if this doesn’t perfectly encapsulate ronance idk what does

Seeing Ghosts

me when i see ronance being critised yet again bc robin is steve's best friend who wouldn't "break bwest fwiend code" and nancy is steve's ex who bwoke poor stevie's heart uwu.

first of all, nancy and steve have been broken up for TWO YEARS already. steve has already forgiven nancy for the break-up. and let's not forget that a big part of why the break up happened was bc nancy was actively mourning the loss of her best friend.

am i saying she handled things perfectly or that her grief is an excuse? no of course not. but i am saying people do not have nearly as much empathy for nancy's trauma and how it affects her as they do for other (male) characters, they just jump straight to calling her an evil bitch. first it's her fault that barb's dead bc she dared to be blinded by romance as a teenage girl then it's her fault when she pulls away from the same guy bc of what happened like... what do you want from her, genuinely?

i'm begging you to stop centering male characters for once in your fucking lives omg. if you don't ship ronance, that's fine but don't bring up this bullshit as a reason not to ship them. robin buckley and nancy wheeler are so much more than their proximity to steve harrington.

btw i'm not hating on steve okay. sorry for the rant i just saw a tiktok that pissed me off so much about how steve would/should be mad about ronance

Steddie exes but Eddie broke up with Steve

They dated throughout middle school until sophomore year of high school. They were childhood sweethearts and Eddie and Wayne were the only real people to show Steve love and kindness

Steve is all in, as we know, and is looking forward to the rest of his life with Eddie. He’s the only person that’s stuck around this long, and they’re in love. Even Wayne says he thinks they’ll beat the odds for teen romance. What could possibly happen to break them up?

Steve’s dad, that’s what. He comes home one day while Eddie is on the floor rambling about something to do with the new Judas Priest album, while Steve watches fondly from the couch. Nothing even remotely incriminating is going on. They’re 5 feet apart, and (for once) wearing their own clothes.

Steve’s dad flies off the handle anyway. Says some awful things about eddies family, his dad, the trailer park, and what does Steve think he’s doing, risking the family’s reputation hanging around with “a boy like that”

Naturally Eddie is swiftly kicked out, and Steve’s receives a backhand when he tries to defend Eddie.

Steve’s dad leaves again two days later, and Steve races down to eddies place to apologise, but Wayne answers the door instead.

Looks at Steve with sad eyes, inspects the bruise on Steve’s cheek, and hands him a bag of frozen peas and a letter. Tells him that Steve can always come to him if he needs anything, no matter what.

Steve reads the letter once he has trudged miserably back home. “I’m sorry, I can’t do this anymore” is as far as he gets before he feels his heart shatter.

The letter is full of rubbish as far as Steve is concerned. He gets being discrete until he’s 18 and can legally leave his parents home, but Eddie is talking nonsense.

“You deserve better” and “I can’t give you a family like you want”. Lots of on-the-surface self sacrificing words that Steve realises a few years later, after the hurt has settled, were eddies way of protecting himself from what he saw as the inevitable, which was Steve leaving him for some upper class girl with a perfect perm and perfect lipstick.

after he had cried himself to sleep and took the long route to school to avoid going past forest hills, Steve decided in all his teenage wisdom to do what Eddie asked him to do, and forget he ever existed.

He pretended to like girls, and tommy hagan’s cruel laughter. Pretended to like Nancy wheeler, and still somehow got his heart broken, because damn, even if he wasn’t in love with her the way he wished he could be, hearing that someone considered the idea of being loved by you was “bullshit” fucking stings.

After Nancy he stops trying to pretend. Leans into his long suppressed instincts to protect people, and shows Dustin how to take care of his curls in a way he learned from Eddie when he had to dress up to go to a cousins wedding in Indianapolis when they were 14.

The stuff with the upside down honestly becomes routine faster than he’d like to admit. He falls into the swing of the bat with an easy grace that comes from years of suppressed protective instinct.

When Dustin starts attending hellfire is when Steve’s carefully constructed “new normal” starts to fall apart. His constant requests for Dustin to shut up about eddie Munson lead Dustin to the conclusion that Steve is still clinging to his old King Steve prejudices, because why on earth would he think Steve was in love with him? Which he was, by the way. Steve didn’t think he could ever truly stop at this point.

