cosmictuesdays asked:
Aw, yeah, schoolteacher Mr. Harrington is an adorable concept. But also, man…with Jonathan going full field medic in that Starcourt plaza…y’know maybe there is a world somewhere, the Kitty Corner to the Upside Down, where Enemies-to-Friends Steve and Jonathan are like, a pair of scrappy healers out at the battlefront in humanity’s fight against the Demigorgons and whatnot.
Actually, I find this “male softness: feature not a bug” trend a pretty great outcome in Stranger Things’ depiction of male characters. I mean, once you take it as fact that this show is a more interested in male characters than female characters—(I don’t know if I agree with claims that the female characters are necessarily any less developed than the male characters, because I think you will find that many of the boys aren’t that developed either, but in a strictly numbers game the girls are just outmanned, pun intended)—given that, what does this show then say about its male characters?
And you know, I wager it’s saying: ‘BE GENTLE’. That a male tendency toward empathy and caregiving is greater in younger generations, and that this is good, and to be cherished and encouraged. And that this is also the surest way to be a Hero.
Sure I’ll back myself up: The boys, the Party, are almost immediately defined by taking in and providing care to a weird half feral kid they find in the woods, and since these are arguably our central characters, this behavior is modeled as that of Good Male Protagonists. If you are a kid watching this show and you want to be like these brave Stranger Things boys, you need to take care of the vulnerable, give them blankets and Eggos. And if you want to be like the most fiercely brave of them, Will and Mike, you also need to love just as fiercely, wear your heart right on your little windbreaker sleeve. And in the next age group up, the valorization of male tenderness continues. Jonathan was depicted as a natural caregiver toward his brother from the start, another sweet Byers boy always making breakfast for his family, but Steve is where it gets interesting. He started revealing the compassionate heart and protective instincts hidden under that hair at the end of the first season, but it wasn’t until he became Babysitter Steve in the second season that he became not only a breakout fave, but a breakout hero, and once again: through exhibiting empathy and caregiving. Even domesticity—in Stranger Things, heroes do not wear capes, they wear dishtowels slung over their shoulder.
I think you know what’s coming up next, and if not you’re probably who needs this Season 3 Spoiler Warner for who we’re turning to now: Hopper, our exception that proves the rule. The next age group up, and the furthest away from the gentle heroic male ideal. If we thought early days Steve was so…like a man, hoo boy, have you met Hopper? Although I’ve always thought it was notable how Chief Hopper consistently throws his gruff, dismissive, Big Male power around on behalf of women and children, against other aggro men, he remains distinctly less caring and open with his feelings than the other male characters. Listen, I still love Hopper despite it all, but he can be a real asshole. He steamrolls over people, and his protection has an unfortunate tendency to lean toward controlling instead. All this makes him less reliably good, even sometimes shifting him into an ANtagonist role—our anti-hero. The third season in particular really saw this slide, but by the end it seemed like a shape had come together: this was Hopper’s last hurrah, the most blustering and inconsiderate he’s been this series, coupled with the most purely heroic thing he could do. Ultimately, Hopper sacrifices himself for the others, taking his brand of hard heroism with him, and leaving the stage to Stranger Things’ new generation of boy: the Soft Hero.