Jonnet ei muista: Stranger Things fandom writing about the 1980s

I've been reading Stranger Things fanfiction the past few weeks, as previously mentioned. Season 4 is set in spring 1986, when I was four years old and temporarily in Toronto (between New Orleans, where I was born, and a few months in the Kansas City area with my maternal clan while my dad was jobhunting).

So of course, I remember the 1980s, although not quite as well as someone who was 11-20 like the main cast of Stranger Things are at the time. (waxjism was 10 in 1986, but she's also Finnish). Most of my memories up until about 1989 are a bit vaguer and spottier, but the era was still the recent past (and the setting of a huge quantity of children's and YA books and movies I read as a preteen) in the more vivid part of my childhood. Just... that's the nostalgia context for this post, I guess. (And I know the likelihood that anybody reading my journal DOESN'T remember the 1980s is slim, but... you know.)

Because most of the people writing Stranger Things fanfiction right now are absolutely tiny BABIES, obviously, in comparison, and it's really easy to tell because the fashion in fandoms right now is mostly to not use a beta and to loudly talk about that and about everything else in their authors' notes, bless their hearts*.

This fandom actually isn't as bad as I might have expected at first, though, based on the egregious violations of google/wiki-availability, logic, and cultural literacy to be found in most historical fandoms when research and betas aren't involved (and I mean even mid-20th century historical fandoms here too, not just the Victorian and Age of Sail stuff). Perhaps it's because it's just one generation away - and because of the current popular wave of 80s nostalgia and pop culture artifacts?

• Phones. Corded phones and period-appropriate cordlesses seem to be pretty well covered! There's lots of adorable lingering on physical description of the phones, as they're obviously exotic to the writer the way they wouldn't be to the character, like 'placing the beige plastic phone back on the wall' style stuff. However, there's also lots of calling people on these corded phones in the middle of the night, and that's not something teengers could get away with. Only rich kids (Steve, and Max in season 3 and earlier) have their own phone extensions in their rooms - that is, a separate phone number just for them. Otherwise, when the phone rang, every phone in your house would ring, so if you called your friend in the middle of the night you'd wake up their parents. (Unless their parents are absent or at work, which applies to Steve and Eddie generally, but not to the other kids.)



• Answering machines! Answering machines seem pretty unknown to this fandom. I haven't seen a single appearance of an answering machine. I have seen voicemail, which was a business-only phenomenon at the time. Guaranteed, absolutely, none of the families in Stranger Things have voicemail at their houses. They kind of fulfill the same purpose, but the answering machine has a miniature cassette tape in it and you can play back the messages, rewind, and then eventually overwrite them of course.



• Not everybody had VCRs in 1986, but it's probably fair enough to assume all the families in Stranger Things do.



• Almost nobody had CDs in 1986. I've seen them make a few probably-accidental dubious appearances. Rich people DID have them, though, so Steve's parents having a big stereo that plays them is perfectly correct. We didn't get our first CD player until 1993, and most of my bourgeois-er friends had them a couple years before.



• Jeans! There's so much wrong about jeans. First of all, "skinny jeans" is modern jeans jargon. Jeans in the 80s weren't "skinny", they were just tight. Furthermore, tight jeans in the 1980s were nothing like modern skinny jeans, because stretch jeans didn't exist. The first stretch jeans spreading through jeans-stores in the mall were in the late 90s (and they initially had a lot less spandex than now - more like 1%). Jeans were 100% cotton in the 1980s. Pure cotton jeans will stretch, but they stretch with wear (heat, moisture, and pressure). People did all kinds of tricks to get into tight jeans - when my mom was in high school in the 1970s, all the girls would lie on the floor after gym class to suck their stomachs in enough to button the high-waisted jeans. Wax tells me that in the 80s punks and scene people would put jeans on in a bathtub full of water in order to let the water stretch them out and then let them dry on their legs (this sounds extreme and I'd never heard of it though). And the end result of that didn't look like modern "skinny jeans", because the fabric just... wasn't stretchy. There was more give. There were more wrinkles. And it was more likely to tear or split. Also, if you look at Stranger Things, nobody has tight jeans: Eddie's jeans are ordinary Levi's, probably 501s, just like Steve's, and they're not tight. Which is pretty standard. Tight jeans were not a requirement or even all that common for metalheads in the 80s. Also I have to assume the access to scene styles is a little lower out in rural Indiana than it might be in a big city.



• Safe sex: Safe sex has been pretty popular in fanfiction - that is, conversations about consent and condom and lube use and prep have all been pretty common - for more than a decade. A lot of this probably resulted from a sort of cultural reaction to the unrealistic portrayals of gay sex in early slash, which provoked a lot of discourse and some heated battles. But part of it also resulted from a general higher awareness of safe sex, culturally. Condoms existed hundreds of years ago, yeah, and there was some historical awareness of the sexual spread of some diseases, but the idea of "safe sex" - the discourse of "safe sex" - is pretty much a post-AIDS-epidemic phenomenon. Not entirely: there was also a huge fight for birth control and pregnancy prevention awareness, and that played a huge role!
  
  But basically, the reason the AIDS epidemic was such a big epidemic, and so deadly, was that all the sex people were having WASN'T safe. At the beginning of the epidemic, it wasn't known how it was spreading. As it continued to spread, the idea of a gay disease (religious undertones) got a lot of cultural weight, but the government continued to do nothing, and that includes nothing about public health or sex education. As gay men started increasingly using condoms to protect themselves, the education was spreading within the community. People who had sex with men AND women spread HIV outside the gay community because safe sex wasn't particularly popular in either situation. The idea of an "STD panel" of multiple tests all at once came later - the encouragement for everyone (and not just gay guys) to get these tests came later too. All this is to say that I appreciate that there's typically a higher than average rate of condom usage in this fandom, mostly without discussing AIDS, because that would understandably open up an unwelcome can of worms. I can buy this, although it should be noted that Steve having a concept of condoms as anything other than birth control is vanishingly unlikely. Eddie is often written as having contact with some form of gay community in this fanon, which is like... I don't think super likely actually, but it's possible, he has a car, there are cities... I can buy it.
  
  And all this is to say that the multi-fandom popularity of a conversation about safe sex where two people agree to forego condoms for romantic reasons because they both know that they're "clean"? Nope. No way. They don't know. They have no way to know that. They might assume it if they're both virgins, but otherwise... no. You would only know this if you had been specifically exposed to the risk of HIV and been tested as a result. That's not impossible for someone in an urban gay subculture, but... for a poor teenager in a rural area? HOW? There are no clinics. There are doctors' offices. You have to have health insurance, or you have to pay out of pocket; you have to call for an appointment.

 



*I'm not actually southern, so "bless their hearts" is not part of my native dialect. My dialect doesn't have an expression that fits the circumstances this perfectly, though.