When Chrissy Cunningham dies, Steve’s world turns upside down (no pun intended). It’s why he throws himself so easily into looking for Eddie, despite his half hearted protests. Because what the fuck had even happened?? Eddie cried when Steve used to kill spiders, he could not stomach such a vicious murder.

Eddie throwing him up against the wall when they find him doesn’t scare Steve (it does something though), but the fear in his eyes does. It stings a little that he doesn’t trust him, but it’s been years, and Steve was kind of a jackass for most of them so he doesn’t altogether blame Eddie.

He does feel like running was a little dumb, but he knows all too well how much Eddie likes to run from things. He hates leaving Eddie in Rick’s boatshed, but he knows that even if he could stay without arousing suspicion, eddie would never let him.

The whole lovers lake debacle deeply confuses Steve. First Eddie almost dislocates his eyeballs staring at Steve’s bare chest, and looks like he’s going to pass out when Steve throws his shirt at him, jumps in after him, gives Steve his BATTLE VEST (the one Steve himself helped make, and fully knows the meaning of) then tries to convince Steve to get Nancy back????

Safe to say Steve’s brain feels a little scrambled.

He blames his whole ‘nuggets’ speech in the rv on that. Because honestly what the hell was he even thinking??

Steve doesn’t think about what happens next.

Doesn’t think about desperately wanting to kiss Eddie when he stops him outside the trailer.

Doesn’t think about the fact that he wasted might be his last moments with him to tell Eddie that he never stopped loving him. That he wants to forget the last few years and just pick back up where they left off.

Doesn’t think about how worried he is leaving him and Dustin there alone.

Doesn’t think about how fucking cool Eddie is now, when he hears master of puppets blasting across the upside down.

Doesn’t think about how much he regrets not saying anything when the vines have him in the creel house.

Definitely doesn’t think about hearing dustins heartbroken wails as they reach the trailer park.

Doesn’t think about the love of his life, lying broken in a pool of his own blood in a nightmare dimension.

Doesn’t think about touching him for the first time in years to lift his dead body and heft it through the portal.

He goes home. And in the shower, he thinks far too much. Stays sat on the shower floor so long that the water would have ran cold, were he in eddies cozy trailer rather than his big tomb of a house with its endless supply of hot water.

He thinks, and thinks, and thinks. Thinks until robin finds him, waterlogged yet dehydrated from crying in his en suite. She has no idea what’s going on, but lifts him out and gets him dry and dressed.

He finally explains everything to her. She cries but he’s out of tears.

Steve doesn’t think he’ll cry again for a long, long time.

kelsey winslow, lesbian extraordinaire

Jonathan starts out the story with a very close-knit family unit, a mother and a brother who all love each other deeply but who have already faced a lot of hardship. this leads to him having a very batten-down-the-hatches, circle-the-wagons kind of approach to life. his circle expands (minutely) as the story progresses, to include Nancy and Argyle, but he always has a limited list of people he cares for, and his goal is to protect them. he’ll make sacrifices for them, he’ll shape his life with them in mind. his whole universe shrinks to fit the few people who matter, and everything else fades away—including the possibility that those people could find happiness in the wider world. the world is a threat, something to be guarded against. you can’t take on the world and win, it’s not going to change for the better no matter what you do, you just have to keep your head down and deal with the tragedy of it. he’s seen monsters, he’s known loss. he knows all too well that the picture-perfect happy family is an illusion painted over resentment and cruelty, or even just an illusion painted over the complications that come with loving flawed people. any other outlook is naivety—this is why Jonathan has so little patience for Bob Newby, who is decent but simple, buying into all the things that Jonathan has already seen aren’t unbreakable. and this is why Jonathan walks away from Steve and Nancy kissing in the high school halls in season 2, not out of jealousy, just out of impatience with how juvenile and unrealistic it seems to him. they’re playing into the image of what teenagers are supposed to be and do, the path they’re all meant to be on, and Jonathan doesn’t have any time for that. the image is a lie. the path where you try to fit into the world and put down roots there can only destroy you. when Will feels bombarded, Jonathan doesn’t tell him that he’s going to be happy and people will come to understand him; Jonathan tells Will that he understands him. Jonathan will do absolutely anything to be there for the people he loves; the world will do nothing for them but break them. their happiness, if they find it, is going to have the quality of escape: stepping outside the stifling boundaries of what’s expected and hiding out in a Castle Byers, somewhere they can be safe with the people they love, away from everything that wants to hurt them.

