Stranger Things 4 and the Sudden Overwhelming Popularity of Eddie Munson

[cimorene]

I was talking about how weirdly popular the Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson ship has quickly become after the release of Stranger Things season 4 recently, and in my prior post compared it to the blossoming of Din Djarin/Luke Skywalker after the Mandalorian season 1. My original thought was that one of the ingredients was a pre-existing fan favorite character who lacked an obvious and available slash partner in canon - that's Luke in Star Wars, an undeniable favorite, and would be Steve in this case. I don't mean to say that Steve isn't a fan favorite character - I haven't observed the fandom before this summer - but I know that people were pairing him (controversially, apparently - lol) with Billy in seasons 2-3. I just have a sort of subjective experience of people in general swooning a little less perhaps.

But what I have seen is a lot more material on the Eddie phenomenon, and I think the popularity of his character is actually much greater than I realized. It's not a fanfiction fandom specific, or a fandom specific, phenomenon, either - it's also out there with casuals and non-shippers and reviewers and interviewers and randoms. This is evident from the focus of a lot of the fiction, too, really. I suspect this is a big driver of the ship's popularity, probably.

As for the runaway popularity of the character, the performance (by a British actor approaching 30 named Joseph Quinn) is obviously a standout. He chews scenery and steals every scene he's in, overflowing with charisma but charmingly vulnerable. His style is also unusually theatrical and broad, full of frenetic energy. The character's charm took the creators (the Duffer brothers) by surprise too. They said in an interview that they kept expanding his role because everything they saw was so great, more or less. Beyond that, though, I think the character has really touched a chord, being relatable to a lot of people:

• He's the first working class character in the ensemble. There's less money in the Byers family, but they still live in a suburban house in a suburban neighborhood; they're getting by on the mother's retail salary. Eddie lives with his uncle - the first character with a strong country accent we've seen - in a trailer park.


• He's the most marginalized character yet. He's a social outcast and is known by the epithet "the freak", which we see him lean into, and the extent of antipathy towards his heavy metal style and Dungeons & Dragons later turns into a full-blown Satanic panic witch hunt. This goes beyond the bullying we see the main kids suffer in earlier seasons (although some of that was legitimately life-threatening).


• He's apparently neurodivergent in some way. We learn early in the season that he's repeating his senior year for a third time, though his intelligence is otherwise obvious. A lot of fanfiction portrays him as ADHD, which seems like a reasonable assumption, although as fanfiction does not always realize, the diagnosis was rare and in fact the 'hyperactivity' portion wasn't part of the clinical definition yet, let alone the popular imagination. Portraying him as autistic is also not uncommon, again, usually undiagnosed, but again, many fanfiction writers unaware that the diagnosis was extremely rare and basically only given to non-verbal autistic children at that point, well before the initial proposal of Asperger's.


• He's a metalhead, which is a very explicitly and deliberately non-conformist self-identification encompassing his whole style. There haven't been any other characters so deliberately announcing themselves to be counterculture in their visual self-presentation, although we do learn that Dustin wore a Weird Al shirt on the first day of school (very bravely, as Eddie remarks). The goth, punk, emo, and metal aesthetics are more threatening to normativity, though, obviously, as you see by people's reactions to them (in the Satanic Panic, of course, but also endless examples from my own childhood of patiently explaining to schoolmates that the goth guy doesn't worship the devil, he's an atheist, and no, that's NOT the same thing because atheists don't even believe the devil exists, let alone care about his wishes, only to have them eventually inform me that he's still scary anyway because it's "weird" or that he doesn't have to be so weird and scare everybody, so he's really bringing the bullying on himself. This is why I typically said I was Unitarian Universalist or agnostic to everyone but my closest friends in middle and high school, and they did the same.)

Comments

[conuly]

many fanfiction writers unaware that the diagnosis was extremely rare and basically only given to non-verbal autistic children at that point, well before the initial proposal of Asperger's.

Obligatory complaint: Not just fanfic writers, unfortunately, but also shrinks, which is Yet Another Reason it's a hassle to get an adult diagnosis.

You know this, I bet :)

[cimorene]

Yeah, I've definitely heard about how hard it is to get an adult diagnosis in general. The idea that shrinks would be... what... dubious because people who have comparatively smaller difficulty adapting to the demands of their daily lives don't already have a childhood diagnosis, even though when they were a child you had to be practically nonverbal (or otherwise extremely unable to adapt to the demands of your surroundings perhaps?) to get a diagnosis?

My first real encounter with autism outside of movie/book portrayals and passing mentions was a kid I used to babysit as a young teenager in the late 90s who had some severe difficulties with the ordinary world. He WASN'T actually totally nonverbal, just like... sometimes unable to access words, I guess? (I don't know enough about the current community to speak to whether that is regarded as a form of nonverbal or not). I was given a sort of elevator pitch about it by his parents and my parents, because they had to be really picky with babysitters and only hire ones that he already liked and I was one of two. And I definitely had the impression that the kinds of severe difficulty in getting out of one's head and communicating were a universal feature of autism, even though I'm sure (without remembering the particulars) that they didn't tell me everybody had the same symptoms or anything like that. And this is surely more familiarity than most people around me had with autism at that time.

When I made friends with another local slash fan in college, she had an Aspberger's diagnosis and that was the first time I heard the term, and I defniitely remember that then (2004) it wasn't considered definitely part of autism. "Like autism, but a lot more mild mostly, but maybe related to it, but they're not exactly sure" is how I would sum up the (well, my, but I'm sure she had done a lot of research and there was a fair amount of talking about it in our group) understanding of it at the time.