War Zone." Erica commented and she had a fair point.
"Normally I'd agree, but we need the weapons. So I think it's worth the risk." Nancy replied and you nodded agreement.
"Me too."
"But is it worth the time? It'll take all day to bike there and back." Dustin pointed out.
Shit, he was right. You didn't have any cars here anymore. The Camaro was still behind that police tape at Reefer Ricks, Steve's Beemer was... okay, you couldn't remember where that vehicle was left, but it wasn't here and neither was Nancy's car.
"Who said anything about bikes?" Eddie suddenly said.
"What? You got some car we don't know about?" Steve asked in confusion as Eddie pushed himself away from the table to face him.
"It's not exactly a car, Steve. And it's not exactly mine, but, uh... it'll do."
You frowned a little at that, "Eddie, what you planning?"
"You know the Selwood's a few trailers down?" He asked, glancing over at you.
The Selwood's? Yeah, you knew them. They've been at the Trailer Park since you moved here and lived in that large Winnebago and... the Winnebago! Eddie wanted to take their Winnebago.
"Hey, Red, uh, you got a ski mask or a bandana, something like that?" Eddie questioned, looking over at your sister.
She thought about it for a moment before nodding and disappearing into the bedroom and returning with her old Michael Myers Halloween mask and a bandana.
Max tossed the mask to Eddie before handing the bandana to you, "it's not just Eddie that's a wanted man. You should cover up too."
That was probably a good idea.
You grabbed the bandana and wrapped it around your face before Dustin gave you his hat which you gladly took and tucked your hair into it and slipped it on.
Once that was done, the group of you walked out the trailer and followed behind Eddie who now had the mask on, leading you across the Trailer Park towards the Selwood's.
Mr. and Mrs. Selwood were sitting out the front under the pullout shade while you all snuck around the side of the Winnebago. Eddie slid open the side window and jumped inside with ease before you all quickly followed him through.
"That was suffocating." Eddie whispered, yanking the mask off as he made his way to the front of the RV and sat down in the drivers seat.
You followed and leant down, flicking the lock on the front door so the Selwood's couldn't open it when they realised what you guys were doing.
Once the door was secure, you pulled the bandana down around your neck before tossing Dustin his hat. You turned back to Eddie just as he yanked out the wires from under the steering wheel and started to cut them with the pliers that you didn't even realise he had grabbed.
"Where'd you learn how to do this?" Steve asked curiously, leaning over Eddie's shoulder.
"Well, when the other dads were teaching their kids how to fish or play ball, my old man was teaching me how to hot wire." He replied, twisting the wires as he spoke. "Now, I swore to myself I wouldn't wind up like he did, but now I'm wanted for murder, and soon, grand theft auto. So, uh, I'm really living up to that Munson name."
"Uh, Eddie, I'm not sure I love the idea of you driving." Robin piped up.
"Oh, I'm just starting this sucker. Harrington's got her. Don't ya, big boy?" He asked, leaning closer to Steve with a grin causing you to chuckle softly before he tapped the wires together and the Winnebago roared to life.
"What the hell? Hey! Open this door!" Mrs. Selwood shouted from outside.
You turned around to find her and her husband looking through the window of the door, banging on it angerly as they stared at you.
"Shit, uh, Steve, you might want to start driving." You said just as Eddie jumped out the seat.
You quickly sat down in the passenger seat, the others all finding their own spots at the back while Steve sat down behind the wheel.
"Everybody hang onto something!" He shouted over his shoulder before he tapped the RV into gear and put his foot down.
You quickly grabbed hold of the dashboard in front of you as Steve sped around the corner faster than what you were comfortable with. But, to your relief, he made it out onto the road without crashing and slowed down to the actual speed limit, not wanting to draw unwanted attention.
"And you gave me shit for bad driving." You commented, glancing over at him and thinking back to that day driving to the tunnels in the Camaro.
Steve snorted softly, his eyes meeting yours for a brief second before focusing back on the road.
"Everyone okay?" You asked, turning in your seat to look at them as they all nodded.
You sighed with relief and turned back around, unable to stop yourself from thinking about Max being used as bait for Vecna. Music played softly from the radio as you stared out the window, a million different scenarios racing through your mind about how this would turn out. All of them ending as horribly as the next.
The others were all chatting quietly amongst themselves in the back, but you weren't listening too caught up in your own head.
"You okay?" Steve asked after a few minutes of silence.
You glanced over at him and nodded, but it was clear that he didn't believe you. You didn't even believe yourself.
You turned back to the window, not really knowing what to say because, no, you weren't okay. Your sister was going to be used as bait and you were going to go up against an evil version of El that had already killed three people... nothing about this was okay.
"It's silly, but I... I've actually, uh, I've always had this dream that I'd have this really big family." Steve started to say, bringing you out of your thoughts as you looked back at him. "I'm talking like, uh, a full brood of Harringtons. Like, five, six kids."
"Six?" You asked in surprise and he nodded.
"Yeah. Six little nuggets. Three girls, three boys. And every summer, I figured all of us Harringtons, we would pack into something like this and just see the country. You know, the Rockies, Grand Canyon, maybe Yellowstone. End up in some beachside town in California. Spend a week parked in the sand. Learn how to surf or something."
You smiled softly, "that actually sounds nice."
"Yeah?" Steve asked, his own smile spreading across his face as he glanced back at you.
"I could teach you how to surf, if you want?"
"You know how to surf? How did I not know that?"
You shrugged your shoulders, "I'm not great at it. Billy was the surfer in the family. He taught himself how to surf when we were kids, then taught me."
Steve smiled softly as you thought back to those years living by the beach and splashing around in the ocean while your mother watched on from the shore.
She used to take you and Billy to the beach whenever Neil was in one of his moods to get you guys away from him. You'd spend hours upon hours out in that water. Just you and Billy in the open ocean with nothing holding you down.
Your mother usually had to yell a few times to get you to come out because neither of you wanted to leave, neither of you wanted to go back home to Neil. The ocean became almost like a safe heaven for the two of you. It was the one place where Neil couldn't hurt you, the one place where you both could relax and just be yourselves.
"Do you miss California?" Steve asked quietly.
"Sometimes." You admitted, although the thought of going back there without Billy didn't sit right with you. California wasn't home if your brother wasn't there.
-
Next Chapter
#steve harrington#steve harrington fanfic#steve harrington fanfiction#steve harrington x reader#stranger things#stranger things fanfic#eddie munson#Billy Hargrove#joe keery#joseph quinn#dacre montgomery#Max Mayfield
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trying to gather up all my "what if henry and el had escaped HNL in 1979 rather than having the massacre" thoughts in one place:
El has never been outside the lab, and Henry seems to have been kept in the basement areas most of his life. Henry himself says "I'm going to find us a way out". The man was flying by the seat of his pants at that point. I'd give so much to see them finding their way out, really bring the "I became an explorer" line into play. Let Henry do a little psychic-skipping from person to person, a little of the psionic searching that we see him do briefly as a kid...almost like looking at security tapes to figure out where one is in relation to the exit. Staring directly at FNAF.
Henry seeing the open sky for the first time in 20 years. El seeing it for the first time in her life. She's never seen the sun in practice, only in theory.
Also, imagine being someone who works in the upstairs/DOE lab or who was visiting the lab for some reason?? Like...you're out on a smoke break, and you just see this bewildered-looking orderly with blood running down his neck burst out the back doors, an itty-bitty girl in a hospital gown peeking out from behind him. She barely comes up to his hip, and he looks unhinged enough to actually bite you if you tried to take her away. They regard you like spooked deer. You turn away, because here's something about the look on both their faces that make you feel like you ought to insist that you never saw them at all. You realize once they're gone that one of them stole your car keys, and you aren't sure which one it was.
Henry "had one driving lesson from Victor when he was 12 and nearly gave him a heart attack" Creel having a "zoomer of the party" moment taking out the lab gate with the car he stole from the above guy. Tod-father moment. Please and thank you. El's in the passenger seat, distracted by the outdoors.
The escape attempt happened on September 8th, and from Brenner's flashback it looks like it was really nice out. That is to say...much nicer than the basement interior. El, born into the artificial cold of the upper lab and kept in the artificial cold of the basement, being out in sunny, breezy 75ºF weather for the first time. Henry, essentially in the same situation, being ambiently warm for the first time since 1958 (he never made it past March, 1959, and March is cold).
Henry "vaguely remembers where the old house was" Creel trying to figure out the streets of Hawkins, which has expanded since the last time he was in it. He ditched the car by Lake Jordan, too conspicuous with its crunched-in front.
El's only 8, and it's been such a long day. The sun is setting, and she's tired. Henry in his undershirt/white t-shirt, El wrapped up in his button-down. She's conked out, fast asleep on his shoulder by the time they make it to the old Creel house. It's filthy, a complete disaster, but no one has lived there in 20 years. If the lights stay off and the front door stays boarded, who's going to check inside?
Also re: the Creel house...almost all the rooms have fireplaces. The midwest gets cold at night in the fall. I offer: Henry and El by a fireplace in a room on the upper floor/back side of the house with the vibes of a) Victor reading by the fire, and b) Holly asleep on Ted's lap. Thank you very much.
Henry "didn't get the chance to get his high school diploma" Creel returning to humanity's hunter-gatherer roots...and by that I mean using his powers to steal food/clothes/etc. Who's going to stop him, if the check-out guy never saw him at all? And either way, who makes people pay so much for basic necessities anyway? Henry "where others saw order, I saw a straitjacket" Creel in his be gay, do crime era. Henry "abuse the system right back" Creel serving pure ST1 El and the Eggos.
Y'know...restoring balance to a broken ecosystem? A shoplifter, but for good.
Everything was left in the Creel house after the massacre. I propose: Henry in Victor's old clothes. Henry in cardigans please and thank you. He's just some guy.
Also...El in Alice's old clothes. She shows up in that little yellow dress and Henry's like "Oh. This hurts more than I thought it was going to". Alongside that...El in Henry's old clothes. El in one of those snazzy little patterned button down t-shirts...please...(El being mistaken for a boy/being the spitting image of young Henry when she's wearing his old clothes...gough...)
El being enrolled in 5th grade and meeting the Party then. She's a staple in their group early on, but she and Mike never go through the weird superhero idolization stuff we see in ST canon. They're 10, she's just some weird girl to him. They're all fast friends, but it was Will who wanted to befriend her first.
(The admin lady saw the proof of residence for El's enrollment and was like hm. Someone finally bought the old--Wait. That can't be right...Well. I don't get paid enough for this, actually.)
El telling Henry about the Party and their DnD obsession and Henry having to try to explain to her what an elf is based on 20 year old memories of reading The Hobbit with Victor (thus revealing himself as, indeed, a nerd).
