To Take His Camaro And His Record Player - Tumblr Posts
I've posted about Neil Hargrove being the one to get flayed in S3 instead of Billy, but my other favorite character to imagine in Billy's place is Chrissy. There's just so much potential there!
S4 establishes what the other seasons were already making clear (one of the things that ST actually manages to be pretty consistent in showing!): that the Mind Flayer/Vecna/One chooses victims who are alone, victims who are struggling with feelings of trauma and isolation. In that way, any of Vecna's victims from S4 could have worked in Billy's place.
But!
Imagine a Chrissy who got flayed and then lived through it (maybe the Party et. al. are more motivated to save someone who looks teeny and sweet and harmless; maybe Chrissy isn't as much a fighter as Billy so she grabs El and runs for it when El finally breaks through the MF's control). A Chrissy whose first victims included her abusive mom and the oblivious boyfriend who never really saw her as her own person, and who has to deal with the conflicting mess of feelings left behind in the aftermath of being forced to feed them - along with a whole slew of other townspeople - to a mass-murdering eldritch monster from another dimension.
On the one hand, of course it's immensely traumatizing! She feels so much guilt it seems like she'll be crushed under the weight of it some days; other days she doesn't know how to do anything but cry.
On the other hand, a part of her feels relieved that her mom and Jason are gone... which means she must be a monster, too, right? Only a monster would be glad that their mom and boyfriend weren't around, when the reason they were gone was because she fed them to the monster that killed them.
This now sets her up perfectly to find herself lost, adrift; isolated from her usual peer group, distanced from her dad who is also grieving the loss of his wife, feeling stained with innocent blood no matter how many showers she takes or how many times she scrubs her skin raw, until she winds up seeking out the local drug dealing supersenior just for a few precious hours of escape from her own head.
And maybe the local drug dealer is kinda cute, and surprisingly sweet, and he makes her laugh and smile for the first time in months. And she goes to him at first for chemical escape, but the longer she interacts with him the more she starts visiting for a friend.
(And maybe that makes her feel guilty, too, because she likes Eddie. Likes Eddie, the weirdo school freak who Jason always sneered about and looked down on for his satanist aesthetic and his poverty and his Unfortunate family history.
She likes Eddie the way she was supposed to like Jason but kind of didn't anymore even before she fed him to a monster. She likes Eddie in a way she's not sure she ever liked Jason, because Eddie makes her feel good about herself without ever making her feel like she's drowning in other people's expectations for her life. Eddie makes her smile, and he makes her laugh, and he makes her feel safe.
And she's not sure she deserves any of that, but she's getting pretty damn sure that she wants it.)
So when the Upside Down comes back this time, this version of Chrissy isn't unaware of it. She's still dealing with plenty of trauma and isolation in many parts of her life, but she isn't completely alone except for the one nice boy she's barely met before she dies. Instead, she figures out that it's back so quickly, and she goes to the person she's come to trust the most these days for help and to warn him, too.
And instead of dying in horrible pain, thinking she might be going mad and with no idea what's happening to her, traumatizing a boy she barely knows in the process and setting in motion the events that will lead to his death not long later, she and Eddie are able to face the Upside Down together and get each other through this interdimensional monster's latest attempt at destroying Hawkins together.