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climate-bison · 19 days

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I’m so excited you like Steve Crain too! He’s been a favorite character of mine for years at this point, and doesn’t deserve the hate he gets.

It bothers me when people don’t recognize the responsibility that weighs on characters. They essentially lost both of their parents at the same time, and you know Steve had to be the one to step up.

This isn’t just applicable to Haunting of Hill House, of course. But I’ve noticed that fans vilify the characters that aren’t victimized as obviously / aren’t the main character.

Anyways, just wanted to share with a fellow Steve-enjoyed lol

New Bestie - same. I got into a very heated discussion about how if the Crain siblings are supposed to represent the 5 stages of grief, the fandom has Steve and Shirley switched around, because everyone says that Steve is Denial and Shirley is Bargaining.

Meanwhile, in the show, Steve spends his adult life going around not necessarily trying to debunk ghosts, but hoping that maybe this time, it will be ghosts, because then maybe his family will just be a different kind of crazy. He says his mom and his sister are sick, and they needed help. He reminds me more of Fox Mulder - the "I want to believe" vibe. But he also is in the unique position of seeing ghosts and not knowing about it. All of his ghosts are people with jobs, moving around the house like normal people. Everyone hears the dogs at night, not just him. He doesn't hear banging on the walls, he doesn't see creepy zombies in the basement, he doesn't have his future self freaking the hell out of him his entire life. He sees his mom - and as far as he's concerned (because this is a horror show, not supernatural, the world he occupies is the one we're in - no vampires and ghosts, etc, and that is Understood) it's just the mental illness that has gone through his whole family finally catching up with him. Anyone in this world who has a family member swear they're being stalked by a faceless ghost while they're high on drugs is going to come to same conclusion Steve does, which is that they're nuts. BUT - he looks for any signs that he is wrong. And I'm still mad that they cut out part of the first episode that has Steve refusing to write about his family anymore, no matter the price, while driving by an accident where he sees multiple people standing around, but when he turns away and the camera is the only one on the accident, you only see the firefighters/first responders.

Meanwhile, Shirley is 100% in denial about everything, including what her own ghosts were. In her House Nightmare at the end, she even denies what actually happened - in her version, she doesn't have an affair. The House actually calls her out on "But that's not what happened, is it?" When Steve is doing CPR on his dying brother, Shirley's first words are "This isn't real". She denies Luke from going to Nell's wedding. She denies that their mother had anything wrong with her, she's in denial that she's running her own business into the ground, she's in denial about the death of the kittens, she's in denial about ghosts too - even though she has much more explicit contact with them with the knocking, and with a witness both times (Theo). She's in denial about the night that they had to flee Hill House. Like if she says it often enough, then it will be true that her family is fine and nothing is wrong.

Sorry. Long rant. But I love this character and this show so much and no one ever wants to talk about it (except @amandagaelic, and she has listened to me for literally hours at this point). One of these days, I will actually finish the Haunting of Hill House fic I have, and it will be posted.

We might all be dead from old age, or so senile we don't even remember the source material, but I'll stipulate in my will that it has to be posted. :-D

AND YES - people have a weird habit of like...picking one character to defend and that's the end of it. No one else can do any right and that character can do no wrong. I see it in Yellowstone fandom a lot. Or in Marvel (the Steve/Tony argument made me leave it altogether). I don't know if it's because fandoms are now predominantly younger, louder/more obnoxious from the safety net of internet anonymity or what, but Seeing Things from Someone Else's Point of View seems to be a lost art in both media and reality.

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climate-bison · 20 days

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When I say that my favourite atla ship is Zutara people assume that I dislike Aang. But that couldn't more further than truth. I love all the kids in team avatar.

I really like Aang, I just don't find his relationship with Katara romantically interesting and therefore I don't ship them.

So if you like both zutara and Aang please like or reblog this post. I want to see how many of us share this mentality.

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climate-bison · 2 months

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climate-bison · 2 months

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Part 2 of 3. More amazing illustrations by Luisa Uribe. Miss Muriel Stacy!!!!

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climate-bison · 2 months

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OG comic

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climate-bison · 2 months

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公费画画🌹嘻嘻

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climate-bison · 2 months

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About Steven Crain

I’ve always been something of a contrarian even as a girl. If my old sister loved strawberries I loved blueberries. If she hated raisins I loved them. It was never personally I have simply always preferred to something different from what the others around me are doing.

The more different things we are doing as individuals in a group the greatest number of experiences are open to all of us. Imagine for a moment that you have a group of five people and five different paths in a forest. All the paths go to the same place, but each takes a different route. Now If all five group members take a seperate path and meet at the end of the day to share their experiences then it’s as if each member of the group has been in five different places all at once. This variety in taste and preference and response enriches us.

And so it is being this person that I am I find myself defending Steven Crain.

Over this last week I have been rewatching eipsodes of The Haunting of Hill House, limiting myself to one a day and taking it in much more slowly than the original ten hour Saturday binge. And in this second watch not only do I find myself not hating Steve I am actually find him a likeable and flawed character much like his siblings and pretty much every other human being in existence.

Spoilers follow.