Henry being very reluctant to participate in anything social…right up until he runs out of ways to entertain himself around the house. Henry realizing this is his chance to get back at all the kids who ostracized him in school by (figuratively) wiping the floor with them at PTA meetings. Henry “canonically has a Thing about getting even with people” Creel, who doesn’t know how to cook or bake, learning to do so specifically so he can put the PTA moms out of business. Turns out, vengeance is both very entertaining and very good bonding time. Henry "can't remember why raw cookie dough shouldn't be eaten" Creel and Eleanor "has never had cookie dough" Creel. The struggle is real.
Coincidentally that ^ happens to be how he reunites with Scott. Henry "disappeared for 20+ years only to come back with no explanations, a little girl who looks eerily similar to him, and a die-hard bloodthirsty vengeance against a handful of specific PTA parents" Creel is so real to me. Scott "it was totally political" Clarke is Extremely Here For It.
I have more but this is it for now, it's been sitting in my drafts for long enough!!
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heyo! I'm writing a Mianite fic for a writer fest thingy and was wondering if you had any tips and/or song recs?
OH BOY DO I
well for starters, having reference materials of canon is SO helpful when trying to wrangle timelines or plot points. jordan first outlines ianitee ideals in an episode that had absolutely nothing else plot related and that i nearly missed on rewatches. here is my timestamped list of plot-important s2 episodes, as well as my timestamped list of andor appearances. hollis has a similar list for s1 episodes here. there is also the ongoing project of aligning s2 episode numbers across streamers. the wiki is pretty good about lore book transcriptions, if nothing else. i have nothing for isles so if that's your setting then godspeed brave soul
as for other tips- young jordan can and will say fuck. not often, but he can. all of tr have Very distinct voices and speech patterns, but they're easy to pick up on and write. (when in doubt, make a weed joke.) npc speech patterns never align in either formality or consistency with tr, so go with vibes and good luck with the pirates. sonja and tom both have secrets that you will not know if you haven't watched their povs and i'm willing to bet that tucker does too. wag's pov also exists. when it comes to it, jordan swore to vengeance, not to mediation; sonja swore to order (sort of), not dictatorship. they disagreed sometimes with the gods in ruxomar. it's fun it's all fun just pick a thread to pull at and run with it dude
song recs are under the cut. i have a Lot.
miscellaneous: the lost at sea ep, fin // the call, regina spektor // battle scars, paradise fears // dear fellow traveler, sea wolf // towards the sun, rihanna // runaway, aurora // mama, mcr // human, rag'n'bone man
tr, as a group: let's dance to joy division, the wombats // 100 bad days, ajr // young volcanoes, fob // 4am, bastille // the last length, colm r. mcguinness // bud like you, ajr // save rock and roll, fob // the kids aren't alright, fob // the days, avicii // the nights, avicii
jordan: karma, ajr // welcome to the black parade, mcr // champion, barns courtney // bleeding out, imagine dragons // just one yesterday, fob // so much for stardust, fob // flu game, fob // run boy run, woodkid // champion, fob // through me (the flood), hozier // dust bowl dance, mumford & sons // my way home is through you, mcr // hopeless wanderer, mumford & sons // our lady of sorrows, mcr // explode, patrick stump // be nice to me, the front bottoms
andor: dirty, grandson // heretic pride, the mountain goats // broken crown, mumford & sons // dear wormwood, the oh hellos // this year, the mountain goats // wolf in sheep's clothing (acoustic), set it off // eight, sleeping at last // karma, ajr // trouble, imagine dragons // what's wrong, half alive // seventeen going under, sam fender // love from the other side, fob // be nice to me, the front bottoms // stay frosty royal milk tea, fob // sing, mcr // moving to new york, the wombats // thus always to tyrants, the oh hellos
ianite (and ianitees): inkpot gods, the amazing devil // home to me, devil and the deep blue sea // who we are, imagine dragons // the only hope for me is you, mcr // go get your gun, the dear hunter // believer, imagine dragons // wait for me, hadestown obc // we all lift together, freya catherine + jack victor // wow i'm not crazy, ajr // new river, the oh hellos // ready now, dodie // hell's comin with me, poor man's poison // guiding light, mumford & sons // nfwmb, hozier // waiting for love, avicii
#ough im honored that i am seen as a woerht sourcd of advice#i am Tired but i hope this is helpful!! at least the mad archiving schemes#save#<- for myself tbh
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I don’t know if anyone’s done this yet but here what I think the similarity between stranger things and evil dead rise is
HEAVY SPOILER WARNING FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE NOT SEEN “EVIL DEAD RISE” !!!
So the basic premise of the movie (not counting the beginning with that blonde girl and her boyfriend) is about Beth, and she’s visiting her older sister Ellie and her three kids, two daughters named Cassie and Bridget, and her son Danny. Then the mom Ellie gets possessed and then kills/possesses Bridget and Danny, creating the evil dead ig, (I’ve never actually watched any of these movies before so I don’t know how the whole thing works lol)
First of all, the producers of the movie are the same who produce stranger things so that’s one thing
Second of all, I definitely think that the similarity is going to be something between Karen Wheeler and Ellie. I’ve seen theories about something with Joyce and hurting Jonathan or will, but I really don’t think it’s about her. Because of the three kids, two girls one boy.
We already know that the creels and the wheelers are connected somehow (Nancy getting the message, Karen’s poster despite her having the least screen time of any season she’s been in, being at the creek house in her poster, mikes parallels to Henry/vecna/one, etc) and that there’s also a theory that Alice creel is Karen wheeler. But I disagree with that theory. I saw someone mention this but what if Karen was the creeks third child. Based on Henry’s age in the flashbacks (12) and victor leaving for the war thirteen years ago, it’s likely he was the result of an affair.
And based on the wheelers having three kids as well, and Karen also (almost) cheating on her husband, it makes sense that Henry could also have a younger sister that resulted from the affair.
This is a personal theory based on the rule of genetics, not saying it’s true and I don’t have much evidence, but I think it’s possible that mike holly or both could have also been the result of an affair. Since mike has black hair and holly has blonde, but Nancy ted and Karen all have brown. It’s theoretically possible if their grandparents have blonde or black hair as well, but we haven’t seen any of their grandparents and it’s unlikely that two kids would get the recessive genes. But again that’s just food for thought.
But imagine that Henry and Karen were twins or something, bc we know that both would be roughly in their 40’s, and Karen would be the younger twin to make it fit. And then Alice creel could’ve given Karen away to someone, probably to a friend so victor wouldn’t know that she had an affair, or at least had 2 kids from the affair. It didn’t seem like he really knew about Henry in the first place though assuming he was a result of the affair.
And Henry having powers means that he probably got it from his real biological dad, which could mean Karen could possibly have powers too. Or could explain the mike having powers theory, which I wholeheartedly believe in btw.
So I definitely think that Alice and Karen are related, and I think it’s possible that Alice may be alive too, I have no evidence for that but it’s a cool idea as well. That could also go hand in hand with evil dead rise, as Beth and Ellie are sisters who see each other after a long time.
This is also 100% foreshadowing Karen getting possessed and possibly hurting her kids, like in Nancy’s vision (mom mike her and holly dying) I think that was blatantly telling us what was happening in season 5
PSA this might not be correct and I might also not have correct info bc I’m going off of memory. This is just my thoughts on the correlation between evil dead rise and stranger things 5 is.
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6am thoughts cause I can't sleep for shit
we've come to the stable conclusion that Karen Wheeler IS NOT Alice Creel
but what if they were friends? that in the little time where the Creel were in Hawkins before all the shit goes down for them, Alice and Karen became friends?
since there both (with my hc dates post) born the same year
imagine 15yo Karen going to town with 15yo Alice and being bestfriends, shopping, talking about boys and girls, laughing together, stay at each other house but mainly at Karen's house because Alice start to think hers is haunted and she don't really like her creepy brother
then- one day, Karen learn that Alice died alongside her mother Virginia and that the little brother that Karen didn't knew really well was firstly in a coma but died shortly after too and it was all the fault of the dad, Victor Creel
imagine 15yo Karen trying to grieve the loss of Alice, the loss of her best friend, trying hard to be a 'nornal' teenage girl after this huge loss in her life
imagine that in her head Karen tells herself again and again, everyday, that if she ever has children she would never let such a terrible thing happen to them
but now imagine, 41yo Karen, realizing that her two oldest, Nancy and Mike and all the other kids, have been in danger for practically 3 years now, and that she didn't see anything, blaming herself for not being able to protect them
imagine Karen learning everything we already know about the Upside Down, learning that it was all Henry Creel's fault, learning that Alice was in fact killed by this little brother who was supposed to be dead
imagine Karen's sadness, anger and grief coming back to her
imagine Karen being a full on badass, leaving her house, leaving Holly with Ted to help Nancy and Mike destroy that fucking thing that is now Vecna for the safety of all the kids, the town- but also in a corner of her head, to take revenge for Alice's death, to take revenge for this bestfriend she lost all these years ago
imagine Karen telling this story to Nancy and Mike and telling that if she knew what was coming for Alice she would have done everything to change what happened
imagine Karen telling Nancy and Mike to always stay united as brother and sister and never take their eyes off the people they love and above all tell these people that you love them
-Vry
#yeah ok i really cant sleep and i was thinking about Karwn#we do t see her that often but i dont know i reallg love her character#i love Karen Wheeler#karen wheeler#stranger things s4#stranger things#stranger things headcanon#headcanon#vrysorcha#alice creel#henry creel#st4#nancy wheeler#mike wheeler
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Watergate pt2
Part one
Eddie Munson x Reader pairing
A/n: I’m not like overly proud of this but I still wanted to post it while I’m working on another Steve blurb :)
Summary: Y/n and the gang try to attack Vecna in the upside down (story spanning from episodes 8 and 9)
Word count: 3900
We were woke up by 7:30. Everyone was awake except for Eddie and me, so they were making quite a ruckus in the kitchen trying to find something to eat. Eddie and I make our way out of the bedroom and take our places on the couch where the group is now sitting. Nancy sat in front of all of us as she explained what she saw.
“He showed me things that haven't happened yet…” Nancy begins. “The most awful things.” She started. “I saw a dark cloud spreading over Hawkins…downtown on fire…dead soldiers… and this… this giant creature with a gaping mouth. The creature wasn’t alone. there were so many monsters. An army…And they were coming into Hawkins. Our neighborhoods, our homes. And then he showed me my mom, Holly, Mike and they.. they were all….” she trails off with tears streaming down her face.
“He’s just trying to scare you, Nance.” Steve ensures her. “Right? I mean it’s not real.”
“Not yet. But there was something else. It showed me the gates. Four gates spreading across Hawkins and these gates…they looked like the one here, at Eddie’s trailer, but it didn’t stop growing. This wasn’t upside down Hawkins…this was our Hawkins” She warns.
“Four chimes.” Max jumps in. “The clock always chimes four times, exactly. He’s been telling us his plan this whole time.” She concludes, shaking her head in disbelief.
“Four kills,” Lucas says. “Four gates. End of the world.”
“If that's true he’s only one kill away,” Dustin states the obvious.
“Jesus Christ!” Eddie swears.
