If I Had A Nickel For Every Time A Creator Told Me That Their Teenage Character Who

Billy Hargrove

Have I mentioned lately how much I love the Billy community? One of us says something to defend our boy and the rest of y’all just appear like the Avengers or something. You guys are awesome

The hypocrisy is amazing. Cause you know that if it were Ted Wheeler ogling, flirting, AND agreeing to sleep with Heather in S3, fans would be out for his blood (for good reason). But, because it was a woman preying on a teenage boy, the narrative pushes her predatory behavior under the rug and said woman apparently gets a bigger role for the next season.

me when i remember billy was 17 when karen put him in her spank bank and decided to openly thirst after him for an entire year following

The Duffers, projecting: Billy role is to be the big bad bully to us our heroes and he’s gonna be mean and loud and an overall maniac because he is the reincarnation of all things EVIILL.

Dacre Montgomery, having the heart of gold that he does: *walks on set

I just wanna let everyone know that my blog is a VERY VERY safe place for billy stans/kinners.

you are heard, you are loved and you are safe with me. <3

Stole this from an anti who was pissed because "trying to avenge his death" is now the only thing I will be thinking about until I see it happen

And a 🖕to the idiots spouting bullshit about all Billy fans hating Argyle when I’m standing right here.

Only good thing to come out of Vol 2 was my beautiful man Argyle making it out of this shitshow alive and unharmed.

Sometimes I wish that the Duffers hadn’t managed to cast an amazing group of actors for ST so that it would be easier to see how abysmal at worst and mediocre at best the show really is.

Literally all of the most beloved moments, lines, and changes to characters/storylines are due to the actors’ improvisations and suggestions.

I don’t know why my mind insists on making me sad, but I just can’t stop thinking about Max in S3 being SO in denial about Billy being the new host for the Mind Flayer or ANYTHING being off about him. Even when El, someone who knows MUCH more about the Upside Down and the Mind Flayer, claims something odd is going on with Billy, she persistently tried to rationalize all the weird things discovered.

Such as when they found ice bags in his bathtub:

Max says that they were “probably for his muscles or something [cause] he works out like a maniac”.

Even if Max really believed that it was some weird workout thing, if I found my sibling’s tub full of ice, I would have definitely been more weirded out; she was mostly dismissive about it.

Or when El said that Billy seemed wrong when they found him at Heather’s house, Max reassures in a humorous way:

“Wrong is kind of like his default, but it’s nice to know he’s not a murderer, because that would have totally sucked”

Despite seeing that Heather was indeed ok, there was still the BLOODY WHISTLE found in her brother’s room. And she was adamant that, as long as Heather didn’t seem harmed in any way, it was enough to disregard ANY suspicions of Billy doing wrong.

Or the Party points out how weird it is for Billy to be fully covered from head to toe at the pool

Max: I don’t know, he looks pretty normal to me.

Lucas: Normal? How many times have you seen him with a shirt on?

Max: I mean it’s a little weird….

Max knows Billy better than anyone in Hawkins. She KNOWS that Billy shows off his body any chance he gets. It is NOT normal to dress more conservatively out of the blue.

It is only during the Sauna Test that she couldn’t deny the fact that Billy is, without a doubt, the new host.

It is so heartbreaking because we can tell that their relationship has improved from where it was left in S2 (when she nearly crushed his nuts with a spiky baseball bat).

I can already imagine that between S2 and S3, they came to a sort of truce. Their relationship wouldn’t do a complete 180 of course. But it would be the type of truce where they would try to be less hostile towards each other, keep their tempers in check, and minimize the arguing between them. That would eventually lead to them having a mutual understanding and respect of each other.

Billy and Max share a lot of similarities (both are headstrong and outspoken) and been put in the same miserable situation (moving away from their home in California), that once they were able to put their bitterness towards each other aside, they formed a kinship and found out that, hey, maybe having this little shitbird/asshole as a sibling isn’t so bad.Their relationship was finally improving and on the path for the better.

Until the Mind Flayer put that progress to a screeching halt.

Alright, I’m done with my depressing rant.🥲

A rant (kinda?)

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

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

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

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