Steve starts out with a couple of merely surface-level friendships and no close family; he’s an only child, he has nowhere to direct his love and devotion, and no one giving that unconditional love to him. he’s already won everything small town high school life has to offer him, reputation and good looks and unsupervised freedom. when all of that is revealed to be vanity of vanities, useless trappings laid on top of an empty cynical life, he too sees monsters and comes to know loss. but his reaction to it is different. in season two, Steve still sees some value in going to a party and wearing the costumes he and Nancy worked hard on. he sincerely misses his girlfriend after an hour, without any cynicism, without needing to appear cool. he’s thinking about getting a job with benefits, so he can be someone to rely on. and as soon as anyone steps into his peripheral vision, Steve loves them. he loves Dustin who orders him around, he loves Robin who makes fun of him, he loves the kids who don’t listen to him, he loves Nancy who broke his heart. his perfect popular ordinary life was empty—so he fills it up with real things, that are still very much real ordinary things. he gives ice cream to the kids and watches movies with Robin, he remembers the song that the carousel horse plays, and through it all he keeps on looking for love and believing in love. the more darkness Steve sees, the more fully he throws himself into the world. it’s after he’s come very near to dying that he tells Nancy his deepest wish is to have a big family and see the world with them—he wants to bring MORE little people into existence and then he wants to introduce them to the whole of the world. he wants to have adventures with them, ordinary people in an extraordinary world, forging through it all together. and then, it’s in the oppressive hell of the upside down, where darkness is literally all around him, that he confesses that the dream is still tied up with her—not some picture-perfect fantasy, but a grounded hope, rooted in his real and abiding love for her, as he really sees her. the world is dark, and wilder and more complicated than it appears. but Steve finds his hope in the most ordinary thing there is: a husband and wife and their children. he is the sane man in a mad world that G.K. Chesteron talks about: the normal boy who becomes the fairy tale hero. 

so what about Nancy? Nancy’s outlook on darkness and the world is very much “ride out and meet them”. she sees evil in the world, and chooses to face it head on, and then, as much as possible, she tries to shoot it in the face. not for nothing does she tell Jonathan in season one when he asks what they should do about the demogorgon, “I want to kill it.” she’s not just being dramatic. she means it. what Nancy most wants, from the moment she discovers the tragedy and violence of life, is to eliminate evil in the world. she wants to kill the demogorgon, she wants to root out the unprincipled men who let it loose and see them punished for the harm they caused, she wants to banish the mind flayer even if she has to chase him out with a hot poker, she wants to set vecna on fire and then pump him full of hot lead.

and so, initially, Jonathan’s perspective seems attractive to her, because he too is aware of precisely the evil that she wants to fight, whereas Steve seems to still be appreciating the shiny surface, the veneer of normalcy and happiness that has ugliness underneath it. “it’s all bullshit,” she tells him. she can’t play the role anymore, she can’t pretend everything is fine when everything that she once knew was poisoned by death. and not only is Jonathan aware of the darkness lurking under reality, his rejection of it is so total that he’s willing to reject the entire world along with it. he so hates the evil that Nancy wants to fight that he will turn away from everything else to hide away with just her and Will. that’s romantic. it is! eros loves to say “you and me against the world”, and the romanticism of that does win out in season two. Nancy picks Jonathan and the escape he offers, picks him because he sees the same world she does. but as the story progresses, we see that their worldviews don’t align perfectly. they’re not in agreement about how to deal with the world. Jonathan wants to get through his internship with a minimum of conflict and go home to his family; Nancy wants to prove herself, change people’s minds, make a lasting difference. Nancy is starting to imagine a life she can build with him, Jonathan can only see what he already has and wants to preserve.