“Try them again!” Steve commands Max. Max gets up and tries to dial the Byers' house again. But not by surprise, no one picks up. She tries again thinking maybe the number could have been dialed wrong but still no one answered.
We try to think about the logic behind the Byers not answering their phone. I suggested that it could be because of Joyce’s new job. I mean, she is a telemarketer now so I’d assume she’d be on the phone for quite a while but Max brings up the point that the line wouldn’t be constantly busy for three days. Whatever is happening here in Hawkins is somehow happening in Lenora.
“But Vecna can’t hurt them…not if he’s dead. We have to go back in there!” Nancy states.
“No! No! No! NO!” Steve, Robin, Eddie, and I all say in response to her crazy idea.
“Why not?”
“Because we barely made it out in one piece!”
“Because we weren’t prepared! This time we’ll be ready! We’ll get weapons and protection and we’ll go through the gate, find his layer, and kill him!”
“Or help kill us! The only reason you survived was because he wanted you to! He’s not scared of us!”
“And for good reason!” Robin adds, “We learned something new about Henry/Vecna/One. He’s a number just like Eleven…only evil and child-murdering with really bad skin. He’s super powerful. He could turn us inside out with the snap of his fingers… it’s not a fair fight!”
“So why fight fair?” Dustin says. “you’re right, he’s like Eleven. So that gives us the upper hand. We know her strengths and weaknesses.” Dustin concludes by explaining that when El travels remotely she’s in a trance-like state. That explains what Vecna was doing in the attack of the old Victor Creel house. He was in a trance-like state in the upside-down attacking his victims remotely. He’ll be vulnerable next time he’s attacking. We’ll need a distraction in order to get to Vecna.
Max offers herself as bait claiming that she’s still tagged by Vecna. Still cursed by him. She says that she’ll be able to distract him while the others find him and chop his head off. I feel bad for her, she’s talked to me before about some of the things that upset her. So I can only imagine the memories she’s seeing due to Vecna.
“Whatever it is…whatever you do… try not to miss.” She says.
Eddie tells the group that he knows where we can get weapons. He searches for the phone book located somewhere in the messy trailer. When he finally locates it he sets it down and flips it to the page he had in mind while we all gather around him.
“Check this out! Warzone. I’ve been there once. It's huge. They got everything you need for uh killing things basically…” Eddie explains
“How is this even legal?” I ask.
“Well lucky for us, it just is.” He says. “This place is just far enough outside of Hawkins. As long as we steer clear of main roads we oughta avoid cops and angry hicks.”
“I think if we’re trying to avoid angry hicks we shouldn’t be going to a place called ‘The Warzone.’” Erica suggests.
“Normally I’d agree but we need the weapons.” Nancy starts. “So I think it’s worth the risk.”
“It’s gonna take all day on bikes.” Dustin brings up.
“Oh, we’re not using bikes,” Eddie smirks.
“Oh, you got some secret car we don’t know about, Munson?” Steve asks.
“It’s not exactly a car and it’s not exactly mine... But uhh it’ll do.” Eddie says awkwardly. He directs his attention toward Max. “Hey, red, you gotta ski mask, or a bandanna or something in your trailer I can use?”
“Yeah, I have something that could work.” Max runs over to the trailer next door and grabs a Halloween mask. “Will this suffice?” She asks Eddie.
“That'll do the trick!” Eddie slips on the mask and urges us to follow behind him. He peaks around each trailer until he finds exactly what he was looking for. He tries to be stealthy, but it’s hard to be stealthy when you’re in a group so large. He runs up to an RV parked near all the trailers and jumps inside one of the windows.
The first thing he does when he gets inside the stranger's RV is take off the mask and rush to the front. He complains about how hard it is to breathe in that mask and I can’t help but laugh at him quietly. I’m second into the RV while everyone else follows quickly.
Once Eddie is sitting down in the front seat he reaches for the wires under the steering wheel. He cuts them with a pair of pliers while Steve and I watch. He starts to rub the cut wires together.
“Where did you learn how to do this?” Steve asks, more concerned than wanting to actually know.
“Well, while all the other kids were out learning how to fish or play ball, my old man was teaching me how to hot wire,” Eddie informs him.
“I’m not sure I really like the idea of you driving this thing.” I tell Eddie, fully aware of how he is with driving because I’ve been in his van with him and it wasn’t too pleasant. But driving a big RV with about 10 people or so in it sounds much worse.
“Oh don’t worry. I’m just starting this sucker. Harrington’s got her, don't you big boy?” The RV starts and Eddie quickly moves out of the front seat to make room for Steve. Steve struggles to accept the fact that he’s gonna be the one driving but after it sets in he starts to drive.
The owners of the RV notice and start to get very angry. Steve is going relatively slow so we all yell at him to speed it up. He floors it towards the road and Dustin notes that they look pissed at us.
“Well, it’s not very day you lose your house and your car in one fell swoop.” I announce.
And just like that, we’re on the road. Steve struggles to gain control at first. He’s definitely not used to driving such a large vehicle so it takes him a moment to figure it out exactly. But once he’s got the hang of it we’re set. It’s just a straight shot from this road to The Warzone.
Nancy takes the passenger seat next to Steve while the rest of us sit in the back. I’m practically on Eddie’s lap as we can all barely fit in there. My hands find their way to his hair as Nancy and Steve are talking in the front. Lucas goes to the very back to talk with Max. And I try to have my own conversation with Eddie.
“I’m going back in there,” I inform him.
“you’re going back where, sweetheart?” He asks, genuinely confused. Not really putting two and two together.
“…The upside down,” I say.
“No! No way! You and I staying up here! We can help in some other way, but I’m not going to put your life at risk!” Eddie looks at me with the most unsettled eyes I have ever seen. It hurts to see him worry about me like this but I know that I have to help my friends more than anything…even if it means risking my life.
“Eddie-” I start to say but he interrupts me.
“Y/n, I can’t let you go there… I can’t risk losing you over…over some monster!”
“Eddie, please listen to me, okay?” I stare into his eyes waiting for him to say something but he says nothing. I finish my thought. “This time we are prepared. We’ll have weapons this time, we can actually protect ourselves and fight them off. Vecna won’t be able to hurt me if he’s focused on Max.”
“I don’t like this, y/n. Not at all…” he sighs out loudly. “But I know I won’t be able to stop you. No matter how much I protest you’ve already made up your mind.” He looks defeated and it breaks my heart.
Steve pulls into Warzone and everyone leaves the RV to go inside except for Eddie, Lucas, Max, and I. We’re sitting there talking about Steve and Nancy. We start placing more bets on whether or not they’ll get back together before this whole thing ends. Lucas and Eddie say they won’t but Max and I say they will. Each winner gets $10, $5 from each loser.
While these are frustrating times it’s nice to be able to laugh as a group again. Not having to think about the possibility of death and worrying about our other friends. Steve bursts into the RV and announces that we have to go. The rest of the group follows him in and Erica tells us that Jason was inside. Steve leaves the parking lot as fast as he can without raising concern among the shoppers.
After driving for about 20 awkward minutes we find a suitable plot of empty land to start working on our weapons. Eddie Dustin and I stick together and make our “Shields” out of trash can lids and long nails.
Eddie places one foot on the crate he was using and puts on a production for Dustin and me. “Light but durable. Deadly but reliable... Hear me now! There will be no more retreating from Eddie the banished!”
“You’re really ready for bat-tle!” Dustin chortles. I can’t help but snort at that pun. It was a bad pun, don’t get me wrong. But it was actually kinda funny. Eddie looks over at me with this blank look on his face like he can’t believe I actually snorted at something so stupid.
“Do you get it?” Dustin asks Eddie. “B-a-t. Bat-tle?”
“Yeah, I get it, dude.” Eddie informs him un-enthused. Abruptly Eddie starts to tackle Dustin and they start to wrestle in the middle of this random field. It’s kind of nice to see them happily play but I can’t help but feel a little embarrassed.
“Is that really necessary?” I ask, not exactly annoyed but more exasperated. I look over to see if anyone else is watching them and see that Robin has glanced over while talking to Steve by the RV. “Sinclairs! How are those spears coming along?” I don’t want to pay any attention to Eddie and Dustin.
Lucas gives me a big thumbs up and I take that as a good sign. The thumbs-up is followed by the sound of the brother and sister starting to bicker. Dustin and Eddie continue to play fight as they bring their shields into the playful matter. They urge me to join them but I politely decline as I continue to put more nails into mine.
We all pile back into the RV and Steve starts driving to the Victor Creel house. The ride there is silent because we all know what’s about to happen. We don’t bother trying to cheer each other up with jokes or anything. We accept that this could be the last time we see each other healthy.
when we pull up to the house Max, Lucas, and Erica get out of the RV. We watch them walk up to the door before driving away. Our main target is Eddie’s trailer, where the gate is. We all go over the plan before even entering the trailer.
“We’re gonna run through it one more time, alright?” Nancy directs. “Phase one.”
I answer this one. “We meet Erica at the playground. She’ll signal Max and Lucas when we’re ready.”
“Phase two.”
“Max baits Vecna. He’ll go after her in his trance.”
“Phase three.”
“Dustin, y/n, and I lead the bats away.” Eddie answers.
“Four.”
“We go into the hopefully bat-free lair and flambe.”
“Nobody deviates from the plan no matter what, got it?” We all reply with understanding and then head into the trailer.
Steve goes up the sheet rope through the gate first and gets the mattress ready for everyone. We all put our gear through the gate and make it through safely. Once we’ve all made it through we start to go outside and Steve stops us.
“Listen if anything starts to go south at all? Abort. Got it? Draw the attention to the bats. Don’t try to be heroes, you’re just decoys.” Steve tells us.
“It’s alright, Steve. You can be the hero.” I tell him.
“I mean look at us,” Eddie says. “we are…not heroes.”
We all start to go our separate ways as the three others diverge into the woods off to Victor Creels house. Dustin, Eddie, and I start to use all the scrap metal we can find in order to make a cage-looking thing around the trailer for our protection.
“Not bad,” Eddie says.
“Not bad at all!” Dustin responds.
“Now for the fun part,” I say, elbowing Eddie who gets the hint after a moment. He rushes inside and just stands in awe at his guitar for a minute. “Jesus…” he mutters. “It’s like she was made for an alternate dimension.” He grabs his guitar off the wall and slings it over his shoulder.
“What do you say, y/n? Are you ready for the most metal concert in the history of the world?”
“Is that rhetorical?”
“Let’s do this thing!” We grab the amps and pedals and get them all connected on the roof of the trailer to make sure the noise travels further and louder. Now we just wait for the queue to start this thing. We sit on the roof dodging the fact that we could die. Just like the drive in the RV, we don’t try to make each other laugh or anything. We just talk.
“We’re gonna be fine, right?” Dustin asks me.
“Yeah, we’re all gonna be fine. We have weapons to protect us this time so there’s nothing to worry about” I try to convince him, but I can’t even convince myself of that fact.
“I wouldn’t place any bets, y/l/n,” Eddie says.
