Fanfic / In a Strange Land

Doom comes to Hawkins, Indiana. Population est. 30,000.

It's two months after the defeat of the Mind-Flayer and a new monster has made it's way to Hawkins. Now ordinary people are acting strange and a plague of nightmares has descended on the town. No dimension is safe and the only people who can save the day still have to deal with finishing their science homework.[1]

A novel-length Stranger Things fan fiction set after Season 2 of the show, inspired by the works of Stephen King and H P Lovecraft. Notable for its strong character voices, historical detail, and a large cast.

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In a Strange Land provides examples of:

• The '80s: Set in winter of '84/'85 and it shows. Laser discs, the Apple Lisa 2 and tons of 80's music and movie references make an appearance.
• Abusive Parents: Neil Hargrove.
• Actor Allusion: According to Bob Newby the Hawkins AV Club never says die.
• Addled Addict: Steve's mom abuses prescription sedatives.
• Adults Are Useless: Averted. Hopper, Joyce, Kali and Mr.Clarke are all instrumental in killing the monster. Sam Owens passes along vital information and even some adults that aren't in the loop like Phil Callahan do something useful over the course of the story.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Not that he feels bad for it for long but Hopper feels the Aboleth's projected loss as the same loss as a parent losing a child when Joyce destroys its eggs and can relate to it.
• Alone with the Psycho: Played with by Nancy and Billy Hargrove in her kitchen -by the end of the interaction neither of them is completely sure which of them is the psycho, or if it's both of them, and Billy is enthusiastically encouraging Nancy to kill him.
• Alien Geometries: Hawkins Lab becomes this when the Aboleth tries to trap Nancy, Jonathan and Steve there, with hallways too long to exist in the building and that always circle back to a single spot.
• Always a Bigger Fish:
  • Happens to Billy Hargrove in the epilogue. He backs down from a potential fight immediately when it's four punks with no qualms about casual violence who fish him out of the trunk of his car instead of Hopper or Steve.
• Age-Appropriate Angst: Played with. Adult characters note that the kids are much, much better at coping with the Upside Down than they are. Particularly true in Steve's case where he doesn't bounce back like the kids but lacks an adult's experience at dealing with his emotions.
• Animal Motifs: People being like moths get quite a few mentions, mostly in the context of self-destruction but Dustin also remembers that some moths can effectively jam predator's sonar and takes inspiration from that.
• Arc Words: "The supreme being of the Three-Fold World","Let the sunshine in, face it with a grin."
• Ascended Extra: Mr. Clarke becomes a major factor in the story.
  • Reed- the guy that 'can't wait to see Nancy's movie' in Season One has an expanded role.
  • Jen from Season One is an occasional POV character and is still having her date nights interrupted by Dustin needing information.

• Author Appeal: The author obviously really, really likes horror - a trait that ends up shared by Mr. Clarke.
• Ax-Crazy: The monster is influencing people to be this. Notably Mrs. Pinbacker with an actual ax.
  • Billy Hargrove, though it's difficult to tell how much is the influence of the monster and how much is just Billy.
• Badly Battered Babysitter: Steve. As always.
• Beware the Nice Ones :
  • At least if you're an eldritch abomination from the Upside Down. In a Party full of Nice Ones it's the three most unambiguously kind characters- Dustin, Mr. Clarke, and Will who put the Aboleth out of commission.
  • Sam Owens presents himself as excessively amicable, mostly harmless, and an Almightly Janitor but his internal monologue points out that you don't end up joining 'CIA Black Ops thinking it's the Red Cross' and while his place on the chain of command is never explicitly stated the fact that he seems to have Ultimate Job Security within the CIA and appears to only answer to *one* direct superior who answers directly to to RAWHIDE and TIMBERWOLF- AKA Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush suggests that Doc Owens has serious sway.
• Be Yourself: A major theme of the fic, along with figuring out who that self is.
• Big Brother Mentor: Steve to Dustin.
• Bittersweet Ending: Hopper finds out his daughter is alive with no way to find or contact her, some of the symptoms of the 'psychic drain' Steve was suffering from are actually untreated PTSD, and the Trio haven't had a chance to really figure out where they stand with each other. However the Aboleth is dead and the bonds of love and friendship between everyone in the group are stronger than ever.