so what we see starting to happen in season four is Steve’s perspective is becoming more and more appealing to Nancy. she’s surprised by that, and I think confused by it. it doesn’t make any sense to her, but suddenly his hopes and dreams don’t sound like bullshit anymore. the picture he paints for her of the life he wants sounds nice, especially because he knows what he’s talking about; he’s been quietly practicing for it, taking care of others younger and weaker than himself, attracting no attention and asking for no reward. it’s not bullshit, it’s not naive—it’s the dream she had before everything fell apart, and now it could be real. and why does Steve’s hope become steadily more and more attractive than Jonathan’s escape? because Jonathan can only retreat, into the safety and solitude of the Byers homestead or into a cloud of smoke. Steve can enter into the world and transform it, light it up from within. Steve can act, and Nancy is a woman of action.

watching season two now so you’ll see me posting about it a lot. anyhow, the way i don’t like karen and ted in this season 😐

mike telling them how some of his toys have emotional value which is good communication coming from a kid, and instead of listening and acknowledging what mike is saying karen goes “oh eMoTiOnAl vAlUe?” full of sarcasm and ted immediately corrects mike saying “they are hunks of plastic, michael”

all i’m saying is joyce would’ve never ✋🏻

this may be controversial but i now more than ever believe that many stancy and even jancy shippers only see nancy as this heartbreaker teenage girl torn between two guys and that’s all there is to her as opposed to ronance shippers that see nancy for the incredible, badass, and intricate character that she is. we respect her as a human being OUTSIDE of being in a relationship and in fic and headcanons try to give her the character development that we believe she deserves because she has so much more potential than just being this arrogant unfaithful and impulsive girl that so many people in this fandom have labeled her as. sure we would love to see her be in a relationship with robin but at least we can respect her decision if she wanted to be the independent baddie she is and deserves to be.

go check out my part 2 to this post

Man I’m gonna start taking Nancy Wheeler rights from a good chunk of y’all... You people treat this girl like garbage. She ain’t a villain in ST, she’s like, a regular teenage (for most of the series) girl who went through significant trauma, is coping badly with it, and who’s greatest sins according to y’all are- *checks notes* dating Steve and the relationship not going well, having a complicated relationship with her brother, and being an independent female character who stands her ground and is pretty emotionally stunted from the trauma she’s been bottling the whole series long.

Nancy is a really nuanced character with a lot of layers you aren’t supposed to be able to peel away from a first glance, a huge part of her character is upholding expectations of her and hiding her problems because the girl’s never had the healthy space to unpack all of the really awful terrifying shit she’s been through. A well put together girl who’s actually got her shit together (in the 80′s) doesn’t sleep with guns in her closet. 

She went through a severely traumatic loss that she blames herself for, lest people forget, it’s canon that she spent a YEAR visiting Barb’s parents and spending dinners with them after her death, because the girl has a guilt complex so deep it’s actually heartbreaking. And also discovering that the regular world she thought she knew is actually full of real actual monsters and another dimension. Yeah, her relationship with Steve fell apart during that, it’s very difficult to maintain a healthy relationship with all of that on your plate. They were both teenagers who sucked at managing it.

Her and Mike have the same sibling squabbling that you see in a lot of places and as we’ve been shown in canon when they’re both not performing the classic Wheeler Family Bottling-up-all-your-feelings schtick, they clearly care about each other a lot and Nancy does a lot of little things to try and look out for Mike where she can. But neither of them want the other (or anyone else) to worry about them so they don’t talk about what’s going on with them. And that tends to translate as them seeming distant. (They both struggle to open up about what’s going on with them unless under duress, we have so many instances of both of them doing this through the show.)

God forbid she be a girl through her teens with some self-respect and who despite the shit she’s been through, wants to make something of her life and be able to stand on her own two feet. She’s got issues like anyone in that show has issues, they are all meant to be portrayed as realistic people with both good and bad traits that make them understandable and relatable. People’s expectations of Nancy to be some kind of perfect girlfriend ideal big sister saint is a really weird wash of her character. 