“I won’t let anything happen to either of you. I promise.” Now that was easy to believe. I can even convince myself of that because it’s true. I would do anything for either of them.
“Let's hope that's not the case,” Eddie says downward. I can tell he’s scared, that he’s not mentally prepared for this battle.
We get the signal that it’s time for us to begin our distraction. Eddie plugs in his guitar to the amp and begins.
“Chrissy, this is for you!” He starts strumming the chords of Master of Puppets by Metallica. I can’t help but mouth the lyrics as he plays along. He’s starting to get really into it as he starts banging his head along with the song.
“Eddie! Gotta lockdown in T-minus 30 seconds!” I tell him.
“T-minus 20!” Eddie starts to play the riff, and I’m very impressed but can’t say anything. I’m too focused on these bats to compliment him.
“T-minus 10!”
“Five!”
“One!”
We rush inside the trailer where we make it to safety and the bat-like creatures can’t get us.
“Eddie! That was amazing! Most. Metal. Ever!!” Dustin and I coo. Eddie bows and waves mouthing “thank you, thank you.”
We hear the bat-like creatures trying to find their way inside from the top of the trailer. We think we’re fine but we keep our guard up. Suddenly a bat starts to come out of the vent and into the trailer. Dustin and I go after it quickly with our spears.
“There’s no other vents, right?” Dustin intrigues.
Bats start to swarm into the trailer with no warning. We somehow make it into the next room over and shut the door behind but it’s obviously not going to hold out against the major swarm of bats. I urge Dustin and Eddie to go up the sheet rope and they make it through successfully. I’m about to go through when I think of a way to protect them. To lure the bats away from the gate. When I start to turn around Eddie and Dustin start yelling at me.
“Y/n! Y/n come on! What are you doing?!” I cut the sheet rope to make sure they don’t follow me.
“I’m buying us more time.” I move the mattress from under the gate to the side of the wall.
“Y/n no! Stop! Stop! What are you doing!”
I run outside of the trailer and hop on a bike that was placed conveniently on the side of Eddie’s trailer from before. I ride it as fast and as hard as I can. The bats chase me at a rate that ensures they’re no longer at the trailer.
I get far enough away that I can kind of slow down my pace just a bit, only to be knocked off of my bike by one of the bat-like creatures. I successfully protect myself from the bats that try to attack me while I’m on the ground. The spear was really useful in that matter. But once I’m up off the ground, the bats start to swarm harder around me. Attacking me faster than I can fight back. And just like that, I’m on the ground again. I feel the bats biting my limbs and several deep wounds starting to form.
“Y/n!” I hear Eddie calling.
For no reason known to me, the bats drop dead around me. I’m left laying there as Eddie runs up to me as fast as he can. Dustin follows shortly after him. Eddie kneels beside me and holds me while trying to convince me there’s not a lot of blood and that I’m fine. I can feel blood running out of my mouth though.
“You’re an idiot you know that, right?” Eddie informs me.
“Yeah, but I’m your idiot.” I try to laugh but more blood ends up spilling out of my mouth. Eddie puts his hand on my head and pushes my hair back.
“You’re gonna be fine. Do you hear me? Let’s try to get up, alright?” He places his arm under my arm to try and support me standing up but it feels wrong.
“I just…I need to…catch my breath.”
“Okay, no rush. Take your time. Take your time, y/n.” Everything starts to go black. It’s getting hard to see. My heart rate feels normal, but I just feel…tired. I close my eyes and everything is pitch black.
---
I can hear Eddie speaking. “Chapter 5, Riddles in the Dark… When Bilbo opened his eyes, he wondered if he had; for it was just as dark as with them shut. No one was anywhere near him. Just imagine his fright! He could hear nothing, see nothing, and he could feel nothing except the stone of the floor.”
When I open my eyes again I’m in an unfamiliar place. The room is white with light blue curtains over the windows. The lights are uncomfortably bright. I’m in a very uncomfortable bed and I can feel all the bandages around me. I look to my side and see Eddie, still reading aloud. Unaware that I’m awake.
“…Very slowly he got up and groped about on all fours, till he-” He looks up, and his gaze holds mine. I can see the light spark in his eyes as soon as they meet mine. “Oh my god! You’re awake! Y/n, you’re so stupid!” He comes to my side quickly, taking my hand in his own and kissing it gently. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m feeling…sore. Kinda heroic.” I joke. Eddie laughs just happy to see I’m okay. “How long have I been���ya know?”
“About three days or so…” He breathes out heavily and hangs his head low before raising it back up. “I’m glad you’re awake and all but you’re gonna get a stern talking to when you’re feeling better. Steve was not too pleased with you when he found out.”
“That reminds me… did Steve and Nancy get back together?”
He laughs, like a real gut laugh before answering my question. “No, uh Jonathan or whatshisface came back from California.”
“Are you serious? I owe you $5 now?”
“You sure do.” He says proudly.
“Can you keep reading?” I plead with him.
“Of course I can,” he picks up the book and flips it to where he left off. “Very slowly he got up and groped about on all fours, till he touched the wall of the tunnel; but neither up nor down it could he find anything: nothing at all, no sign of goblins…”
#eddie munson fandom#stranger things fic#stranger things imagines#stranger things blurb#eddie munson#eddie stranger things#stranger things 4#eddie munson imagine#eddie munson blurb#eddie munson fluff#st4 imagine#im in love with eddie munson#fix it fic#joe quinn#joseph quinn
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How Long Our Fav Characters Would Survive in a Horror Novel
In the spirit (ha) of Halloween, we're asking "How long would our fav's survive in a horror novel?"
Also, we’re answering! Check it out 🎃
(and super thanks to @omni-scient-pan-da for the Halloween-tastic banner)
Talasseres Charossa — The Unspoken Name by A. K. Larkwood
My favorite character / unrequited love interest Talasseres Charossa is as petulant and grouchy as he is brave and gay. He’s gone toe-to-toe and steel-on-steel with god(s) and garbage wizards, but would he survive a horror novel? Unfortunately not. Let’s be real. He’s gonna trip and fall into a patch of evil quicksand, or willingly surrender to a hot vampyre lord of advanced age.
— Andrew King, Digital Marketing Coordinator
The Demon-chicken — Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher
Would this chicken survive? Absolutely. This chicken would be the VILLAIN of the horror movie. But just as the protagonists wipe the blood off their brows and the sun breaks over the horizon and hope seems to burn anew, the camera would slowly pan to the side until we are greeted with the beady black eyes of the demon-chicken. You will gaze into those eyes and witness the abyss, understanding that the true horror is that we will never escape from its fowl [sic] clutches.
— Yvonne Ye, Ad/Promo Assistant
Viv — Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
So I know my favorite character and general light of my life, Viv from Legends & Lattes, would absolutely DEMOLISH anything that came at her in a horror novel. A bad-ass orc barbarian who’s spent years on the road packing steel and raising hell as a sword for hire? Yeah, she’ll be fine. PLUS she has a cozy coffee shop filled with lattes, giant cinnamon rolls, and other treats to make it home to. What other motivation does she need?
— Rachel Taylor, Senior Marketing Manager
Charlie Hall — Book of Night by Holly Black
Back again with another character because authors are simply too good at their game and have created too many favs. Next up, I’m choosing Charlie Hall from Book of Night and I’m saying she’s Final Girl™️ material and she’s going to survive. So Charlie occupies a world of devious shadow magic practitioners and they’re all kind of in competition with each other to access more techniques, knowledge, and power. The presence of supernatural powers puts vanilla human Charlie at a disadvantage, but that’s why she’d survive a horror novel. She’s used to this shit, y’all. Also she’s really cool and Book of Night makes me want to buy goth clothes and get another tattoo.
— Andrew King, Digital Marketing Coordinator
The Demon-chicken (again) — Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher
For me, T. Kingfisher is the ultimate horror author. Whether she’s writing low stakes fantasy or high stakes horror, you know it’s gonna be spooky and that I’m gonna be wrapped in a blanket with a cup of tea in my paw and it’s GONNA be raining. Therefore, I choose the chicken familiar from Nettle & Bone. This chicken is literally possessed by an evil entity but only helps our protagonist princess to her end goal. The chicken only uses her evil powers for good. In conclusion, the chicken familiar is quite literally a horror novel unto herself; not only would she survive, she’d help her friends along the way, and maybe even lay an egg or two.
— Jordan Hanley, Senior Marketing Manager
Victor Vale — Vicious by V. E. Schwab
Cold, calculating Victor Vale is as ambitious as he is intelligent. He also has a tendency to be ruthless and obsessive, willing to push the limits of his own body to the brink of death in the pursuit of powers beyond imagination. With his ability to manipulate the pain of others he may last until the grand finale of the horror movie, but his tendency to adopt kids and dogs with his former cellmate will inevitably get him killed. The real question is whether he’ll stay dead or if he might rise up in the post-credits scene to star in a horror movie of his own.
— Becky Yeager, Senior Manager of Ad/Promo & Marketing
#halloween books#vicious#v. e. schwab#the unspoken name#a. k. larkwood#legends & lattes#travis baldree#nettle & bone#t. kingfisher#ursula vernon#tor books#demon chicken
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oooo how about 😏 with our Mass Effect S/Is! Her name is Holly "Gryphon" Victor and she's besties w Joker and went through school with him! She's primarily a mechanic for the ship so she spends a lot of time around Tali and the guys around there. She's kinda quiet and focused during her work but fairly upbeat and playful with others, so when she's not working on the ship you can find her bantering w Joker. Definitely hangs with Garrus tho cause their personalities would mesh rly well. In ME3 she hangs around above a lot more often cause of her crush on Traynor eheheh
oooh i like the sound of ur s/i!!
😏 - would your s/i tease mine about their f/o? do you think it’d be easy for my s/i to tease your s/i about their f/o?
you know the girlies gotta talk abt their crushes and lowkey make fun of each other,, tali and traynor are both such dorks so i could totally see my s/i teasing yours about liking them, anytime they do a dorky thing my s/i would just look at yours like “you picked them.” also since your s/i would be good friends w garrus i could totally imagine your s/i trying to play wingman and making my s/i embarrassed but also like “soooo did he say anything about me??” fgjsksk
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from ‘imagining the worst: stephen king and the representation of women’
“OH DEAR JESUS IT IS FEMALE”: Monster as Mother/Mother as Monster in Stephen King’s It
Linda Anderson
Stephen King has been quoted as saying that in It he was attempting to create a monster that would be a synthesis of all of the great monsters of American popular culture: “[I]t’s like a monster rally—everything is in this book, every monster you could think of’ (Winter, 184). King scholars differ as to the literary value of this “monster rally”: Michael Collings declares It a “masterpiece”
(Phenomenon, 13), and Burton Hatlen likes it “a lot,” although finding it “imperfect in certain ways” (146); Don Herron’s assessment is scathing (216— 17). Clearly, what King aimed to create in It—and in It—was what Georgie Denbrough imagines (rather exceptionally for a six-year-old) as “the apotheosis of all monsters” (It, 7). Whether King succeeded in his attempt must ultimately depend on each reader’s taste, but it is certainly the case that King’s monster, even if not exalted to divine rank, is unusual.