• Blatant Lies: Steve only knows about Krypton because he's seen Superman III. Obviously.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: An interesting case with the Aboleth. While it's obviously actively cruel, vindictive and petulant it seems to truly believe that humanity should be grateful to it since while the Mind-Flayer will leave the world a dark, toxic, empty ruin, it will preserve humanity's consciousnesses within itself. Forever.
  • Mr. Clarke thinks that it's probably a bad idea to try to assign human moral understanding to a thing from another dimension, though this philosophy doesn't survive his first encounter with it.
• Body Horror: The bodies of victims of the Aboleth who have their consciousness eaten are still technically functioning, if empty, until the necrosis sets in and they rot alive.
• Book Dumb: Steve frequently comes off as a bit dense (thinks you can go straight to prison for anything if it's illegal- including slander and that psychic driving probably involves cars) but his thought process is as complex as any of the other POV characters and he's a pretty quick thinker. How many of his denser moments are Obfuscating Stupidity is unclear.
• Book Ends: The flashback to the D&D game the kids and Steve are playing starts in the first chapter and ends in the last.
• Blood Oath: Nancy and Jonathan and Steve of the 'cutting their hands open' variety.
• Break the Cutie: In the final chapters, it is all but outright stated that Steve's mom used to be a much kinder and loving person to Steve, but was mentally destroyed by finding out the real reasons that Steve's dad moved them back to Hawkins.
• Break the Haughty:
  • While less concerned with being King of the School than he used to be Steve is still trying to claw his way back to social normalcy early on, pointing out that there's only so outcast you can get with his family's money and that there are still hangers on who are betting on him bouncing back and bringing them with him. He goes through a lot and ends up losing any interest in the pointless things he used to think were important, while ending up happier with real friends.
  • Steve's father, noted as incredibly aloof and distant, breaks down completely when Steve confronts him about having helped the Lab.
• Brought Down to Normal: El's traditional ability to use her mind powers to kill Upside Down creatures directly doesn't work and causes her powers not to recharge. She figures out a way around this in Chapter 11.
• Bully Brutality: It IS based on Stephen King, after all. Billy Hargrove opens a fight with Steve by clobbering him with a sock full of gym locks- a weapon that's commonly used in *prison*- and ends it trying to choke him to death.
• The Cameo: While the DJ on radio 6.60 is never named, it's pretty clearly Grant Mazzy from Pontypool.
  • Nancy Wheeler's locker is next to someone named Ashley Williams
  • Keeping with the theme of tabletop gaming and fighting Eldritch Abominations, Dustin Henderson mentions an uncle that thought a cult was stealing his lawn gnomes and who got the entire family banned from Toronto. That's right. Ol' Uncle Henderson
  • John Rainbird from Firestarter gets mentioned twice in the last chapter.
• Celebrity Paradox : Due to Canon Welding the fic explicitly crosses over with the (a?) universe of Stephen King with an appearance by The Shop and mentions of John Rainbird and The Dark Tower - but Billy and Steve both make pop-culture references to The Shining which means Stephen King exists in universe too...though since King is a character in the Stephen King universe this doesn't really present a problem.
• Central Theme: Friendship and identity.
• Chekhov's Gag: Early on, Max idly thinks to herself that Billy's car sounds "like a thunderstorm that rains douchebags". A few chapters later, Dustin is busy trying to revive his unconscious friends when he thinks he hears thunder off in the distance... only for Billy to show up in the driveway instead.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • How Steve cheeses a boss fight during D&D becomes vitally important at the end.
  • The Ariel file Dustin notices on Steve's Dad's computer.
• Chick Tracts: The Wheeler's neighbor finds out that The Party plays D&D and starts bringing these over on game nights.
  • Lucas doesn't want to be Elfstar anymore, he wants to be Debbie!
• Childhood Friends: The Party obviously. Also Steve and Jonathan who were best friends from ages 7-10 before Steve finally gave into pressure from his dad and abandoned him for Tommy.
• Childhood Friend Romance: Jonathan had a crush on an oblivious Steve when they were little kids.
