newsflash fuckwads I'm a good person

Steve Harrington is older than Billy by at least a year.

That makes the situation from season two seem so much worse.

So, his thirteen-year-old sister goes missing, snuck out of her room and no one knows where she is. He has to go from one house to another like a pinball- and at one of those houses, a woman in her forties is clearly into him, a minor, but we won't get into that now other than that probably puts him on one hell of an edge- to this house that looks abandoned in the middle of the woods. He can see his sister in the window, briefly.

And then a senior steps out. Steve is a senior in high school, older than Billy, maybe even eighteen, and he has a past of being a playboy. Then, when Billy asks if Steve has seen his sister, knowing damn well she's in the house, Steve lies. And keeps lying.

Alarm bells intensify.

All he does is put Steve on the ground before he walks in. The house is a wreck, there's no actual adult in sight (if Joyce or Jim had been there, he probably would have cooled down. Jim would still raise alarm bells, but he's an actual adult, a parent, so he's better than King Steve Harrington,) and Max, who is thirteen, is the only girl in the house.

His thirteen-year-old sister went missing and he found her- needing to look for kids he knew she hung out with- in a decrepit house- home to Jonathan Byers, who still has a reputation as a creep and Billy isn't sure how deserved that reputation is- in the middle of the woods at night with a group of guys and a man older than Billy who has a playboy rep and who lied about her being there and actively tried to keep Billy from going inside.

Billy doesn't know what's going on. That's the situation he walks into.

Can you imagine? I would have freaked out, too.

Because he's a teenager from California, he knows that this situation is all kinds of suspicious. He knows that Max is a child in a situation with a billion red flags she may not be old enough to see. But he sees them. He sees that she's been out for gods know how long and no one knows where she is. He knows that this house looks like a drug house or an abandoned house from the outside and that there's clearly something incredibly weird happening in this house. He knows that King Steve is an adult who lied to him and tried to keep him from getting inside to talk to his sister. And that his very young sister is the only girl in the house.

Since you're both a racism apologist and too stupid to do math. Billy was 18 years old when he died. He would have graduated the same time as Steve. You are very dumb. "By at least a year" no you're just confusing the fanon you guys all made up for a racist guy who abused his sister and terrorized her friends because he was racist. If you're gonna continue being a dumb cunty piece of shit with bad racist takes at least learn how to do fucking math instead of having the mental capacity of a blueberry fucking muffin.

Also, Steve was white. What happened with Lucas was another issue entirely that I did not bring up in the original post.

I think you're the one a bit obsessed, and you're yelling at me for something that isn't even an issue on Wednesday morning and you're cussing at me and calling me names over a fictional character when you didn't even read the post.

I think you are being a troll but in case this is sincere: not at all what neonliminality or I were saying. We were talking about how white people, particularly men, are often given the benefit of the doubt and assumed to be rational and thoughtful, regardless of the validity of their beliefs. White men are afforded a respect no matter which stance they take that people of color often are not. People in this fandom seem to connect more with Shane and take his point of view under account in a way they don’t for Ryan: I doubt this would change if Shane was the believer and Ryan was the skeptic.

they really are!!! and a lot of time they either don't see how its racist or they just don’t care!!

the amount of fic/fanart/content from fans in general that try to make ryan like this little kid and shane like this super macho man is insane!!!!! 

and it makes me so upset because a. Ry is far from a child and b. he’s arguably more stereotypically masculine than shane is, and yet who do we see consistently getting cast into the submissive role? who do we constantly see having his agency taken away? who is the one who is often brutally violated and or almost tortured in the dark fanfics that this fandom writes all the time??

(spoiler alert: it’s not shane)

like if it was just one or two shippers doing things like this it’d still obviously be gross and wrong but its so ingrained in every part of the ship it becomes almost impossible to separate the ship from the racism. and it makes me so upset knowing how many people claim to fans of ryan and yet thrust these incredibly harmful stereotypes onto him (ones that have real world ramifications and ones that he’s actually probably had to deal with in real life)

I don’t know why I’ve been obsessively thinking about the concept of “gaydar” 

but I have. 

Actually no it’s because a straight family member used the term like 

“oh I have really great gaydar” 

and it made me feel really gross 

and it took me like a full hour to realize why. 

When heterosexual people say that, 

it feels like they’re bragging about their ability to clock us, you know? 

like a straight person is telling me that they can spot us queers at 50 paces 

and i’m immediately going to be uncomfortable with that, 

whereas when other queer folks talk about being able to spot each other 

it’s a tool for survival. 

