good morning everyone! (or afternoon depending wherever you are 👀)
just a quick update:
I am currently working on part 5! 😮💨 I hope I can get it out sooner than later but we’ll see.
then after I publish part 5, instead of jumping into another series right away, I want to focus on the requests I have in my inbox. I’ve read them all (and even started a couple of them) but haven’t had the time to complete them, so I want to do some of them at least so I can give back to everyone 🥹
I just want to let everyone know that I’m not ignoring you or your request, but just that writing takes a lot of time for me and I want to give every request/idea the time they deserve 🥹🫶🏼
thank you for your support and understanding! 💖
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Oh would you so kindly expand on your Murray/that plotline™ thoughts? Btw I didn't remember it as a cheating situation but since it's been so long since watching that season i was taking other people's word for it. And yeah i don't think Murray did anything even if it was. like he didn't make them have sex.
I started to type out an answer to this ask, forgot to save it as a draft, and lost all of my thoughts, so apologies if this is a little disjointed but! I will do my best to give my thoughts coherently <3
I really do think the Murray thing is maybe a mischaracterization of his intentions, but also not the thing I care most about when it comes to narratives that deal with Steve/Nancy/Jonathan situation in season 2, because at the end of the day it's just another reframing of the same tired take tbh
I'll stick it under the cut though because I know I can be wordy
There's this, like, company line in this fandom that Steve and Nancy were just two teenagers who hurt each other, which I one hundred percent agree with, only that tends to be the company line everywhere except for the Steve-centric fics that get written about that plotline, which instead seem to frequently make an argument that "Nancy cheated on Steve, was cruel enough to cause long-term emotional damage, and then either is forced to grovel for forgiveness or be shut out of his and his friends' lives forever" which is. Not that. Right?
Fandom cultures at large, not just this one, are more willing to do empathetic, in-depth character analysis of male characters than they are female. This is something we know to be true and this is something that is noticable in how Nancy gets treated by fanon, especially when it comes to her relationship with Steve.
Because here's the thing, we could debate it all day (and I won't, for the record, if anyone's thinking about starting a fight) but for my part, what she did wasn't cheating. From the very first time I watched season 2 when it was released, I always read the Halloween fight and the morning after as a breakup.
HOWEVER, even if Nancy did cheat on Steve? It doesn't warrant the downright malicious Nancy characterizations that often feel ubiquitous to this fandom.
Even if Nancy did cheat, there is a refusal to look at the situation from her point of view, something which even Steve is canonically able to do by the end of season 2 (we'll get to that). Because there's more nuance here to take into account than just Nancy making a choice to specifically hurt or break Steve and there's more nuance here than Steve being incapable of moving on from this breakup.
In fact, if you really look at the choices both of them are making, it has very little to do with each other and everything to do with their own reactions to immense personal trauma and grief. Nancy has spent a year suppressing a mourning she's not allowed to experience out loud, and you expect her not to snap eventually?
Does personal hardship mean cheating is, like, a good thing (if that's the takeaway you're going with from canon)? No. Does it still wildly differ from the cruel and intentionally malicious version of Nancy that shows up in far too much fic? Yeah.
She's a teenage girl whose best friend died in a violent and preventable way at sixteen years old. Nancy tried to fit herself into Steve's coping strategies, tried to let it all go back to normal, and was visibly hurting in the process. She sought out comfort. Understanding. A chance to be heard.
It's a disservice to both of their characters to treat this like there's a "good" and "bad" guy, when the way they handle it in canon, the way Steve comes to terms with it (literally within days he is telling her to go with Jonathan, by the way), is all vitally important to their growth.
When Steve says "I may not be a very good boyfriend" that's not about him being down on himself or having low self worth, it's a moment of growth and self reflection/ awareness for him to acknowledge that in his efforts to make himself feel better, he also hurt Nancy. It's about him no longer being in the same bitter headspace of "what am I apologizing for?" that he was at the start of the season, and having the maturity to see that they don't work as they are at their current mental states, no matter how heartbreaking that may be for him.
And Nancy choosing to go with Jonathan is really just a continuation of everything she was doing in trying to get justice for Barb-- she's choosing to follow her heart after being trapped away from acknowledging it for so long.
In other words, not only does he not have reason to, but Steve doesn't hate Nancy, Steve doesn't hold a lifelong grudge against Nancy, Steve doesn't think Nancy is a cruel and unfeeling bitch, but fic authors sure seem to.
If it were just a handful of fics here or there, I wouldn't be so adamant about it, but it's such an ingrained narrative in this fandom that sometimes I think people have genuinely forgotten the canon context.
Don't strip them of their agency and everything they learn from getting together and falling apart by making Steve less emotionally competent and Nancy more borderline abusive than either of them are.
It's boring and it's sexist and it shouldn't be the norm.
but that's just my 2 and a half cents peace and love anon, hope this answered your question <3
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