【Writer's Bullpen (2009)】

Spoiler warning: This post contains plot details for Stranger Things 2.

Stranger Thingsis built on Writer's Bullpen (2009)mysteries, but there's no character quite as inexplicable or poorly defined as Billy Hargrove, the aggressive bad boy who spends most of Season 2 terrorizing Max, Lucas, and Steve, for reasons that are never fully explained beyond him being a walking villainous cliché.

Billy's antagonism towards Max and Lucas is fairly easy to interpret: Max is his stepsister, and he's clearly resentful about being forced to babysit her. Lucas is black, and Billy's dad is an abusive, bigoted prick, so it wouldn't be hard to imagine that his backwards ideas have rubbed off on his son -- although the show is oddly squeamish about overtly addressing it as racism, which is especially weird considering that the writers are notsqueamish about having a musclebound 17-year-old trying to beat the crap out of a nerdy 13-year-old.

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Interestingly, the actor who plays Billy, Dacre Montgomery, disagreed that Billy's dislike of Lucas stems from his race in an interview with Newsweek, which only makes his motivations more baffling -- but he did admit that the script did contain "a far worse piece of language" for Billy to call Lucas before the line was ultimately cut.

But Billy's interactions with Steve are far more opaque -- he obviously recognizes that Steve is the most popular jock at Hawkins High, and as the new kid in town, probably wants to assert his alpha dog status by challenging the local golden boy.

Pretty general bully stuff, until you start factoring in Billy's general obsession with one-upping Steve or catching his attention -- not to mention that homoerotic basketball game, which is followed by a steamy shower scene in which Billy calls Steve a "pretty boy" while he leans... unnecessarily close.

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And we're not the only ones who noticed -- the pretty boy himself saw theTop Gunsimilarities between their characters:

"It’s kind of like this homoerotic sort of vibe. Especially with the basketball scene, it totally reminds me of a Top Gunvolleyball competition sort of thing," Joe Keery told Vulture. "I don’t know if that’s what the Duffers intended, but it’s interesting that people are gleaning that from it. There may be a grain of truth in that, although we didn’t talk about it. But I think that all of those ’80s things have that sort of influence potentially, so, yeah, I don’t know. We’ll see. I think maybe we’ll touch upon that next year."

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We asked Montgomery to weigh in on whether Billy might be attracted to Steve and overcompensating for it with aggression, and while he didn't outright shoot down that interpretation, he admitted that he wasn't consciously playing into the homoerotic tension: "We were talking about this idea of Billy being threatened by Steve or emasculated in some way. He gets uprooted and taken to this town. I definitely agree with the element of that question, that’s an interesting… I hadn’t heard that one. I think he feels threatened by Steve, but we hadn’t really gone into that. It’s interesting."

With a father who's so soaked in toxic masculinity that he calls his teenage son the f-word for caring about his appearance, it wouldn't be a surprise -- especially in 1984 Indiana -- for Billy to have wedged himself pretty firmly in the closet, or to be hitting on safely unattainable moms to keep up the facade. (Or, you know, it could just be lazy writing.)

Whether the Duffer Brothers were developing Billy with that intention -- or if it's an additional layer that the actors might bring to their performances in Season 3 -- remains to be seen, but for now, the internet is happy to captain the good ship #Harringrove until they make up their minds.

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