• Children Are Innocent: Steve seems to admire this about The Party, especially contrasted with his own adolescence, to the point that part of why he likes hanging out with them seems to be actually getting to *enjoy* things without worrying about if it's cool or adult or not.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: The fight against the Aboleth in the Inbetween has this in spades. From Mike realizing how to Shapeshifter Mode Lock the monster to the other's realizing that they can will their signature weapons into being. But unfortunately *not* a rocket-launcher.
• Clipped-Wing Angel: After Mike figures out how to Shapeshifter Mode Lock the Aboleth with their belief that the creature is an Aboleth from D&D he brings it down from 'unkillable' to 'manageable' by giving it stats.
• Cool Car : The author's note at the end states that the entire idea of the fic came from how a kid rich enough to be driving something that cost more than the average person makes in a year as their first car ends up having Steve's character development.
• Crossover: Starts as an homage/pastiche of Stephen King but veers into true cross-over territory when Nancy, Steve, and Jonathan run into The Shop, AKA the Weapons Shop of Isher AKA The Department of Scientific Intelligence, the group responsible for the events of Firestarter and The Mist and who fail to stop the super-flu outbreak during The Stand.
  • Roethe and Subject Six are part of Project Arrowhead- the project to open gates to other worlds that resulted in the events of The Mist.
  • Diethyltryptamine-19 is the mind-enhancing drug developed by Project MK Ultra in Banshee Chapter.
  • Billy and Max moved to Hawkins from Santa Carla, California.
• Dark World: The Inbetween is nothing but dark. With all the Stephen King references in the fic it's possible that the author is assuming that the Void of the show is analogous to Todash Space — the dark dimension that characters travel through in The Dark Tower when they 'go todash' and that spawns the monsters from The Mist.
• Death Seeker: A few.
  • Billy is this explicitly and only seems to come alive when there's the threat of physical danger.
  • Hopper mentions that he was once this and could easily slip back into it, trying to kill himself slowly with pills and booze.
    • Kali asks Hopper if he ever hated anyone enough that he would take poison if it meant that they would die and he all but states that the answer is himself. In the last chapter Hopper's POV reveals that the reason Diane left him was that she found him after he attempted to kill himself with sleeping pills shortly after Sara's death.
  • Hopper calls Steve out on having death-seeker tendencies in that he ignores his own well-being in favor of the kids and it's going to result in him getting killed.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: A slight deconstruction of Mom!Steve/Good Babysitter Steve Harrington. While Steve is still incredibly protective it's obvious that he's way out of his depth and struggling with personal issues that make his insistence on being a Very Responsible Adult incredibly emotionally draining and physically dangerous. Dustin mentions that The Party are closer to being his babysitters.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Due to taking place in the early 1980s.
  • Billy considers things that would range from sexual assault to possible manslaughter through alcohol poisoning to be pranks to pull on someone that passes out at a party.
  • Steve thinks Billy might be 'queer for him' and not in the LGBTQ inclusive way, though he seems to be more concerned by the fact that Billy is a violent maniac than his possible sexuality.
  • The Zimmerman brothers and Billy use 'faggot' and 'retarded' freely when insulting the party.
• Depraved Bisexual: Billy has shades of this- though he seems more interested in a person's capacity for violence than anything else. Dustin lampshades it, saying that the only thing Billy's in love with is beating the shit out of people.
• Determinator: Pretty much everyone. How people deal with the need to be this is a main theme.
  • Steve is noted by multiple characters to be this- constantly throwing himself into danger for the sake of other people and never resting. It ends up taking a huge mental toll and the final fight with the monster sees him finally letting other people fight for him.
  • Nancy is noted to be scarily determined by both Jonathan and Steve. It gets them in trouble as much as it gets them out of it.
  • Dustin and Will are this in Chapter 11- both will stop at nothing to rescue their friends, even if they're terrified.
  • Joyce barely hesitates to take Hopper's gun when it seems like she's going to have to chose between shooting him and getting home to her sons.
  • Hopper, Joyce, and Kali fighting the Aboleth.
  • If you go for the magic rather than the mundane explanation of Bob's appearance, Bob Newby isn't going to let a little thing like being dead stop him from being a superhero and helping save Joyce and the kids.
• Didn't Think This Through: Jonathan suspects that actually thinking something through before he acts could possibly make Steve spontaneously combust when Steve gives away the fact that they know El to Dr. Roethe, completely unnecessarily.