Instead of appearing in a single, gruesome, terrifying form, It manifests Itself as many different avatars. Its incarnations include such classic monsters as the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Dracula, a teenaged werewolf, and Frankenstein’s monster. Less traditionally, It appears as a leprous hobo, Paul Bunyan, and Buddy Holly. It can possess the bodies of living people, as it does that of Beverly Marsh’s father, and It can take the form of dead acquaintances of the other characters, such as Belch Huggins and Victor Criss.
Its most frequent avatar, however, is Pennywise the Dancing Clown. One common element of nearly all of Its manifestations is that they are explicitly defined as male.' Though King as narrator is careful to refer to It Itself as gender-neutral, his characters sometimes refer to the avatars as male. On more than one occasion, It even defines Itself as male, saying that Its name is Bob
Gray, or even Mr. Bob Gray. Ultimately, however, and this is presented as the ultimate of Its horrors, It is discovered to be female and pregnant—not It at all, but She and Mother.
Eventually, of course, It is defeated, first and temporarily in 1958 by children, and finally in 1985 by adults (themselves unable to have children) who are able to “become children” again. The principal battle of the book is between a group of six boys/men (and one token girl/woman) and a (literally) devouring mother-figure who is made more monstrous because, as the book makes clear,
She does not kill merely for food or to support Her young: Her creative and bleakly humorous use of children’s popular culture suggests that She enjoys terrorizing, mutilating, killing, and devouring children, primarily male children, whose only rational response is to destroy Her. The female character who is part of the victorious group (known as “the Losers”) is ostensibly established as a virtuous mother-figure, in contrast not only to It but also to the novel’s real human mothers. However, her part in the defeat of the monster is problematic.
Only the group’s boy-men, with advice and limited help from their fathers, father-figures, and other male characters, can defeat the monstrous mother.
Despite all of the apparent male violence—human and inhuman—throughout the novel, It is ultimately about resolving pre-Oedipal conflict, the attempt to erase the “primary experience” of the link between mother and child and to “release the hold of the maternal entity” through male language (Irigaray, 14; Kristeva, 13).
Whether or not readers agree that the revelation of It as She and Mother constitutes the ultimate horror, those familiar with King’s other novels and tories should not be surprised at encountering a monstrous mother because such figures are common enough in his works to constitute a motif.* Even readers not familiar with King’s other works should not be too surprised at the revelation of
It as the monstrous mother because the idea of mothers as monstrous is established well before the book’s climax. Human mothers in It are not entirely unsympathetic: Many of them are poor, often working in hard, sometimes hazardous, dead-end jobs, and some of them are struggling to raise children by themselves (among the Losers, only Beverly has a father who is a dominant figure). Nevertheless, It is largely written from a child’s viewpoint, and as mothers these women are seldom more than ineffectual at best and often fail to rise even to that depressed and depressing level.
The best mother in the novel is probably Jessica Hanlon, but even she is represented as somewhat repressive, particularly when compared to Mike’s father, Will.* Jessica is the parent who keeps Mike at his chores, while Will is the one who tells her a boy needs time to play. Jessica is the parent who enforces discipline, to such an extent that even Will avoids her anger. Jessica tries to keep Will from giving Mike information that he needs to combat the monster. Jessica is somewhat humorless: When Mike and his father were having “great fun” watching Rodan on TV, she “popped her head in and told them to hush up before they gave her a headache with the noise” (275). Toward the end of the book, It reveals that the reason Mike sees It as a monstrous bird is that the infant Mike was attacked in his cradle by a crow when his mother left him in the yard while she was hanging out laundry. Although Jessica Hanlon is a loving mother, she is clearly represented as stricter and less fun than her husband, although still unable to protect her son, or even, at times, to comprehend the dangers of the world he lives in.
Richie Tozier’s is the only other family in the book that is other than gravely dysfunctional. (King offers almost no information about Stan Uris’s family.) Maggie Tozier, however, again in contrast to her husband, is represented as being no fun. She reproves her husband for “vulgarity,” refers to ichie’s beloved horror movies as “awful junk,” and “like Bill Denbrough’s mother” is “death on rock and roll” and is “traumatized” by seeing Jerry Lee Lewis on TV.° She becomes “furious” with Richie when his glasses are broken by a bully (662). She is described as being likely to “have a bird” if she finds out that Richie has been riding double on Bill’s bike, but she is completely unaware that her son is plotting with Bill to kill It and is shown as cheerfully pouring out iced tea for the boys as they plot their dangerous mission (363). Shortly after this episode, we hear her thoughts about the boys:
I don’t understand either of them, she thought. Where they go, what they do, what they want... or what will become of them. Sometimes, oh sometimes their eyes are wild, and sometimes I’m afraid for them and sometimes I’m afraid of them... . A pretty little girl she could have understood. (King’s ellipses, 366)
Ben Hanscom’s mother is affectionate and supportive. She is a single mother and works hard to raise her son, although even that virtue causes Ben anguish, as he worries about what her job in a textile mill is doing to her health. She is “a hard woman,” who usually insists on having her own way, and Ben is rarely capable of standing up to her (185-86). She knows little about her son’s life, particularly about his friendlessness early in the book, and he feels unable to talk to her about this or his other worries. Although Ben loves her, he doesn’t trust her. When he is pursued by It, he gets home to find that his mother, exhausted from work, “had not, in truth, much missed him” (215), and after being knifed by the murderous Henry Bowers, he thinks of his mother not as a comforter or protector but as someone who is “going to give him sixteen different flavors of holy old hell” or put him in the emergency room for ruining his clothes (216). Worst of all, she stuffs him with food, even after he is obviously grossly obese, and it isn’t until Ben is in high school—and then only after having “a hell of a fight” with her—that he is able to lose weight, and then only with her fighting him every step of the way. His weight, Ben suggests, was “a kind of security thing with her” (496).
And these are the good mothers.’
The remainder of the mothers in It are almost worse than the title character. Devastated by their younger son’s death, both of Bill’s parents withdraw into themselves, leaving Bill feeling that they blame him for George’s death and no longer love him, but Bill’s mother is the parent represented as least functional, most repressive, and most to blame for the failure of both parents.
She is the parent who reproves the boys for making noise and who refuses to allow Bill to have a rifle. She is the parent whom Bill wants to please, but whom he never can please. And, like Maggie Tozier, she is the parent represented as being confused and frightened by children, including her own son.
Eddie Kaspbrak’s mother is the most thoroughly described and in many ways the most monstrous in It. She is, in fact, described as “something nearly monstrous’”—because she weighs 406 pounds—as well as “crazy” at the time of her death (90, 95). She is racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Irish, and homophobic, hugely fat, stupid, frightened, but also “implacable” (88). Eddie “in a sense, [marries] his mother,” and his mother is obviously the cause of Eddie’s marrying her epigone, Myra (85). Eddie’s mother consciously uses tears as a weapon, is responsible for Eddie’s psychosomatic asthma, and turns him into a lifelong hypochondriac. When Eddie is hurt or in danger or contemplating doing something as harmless as playing baseball, his principal concern is not his own feelings but his mother’s reaction—always conceived of as strongly negative.
Even after his mother is dead, he can still hear her voice inside his head, warning him of imaginary perils. She is terrified that he will grow up, move away, and get married, thus leaving her alone, and when he shows signs of independence, she becomes afraid of him. Sonia Kaspbrak is explicitly associated with It in several ways. When she tries to drive all of Eddie’s friends away, Eddie sees It capering with glee and finally pretending to kiss Sonia’s cheek. When Eddie sees her most clearly, he associates her with the incarnation of It that has frightened him most: Her eyes, he realizes, are “almost predatory, like the eyes of the leper that had crawled out of the basement at 29 Neibolt Street” (789-90). Horrified at his own realization, he succeeds only in further extending the comparison when he tries to tell another character, “She’s not the leper, please don’t think that, she’s only eating me because she loves me” (790). Finally, It even takes the shape of his mother.
In addition to being manipulative, oppressive, ignorant, and afraid of their children, the human mothers in It all demonstrate a more immediate shortcoming: They are unable to protect their children. Occasionally, mothers in the book are actually the ones to inflict violence, intentionally or not: Tom Rogan’s mother, a single parent with four small children, often beats young Tom with a stick, thereby turning him into a wife-beater. An unnamed mother accidentally drops her baby into the Derry Standpipe, where it drowns.® Sometimes, children become victims of It when their mothers (never, it seems, their fathers) fail to watch them carefully enough. Three-year-old Matthew Clements is taken when his mother briefly leaves him outside alone to attend to her laundry. Five-year-old Laurie Ann Winterbarger is in her mother’s sole custody when she disappears. Patrick Hockstetter’s parents both fail to realize that their five-year-old son is a psychopath, but it is his mother who is home asleep when Patrick murders his infant brother Avery. More commonly, though, the failure to protect children is due to a lack of understanding, although even this is represented as the mothers’ fault because the children, reasonably, given the mothers they have, do not feel that they can talk to their mothers.’ The mothers are not, for the most part, uncaring: They try to protect their children against falling off bicycles, contracting contagious diseases, or becoming victims of what they assume to be a sex maniac who preys on Derry’s children. They fail, however, to understand not only the threat posed to their children by It but even the more obvious dangers of schoolyard bullies and domestic violence (at least some of which dangers are inspired by It).
Worse than the lack of understanding, however, is the fact that mothers in It fail to protect their children against domestic violence by men. Young Henry Bowers is driven insane largely by having to live with his crazy and abusive father, whose wife leaves him after he nearly beats her to death. Why she abandons their son to be abused by Butch Bowers is not explored. On occasion, mothers even protect abusive and violent men rather than their own children. Beverly Marsh’s mother, like so many others in the book, is loving and concerned, but too busy with her job and her husband to be involved in her daughter’s life or even to be aware of Beverly’s lack of friends. More important, she seems to be unaware that Beverly’s father is physically abusing their daughter, or, if she is aware, unwilling or unable to do anything about it. The mother of four-year-old Dorsey and ten-year-old Eddie Corcoran allows her husband, the boys’ stepfather, to physically abuse both of her sons and defends him even after he kills Dorsey and Eddie disappears. She subsequently has Eddie, one of Its victims, declared legally dead so that she can “enter into possession of Edward Corcoran’s savings account,” which consists of $16.00 (255).
