I apologize if you’ve already written about this before, but one thing I’ve been wondering about your Indelicate version of Eddie is in regard to his occasional tendency toward more (for lack of a better/less serious-sounding term) “aggresive” actions (e.g., throwing the lotion bottle, throwing the water, etc.) directed toward Richie. I know it was hinted at that the urges to aggress may sometimes be/have been the result of repressed or misconstrued attraction, but I’m wondering if some of it is also a result of Eddie’s injury and the related feelings of a lack of control over his own body? Like hypothetically, if Eddie were never injured or if we fast-forward to him completely healed, do you think that moments like that would still happen? Or am I just really reading too much into the fic and making up this aspect of it? Hope that makes sense - I just love your characterization of Eddie and I want to make sure I’m understanding as much as I can!
I actually haven’t written about this before, and I think that it’s a good thing that I take the time to meditate on it now, because I don’t want the idea that throwing things at your romantic partner is, like, a good thing.
So a lot of my thoughts on Eddie’s aggression derive from two specific aspects of his portrayal. The first (chronologically in Eddie’s timeline) is the portrayal of Eddie as high-strung, snappy, and verbally combative in IT Chapter One (2017). Within the last year and a half I saw a post that pointed out that some of Eddie’s aggression--especially in interacting with Richie--probably derives from the high-stress situations of a) being hunted by an alien clown demon and b) being abused at home. I had a college professor discussing a history and trauma class point out that, “Traumatized people don’t always behave well.” There are the usual caveats that explanations are not excuses; however, I think that the constant knowledge that he has to return to Sonia’s house and the persistent alarms telling him when he has to take medication, so that even when he’s apart from her he can’t get away from her interference, means that Eddie’s under high pressure. And then you get to the point where all of the children in Derry are being hunted by an actual monster, and it’s a wonder that Eddie behaves as well as he does, because I certainly wouldn’t.
I usually like to incorporate some of book!Eddie’s dreamy introspection into his internal narrative in Indelicate, and I think that some of his pressures are relaxing now that he’s a) no longer living in a house with Sonia, b) acting specifically in ways that maximize his own agency (going where he wants with whom he wants, eating what he wants, actively rejecting much of her influence). However, he’s still got a lot on his plate, and some habits die hard. This is why I have moments of Eddie waiting with the perfect snappy comeback on his tongue, and then stopping himself because he knows it’s something he doesn’t mean. He doesn’t actually want Richie to never talk again, he loves it when Richie talks, and he’s struggling towards sincerity. I personally have a lot of difficulty letting go of the put-down jokes in favor of being sincere with the people I love, so I thought I’d give Eddie several moments of consciously choosing to be honest and kind with Richie.
The second influence on Eddie’s relationship to physically “lashing out” is his introductory scene from IT (1986), where he’s leaving home and Myra is chasing after him demanding explanations and wailing about how terrified she is. I know that there are lots of analyses of this scene and thoughts on Myra versus Sonia, and I’m not interested in those right now; however, what caught my eye was that Eddie sees Myra’s distress and his first thought is something along the lines of “you might as well hit her”--not that he wants to hit her and he has nothing to lose, but that his causing her emotional distress is as bad as physically abusing his wife. (I can’t recall at the moment whether Eddie’s section comes before or after Bev’s introduction, but I want to say that it’s before, and I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that Bev and Eddie’s very different home lives are contrasted.)
So I thought, that as a boy child without a father, raised and abused by his single mother--and considering his issues with (as I write it) suppressed gay feelings, and the sort of “glass closet” I write him with--Eddie’s concepts of masculinity are probably pretty toxic. I think that in order to maintain control over Eddie, Sonia probably got very emotionally manipulative when he resisted her at all, especially as he got older and taller and physically stronger than her, and that she probably cried out things like “Eddie, you’re hurting me, how can you hurt your mother like this?” and made Eddie feel like the abuser (which is, I’m given to understand, a frequent tactic of abusers: reversing the roles to make the victim feel apologetic and guilty). I’m specifically thinking of the way that Gillian Flynn writes manipulative white women who weaponize white women’s fragility--Adora in Sharp Objects, since that’s actually the only Gillian Flynn book I’ve read so far. I think that Eddie would be very conscious of what he perceives as his capacity to be an aggressor, and it would be one more way that Sonia could keep him docile.
Later, with Myra--and I’m writing Myra more sympathetically in Indelicate than I did in Things That Happen After Eddie Lives, so I’m not interested in getting into the “is Myra abusive?” conversation right now, because I’ve written her both ways--I think that Eddie likely had a sort of learned helplessness about his own agency with Sonia that he then transferred onto his relationship with Myra. In Indelicate, I write him with a lot of reluctance to volunteer any information towards her, or his emotional state, or to make any of his wishes known (frequently she shoots them down as too extravagant, the way that I talked about Eddie’s relationship to money and luxury and Myra refusing a larger bed).