It's so insane to me that Steve LITERALLY slut shamed Nancy in front of the ENTIRE town and it was never brought up again 😩

I KNOW Nancy was ( and still is let's be real, it's a small town ) getting harrased left, right and fucking sideways.. and not just by Carol and Tommy either .

My personal HC is that Jason Carver is one of those tormentors , there was just too much tension and a LOT of malice in Nancy's gaze for it to be anything else imo. (Besides the fact that he's actively threatening her brother but STILLL)

Anyways, this is me saying that I don't ship Stancy at all bc of this. Personally, to me, what Steve did to her isn't really reconcilable, he can change and grow all that he'd like but he can't ever take back how much he hurt Nancy. Plainly, he doesn't deserve her.

More s4 Billy thoughts.

I'd like to think that Billy would be forced to stick with the kids when the older kids have to go into the upside down, but he not happy about it lol. Like during that whole scene where they're all getting into the boat and Billy starts getting into the boat, but Eddie stops and says:

"Yeah no- this boat can barely fit like 4 people, okay? I doubt it's going to fit 5." And Billy look it's not like Billy wants to go into the upside down, like that's probably the worst place for him to go after the Mind Flayer situation and the fact that he's cursed by this Vecna asshole, but he does not want to be with these stupid kids. He wants to be with his boyfriend.

So he starts saying that Nancy should stay with the kids because "Isn't it like in your nature to be good with kids?" and Billy might be a little misogynistic because he has mommy issues and still an asshole to people who he doesn't really know. That little questions gets Nancy all riled up and she says "No, actually I'm not. Steve has the best expierence with them, Steve should stay with them if you really want to go."

"Steve needs to stay with me."

"Well we can't have both of you gone."

"I doubt you give a shit if I left, you just want Steve."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means you're still in love with Steve."

And everyone kinda has an 'oh shit' moment, like even the kids are shocked that Billy just said that. Nancy has this offended look on her face, Robin and Eddie look like Billy just killed someone, and Steve looks like he wants to kill himself. Steve apologizes to Nancy really quickly and excuses himself to talk to Billy alone where he drags Billy by his shoulders back into the woods.

Steve's shocked about all of this with his "Are you kidding me? Why the fuck would you say something like that? Nancy doesn't even like me anymore, she's dating a whole different dude! And just 'cause he's in California doesn't make they're over with. And even then, why would she go for me again?" And Billy retorts with, "Are you fucking with me right now? She's been on you this entire fucking time! When she waved at you at that crime scene, when she helped picked spider webs out of your hair and said 'you're all pretty again now', and how she wanted you to join her and robin on their little fake identity adventure at the pysch ward. She. Wants. You."

"If she does want me, what's the big deal? It's not like I'm going to go back to her."

Billy kinds shuts up at this, his lip twitches and he starts looking everywhere, but Steve's eyes. Steve finally gets like, like a lighter being flickered on, the flame has finally lit up in his brain.

"Billy do you... do you think I might go back to her."

Billy shrugs, not having the balls to answer the quesitons truthfully. "I don't know... I mean... I've kinda been a lot for you to handle-"

"What!? Are you kidding me? I've dealt with 4 sassy ass children this past year- 6 of them just last year and you think you're difficult to handle?"

"Don't lie-"

"I'm not! Yeah, sure, you're panicked nightmares keep me up but I like comforting you. I like the fact that I can comfort you. You have no idea how much I love you, no idea." Steve's holding onto Billy's shoulders really tightly because Billy likes it when Steve holds him in place, gives him a sense of grounding. "And if I'm honest... I don't like the idea of you going down there at all. With everything that's going on I'd feel much better if you were up here."

Billy dwels on this for a moment before finally letting out a annoyed sigh. "Fine... whatever." Steve's eyes shine brightly. "I'll stay, but I swear to god Harrington there better be a 6 foot pole between you and Wheeler or I will strangle you with these headphones."