The inability or unwillingness of mothers to protect their children is particularly important because It preys primarily upon children, mostly boys. Although there are a few mass killings that must have involved girls—the disappearance of approximately 340 people in 1741 (153) and the explosion of the Kitchener Ironworks during an Easter egg hunt arranged for the town’s children (157)—only a handful of Its more than twenty named or described child-victims are girls. When It chooses older victims, they are almost invariably men; although adult women sometimes die when It stages a mass killing—the fire at the Black Spot (463-69), the massacre of the Bradley gang (641—55)—the death toll is always much higher among men than women, and there are some mass killings in which the victims are exclusively men—the 1879 lumber-camp slaughter (157), the mass murder at the Silver Dollar in 1905 (883-93). Often, in fact, these mass incidents seem to occur in places where a largely or exclusively male population would be expected—an army base, a lumber camp, a disreputable saloon. Furthermore, King suggests that knowledge about It drives several men to suicide (including Stan Uris, Branson Buddinger, and Richard Macklin); women, apparently, either lack such insight or fail to be so horrified that death seems preferable to life with such terrible knowledge. In fact, there is no evidence that It ever singles out a female character over the age of eighteen for Its attentions. Adult women seem almost immune to Its attacks, except as incidental victims. The maternal monster rarely preys on Derry’s monstrous mothers.* As Georgie Denbrough presciently imagines, It is “a creature which would eat anything but which [is] especially hungry for boymeat” (7).
The fact that It eats Its victims is central to the horror It evokes. Again, the eating seems confined almost exclusively to young male victims. Although girls, women, and adult men are killed by It, there is rarely a suggestion that they are devoured.” Its appetite is one of Its two defining characteristics, eating and sleeping: An alien life form that arrived “from a place much farther away than another star or another galaxy,” It likes Earth because the “quality of imagination made the food very rich. . . . Upon this rich food It existed in a simple cycle of waking to eat and sleeping to dream” (758, 1007). It is described as a “homicidal endless formless hungry being” (1054), and describes Itself to Bill as “the Eater of Worlds” (1052). Bill comes to understand that It is a being that “only ate” (1054). When It becomes fearful of the Losers, Its response is defined in terms of eating: “Jt hated the fear, would have turned on it and eaten it if It could have” (1015).'°
But it is not merely the physical fact of being devoured by It that is terrifying. More horrific is the suggestion that children who are killed and eaten by It continue, in some sense, to live not only with It but within It. Betty Ripsom’s mother tells her husband that she heard “‘a whole slew of voices, all of them babblin together’ speaking from the drain of her kitchen sink: ‘Who the hell are you?’ she calls. ‘What’s your name?’ And all these voices answered back, she said—grunts and babbles and howls and yips, screams and laughin, don’t you know. And she said they were sayin what the possessed man said to Jesus: ‘Our name is Legion,’ they said” (154). Mr. Ripsom goes on to tell Mike that he himself later heard his daughter’s voice “screamin and laughin down there in the pipes” (155). That these voices and Its repeated assertions that Its victims all “float” down where It dwells are not merely illusions or lies is strongly suggested during the Losers’ first battle with It, when It tells Bill, “wait for the deadlights! you'll look and you'll go mad... but you'll live . . . and live _ and live... inside them... inside Me” (King’s ellipses, 1055). During his ordeal, Bill becomes confused as to whether “It wanted to eat little kids . . . or suck them in, or whatever It did” (1055). The answer, apparently, is that It both eats little kids and sucks them in. They are eaten but somehow remain alive within the monstrous mother.'’ As Jungian myth-scholar Erich Neumann explains, The mysteries of death as mysteries of the Terrible Mother are based on her devouringensnaring function, in which she draws the life of the individual back into herself. Here the womb becomes a devouring maw and the conceptual symbols of diminution, rending, hacking to pieces, and annihilation, of rot and decay, have here their place. (71-72)
It is not until the end of the book (the ends of both battles with It being narrated in alternating sections) that Its true identity as female and mother is revealed. Whether or not this revelation shocks the reader, it certainly has a profound effect on the two characters who first (in terms of the book’s somewhat skewed chronology) make the discovery. Tom Rogan drops “dead of shock . . . his eyes filling with the blood that had squirted out of his brain in a dozen places” (1016). Audra Denbrough puts “out one powerful, horrified thought—OH DEAR JESUS IT IS FEMALE,” before “her mind [is] utterly destroyed by her first sight of It as It really [is[’ (1016, 1015). Though it is possible that we are supposed to believe that these characters’ reactions are provoked by Its spider-avatar, that appearance had no such effect on the children who saw Its “true” form during the 1958 battle. Granted that the children know, as Tom and Audra do not, that they are about to face a monster, and granted that King emphasizes the toughness of children’s minds, the power of the spideravatar is later denigrated by the boy Bill, who thinks that “once seen, Its physical form was not so bad and Its most potent weapon was taken away from It. They all had, after all, seen spiders before. They were alien and somehow crawlingly dreadful. . . . But a spider was, after all, only a spider” (1074~75).
Audra’s last thought, in particular, suggests that Its femaleness, not Its arachnid form, is what causes death and madness.”
How that femaleness is recognized (not, one might imagine, a recognition easy to arrive at with regard to a bug, however large) is suggested when the Losers confront It in the final battle, although in a passage that raises at least as many questions as it answers:
Its belly bulged grotesquely, almost dragging on the floor as It moved. .. .
That’s Its egg-sac, Ben thought, and his mind seemed to shriek at the implication. Whatever It is beyond what we see, this representation is at least symbolically correct: It’s female, and It’s pregnant. . . . It was pregnant then and none of us knew except Stan, oh Jesus Christ YES, it was Stan, Stan, not Mike, Stan who understood, Stan who told us... . That’s why we had to come back, no matter what, because It is female, It’s pregnant with some unimaginable spawn . . . and Its time has drawn close. (King’s ellipses, 1048-49)
Its swollen belly identifies It as pregnant, and therefore female, and the “grotesque” bulging of Its belly links It with the monstrously fat, devouring mother Sonia Kaspbrak.'* The realization that It is pregnant adds to Ben’s horror, and because he and his friends are in immediate danger of death and worse than death, only a powerful horror could increase his fear. Unfortunately, Ben fails to specify what Stan told the rest of the Losers during or after the first battle with It, since the book provides no other evidence that Stan realizes that It is female and pregnant. Richie does suggest that It is female during the first attack, but this suggestion puzzles Ben: “Her? Ben thought stupidly. Her, did he say?” (1051). Ben’s befuddlement is understandable, as there is no indication of how Richie comes to recognize Its gender, although this recognition is immediately echoed by Bill, who begins referring to It as “bitch” (1052).
Though there is no clue given as to how they do so, the boys recognize the undisguised It as She and Mother and that recognition makes It far more horrible than Its earlier assumed male or gender-neutral avatars.
In contrast to It and the human mothers of the book, one female character is represented as a positive maternal figure, even though she has no children. Late in the novel, after the first battle with It, Beverly invites each of her six comrades to have sex with her, which all of them do, one after the other. Some critics find this episode to be both an effective narrative device and a breakthrough for King, suggesting that the scene not only presents a positive female and maternal presence in the novel but also operates as a rite of passage, with an emotional rather than physical emphasis.'* Clearly, King is trying to establish Beverly as a positive maternal figure'°—Eddie, the first of the boys to have sex with Beverly “comes to her... the way he would have come to his mother only three or four years ago, to be comforted” (1080).
Nevertheless, though tastes, of course, will differ, there is no question that many readers are likely to find this episode disturbing or absurd or both.
Although King is careful to establish the sex scene as Beverly’s idea, it is irresistibly reminiscent of gang-rape. The children have faced their greatest fears, and ultimately death, together to defeat It, albeit only temporarily. Sexual intercourse seems unlikely to deepen the emotional bond they have already forged or make them more mature, even if maturity were a fate to be wished for in Derry, a place in which all of the adults are violent, corrupt, ignorant, or ineffectual.
Because of the structure of the group, each of the boys has sex individually with Beverly, who becomes less a character than a link between the boys, all of whom are saved by “doing it” with the same girl. If the physical aspect were not paramount, one might be tempted to suggest that a stronger “link” might be forged by group members having sex with each other regardless of gender, but this would violate the book’s heterosexual-male perspective. The role of female characters is to be there for male characters, as either motherenemy or mother-comforter. From this heterosexual-male perspective, having (as they think) killed mother, the male characters are now able to have sex with mother; in both instances, of course, there is displacement: The mother is not the real mother. Although this episode is intended to contrast Beverly as good mother with It and the book’s other monstrous maternal figures, the contrast leads to the conclusion that the bad mother devours boys and therefore must be destroyed, to be replaced by the good mother, who encourages boys to have sex with her and thus become “normal” men.
Even if accepted as “good mother,” Beverly is a severely limited character. It is defeated by the male members of the Losers’ Club, all of whom take an active part in the 1958 battle. The four men who are present for the 1985 battle are also active in destroying It and Its offspring. Beverly, on the other hand, has to be rescued from Its clutches by Ben in the first battle and in both
battles tries to prevent Bill from confronting It. Like the other human mothers in the book, she acts as an inhibiting force in the necessary male battle against the monstrous mother. In the earlier struggle, she heroically interposes herself between Bill and the monster, but she seems unable to attack It in Its final, feminine form, and her part in both battles is limited to encouraging and comforting her male companions. Her apparent inability to engage with It is not merely physical because the most important aspects of these fights are intellectual and imaginative. Bill, Richie, Stan, and Eddie all use their knowledge of It and their imaginations to hurt the monster. Although there seems to be no reason why Beverly could not do the same, she does not do so.
Her only significant contribution occurs after the first battle, and it consists of offering sex and comfort. The necessary conclusion is that even the ideal girl/woman/mother is unable to be of much help in defeating the monstrous mother.
That killing the monstrous mother is a male task is also emphasized by the fact that the Losers defeat It with the advice and help of male characters, often fathers or father-figures. As Tony Magistrale has pointed out, ‘“Mike’s father and [male, army] friends unconsciously serve as models of inspiration for Mike and his friends” (Moral Voyages, 111). In addition to what he learns from
his father, Mike gets his information about the history of Derry and the cycle of Its depredations from male authorities, mostly elderly men, but occasionally male children. (One of Mike’s informants, Norbert Keene, suggests that Mike could get information about the massacre of the Bradley gang from Charlotte Littlefield, as well as five men he names, but there is no evidence that Mike avails himself of this opportunity.) Stan’s father teaches him about birds, knowledge that he uses to ward off Its attacks on both himself and the group. Bill’s father advises him that Derry’s sewers are dangerous and (unwittingly) provides the workshop in which the children make the silver slugs with which they attack It on Neibolt Street. Bill also gets some good advice from a male child—“‘You can’t be careful on a skateboard, man” (1126).
No one gets (or seeks) useful advice about It (or much else) from women or girls. Mothers, in fact, seek to prevent their children from getting information and tools they need to defeat It: Mike’s mother doesn’t want him to hear about the Black Spot, Richie’s mother discourages him from learning about rock music and horror movies, and Bill’s mother refuses to let him have a rifle.
More significantly, the Turtle—Its most obvious opposite, if not exactly adversary, because the Turtle seems too passive to function in that capacity—is identified as male and is crucially important, because he not only encourages and advises Bill in his first battle with It, but also, at least in Mike’s estimation, is responsible for awakening Mike to the possibility of Its return. The Turtle is large, old, kind, and more powerful than It, but, despite his apparent good intentions, cannot or will not act directly against the mother-monster: “/ take no stand in these matters,” the Turtle tells Bill when the boy begs for help against the monstrous mother (1053). Clearly, however, the Turtle is a father-figure, because he repeatedly refers to Bill as “son” (1053, 1054, 1056, 1057, and so 16 on).
