Cimorene

The Load Out (25012 words) by micster
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson, Steve Harrington & Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Steve Harrington & Dustin Henderson, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington, Maxine "Max" Mayfield/Lucas Sinclair
Characters: Steve Harrington, Eddie Munson, Maxine "Max" Mayfield, The Party (Stranger Things)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Friends With Benefits, or is it... more?, the boy band au that possessed my body, Steve is a band manager for the party and he's Stressed
Summary:

"The most puzzling addition to their entourage, worse than his ex-girlfriend and the guy she ditched him for, weirder than a child star fresh out of rehab with a brand-new social security number, and more frustrating than a bus-full of teen pop sensations, is Eddie Munson."

It's the summer of 1988 and Steve is sweating his way through the boys' third (and biggest) national tour, all the while dealing with Robin's new career, Max's creative heel-turn, and also, inexplicably, Eddie Munson.

Bookmarker's Notes:

This totally lives up to the promise of the premise and summary. Funny and sweet.

• This makes the fifth (?) fic I've opened (and then immediately closed) where the author notes at the beginning admit that the author hasn't watched any of canon.



• I habitually read only complete works, and there are SO many new authors who mark their work as complete when it's actually the first part of a WIP. I refreshed my memory because I was kinda like, HOW can you make this mistake?! - and there isn't a checkbox that explicitly asks whether it's a complete work; rather there's a ticky box for a multi-part work, and the intention is that you click that box and then leave the default ? if you don't know how many you're going to write. I was tearing my hair out at too great a rate until I composed the following missive a few days ago, which is now pinned to the top of my notes app, and I now leave it as a comment on every one of these I encounter:
  

  This is a good start!
  
  But since it's a work in progress, this should say it's chapter 1/?, not 1/1. Right now it's mislabeled as a finished story. When you post the first chapter of a longer story, you should tick the box for "This work has multiple chapters" and then a box will appear that lets you type the estimate for the total number if you know, or just a ? if you don't. Then until you post the last chapter it will automatically be sorted as a work in progress!

  
  

1. Definition of doe-eyed : having large innocent-looking eyes
   First Known Use of doe-eyed 1933
   Merriam Webster
   
   doe-eyed (dō′īd′) adj.
   1. Having wide-open, innocent-appearing eyes: doe-eyed children gazing at the shelves of candy.
   2. Credulous and unsophisticated; naive: took advantage of doe-eyed investors.
   American Heritage 5th ed. via Free Dictionary
   
   "Doe-eyed" (not typically used as a noun ie "doe eyes", although obviously that form is possible; the fact that the adjective is almost never seen in the fandom while the noun is incredibly widespread is certainly indicative of something off in people's acquisition of the term) doesn't refer exclusively to the size and color of eyes, but to an appearance of innocence, sweetness or naivety, or metaphorically to actual naivety.



2. two-finger salute, slang
   A rude gesture of anger, displeasure, or dismissal in which the index and middle fingers are raised, with the back of one's hand facing the other person. Primarily heard in UK.
   The car behind me had been honking at me to go faster, so I just held up a two-finger salute when he eventually passed by.
   I threw the customer out of the restaurant when I caught him giving a member of our waitstaff the two-finger salute.
   Farlex Dictionary of Idioms via Free Dictionary
   
   The "two-fingered salute" (also "the forks" in Australia[11]) is commonly performed by flicking the V upwards from wrist or elbow. The V sign, when the palm is facing toward the person giving the sign, has long been an insulting gesture in the United Kingdom, and later in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa[2] It is frequently used to signify defiance (especially to authority), contempt, or derision.[12] It was known in Canada with the meaning "Up yours!" as late as to the generation which fought in World War II, perhaps because of their familiarity with the Victory sign throughout the War years. However, subsequent generations seldom use it, and its meaning in this sense is becoming increasingly unknown in Canada.[13][14]
   
   As an example of the V sign (palm inward) as an insult, on 1 November 1990, The Sun, a British tabloid, ran an article on its front page with the headline "Up Yours, Delors" next to a hand making a V sign protruding from a Union Jack cuff.[15][16] The article attracted complaints about alleged Francophobia, which the Press Council rejected after the newspaper stated that the paper reserved the right to use vulgar abuse in the interests of Britain.[17]
   V sign: As an insult, Wikipedia
   
   You can find an article on Wikipedia called "two-finger salute" about the Polish military and Cub Scout salute. The gesture it describes is not and never has been the meaning of a slang expression, but it seems to be what a fairly large chunk of the Stranger Things fandom (hilariously) think "two-finger[ed] salute" refers to. It seems clear from the popularity in this fandom that it stems from a misunderstanding of the British (et al) expression. 1980s kids probably wouldn't have often used a military or Cub Scout salute (no 'two finger' qualification necessary), which is what people seem to think they are referencing; it obviously does have a meaning - it's just not an especially popular element in the pop culture gesture lexicon of the 1980s (or now).



3. coo (ko͞o)
   v. cooed, coo·ing, coos
   v.intr.
   1. To utter the murmuring sound of a dove or pigeon or a sound resembling it.
   2. To talk fondly or amorously in murmurs: The visitors cooed over the newborn baby.
   v.tr.
   To express or utter with soft murmuring sounds.
   American Heritage 5th. ed via Free Dictionary
   
   When a person coos, their tone of voice is different, what the definitions here and elsewhere are describing as "soft murmuring sounds" or "in murmurs". It's that voice that people use for babytalk and romantic partners. I'm not 100% sure what people have been thinking it means, actually, but a fond tone of voice is my best guess.

waxjism

• 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.