It is very much Shirely’s response to Steve in the very first episodes that I think heavily influences fandom’s general opinion of the character and his actions. Shirely calls Steve selfish,accusing him of being a poor elder brother and insists that she is the one to take care of everything. Yet the actions of the rest of the family demonstrate something different.

The flashbacks of Nell, Luke and Theo show us a Steve that is caring and heavily involved in the lives of his younger siblings while Shirley actually features very little, except you know to make Luke leave his twin sister’s wedding so she believes he wasn’t there for her. Moving right along.

Steve is the very first person Nell calls when she reaches her breaking point, she calls Shirely when she can’t get ahold of him. When she finally speaks to her father her father directs her back to her eldest brother and then calls Steve immediately despite the late hour.

Now to be fair it was partially because she lived closest to Steve, but it’s telling that Hugh doesn’t pay Steve’s objections any attention or even know that Steve and Leigh are seperated; Nell can’t go to his house because he no longer lives there. Steve’s support and availability are taken for granted by the dad and the rest of the family.

When Steve finally does return to his apartment he finds Luke robbing him. He doesn’t react with anger, he gives Luke more money and let’s him keep some of the stolen items. He also doesn’t challenge Luke’s statement that the money isn’t for drugs. Instead he asks Luke if he’s cold, because he remembers that Luke told him feeling cold is a symptom of withdrawal, such a small detail of his brother’s life to recall two months after they discussed it.

When Luke has actually earned a day pass after completing a month of rehab he doesn’t visit Shirley or Theo or his own twin instead he choses to take Joey, an important friend to have dinner with Steve and his wife. Like Nell Luke knows that it is Steve he can reach out too –not Shirely despite her insistence– no matter how many times he messes up.

They do argue during this visit, but it is only as Steve rather adroitly points out that Luke should be wary of Joey, because she might burn him, which of course she does. To be fair he did it in a very irritating elder sibling way, but again it comes from a place of caring and Steve wanting Luke to succeed.

Even Hugh seems to lean heavily on the eldest Crain sibling, because it is Steve who is with Hugh at the lawyer’s office when they are children. Iit is Steve who has to hear his father say that he won’t fight to keep his kids with him and he won’t take any of the steps the lawyer is advising to keep the family together.

This seems less and less like the actions of a man who only looks out for himself and more and more like someone whose support, care and availabilty are so consistent that it is always taken for granted by his family. This is so much the case that they can rage at him about his book, calling him names, embarassing him in front of his fans and he still gives them the promised royalties and shows up when they need him.

Now about that book. I can’t even bring myself to condemn him for writing it. Now his siblings have every right to be angry at him because they don’t like being portrayed as mentally ill, but let’s pause here. Unaware of the supernatural events around him Steven Crain sees him mother succumb to mental illness and depression and kill herself. In this time of crisis his father provides absolutely no leadership for the family whatsoever and he watches Theo, Nell and Luke sink further into various mental illness as they age.

Luke becomes addicted to drugs,Nell struggles with deppresion, PTSD and perhaps other symptoms to the point that no one is suprised by the idea that she went back the house and killed herself as well. And even though Theo functions she is completely, emotionally walled off from everyone she loves.

Steve percieves a family in crisis, people that he loves in crisis and no one is doing anything about it. No one wants to name the illness, no one wants to get help.

Now since his family has been so scarred by what happened at Hill House he writes a book about it and uses that money to get all of them a better fucking life. They may not have healed from the tragic events that took place there, but the story can pay for all of their dreams Shirely’s funeral home and her charity cases, Theo’s Ph.D and subsequently her practice, Luke trying over and over again to go for rehab and Nell’s therapy and pretty much anything else she wanted.

The fact that Steve had a vascetomy is perhaps one of the most telling things about his character. It tells us first and foremost that he sincerely believes what that the family is ill and in need of help, but more importantly it also show just how deeply affected by the events at Hill House he is.

Of all the children Steven Crain is the eldest he would have the strongest, clearest memories of not only his mother, but his entire family before that summer and so he can most clearly mourn for who they were, the promise of who could have become before that summer at Hill House. And I think he just could not bear the idea of having a child and watching them sucumb the way his mother did and the way his siblings seem to be.

And this is also yet another thing that no one else in his family seems to know about him.

The younger siblings feel a certain ownership of the family’s experience at Hill House. Steve is excluded from this in spite of the fact that he was there, he witnessed it and was as deeply affected by what happened as the rest. It silently tragic that his understanding of the events seperates him from his family as surely as Theo’s walls seperate her from everyone that she loves.

Steve isn’t perfect none of the Crain siblings are they all do crappy things to each other and make mistakes, this is the inevitability of life. But I think if you simply dismiss Steve as selfish or gaslighting his siblings you’re missing out on a huge chunk of the characters and a huge chunk of the story.

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climate-bison · 2 months

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#harry potter fanfiction #harry potter #mauraders #fanfic

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climate-bison · 2 months

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I’m rewatching Volume 5 and this scene is making me laugh:

Weiss: *just got impaled*

Oscar: Oh my gosh Ruby are you alright?!

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climate-bison · 2 months