I write Eddie as largely unaware of his attraction to men until his near-death-experience, but only because he did not allow himself to connect the dots between what he thought of as physical symptoms (tunnel vision on hot man in coffee shop = optic nerve impairment, see doctor); but I think that Eddie was profoundly aware of his unhappiness in his marriage and just tried to reason with himself that everyone felt like that, and everyone was miserable and suppressing their own wants and needs, because that’s just what marriage is, and any other approach to his marriage would make him abusive, so Eddie and Myra’s marriage was emotionally volatile and extremely stressful.
Which is to say that Indelicate Eddie is a powder keg when Richie gets to him.
Again, I don’t think that throwing things at your romantic partner is an acceptable mode of interaction and I don’t want any readers to get the idea that that’s the underlying message of Indelicate, because it’s not. The scene with the moisturizer is derived from something that happened to me years ago (I was Richie, the guy I had a crush on was Eddie) involving a wayward Frisbee; the scene where Eddie tries and fails to throw a drink at Richie is derived from an anecdote of the early days of my parents’ marriage (my mother was Eddie), one that my father’s coworkers and boss loved to talk about and his best friend still brings up when they hang out.
However, Eddie’s relationship to physicality is also deeply informed by a tumblr post I saw over a year ago that talked about how Eddie grew up being told that he was fragile and delicate and sickly, and how Richie did not give a shit about any of that and was more than willing to just grapple him. For this fic, I decided to lean into that idea: that Eddie longs to be treated as though he’s solid and healthy and strong, and he finds a lot of relief in Richie <i>not</i> treating him gently. But because Eddie is actually physically injured in Indelicate, Richie is being careful not to break him while also dealing with Eddie’s very real (and largely unvoiced) desire for physical contact. It’s not an accident that at the end of the chapter in which Richie and Eddie have a shouting match that Richie wrestles Eddie to the floor and pins him and blows a raspberry on his belly--which is incredibly juvenile at the same time that it’s a display of Richie’s physical capabilities and Eddie finds that bizarrely attractive.
So, on top of Eddie’s desire for physical contact, his extreme stressors, and his lifetime of maladaptive coping mechanisms--the other thing that I consider when I write his dynamic with Richie is that Richie is not physically intimidated by Eddie at all. This is not because Richie is stronger than Eddie (he is) or larger than Eddie (he is). This is because there was a time in which Richie and Eddie found it perfectly acceptable to grapple each other as a form of interactions, because Richie and Eddie have known each other since they were seven years old. I even like to think that at one point, Eddie was the taller of the two, because Richie hit a really ridiculous growth spurt somewhere around the start of puberty and Eddie was something of a “late-bloomer,” and Eddie silently seethed about it through their entire adolescence.
So when Richie and Eddie lash out at each other--largely Eddie, because I think Richie, with his fear of the werewolf and of losing control and hurting someone--they’re building on sort of a lifetime of informal physicality. Stitchy does something similar in their Richie/Eddie fic where elements of roleplay always appear in their romance, because they were kids who played pretend games together, and when you have a bond like that with someone, it does permanently shape what sort of interaction you do and do not find acceptable. I also included a flashback into childhood where Richie gets angry with Eddie and very deliberately and methodically pushes him down on the ground and Eddie cries, not because Richie physically hurt him (he didn’t), but because it wasn’t in good fun there, that was Richie deciding to throw him around because he knew it would upset him.
So there’s a lot going into Eddie’s physically aggressive responses in Indelicate--the toxic masculinity that dictates the way that men are allowed to express anger and the ways in which they are allowed to touch each other; the profound stress that Eddie has endured for his whole lifetime without getting many better coping mechanisms; the feeling of lack of control of his physical body; a regression to childhood habits; and a deep sense of relief that Richie (being big, strong, and a man) is not vulnerable to him in the way that Sonia convinced him she (and later Myra) were.
I hmm’d and haww’d over a scene in the most recent chapter in which Eddie strikes Richie with an open hand (it’s a little slap on the chest, and I wanted it to come across very like the sort of corrective smack to the back of the head that I can imagine any of the Losers issuing to Richie back in 1989 when he shoots off at the mouth), because that’s not something I’d be comfortable doing to a romantic partner myself. Richie thinks nothing of it and turns it into a dirty joke, but I do need to get more into Eddie’s decision to touch Richie in kind ways in direct refusal of that “you construct intricate rituals that allow you to touch other men” facet of toxic masculinity.
I know it’s a ridiculously long answer, but it’s a serious issue and I wanted to give it the greatest possible consideration instead of writing something flip. Because both the incidents you named (ones I didn’t even realize formed a pattern, to be honest) are drawn from real life, I can’t say that they’re moments that are influenced by Eddie’s physical disability, but I do think they’re more influenced by his emotional state. I also think that as some of his stressors come off his plate and he gets more comfortable having an adult relationship with Richie, he’s going to stop throwing things at him. I even had Eddie stop after throwing the water, not just because it was ridiculous but because he realized how out of line he was in that moment. Recognizing when you’re out of control in an argument is, I find, an important part of self-improvement; and learning to walk away or to reset is a valuable skill.
Thank you so much for reading!
