You know what I want to see, I want to see more of Steve, Eddie, and Robin being 1980s small town kids from Indiana, by which I mean;
Robin is The Source of Gay Knowledge purely because her parents host Hippie Christmas and she managed to sneak away to find a neat bookstore in Indiana once.
Her knowledge is not in depth. It's patchy, woven together through rumors, stories she heard or things she picked up from her parents' old pictures. She's got a handful of zines, one book, and some movies she managed to order for Family Video behind Keith's back.
She acts like she's Queen of the Queers because in Hawkins she pretty much is.
(Max and El ask her what a lavender marriage is once, something they overheard snooping around.
Robin confidentially answers that it's code for when one woman dresses up as a man, fooling officials into wedding two woman.
She does not live this down two years later when they find out what it actually means.)
Eddie doesn't spend every weekend in Indianapolis.
Gas is expensive, his busiest days of his "job" is Friday and Saturday, and he has no fucking clue what the hanky code is.
He's wearing that bandana because Metallica front singer James Hetfield has one on all their tour posters.
Eddie does make it down to a gay bar though, by accident. Rick needed some back up for a shady deal. Promised Eddie a boatload of free drugs to sell if he agreed to just stand there and look mean.
He was warned the bar they were meeting in was 'weird' and to not 'freak out' --which Eddie thought was hilarious given his nickname and general appearance, but whatever.
He doesn't understand when they get there, because it's just a bunch of hot men with hanky's in their back pockets everywhere.
Then he sees two women kissing and it clicks.
He can't out himself in front of Rick, but one of the bartenders playfully dresses him down for his own hanky, letting him know all about the code and teasing him through his embarrassment.
He's got an offer to come back and learn what color and which pocket his hanky should actually be in, a prospect Eddie was salivating at until Chrissy Cunningham up and died on his ceiling.
(He still wore the hanky, because the feeling of that bartender tugging it out and stuffing it back in might be the closest thing he's ever had to sex and he absolutely wants a repeat.
He's young and horny, sue him.)
Steve Harrington may not be academically smart but he's not dumb.
He figured out a while back that the basketball team as a unit probably crossed the queer line more than once--or at least it did before Hargrove came in.
( Brad Handly for example, went around slamming kids into lockers and screaming slurs like a fucking movie villain one Monday because the varsity team got dead drunk at Laura's party on Sunday and hey, look, there weren't that many girls there, okay?
They all had fucking hands and mouths. Everybody but Tommy was single and hot to trot. Nothing gay about it.
Its not even like they were kissing or treating each other like chicks. It was just Brad's first time and they got to tease him later for overthinking it.
Dude graduated soon enough after and given Steve was on the team as a sophomore, he hadn't thought about the guy and why he might be freaking out so bad in years.)
Robin's entire panic attack at Starcourt, and a few more after had Steve replaying that whole incident. Reframed it a bit, and, yeah.
In retrospect that had been extremely gay, actually.
It sat with him a lot easier than he'd thought it would. Partially because of Robin, but mostly because that's just who he was.
Stranger things had happened to Steve and this one didn't want to kill, maim or otherwise eat him, so it got filed under 'interesting facts he should never tell his parents if he wanted to keep his trust fund' and then he went about his day.
(Or he tried too, anyways.
It caught up to him when Eddie and Robin somehow figured out the other was queer and dragged him along to some bar Eddie had a standing invitation at, with demands for Steve to do what he did best.
Babysit.
Their magical trip was utterly destroyed when Brad Handly happened to be the very same bartender who had given Eddie the invite.
Considering Brad's immediate bark of laughter followed by a hug and introducing himself as "Steve's gay awakening", Steve ended up having to speedrun through Eddie and Robin both having a crisis for him.
It didn't help that Steve had politely, and laughingly, corrected Brad with a casual;
"Pretty sure that was Tommy man, but if it helps I think that tongue of yours gave Matt Burdon a crisis."
--which ended up with him answering a lot more gay sex questions with Brad than he cared too.
At least he, through Brad, was able to help Robin connect to some local lesbians and--after a second crisis from Eddie regarding how Steve managed to have more sex than "the resident town freak and guy who actually knew he was gay, Steve!"-- even helped Eddie out by catching the metalheads tongue with his mouth later that evening.
The last one landed him a boyfriend, trust fund be damned.)
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no one’s talking about that half-naked alien petting till and i am both glad but also haunted by that. please tell me that wasn’t implying what i think it is. till has gone through wayyy too much and i will literally sob if it turns out he’s gone through this too
I had a post drafted about that but I didn't know how to feel about posting it at first. I'm just gonna reiterate it here though.
The entire first verse of ROUND 6 was actually pretty uncomfortable to watch, at least for me. I genuinely thought we were going to delve into that territory, you know. And I wouldn't put it past VIVINOS of all people to do it. The dim lighting, alcohol bottles, the very familiar environment of private rooms and drunk cruelty, it all resembles certain acts and situations that are unfortunately common within the performance industry. ALIEN STAGE obviously emphasizes the horrific aspects of stardom and could be read as a commentary on that kind of culture as a whole (constant performativity, lack of autonomy, performers as objects possessed by those of higher power, literal cutthroat competition, etc.), so exploring the topic of assault isn't unlikely, especially when it's so prevalent in that kind of fame. Still, I was jarred when I first watched the video.
The way that they handled Till was upsettingly familiar to me. It was slightly easier to bypass when Urak was simply shoving him via telekinesis. But a group of large, drunk aliens violently putting their hands on him, grabbing him by the neck and bending him on the table (it was at this point I began to feel a bit squeamish), it became a little too real? For me at least. And then there's your main point, the assaulting alien that was clothed in the scene before is now naked in the next, save for the open, unbuttoned shirt. And Till is on the ground next to him, his hair carded through and scratched by giant hands. Till is disheveled and sweating. It seems this was the lowest point of his night, seeing as how he dreams up an angelic apparition of Mizi. An escape, a salvation. Someone that could offer him a soft, gentle respite to balm the pain of his abuse. The way he desperately reaches out, shaking and exhausted, it's painful.
I know it's not explicitly shown in the video. It's not implied in posts (although from what I hear, there's traces of something similar in the Anakt Kit book), but you can't deny the thoughts that the imagery brings to mind, especially when said imagery is so vivid and visceral. I won't claim that this is the absolute message the team was trying to convey, nor that this is the correct way to perceive that scene, just that the pieces leading to this interpretation are there. VIVINOS videos are meticulously crafted, and the whole collection deals with disturbing concepts and topics. If they wanted to imply something, they'd know how to do it. Anyway, the first scenes struck a chord in me, to say the least.
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