#im not even mourning the friendship yet and im just flashbacking to that moment like wtf i shouldnt have brought it in the 1st place | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

palmviolet · 5 years

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jim hopper, or how to fuck up a character: the guide

so. i am mad.

hopper was the character treated the worst in the season. (except perhaps will, because i was expecting so much and got so little.) but seriously? his characterisation was appalling.

i have already had problems with his parenting of el in s2. (as @nancykali has talked about in the past.) he was overly controlling and borderline abusive in trying to keep her safe - and this, while awful, could have been fixed in s3. you know how?

1) have them actually talk to each other about feelings etc.

2) have joyce actively involved in co-parenting el (as hopper clearly is not up to it on his own).

3) not be so controlling.

instead, what do we get?? horrifyingly controlling, obsessive parenting played for comic relief. joyce is clearly not a large part of el’s life (as she calls joyce ‘will’s mom’ only). hopper decides he wants to talk to el, have a ‘heart to heart’ - but instead he traps mike in his car and basically yells him down. not! good! parenting! and then he lies to joyce about it! and she doesn’t know this until after his death! which will make her already traumatic and tangled feelings even more complicated! ugh!

and then hopper and el are separated. for the rest of the season, until the very end. he gives her a nice speech, but that’s it. until after his death, when the mourning for his death is only really given to el- only el is really allowed to cry, only el is given a long moment with his memory. he’s spent the whole season with joyce, not even thinking about el (another writing mistake), and yet joyce is not allowed to mourn at all. what the fuck

and then. phew. his treatment of joyce.

i made a list of everything he said to her that made me want to cry.

(prior to this also mr clarke suggests she is delusional, ‘apophenia, seeing patterns that aren’t there’, and nancy tells jonathan he really is joyce’s son, because he ‘worries too much’.)

1) joyce tries to explain why she stood hopper up. he refuses to listen, repeatedly saying ‘you’ve outdone yourself, joyce!’ implying she’s descended to a new level of crazy. she recognises this and tells him ‘you’re not even listening to me!’

2) ‘it makes sense, i’m sorry.’ she sighs in relief because she thinks he believes her, like he has done in the past. UNTIL he becomes horribly, horribly sarcastic - almost cruel. she is very visibly worked up and distressed but he only cares about his feelings.

3) ‘now you’re inventing things to get worked up about because god forbid any of us move on!’ - seriously?? she’s clearly still traumatised and grieving bob’s death, and even if she is inventing things he should be concerned, not angry, because clearly she’s still dealing with the trauma of it all IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU HOPPER FFS

4) then they finally get to the lab. when she’s frozen staring at the spot where bob died hopper hesitates and seems very impatient - ‘are you okay? do you wanna wait in the car?’ it’s very peremptory.

5) then they get to the room where the gate was. he touches the empty wall and says ‘nobody’s home’ in a pretty scathing tone. joyce clearly has severe ptsd (she literally has a flashback that we see on screen while facing this wall) but hopper doesn’t seem to care. he’s treating her with a lot of impatience, patronising her like she’s a child.

6) she says ‘i feel like i’m losing my mind.’ well guess what, that’s because hopper is treating her like she is. after a moment he says ‘you’re not losing your mind’ and it sounds a little begrudging. thankfully the scene progresses to a more equal, healthy conversation involving the sharing of trauma. thank god.

7) ‘i think you should stick to sales’ after she screws up the numberplate - he doesn’t even give her a chance to explain that it’s a motorcycle, not a car, he just decides that she’s useless. however he does apologise somewhat by later telling her she should work with him instead.

8) the worst line. the worst fucking line in this season. joyce says of murray ‘he’s not eccentric, he’s certifiable’. is it wrong? yes. is it very slightly hypocritical? yes. (but only because others have dismissed her as crazy in the past- not because she is crazy.) but hopper’s response- oh my god. he shuts her down so completely it’s horrifying and i felt physically ill when watching. ‘glass houses’. ‘you know, pot calling the kettle black.’ what the hell? is that meant to be a joke? he basically just called her certifiable and a hypocrite. hopper, the only one who never called her crazy, who never dismissed her like that. he’s suddenly decided he can’t trust her intuition anymore and that she’s just as crazy as they all say. what the fuck

9) it gets a bit better from here. but- in the car on the way back to hawkins, once again he belittles her: ‘we’re on our way to rescue our children from the big bad 4th of july celebration’. jesus christ, hopper, just because you haven’t shown an ounce of concern towards el except when it’s to do with mike-

10) and then joyce imitating him in the last episode. ‘it’s really hard to listen to you when you make everything sound like it’s the end of the goddamn world’. joyce has literally recognised that he doesn’t listen to her, that he’s been diminishing, ignoring, and belittling her - even gaslighting her, using her reputation and history of mental illness as an excuse to just ignore her concerns.

in short, i am horrified. i enjoyed some parts of the jopper storyline but a great deal of it was really quite concerning and his storyline with el was awful. the worst part of the season for me, by far.

and don’t get me started on how they presented the aftermath of his death. (but im gonna go for it anyway lmao)

so we’re given the beautiful, tragic scene of el realising he’s dead, and joyce sobbing into her son’s shoulder. however even this has glaring faults - joyce shouldn’t just look at el breaking down. joyce and el should grieve together, because it is they who love/loved hopper the most. especially since el becomes joyce’s surrogate daughter at the end - there definitely should have been more signs and foreshadowing for that. for god’s sake, duffers, one female friendship isn’t enough.

and then- the very next scene is steve and robin looking for jobs. it’s a goddamn comedy scene, and it’s so jarring it hurt. seriously, it diminished the emotional impact ridiculously, almost bathetic. and then joyce gets- what. ten seconds? of grieving? and even when she’s having her moment of mourning el comes in, takes the speech, and suddenly the whole scene is all about her, again. now i’m not diminishing her pain but when all season long it’s been joyce & hopper, the lack of emotional impact is frankly disappointing.

hopper was a great character at the start of the show, and even had his great moments this season. but he was reduced to this caricature - angry, overprotective dad, snarky love interest whose sarcasm was often downright cruel. i am so disappointed in the way they presented him, because they could have done so well - fixed the mistakes they made in s2 and made him even better.

tl;dr: hopper is borderline nasty to both el and joyce in this season and thus is vastly out of character. do better, duffers.

#jopper #jim hopper #joyce byers #el hopper #st spoilers #stranger things spoilers #st3 #st meta #god im so mad #ughhhhhhhhhh #:((((#he’s just so nasty to joyce and el #like wtf

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