#hyperfixation talk

I feel like in order to understand my point here, one has to understand the quintessential Trans Experience of watching people mourning for the version of you that they believed identified with your birth sex. Parents mourn the children they thought they had, and as a trans child, you have to step back and watch your parents talk about how you killed their little girl, or watch as they mourn their son. This can be incredibly damaging as you are not dead, you are right there in front of your parents, and they look right through you and talk about how you killed the person you used to be. You are both the cadaver in the grave and the convicted felon. But the person in the grave is a wax statue, and the people who are supposed to care for you more than anyone else in the world are crying over a wax figure of the person they thought you were, and you have no choice but to stand back and watch.

Bill’s Big Derry-Brand Repression is that he still blames himself for his brother’s death, right? like that’s what he has to deal with most in Chapter 2. I think it adds a lot to Bill’s character if Georgie’s death is not the only “dead” Denbrough child Bill blames himself for. If Zack and Sharon Denbrough had the INCREDIBLY COMMON reaction that is characterized by blaming their son for the “death of their daughter,” that shit Hurts. In my headcanon here, the narrative goes that Bill came out really young, like 7/8, and his parents tried to understand and support him but ultimately made the mistake of speaking as if their ‘daughter’ had died. Bill never died, he just grew into someone different than who they were expecting. But at that age? That shit gives you a complex, no doubt.

Zack and Sharon are shown to become increasingly emotionally distant from Bill after Georgie’s death. They don’t blame Bill, I genuinely believe that. But when they respond to grief in that manner, Bill likely made a connection between that and how they reacted/treated him after he came out initially. So now Bill’s got it in his head that he killed not only Georgie, but the daughter the Denbroughs thought they had.

He already blames himself for the mourning process his parents went through when he came out, and now he blames himself for Georgie’s death as well. I think that in this narrative, that’s one of the reasons he refuses to believe that Georgie is dead. Obviously, he loves him dearly, and wants more than anything for him to be alive and to come home. It is mostly pure brotherly love!! But some neural pathway in Bill’s brain has made the connection that the children that the Denbroughs mourn are not really dead. It’s entirely subconscious, obviously, but that shit HURT.

When Bill returns to Derry, fully medically transitioned, established as male in the public eye, he’s suddenly thrown back into his intensely self-blaming ways. He thinks he robbed his parents of their daughter, thinks he got Georgie killed by pretending to be sicker than he was, thinks he’s the sole source of his parents’ misery all those years. The scene in the flooded basement in chapter 2 becomes twice as poignant if you perceive Bill as trans. He didn’t get Georgie killed, it wasn’t his fault. And he’s not to blame for his parents deciding to mourn a child that they never lost.