fuck it. stuckwith-harry -> smalltownboymp3
Cosmic Funnies
AnasAbdin
Game of Thrones Daily
Cosimo Galluzzi
KIROKAZE
dirt enthusiast
Three Goblin Art
h

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

Love Begins
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
ojovivo

oozey mess
Show & Tell

roma★
taylor price
Not today Justin
TVSTRANGERTHINGS

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@smalltownboymp3
fuck it. stuckwith-harry -> smalltownboymp3

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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[looking at people younger than me] you have your whole life ahead of you [looking at people older than me] you have your whole life ahead of you [looking at myself] its over
happy pride month
basically i like to pick my interests based on what will be most embarrassing for me at any given time

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damn 🌻 hit us with it
retrospectively kind of glad byler wasn’t canon because 1. i would have wanted it to have been done in one of a few very specific ways and would have felt bad expressing disappointment if it wasn’t. 2. the fanworks wouldn’t have been as good and 3. you wouldn’t have been able to criticize season 5 on here much at all because the general perception on it would have been positive even if most everything else was the same
what’s the deal with the birthmark?
as i would say most people on byler tumblr know, the montauk pitch deck described the party differently from how they ended up in stranger things. dustin was overweight with “oversized” glasses; lucas had the last name conley and parents in the midst of a “vitriolic” divorce; mike had a large birthmark on his cheek. as in canon, will had “sexual identity issues.” all four of them — the Black* kid, the fat kid, the gay kid, the disfigured kid — have easily identifiable marginalized and therefore bulliable identities.
in-show, we see that the main kids are still bullied, even if not for exactly the same reasons as described in the montauk bible. will is poor and (perceived as) gay; dustin is physically disabled; lucas is Black; in later seasons max is poor and doesn’t fit gender norms; and el is perceived as having an intellectual disability. that only leaves mike, who is bullied because he… looks like a frog?
of course, kids can be and are bullied for having nerdy interests, or for not being conventionally attractive. but the more common form of bullying — the one we see in stranger things — is the specific targeting of minorities; of those who are different. (“midnight? toothless?” “there are certain types of people in this world…” “i always took you for a queer, but…” “will’s in fairyland now…” etc.)
a nerd is also someone who is different, but lucas, dustin and will (and el and max) all hold marginalized identities in addition to their interest in science and dungeons and dragons, while mike doesn’t.
this places him in a really interesting situation in his relationships with the other characters. he is friends with all of these people who are both bullied and systemically oppressed by society and is basically powerless to help them. we see him comfort dustin, will, and el when they are bullied, but ultimately he is unable to really change anything about the situation. sometimes, he is even lumped in as a target explicitly because of an attempted defense of a friend (see: 1x04).
this role — who helps when his friends are bullied but doesn’t understand what they’re experiencing — extends even to the supernatural plotlines. in every season, he has a close relationship with the character most dangerously affected by the supernatural plot (will in seasons 1 and 2, el in season 3, will in season 5. mike is arguably replaced here by lucas in season 4, but his relationship with el still relates heavily to the supernatural.) but in the same way as with the more mundane dangers, he remains separate from their experiences and unable to really help. he’s there to catch will and el when they fall, but he can’t fight the mind flayer any more than he can fight angela. (this both ties the supernatural arc into preexisting interpersonal conflicts and expands on the reading of the supernatural as a metaphor for real-world bigotry, but that’s another post and one that’s been made before by better analysts than me.)
among people who don’t like stranger things, mike’s separation from bigotry is often characterized as a misstep on the writers’ part. mike — the leader, a writer, and the dungeon master — is often held up as an example of the failings of the show. “this show purports to be about losers and outcasts,” they say, “even those whose stories weren’t told in the real 1980s, but the leader of the child characters is a straight white kid. yeah, right.”**
obviously, stranger things is not exempt from criticism. (see: handling of lucas and billy in s3; or lucas, erica, and jason in s4) but i think this element of mike’s character is something other than that. he was originally written to have a large birthmark that caused crippling insecurity, but both the birthmark and (in s1) the insecurity are markedly absent. this points to not the creation of a self-insert character,*** but to the intentional creation of an “outcast” among the outcasts. the show is posing the question: does mike understand or not?
we see this most explicitly in seasons 1 and 4. in season 1, the scene of mike and el on the railroad tracks: mike admits to el that he’s a victim of bullying, that everyone at school sees him as a “total wastoid,” but that he was embarrassed to tell her. she solemnly assures him that she understands. she’s seen what happened between him, troy, and james in the school gym and is able to put the pieces together. even though she hasn’t been out of the lab for very long, she understands bullies.
conversely, in season 4, both el and will presume that mike does not understand what it’s like to be different and to be bullied because of it.
mike doesn’t understand why el has been lying to him about california, because he’s been “bullied his entire life” and he “knows what it’s like.” she tells him, however, that he cannot understand her experiences because she, unlike him, is actually different [from other people] and does not belong anywhere.
will does not say as explicitly as el that mike does not understand his experiences, but the 4x08 van scene (“[i’m] so different from other people… and when you’re different, sometimes, you feel like a mistake”) strongly implies that he does not think or even suspect that mike understands what it’s like to be different. mike, in will’s mind, needs an explanation of how both will and el are different from him and do not fit in to normal society.
and i think all of this is intentional! by the end of season 4, the absence of any visible oppression for mike is forcing the question: is he the token straight, white, abled guy of the friend group, or not? why remove his physical marker of difference? why is he so insistent that he understands el and will’s struggles when neither of them believe that he does? does mike understand what it’s like to be different, or not?
*the montauk pitch deck does not mention lucas’ race. in the case that it was not originally intended, lucas would have been “the kid with divorced parents.” this might not seem like a big deal now, and certainly doesn’t compare with the struggles he canonically faces because of his race, but in 1980s conservative small-town new york (or indiana), having divorced parents (especially if they were loudly and publicly divorcing in-show) came with a certain stigma.
**i know there are posts that express this sentiment and i know that i even have some on my blog, but i have been unable to find them. if anyone knows of one, please let me know so that i can link it in this post. if you’re looking, i would recommend starting in an archive from july 2022. lol.
***in a recent interview and several older ones, the duffers have alluded to mike being a self-insert character, though not in those terms. but i don’t think that this negates my point. it’s common (at least fanon) knowledge that they drew inspiration for will and el’s twinnish relationship from their own lives, but that doesn’t necessitate a one-to-one parallel between the two relationships, and same with mike. (or maybe ross is gay.)
update: he does in fact not understand. lol
atla fans are so lame they’ll write elaborate modern aus where the fantasy world with nary a single white person is transposed into the starbucks on main street in bumfuck kansas and then they won’t even have the decency to do the bare minimum and make katara a communist. at most they write her as like. a third wave feminist who thinks healthcare should be more affordable. guys she literally bombed a factory .
can we get 36 hours a day? not for any productive purposes i just want to finish my to watch & to read list in this lifetime . also probably get enough sleep
My roommate and I finished riverdale like a week ago and as we were watching it there were a bunch of lines that made us lose our shit so once we finished the show they went back and compiled every single one of them into this absurd 7 minute long video. I feel like y'all would enjoy this over here.