• Dirty Coward:
  • It's pointed out that the Aboleth is basically the schoolyard bully of Eldritch Abominations, in that it only picks on entities it's pretty sure are incapable of offering any kind of resistance to it. Which makes it rather unfortunate for it that it encounters The Party, who despite being nominally outclassed in every way are nevertheless more than willing to fight back.
  • Billy Hargrove. For all he talks a big game about violence he never fights fair against someone who could actually beat him.
  • Lampshaded by Dustin at one point, who figures out the Aboleth's motives partly by comparing them to a bunch of bullies who were frightened off by Steve earlier in the story, but who later got another group of kids to pick on them instead.
• Disappeared Dad: Dustin's dad apparently 'went out for cigarettes' sometime after Season 1.
• Dissonant Serenity: A hallmark that someone is possessed by the Eldritch Abomination is engaging in extremely odd, violent or unusual actions without demonstrating any kind of awareness that what they're doing is unusual. Such as an elderly neighbor of Mike's trying to murder the Party with an axe acting like she was just coming around to borrow a cup of sugar.
• Distressed Dude: Steve and Hopper get the lion's share of being in distress. Will is notably the single safest person in Hawkins, for once.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Billy's POV during his fight with Steve gets noticeably sexual in how he thinks about violence- with Billy even thinking that Steve should fight back obvious pain by 'thinking about baseball'.
• Dr. Feelgood: Steve's father, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, plies his wife with drugs like Valium and benzos in order to help her with her "nervous disposition," leaving Mrs. Harrington constantly drowsy and confused.
• Dumbass Has a Point: Steve, pretty consistently.
  • He immediately assumes that Dr. Roethe was an ex-Nazi scientist as soon as Murray says she's German since you can just assume 'Germans that do mad science are definitely Nazis'. Even Murray has to give it to him.
  • Says that there has to be something hidden in the National Lab because there's no way a bunch of people who experimented on little girls would pass up an opportunity to screw over their co-workers. He's right.
  • Guesses that Nancy and Jonathan are going on an investigation vacation, since after the kids told Mr. Clarke about the Aboleth there's no way they were going to pass up a chance to tell 'their guy'.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Aboleth a transdimensional creature that can create illusions, warp reality and whose presence causes the people of Hawkins to become hateful and violent before taking them over all together as a Puppeteer Parasite.
• Emotion Eater: The Aboleth encourages guilt, misery and fear in the people it targets.
• Escapism: While watching the gang play Dungeons & Dragons, Steve realises that this works for them in two ways; firstly, as nerds who are frequently ostracised, belittled and picked on by bullies, it allows them to create characters for themselves who are heroic, powerful and brave. And secondly, as kids who have frequently been forced to do battle with terrifying monsters, it allows them to take these battles and fight them on their own terms, against creatures who can be defeated by rolling dice and counting numbers on sheets of graph paper.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Dr. Roethe is an ex-Nazi scientist with no compunctions whatsoever about experimenting on children or murdering teenagers to cover up her secrets, but she seems to genuinely view what she sees as Subject Six "toying" with Jonathan, Nancy and Steve as unnecessarily cruel, and sincerely regrets that they were about to be inflicted with Subject Six's powers while conscious, having planned for them to be killed while out cold.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Reed and Tommy H. are happy to go with Billy to rough-up Steve but absolutely freak out when it starts to escalate.
  • They aren't high standards but Billy is angry that the Aboleth is trying to force him to kill the Party when they're unconscious instead of letting him and Steve duke it out, has no real desire to hurt Dustin (at least until he insults him) and even offers him a chance to run away.
• Evil Counterpart :
  • Billy for Steve in regards to the Aboleth's influence, to the point that it haunts each of them as the other. Billy lacks any friends or support system and mostly gives in. Steve has the party and manages to No-Sell it's attempts.
  • The Aboleth to Kali, having basically the same power-set when it comes to reality-warping. She even calls it her 'evil twin'.
• Expy : Billy's role in the story shares a lot of similarities with Henry Bowers.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Most of the music foreshadows future events. None of them good.
  • In the transcripts that the teenagers recover from the lab, Subject Six repeatedly asks if she can play with Eleven if she does what her handlers order her to do satisfactorily. When they are trapped in a secret lab room with Six at the Shop, Jonathan remembers this and calls on her bond with Eleven to save their lives.