Like here’s the thing right? 

being able to tell is important sometimes.  

Here’s an example: 

A couple summers ago I was in a very very small town in Nova Scotia, Canada 

(like 6 buildings small) 

and I met a woman in the library who was probably a little older than my actual mother. 

She was there most days using the wifi 

because she lived across the street in an apartment without internet. 

We sat at the same table a few times and spoke briefly about life in passing 

and after a few of these not-talking-about-gay-stuff convos I was pretty sure she was a part of the lgbtq community 

and I slipped in a casual pronoun re: an ex 

and she just looked at me, 

stopped completely 

and said “oh thank fuck, I thought so.” 

and instantly started talking about her girlfriend, 

it was like this huge wave of relief washed over both of us 

because we were in a small rural town and both hovering in this really queer space and unable to talk about it. 

Anyway she was really rad and took me to the closest big town to buy me a tim hortons coffee 

because she found it reprehensible that I had been in canada for more than 3 weeks already and hadn’t ever had it. 

Almost instantly it was like 

“oh okay we have this thing in common that other people may not be cool with 

but we can actually exist and not hide shit without the fear of violence or anger”

but when it’s a straight person

they’re pretty much just letting you know that they can spot the fact that you seem “abnormal” to them 

like great 

No, they have Westron names and English names.

What you’ve got to understand is that everything Tolkien wrote was him pretending to merely translate ancient documents. He was writing as if the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were actually been written by Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam (or Bilba, Maura, and Ban) and he was just some random contemporary academic translating it all into English for us. 

There are many languages in his books, but generally speaking, everything written in English in the books is a translation of the language “Westron.” Therefore any names that come from Westron, he translated. Names coming from other languages, like Sindarin, he left as they were. Why? IDK. Maybe because the stories are from a hobbit perspective and hobbits speak Westron, so he wanted the Westron parts to sound familiar and the other languages/names to remain foreign? 

“But Mirkwoodest!” you cry, “The word ‘hobbit’ isn’t an English word! And the names Bilbo Baggins, Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Peregrin Took, and Meriadoc Brandybuck” all sounds super weird and not like English at all!”

Psych! They are in English! (Or Old English, German, or Norse.) Once again you underestimate what a nerd Tolkien was. Let me break it down: 

In Westron, hobbits are actually called “kuduk,” which means “hole-dweller,” so for an English translation, Tolkien called them “hobbits” which is a modernization of the Old English word “holbytla” which comes from “Hol” (hole) and “Bytla”(builder). 

“Maura” is a Westron name which means “Wise.” Weirdly enough, “Frodo” is an actual Proto-Germanic name that actual people used to have and it means the same thing. 

“Banazîr” is Westron for “half-wise, or simple.” In Proto Germanic, the prefix “Sam” means half, and wise is obviously a word we still use. 

“Razanur” means “Traveler” or “Stranger” which is also the meaning of the word “Peregrin(e)” This one is a twofer because  “Razar” means “a small red apple” and in English so does “Pippin.”

“Kalimac” apparently is a meaningless name in Westron, but the shortened form “Kali” means “happy,” so Jirt decided his nickname would be “Merry” and chose the really obscure ancient Celtic name “Meriodoc” to match. 

Jirt chose to leave “Bilba” almost exactly the same in English, but he changed the ending to an “O” because in Westron names ending in “a” are masculine. 

I’m not going to go on and talk about the last names but those all have special meanings too (except Tûk, which is too iconic to change more than the spelling of, apparently). 

The Rohirrim were also Westron speakers first and foremost, so their names are also “translations” into Old English and Proto-Germanic words, i.e. “Eowyn”  is a combination of “Eoh” (horse) and “Wynn” (joy/bliss). 

“Rohirrim/Rohan” are Sindarin words, but in the books, they call themselves the “Éothéod” which is an Old English/Norse combo that means “horse people.” Tolkien tells us in the “Peoples of Middle Earth” that the actual Westron for “Éothéod” is Lohtûr, which means that Eowyn and Eomer’s names, which come from the same root word, must also start with the letter L. 

The names of all the elves, dwarves, Dunedain, and men from Gondor are not English translations, since they come from root words other than Westron. 

The takeaway from this is that when a guy whose first real job was researching the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter “W” writes a book, you can expect this kind of tomfoolery.

Notes: Sorry I said “Razal” instead of “Razar” in my original post I’m a fraud. 

Further Reading: