This Is So Eloquently Put. Wow Just Wow

This is so eloquently put. Wow just wow🙌🏽

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quote by Ari Cofer

Please watch this movie!!!

For the last several weeks, I've gotten to witness what may be the most positive thing I've ever seen the DC fandom do. 

To not let Blue Beetle become forgotten or ignored, a group of Twitter users got together and unironically formed what is now known as "The Blue Beetle Battalion". If you didn't know about this the "Blue Beetle Battalion" grew to become a genuinely positive group of folks who had one intention: to positively promote Blue Beetle as much as possible because Warner Bros/DC Studios couldn't do so. 

To most people's shock, that group grew to become a massive amount of people across Twitter to the point where even the cast of Blue Beetle became aware of its existence and started to push the #BlueBeetleBattalion hashtag to higher levels than we ever thought it'd reach. We'd spam gifs, tell people why they should support it, push all the positive stories surrounding Blue Beetle and even hype up all of the new posters that would drop. The best part is that along the way, a lot of people grew to become friends or at least aware of each other's existence and social media profiles as we'd joke around as we continued to push Blue Beetle across social media. At most, it was gonna be a funny joke to look back on where we'd all think "Man it sucks it didn't work out but at least we tried" but here we are today, having our efforts and love for Blue Beetle, Xolo Mariduena and the cast of Blue Beetle vindicated.

At the time of this post, Blue Beetle has gone against all the odds and currently sits at an 85% on Rotten Tomatoes! The highest DC film score since The Batman, can you believe it!?

As I said in so many of my other Blue Beetle posts, please support this film. Please go out and watch Blue Beetle with your friends and family. As the first live-action Latino superhero film, the representation that it's bringing is such a warm welcome and no matter what people say, we need more superhero projects that represent massive cultures to have amazing lighthearted success stories now more than ever. Let Blue Beetle be the beginning of this amazing trend of these incredibly important films overcoming all of the odds no matter how many people choose to immediately write it off. 

Blue Beetle releases Aug 18 in theaters across the world y'all

may all of the things that lack gentleness and kindness fall away; i don’t want the sharp edges of cruelty to shape life around me. i don’t need tough and rough. i want people that know the tenderness of our bruises and choose not to weaponize hurt disguised as “tough love.”

I’m so tempted to rewrite canon scenes that are slightly or maybe totally altered.

@kl125 LOOK ITS US

the preview for the next suchwita episode made my whole day! ♥