  • Also in the transcripts- Subject Six is asked to quote back a line from a book code and replies Each one, tripping on his toe/Will be here with mop and mow/Do you love me, master? No? a line spoken by enslaved air spirit Ariel in The Tempest- Steve and Dustin both fail a spot check and don't connect it to a file named Ariel on Steve's dad's computer until chapters later.
• False Friend: Tommy and Carol are this even beyond what they were on the show.
  • Steve paints an incredibly bleak picture of a 'friendship' with Tommy that was made up of almost constant pressure to be 'cool' that encouraged Troubling Unchildlike Behavior; smoking at ten, drinking himself sick but not being able to show it at thirteen, and being afraid that Tommy was going to tell the entire school that he was a loser if he hadn't had sex before High School- and that was always right on the edge of Tall Poppy Syndrome if he was exceptional in any way that didn't serve him being popular/helping them be popular. Murray Bauman shows Steve witness testimony that shows the two of them coordinated their statements to the police to make it seem like Steve might have killed Barbara. It's telling that Steve doesn't know if they did it take heat off of Tommy or purely because they thought it was funny. Steve mentions to Jonathan that Tommy and Carol wouldn't even buy him a coke without making him pay them back- something you can see happen in Season One of the show- implying that he was more Meal Ticket than friend.
  • Reed saw Steve as an Extreme Doormat that was easy to manipulate through praise.* Family of Choice: These being more meaningful than blood relationships is a major theme of the fic, with both Steve and El fully accepting that they're part of one.
  "“Best kinda family is the one you choose yourself. Looks like you picked a good one.”
• Fatal Flaw: Hubris for the Aboleth. It's so confident that it's unkillable and that the only thing standing between it and winning are El and to a lesser extent Kali that it treats everyone else as an after-thought. Cue a No Holds Bar Beat Down that spans three separate dimensions.
• For Want Of A Nail : Or rather, for not wanting a nail. If the heroes had done anything differently in Chapter 11- even Dustin taking more than a couple of seconds to rest- either the town would have been destroyed or the monster would have won.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You:
  • The page breaks throughout the fic have messages from the monster hidden in Zalgo text, directed to the reader.
  • A rare case of The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect The Characters. When Mr. Clarke gets involved in the action of the story proper and encounters the monster he ends up too rattled to deliver the End Notes, basically telling the readers to just move on.
• Freudian Trio: Nancy (Ego), Jonathan (Superego) and Steve (Id).
• Gaining the Will to Kill: Joyce and Hopper are concerned about this happening to the kids.
  • Hopper is both relieved and upset by Steve's willingness to use his bat against a person in Jane's defense.
  • Even with their lives on the line Jonathan thinks that they can't let Nancy shoot a human being.
• Genre Roulette: Starts as mostly a Coming of Age Story character study but eventually ends up straight horror.
• Genre Savvy: At this point, pretty much everyone- but Dustin, Mr. Clarke, and Mike stand out for how willing they are to draw inspiration from movies, D&D and various other media.
  • Lampshaded by Mr. Clarke who thinks that maybe the army keeps failing because they try to use guns against the monsters from the Upside Down instead of D&D, earth science, and tactics from old horror movies.
  • Dustin and Lucas encourage Mike to make whatever the next boss in their D&D game is something easy because they'll probably have to fight it next year.
• Gilligan Cut:

Dustin: Don't worry, I have a plan.

[Cut to next chapter]

Steve [worried]: This is a terrible plan.

• Government Conspiracy: Murray is in this, so quite a few get a mention.
  • Real life divisions of Project MK Ultra such as Brenner working with Donald Ewan Cameron on psychic driving experiments during Subproject 68 and on Project Artichoke and Bluebird (CIA projects that researched 'enhanced' interrogation methods), and Owens being previously involved with Project SCANATE (aka the Stargate Project, an attempt to use remote viewing for gathering intelligence).
  • The Lab kidnapping Bill and Mary Martin and Sara Hopper
• Guile Hero:
  • Dustin realizes that in order to stop Billy Hargrove and save his friends from the Aboleth he has to be this.
  • Will ends up saving the day once and for all by using his wits and tricking the Aboleth.