In a further suggestion that the boy-men attacking It must assume the role of the adult male who is, however, more capable than the book’s inadequate fathers, King describes how Bill successfully recites his magic formula: “Dropping his voice a full register, making it not his own (making it, in fact, his father’s voice)” (1056).'’ Finally, It is defeated only after Bill and Richie are able to bite into Its tongue, an attribute that “always possesses a phallic character” (Neumann, 169).
The book ends on a note of comparative happiness. Although Stan and Eddie have died in the attempt, the surviving adult males have “killed the bitch” (1098). Stan’s and Eddie’s deaths are themselves symbolic because Stan, unable to face a second battle with the monstrous mother, commits suicide in a kind of return to the womb, locking himself in his bathroom, removing his clothes, and cutting his wrists to bleed to death while sitting in a tub of water. Eddie, who does face the second battle, dies when It bites off his arm, a symbolic castration (in the sense that Freud uses that term to mean amputation of the penis) by the vagina dentata.'* The word continually applied to the monster throughout both battles neatly represents the power gained by correctly naming the enemy, who is discovered to be not neutral, but female—not IT, but bITch. The monstrous mother, which could not be killed by boys, even though they recognized her as the source of evil in their world, is destroyed by men. The “fucking BITCH” (1049), who threatened to seduce and devour male children is no longer a danger. Furthermore, although the Losers are only thirty-eight at the time of the last battle, it seems that none of them still has surviving parents, or at least not parents worth mentioning. Thus, not only It, but apparently all of the real (inadequate or monstrous) mothers are dead as well. The ending suggests that, having defeated the monstrous mother, the surviving protagonists will now repress the memories of their titanic struggle and get on with their lives as adults.
In her analysis of Carrie, The Shining, and Misery in light of theorist Julia Kristeva’s discussion of abjection, Clare Hanson concludes that ‘Horror fiction . . . seems to be designed to work for the masculine subject as an exorcism: It offers a way of repassing through abjection and of distancing oneself once again from the power of the mother” (153). From this perspective,
It clearly does function as King’s “magnum opus” (Winter, 183), not only providing the “gross-out” elements for which his work is notorious but also associating them with the huge, seductive, devouring mother as the ultimate horror. Despite critics’ suggestions that It and Beverly Marsh are the novel’s only significant female characters, it is clear that It is an objectification of the book’s many monstrous mothers, who are powerful but un-nurturing.'” For the boys in the book to survive, as many do not, to prevent themselves from being engulfed and devoured, and to become men (heterosexual and potentially fathers themselves), they must kill the monster who stands for all of their monstrous mothers, a task in which they can expect only limited help—advice and tools from their fathers and encouragement and sex from a young female figure. The devouring bITch-mother can only be destroyed by masculine force, knowledge, and language in an exorcism of pre-Oedipal anxiety.
NOTES
Thanks are due to Terri Whaling for her invaluable help with this chapter.
1. It does occasionally appear as female, briefly as the dead Greta Bowie and more significantly as “Mrs. Kersh” who turns into a witch. It also sometimes appears in nongendered incarnations, such as “the Crawling Eye,” and as animals such as a giant bird, the shark from Jaws, and a gigantic Doberman Pinscher in a clown suit.
2. Many of the ideas underlying this chapter rely on the work of such literary theorists as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, who have identified a variety of cultural constructions as stemming from male anxiety about maternal power, and, in particular, the maternal body. For a more strictly psychoanalytic discussion of such issues, see hodorow (106) and Horney.
3. Mothers who are religious fanatics, treacherous toward their sons, or in other ways menstrous appear in Carrie, The Dead Zone, The Running Man, and Rage, the last of which even provides a foreshadowing of Its mother-as-collection-of-monsters in a description of Carol Granger’s mother. The mother in The Shining allows her son to be abused by his father, and mothers in Cujo, The Stand, Pet Sematary, and “The Boogeyman” are unable to save their children’s lives. See Collings, Stephen King as Richard Bachman (26) and Pharr (26-27). For a contrasting view, see Magistrale, Moral Voyages (95-103). On monstrous women in It, see Collings, Phenomenon (21). On monstrous women in King’s other works, see Collings, Phenomenon (108) and Facets (75); Hanson; Magistrale, Landscape (70); and Winter (53).
Fathers in King’s works, of course, are also frequently abusive or ineffectual: See Collings, Stephen King as Richard Bachman (25—26 and 134) and Magistrale, Landscape (72). On dysfunctional families in It, see Davis (95). On the failure of parents and other adults in It to protect their children, see Magistrale, Landscape (111-13). On inadequate and abusive parents in King’s other works, see Collings, Facets (74), Phenomenon (16), and Stephen King as Richard Bachman (16-17, 25, and 62-63); Collings and
Engebretson (89); Heldreth (65-66); Magistrale, Landscape (92); and Newhouse (51—55):
4. One of the few good mother-figures in King’s works is “Mother” Abagail of The Stand, but her virtue may have more to do with her race than with her gender or maternal qualities because King himself has described her, along with Dick Hallorann (who plays a major role in The Shining, as “cardboard caricatures of superblack heroes, viewed through rose-tinted glasses of white-liberal guilt” (Underwood and Miller, 47). This suggests that the fact that the Hanlons are African-American may have something to do with the fact that they are the happiest and most loving family in It, despite their comparative poverty.
5. That Maggie Tozier should so detest rock and roll is particularly ironic because her son grows up to become a famous disc jockey (343, 582, 720).
6. This is Eddie Kaspbrak’s version. Ben says that he “had heard that it was actually a kid, a little girl of about three” (417).
7. A suggestion of how ignorant mothers in It typically are about their children’s lives occurs in the case of sixteen-year-old Cheryl Lamonica, unusual among Its victims not only because she’s female, but because she is a mother, having borne a daughter at thirteen. The authorities originally assume that Chery] is the victim of one of her many boyfriends: “‘They were nice boys, most of them,’ Cheryl’s mother said. One of the ‘nice boys’ had been a forty-year-old Air Force colonel with a wife and three children in New Mexico. Another was currently serving time in Shawshank for armed robbery” (180).
8. It claims to have killed Barbara Starrett, a librarian who was “fifty-eight or -nine” at the time of her death (548). Because, however, It makes this claim in the course of terrorizing Ben, who was fond of Mrs. Starrett, and because she reportedly died of a
stroke, rather than being killed by violence, like the rest of Its victims (many of whom are also mutilated and entirely or partially eaten), the truth of this claim may be doubted. As Bill comes to understand late in the book, “much of Its talk is nothing but a bluff, a big shuck-and-jive” (1056).
9. Betty Ripsom is said to have been “ripped wide open” and “mutilated” (155, 180) and both she and “the Albrecht girl” are mentioned, along with three young male victims, when Mike is thinking about the word “haunt” as meaning “a feeding place for animals” (159). Mike recalls that “the bodies of the children that were found back then and now weren’t sexually molested, not even precisely mutilated, but partially eaten” (702), but there is no explicit description of It actually eating Her female victims, although It is apparently preparing to eat Audra Denbrough and the adult Losers. It is described as having “fed on [only] a few of the older ones over the years” (1016).
10. Bosky sees It as having “five basic faces: eating, excreting, sex (including procreation), fighting or killing, and dying. These are, in other words, all of the universal activities of the animal body, except for sleeping and being born. In a sense, It is the body, a devilish body that tempts us with its appetites and betrays us into death” (147). In fact, however, excreting is never mentioned with regard to It, nor is sex—how It can have become pregnant is a question the novel does not invite us to ask. Until the end of the book, It is unaware that It could face an adversary requiring fighting, or that It could die.
Killing is merely part of Its feeding cycle, and when It finally does have to fight, It does so by eating, both physically, by biting off Eddie’s arm and swallowing it, and mentally, by “feeding on [pain]” (1056). Sleep is the other half of Its cycle: It sleeps for twentyseven years (the approximate length of a human generation), awakes to feed on a new generation of children, and goes back to sleep: “Jt wanted only to eat and sleep and dream and eat again” (1008).
11. The horror of being “incorporated in [It] alive” is noted by Bosky, who sees this as an image that “presents a horror of corporeality, a duality of mind trapped inside flesh. In conjunction with Its pregnancy, the image also suggests a fear of the female body, which shelters yet engulfs, within the womb or through a hungry sexuality” (150).
Because the mind of Audra Denbrough is described as being “with It, in It” (1015) while Audra is still alive, it is apparently possible for It to devour the mind without devouring the body, although what this means is not really explained or explored. Audra’s mind apparently remains where It is even after Its death, until she is saved and restored by a bicycle ride. Also unclear is whether It is telling the truth when It tells Beverly that “No one who dies in Derry really dies” (571); if true, this statement may suggest that all of Derry’s dead are somehow Its victims.
12. Abraham discusses the spider as symbolic of the “angry,” “wicked,” and “dangerous” mother, and cites a case in which a spider killing its victim by sucking his blood “served as a castration symbol” for a patient whose “phantasies were concerned with the danger of being killed by his mother during incestuous intercourse.” C. W. Wahl also associates the spider with mother-son incest (Abraham, 326, 332, 331; Slater, 87 n., 65). Neumann notes that the spider symbolizes the “Terrible Mother” in various cultures (66, 177, 184, 233).
13. Its body is later referred to as “bloated” (1092). On obese female characters, particularly mothers, in King’s works, see Bosky; Collings, Facets (75 and 81), and Stephen King as Richard Bachman (17); Collings and Engebretson (28 and 147); and Wornom (158).
14. See Magistrale, Landscape (117-18) and Moral Voyages (94-95); and Collings, Phenomenon (24-25). In contrast, Don Herron finds the episode degrading to women, ridiculous in its content, absurd as one of the book’s climaxes, and feeble stylistically (216-17). Collings points out that sexual intercourse is “also referred to as doing ‘it,’ with connections to the monster that are anything but accidental” (Phenomenon, 24).
15. Pharr describes Beverly as “earth mother,” as does Magistrale (Moral Voyages, 95) and King himself (quoted in Magistrale, Second Decade, 7). Pharr also describes Beverly as “high priestess of heroism itself,” a “living icon,” and “the Jeanne d’Arc of
the Losers,” even while recognizing that Beverly “is no one’s peer” and “fits a maledesigned mold” (30, 31).
16. After the deaths of both the Turtle and It, the “Other,” which is apparently more powerful than either of them, also refers to Bill as “son” (1094). The Other is not explicitly gendered, although its words and attitude would seem to align it with the male Turtle.
17. Bill’s mother gives him this formula to help him control his stuttering, and it is perhaps the only useful piece of information given by a mother in It. Of course, it is Bill, not his mother, who realizes that the formula can be used as a weapon against It. Mike also emphasizes the importance of his father’s voice (452).