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people will describe their incredibly nebulous sexuality to you that they’ve never been able to define and the whole time you’re thinking that sounds like bisexuality brother
no, mother... you should have read my supposed "school field trip" permission slip closer.... i foresaw your betrayal a mile away.... im afraid, mother, it is you who has been sold to one direction
it’s so hard for me to listen to heartbroken/angry breakup songs by straight men bc no matter how good the song is i’ll be like i’m not sure if i fully believe you. let’s hear her side of the story.
this ALWAYS happens to me with Serbia. i'm always like my boy i know you're the problem i just can't prove it yet
Never read Baldwin before?
Nonfiction
The Price of The Ticket (borrow from IA)
The Fire Next Time (pdf download)
Notes of A Native Son (pdf download)
Nothing Personal (read on IA - not great quality sorry)
The Last Interview (pdf download) (only 10 pages!)
Fiction
Giovanni's Room (pdf download)
If Beale Street Could Talk (pdf download)
BONUS
Little Man Little Man (read or pdf download on scribd) (Baldwin's only children's book)
Go Tell It On The Mountain (pdf download)
Another Country (pdf and epub download)
Sonny's Blues (pdf download)
Going to Meet the Man (pdf download)
being into some bullshit that nobody cares about and also is stupid really changes you

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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im so sexy and fun and fucking doomed
That post about death note being "everyone's first anime" (untrue statement) made me curious and now I want to gather data for science
Can you reblog this and tell me where are you from and what was your starter anime?