Spacecasehobbit - Space

this will NEVER not be funny

❤️ 💛

It's been almost 5 years, and Billy Hargrove is still the most interesting character, imo, that Stranger Things produced, as well as possibly the show's greatest example of writing that didn't line up with the stated intention of a character's moral alignment.

The guy shows up, mildly antagonises the rich senior guy who he's been told used to run the school (and comes across much more as a closeted queer guy who wanted to flirt with Steve, to a good chunk of the fandom), and shows some abusive tendencies towards his younger step-sister & potential racist views towards the black boy he sees making her cry. Then the audience learns that he's still in an abusive situation himself, with a father who hits him, talks down to him/calls him slurs, and then expects him to effectively parent his step-sister - likely with the expectation that Billy will "parent" Max the was that Neil "parents" Billy, and thus make himself Max's bad guy instead of Neil.

So Billy goes looking for his sister, already in a bad mood because she ran away while he was supposed to be watching her, and he's now gotten hit and belittled and forced to cancel a date he was clearly looking forward to and spend his evening tracking her down instead. Then he finds her, in a stranger's house, with three middle school boys and the high school senior he's been mildly antagonizing at school. None of these people live in the house they're hiding out in, and Steve starts lying to him and insulting him pretty much the moment he arrives.

At that point, it's not great that Billy snaps and beats the hell out of Steve, and it's certainly not great that Billy tried to go after Lucas. It is also not exactly a sign that he's an irridemable monster who dreams of naught but blood and violence, though. It's a kid stuck in an ugly situation, feeling backed into corners with no good options to find help or keep himself safe, coping poorly and lashing out the only way he's been taught.

And then he gets injected with sedatives and threatened with a baseball bat, after which he seems to leave Max, Steve, and the others alone.

Until he gets possessed by the Mind Flayer while on his way to meet a middle-aged woman who was flirting with him since he was 17 and who had been effectively stalking him at his workplace along with a bunch of other middle-aged moms. Then Billy spends some time desperate, confused, and terrified, before he retreats further and further into himself to avoid the horrifying things the Mind Flayer is using his body for. He hides himself in his mind, until El finds him, shares a happy memory from when he was 10 and his mom was still around, and shows him a bit of empathy and kindness.

And that's all it takes for Billy to put aside his own terror and stand up to the horrific, nightmarish monster that had been possessing him, had already killed a bunch of other people it had forced him to feed it, and now wanted to kill El and a group of other kids that included the step-sister he hated but had been forced to watch out for by his abusive dad. Billy takes one act of kindness from a stranger, and stands up to put his own body between the monster and the other people it was trying to kill. He stands up to it while it stabs him repeatedly, until it kills him, and he uses his last dying breath to apologize for the shitty way he'd treated Max.

And somehow, this character is meant to be a villain...