Steve thanked him for being understanding and they shared a super sweet kiss super romantic blah blah blah. They come back to the group and Billy (slightly) apologzies to Nancy. Being forced to by a nudge with Steve's elbow and a glare from Max.

The older kids finally got on the boat and Billy threatening told Steve to stay safe or he'll "revive you only to kill you again you fucker!" Steve blew him a secret kiss.

And yes, Billy did stare at Steve's chest hair with Max. The two started fighting over the binoculars. They'll disagree a lot, but they'll agree on one thing, Steve Harrington can get it.

Billy doesn't get caught by the police because are you serious? That dude has ran from the police on several different occasions and won every single time. He finds out that the older kids have dissapeared, freaks out for a second before realizing that he needs to get the kids back. He goes back to that reefer rick guys house but the cops are looking through the car they used so he can't use that but he does find a motorcycle in reefer ricks garage and goes fucking crazy with it. (I just like biker Billy and I think that would be really hot cool of him) This leads to Billy going to the Wheeler's house, seeing Dustin through Nancy's window and becomes s1 Steve Harrington. The kids update him on everything and he shares a quick hello to Steve who gives him a "hi :)" back with an "I'm okay" to soothe Billy's nerves because Steve knows his boyfriend. And everything is mostly the same but that scene where the kids are all riding their bikes away from the Wheeler house, but with Billy in the front of their group on the motorcycle and it looks like some wack ass bike gang. I love that I'm sorry.

It really upsets me, when people try to make Nancy out to be the bad one, in the bathroom scene. She has seen so much, and lost one of the most important people in her life. She did the best she could, trying to get people to listen, and look for Barb, but not many people did.

She knows her best friend is dead, and she hears Barb’s family are selling their house to go find her because they believe she’s out there alive. She’s not able to tell them the truth, that she’s actually gone. The pain that must feel has to be unbearable. Nancy thinks she is the reason why Barb is gone. She believes she killed her. And knowing that her last conversation with her wasn’t good and she ended up telling her to leave. That is one of the most painful things to go through. She wasn’t able to say goodbye either. She’s being told to party and be like stupid teenagers (this is not a post attacking Steve so do not make it one, please), while she probably cries herself to sleep most nights due to the pain of losing her best friend and fully knowing she is gone and never coming back. I will never understand anyone who can say she was gross, in this scene, when she has been through so much and was obviously in a very vulnerable state. She hasn’t been okay in a year, spending time with her best friend’s grieving family, having these thoughts that she killed her. Nancy Wheeler is not a villain. She is not a bad person. She is not a terrible girlfriend. She was a girl dealing w extreme amounts of trauma and didn’t have any good coping mechanisms. She thought she was the reason for her best friend’s death and thought nobody was listening.

Jonathan says something mildly bad about Steve and Robin goes feral on him.

Jonathan isn't even sure what she is saying anymore. He only knows he walked into family video in the morning and it's getting dark outside now.

Steve has given up trying to stop her and is watching a movie with Nancy behind the counter.

nancy wheeler antis are actually so weird to me. and honestly, I'm done playing the nice card of, "not trying to be rude" cause I am. I'm simply just so tired of it and I don't get it. ESPECIALLY with the bullshit reasons yall have for hating her by bringing up, "oh, but she hurt poor baby steve. she's such a bitch" look, I understand steve's feelings in that situation but I feel for nancy SO MUCH MORE. because yall CONSTANTLY ignore her trauma and call her a bad girlfriend to steve and even going wayyyyy out of line and saying she ABUSED him? and even if she is a bitch, she's allowed to be anyways. I support her rights and her wrongs. and also some of you guys are the same people who stan the CANONICALLY racist abuser known as b*lly flopgrove. like be for real with me right now

you guys are weird, you're high key misogynistic in my opinion, and your takes suck and you should stay off my blog and never have an opinion on nancy wheeler ever again or you're getting blocked

NANCY WHEELER | “bullshit”

Season 1— 3 times Season 2— 7 times Season 3— 1 times Season 4— 0 times

Did I watch the last 4 Nancy Drew episodes and take notes on them to try and figure out whether Nancy and Ace have forgotten that they’re cursed? Yes I did.