18. Bosky describes this episode as “perhaps” a “symbolic castration.” She also notes the parallel between Sonia Kaspbrak and It as devouring mothers, and makes interesting points about Bill’s final attack on It, which “suggests both sexual violation and a kind of reverse, forced birth” (150).
19. Pharr suggests that It is “the only other significant “female’” (besides Beverly) in the book, although she describes It as essentially asexual (31). Magistrale’s insistence that “Beverly Marsh is the only human female in It’ (Moral Voyages, 94) and that
“{Beverly] and It are essentially the only females in the book” (Second Decade, 6) is simply inexplicable.
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——. Stephen King: The Second Decade, “Danse Macabre” to “The Dark Half.” New York: Twayne, 1992.
Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Bollingen Ser. XLVII. 1963. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.
Newhouse, Tom. “A Blind Date with Disaster: Adolescent Revolt in the Fiction of Stephen King.” The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares. Edited by Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987, 49-55.
Pharr, Mary. “Partners in the Danse:. Women in Stephen King’s Fiction.” The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape. Edited by Tony Magistrale. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992, 19-32.
Slater, Philip. The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family. 1968. Boston: Beacon, 1971.
Underwood, Tim, and Chuck Miller, eds. Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988.
Winter, Douglas E. Stephen King: The Art of Darkness. 1984. New York: New American, 1986.
Wornom, Howard. “Terror in Toontown.” The Stephen King Companion. Edited by George Beahm. Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1989, 155-60.
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*I AM, IN LARGE PART, A FIGMENT OF MY OWN YEARNING IMAGINATION.
*NAME: Zoya Finch.
*AGE: 27.
*OCCUPATION: socialite, philanthropist, con / artist.
*ALLEGIANCE: Jabberwocks.
*PINTEREST: here.
»»» a white bird in a blizzard; the deflective intrigue of the unknown; a crude papier-mâché mask; the kinds of bargains made in folktales; the delicate legs of a spider as it spins silk; a blank canvas revealed to be an intricate overlay of white and off-white streaks of paint; deals with devils and no true victor; the gaze of a room sweeping in one direction; the seven of swords in meaning ( strategy, secrecy, and deceit ); the seven of swords in acronym ( fitting for a girl forever lost to strange new depths ); the seven of swords in practice ( power doesn’t just come from what’s real, but what we believe is real. )
BASICS, HISTORY, WANTED CONNECTIONS, & EXTRAS UNDER THE CUT !!
*BASICS.
BIRTH NAME: Zoë Vogel
CURRRENT NAME: Zoyalind Amandine Finch
NICKNAMES: Z ; S.O.S ( acronym of ‘seven of swords,’ used by Jabberwocks only ) ; Birdy ( used only by Rune and those in the know )
AGE: 27
D.O.B.: July 14, 1995
BIRTHPLACE: Grigny, France
CURRENT RESIDENCE: London, England
LANGUAGES SPOKEN: English, French ( native ), conversational German, beginning High Valyrian ( learned secretly via Duolingo )
AFFILIATION: Jabberwocks.
OCCUPATION: socialite ( but really, con + artist )
EDUCATION: secondary school / limited university-level coursework
SEXUALITY / ROMANTIC ORIENTATION: whatever, whoever, whenever
RELATIONSHIP STATUS: single
CHILDREN: none
POSITIVE TRAITS: artistic, fun-loving, imaginative, quick study, sociable
NEUTRAL TRAITS: chameleonic, enigmatic, proud, selectively loyal, vain
NEGATIVE TRAITS: hedonist, mischievous, narcissistic, opportunistic, self-indulgent
INSP: Anna Delvey, Banksy, Holly Golightly, Jessica Rabbit, Megara, Vesper Lynd, and the girlboss/gaslight/gatekeep meme
*HISTORY.
It was never a secret to little Zoë that she was an unplanned child. The absence of a father throughout all her formative years was evidence enough, along with a distinct longing for the more that simply could not be provided by her poor, immigrant mother. She grew up a child of invention, prone to fits of drama and imaginative histrionics — teachers would note that she’d seemingly mastered the ability to cry ‘truthful’ tears on a moment’s notice by the age of nine, and used this to trick classmates into believing some heartbreaking story that would lead to her acquiring more toys, money, and candies than she’d left home with.
Her better qualities, however, showed an early aptitude for art, rhetoric, and escapism. Zoë learned young that there was nothing people loved more than a good story, or the impression of one — with ‘good’ denoting not just qualities of wholesomeness or courage, but instead something that one could sink their teeth into and bite at until they were left with complete satiety. The world around her, more her mother’s than her own, was all dismal and dingy and small. There was nothing interesting about their one-room hovel, nor the fact that both inhabitants worked degrading, menial jobs just to put scraps on their table once a day. What was interesting, however, was what young Zoë imagined in its place, dream-worlds turned into reality by way of canvas and pretend — deluding even herself into believing she was a special girl made for special things.
Instead of attending university like her mother had hoped, Zoë took a job as an au pair for a politician’s family, and remained with them for a few years longer. It was through this work that she had her first true encounters with the elite — not as a participant, but as an observer, and one who was granted the opportunity to study until it became second nature. Once that piece fell into place, the girl continued her attempt at being her own divining force, creating destiny rather than waiting for it to come to her. Lying to her mother about the status of her work, Zoë Vogel relocated to London and re-fashioned herself as Zoyalind Amandine Finch, the daughter of a French heiress and British-German diplomat. On charm alone, she could sell her new acquaintances on the fantasy — but then again, who could have denied someone with her beauty, knowledge, and the natural eloquence of her tongue?
Quickly, she became a darling of the London arts and club scene, acting on behalf of her ‘Finch Foundation’ by hosting artists’ debuts and other vernissages before they moved onto larger exhibitions at London’s grandest museums — including, by way of the pseudonym of ‘Birdy’ — her own work. Long dead was the girl who’d hand-scrubbed floors, polished silverware, or chased after children, and in her place was a socialite free to roam the realms of high society and an artist whose anonymity ensured her success. However, on a ruthless string of bad luck, Zoya got desperate when her financial demands couldn’t be met by what she made ( or made up ), and so she struck a deal with the Jabberwocks: their loaned support in exchange for the business her so-called foundation brought in — and whatever else they found her useful for.
In the time since, Zoya’s become the shining starlet of the Red Rose Casino, hosting her parties there and ensuring that the status-hungry and wealthy alike empty their wallets and shed their inhibitions at the Jabberwocks; crown jewel, only to come back begging for more. The casino provided the experience, but she sold the illusion in the first place, the promise of elite treatment sealing the fates of so many as little more than Alices gone down the rabbit hole of gambling and grandeur.
*WANTED CONNECTIONS.
more will be added v soon, along with a proper connections page once i figure out zoya’s theme and pages and whatnot !! these are all up for grabs, and if you like bits of one but not the whole idea, dw — i’m all about collaborating on some cool plot together, so just hmu and let’s dream something up <333
ENEMIES: It’s an obvious one for a girl like her, but I think it’d be fun to play around with varieties of this trope, meaning — friends turned enemies, rival elites, someone who’s realized they’ve been conned by her, etc. Honestly, I just want to see Zoya squirm, retaliate, and/or attempt to con her way out of the situation. There are lots of reasons to be a hater, and so I’d definitely like to play out different versions of ‘enemies,’ most especially between Zoya and a member of the Jolly Rogers, but also between Zoya and a civilian or member of government.
GUIDING LIGHT: ( Likely only suitable for someone unaffiliated with either group. ) She doesn’t hate the woman she’s become, but I do think there’s a part of Zoya that wants to know if she could ever be someone more typically ‘good.’ This plot would be for a far gentler soul than she is, who against all odds, is or becomes someone that Zoya ( normally very suspicious of the goody-two-shoes types ) not only trusts, but even aspires to be more like. I’m especially interested in playing this out and seeing how Zoya’s own shadowy self might affect the other’s light-like qualities, in addition to the reverse, of course.
HADES TO HER MEGARA: ( Likely only suitable for a fellow Jabberwocks member. ) I imagine that this is the person with whom she struck her deal, and is essentially indebted to for loaning her money in exchange for the business her fallacies brought in to other establishments. Similar to Meg / Hades, I think that this person ( whether of their own accord or on the Jabberwocks’ orders ) would find ways of stretching out the terms of the deal, making Zoya interminably in debt to them and seemingly without a way out. How this might pressure her into making other deals and decisions, along with exploring a potentially twisted little connect, would really be so fun to me.
HEARTBREAK: Heavily inspired by this, and ( despite the connect’s name ) not necessarily just for a romantic plot!! Similar to the Guiding Light connect, I’d really like to play around with someone who either sees the good in Zoya, or perhaps has simply been duped into believing her to be a truly good person. The drama comes in when either the curtains are raised and the masquerade is over, and it’s clear that Zoya is going down a path / becoming someone that the other cannot support. I can definitely see this fitting a romantic or friends sort of ship, especially one which originally started via Zoya’s con artistry but has since grown into something far more real than Zoya could have ever predicted — thus making the outcome, on both parties’ ends, all the more heartbreaking.
WRATH OF CONS: ( listen, i had to go for at least ONE terrible punny name. ) I’d love a little cat-and-mouse sort of relationship between Zoya and a rival con, especially one that starts with neither party knowing the other’s true intentions. A little bit of Mr. and Mrs. Smith energy, though not necessarily romantic-inclined!
ofc, non-specific connects are always welcome! for example: friends, romances, colleagues, etc !!
*EXTRAS.
i. Although it happens to be an interpretation of her birth surname, there’s genuinely no reason as to why she chose the surname ‘Finch.’ She simply thought that it lent a nice ring to her new name, and sounded believably aristocratic enough — an old money name, and one with plenty of character and animal allusions to go along with.
ii. Fittingly for her alliance, Zoya is enamored with tarot and all things occult. She’ll gladly read her friends’ spreads at parties, perform a monthly energy cleansing at her flat, and check her horoscope at breakfast. Her belief in these practices is...not exactly firm, per se, but there is a sort of optimistic nihilism behind it all.
iii. Zoya has the palate of a child: sweets, fried foods, uncomplicated dishes, things packaged with sugar and no visible expiration date, the same old order from the same old place. Even with her talents for reinvention and fallacy, you can’t adjust tastebuds with a trick of memory.
iv. Taking after her mother and the countless others of their low-income area, she’s been a smoker since her teen years, and her voice ( naturally somewhat low-pitched ) has gotten increasingly raspy over the years. Doctors would argue that it’s chronic laryngitis, but Zoya simply embraces it as part of her smoke-and-mirrors charm.
v. Though French was her mother’s native language and the one they spoke at home, Zoya learned English out of necessity and studied German for several years in school. When she worked as an au pair, she put those lessons to good use in order to better accommodate the family. Zoya much prefers French and German when not speaking English, so much so that one can easily tell where they stand with her depending on the language of the pet name she gives them.
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