More Billy sketches!! This guy is like a parasite, always stick to my brain every time I watch the show lol

Eleven reaching out to the young boy still inside of Billy. Missing his mother and scared of his father.

Here's the full page

You told her the wave was seven feet. You ran to her on the beach. There were seagulls. She wore a hat with a blue ribbon, a long dress with a blue and red flower, and yellow sandals covered in sand. She was pretty. She was really pretty. And you…you were happy.

Billy boy blue, don't you cry no more

Tender Harringrove doodle

Running to ur (boy)friends house after a run in with your father but your still too stubborn to be comforted properly. Atleast hes trying though guys

Taste of Cherry (1997) dir. Abbas Kiarostami

You got a memory in mind? Yeah. It was a time when I was the happiest.

*Empathising* with Billy Hargrove from the jump (before Neil and the reveal of parental abuse makes him at the very least a *sympathetic* character) requires the viewer to recognise repression (of self) as the driver of his suffering--which is actually a minority lived experience and why the majority of Stranger Things viewers--who are cis / straight / neurotypical or otherwise have not experienced negative consequences as a result of expressing their authentic self--disregard him as a character and blorbo.

You can almost see the bubble of space being preserved around him in relation to other characters, like a shark moving through a school of fish.

That smile and his ✨bouncing✨is Dacre playing him as being authentically engaged/curious/pleased/playful/confident. But prior to that, his smiles are cold and practiced to be charming. When he is not being watched, the smile drops because he has contempt for the other character for falling for the act and failing to interest him.

This queer reading of his character is something deduced before it is revealed that his father is a violent threat and is able to successfully frighten and control him with the threat of a label like “faggot”.

Despite being established as bored / dismissive / disinterested in communicating with other characters, he takes an immediate visual interest in Steve at the party and expresses that interest by breaking from his self-imposed isolation and making conscious attempts at physical and then verbal contact with Steve (on the basketball court and in the showers after).

Dacre's delivery of that laugh is a complex mix resignation, self-loathing and relief. Resignation--to playing out the fight as the "character" he has cornered himself into. Disappointment--that his attempts to convey his real self were futile / laughable / ineffective to allow Steve to perceive him any differently. Disgust--for hoping that he would and at his motivation for that hope. And relief--that at least now the interaction will proceed in a way which is familiar and safe to navigate: with violence.

this scene, this moment, makes me feel like there's some sort of shared trauma that these two have experienced together and no one in the group knows. because this is some next level emotional shit that is going on here.