• Guilt Complex: Steve is dealing with one of these early on due to the fact that he technically failed to save Dustin in the tunnels during Season 2 even though he had time to at least get him up the rope. Seems to mostly get over it as their friendship develops and he gets a chance to make up for it when he saves him from the Aboleth
• The Gunslinger: Mike gives this class to Nancy in the Inbetween. She shoots with her mind
• Hate Plague: The first sign that the Aboleth is in Hawkins is people starting to become unnaturally murderous or self-destructive.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power:
  • Jonathan feels inferior to both Steve and Nancy due to his being the quiet, thoughtful Non-Action Guy. It's only because he makes the attempt to understand Subject Six and connect with her as a person that they make it out of the Shop's lab alive.
  • Mr. Clarke readily admits that he doesn't know how to shoot or fight but that he'll help however he can. His information on how parasites function proves to be extremely important to figuring out the nature of the Aboleth and his ability to build a radio jammer saves the entire town.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • Steve goes through one after finding out that his father did contract work for the National Lab and was part of faking the death of Subject Six aka Sara Hopper. It takes Dustin to knock him out of it.
  • Dustin gets his own in Chapter 11. After beating Billy in a fight, coming up with a plan that works perfectly, saving the town (and getting extra credit in the process) and just generally becoming the Determinator he goes back to get the others and finds that nothing he did woke them up. He finally shuts down.
• Hidden Depths: Steve wants to come across as cool and unflappable, but he's surprisingly sensitive and smarter than most people give him credit for. While he's still always slowest on the uptake when it comes to complex concepts he generally proves to have good instincts and is actually a creative thinker. He's also deep down nerdier than the other characters assume from his Jerk Jock exterior, and was a huge fan of Superman comics.
• Homage: As per to Stranger Things.
  • Most of the chapter titles are based on a H P Lovecraft stories.
  • To Stephen King to the point of being a Whole-Plot Reference for IT.
• I'm Not Afraid of You: Subverted by Will, who admits he absolutely IS afraid, but is going to what he has to to help his friends anyway.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Steve is still sporting one of these toward the beginning of the fic and his desire to be liked leads to him making bad decisions. His nightmare at the lab boils down to doing something stupid for approval and getting The Party killed. He starts to get over it in Chapter 10.
• Insult Backfire:
  • At one point, Nancy finds that her locker has been defaced by Carole with "Nancy Fingercuffs", a crude reference to her friendship with Jonathan and Steve. Carole and her friends are eagerly watching for her reaction, clearly anticipating some kind of meltdown on Nancy's part. Except that Nancy both (a) has much bigger fish to fry than some mean-spirited high school bullying these days and (b) doesn't exactly hate the idea of being with both Jonathan and Steve even if she doesn't fully realise or understand what she's feeling. So she just corrects the grammar of the insult instead.
  "Try proof-reading next time. It's only three words."
  • Jonathan calls Steve a 'competent asshole' Steve cheerfully decides to only focus on the first half.
• Invisible Parents: As is Stranger Things fanfiction tradition, Steve's parents are rarely around. When they are his mother is checked out and his dad fluctuates between being disapproving and deeply disinterested.
• Irony:
  • At one point, Mr. Harrington lays into Steve for his choice of friends, calling them a bunch of Gold Diggers who are just using him as a Meal Ticket and are a Toxic Friend Influence on him. This prompts Steve to flash back to meeting the friends his dad pushed him towards hanging out with who, despite their more 'appropriate' backgrounds, actually turn out to be a bunch of Gold Diggers who are just using him as a Meal Ticket and are a Toxic Friend Influence on him, and the friends Mr. Harrington disdains are True Companions to him.
  • The (possible) ghost of Bob Newby cheerfully notes the irony of his showing up as a supernatural presence despite having hated "spooky" stories when alive.
• It Will Never Catch On: At one point, Steve rubbishes his dad's Apple Lisa 2 computer by dismissively stating that the only people who will ever want to buy "a $5000 typewriter" are nerds and rich assholes like his father who want to flaunt their wealth. You will, of course, note the irony that thirty-odd years after this scene is set, this character's thoughts on the subject of home computing and its likely irrelevance have been written, published and read almost exclusively on the many descendents of said $5000 typewriter.
• Jerkass: Murray Bauman takes pleasure in belittling Steve and basically reveals that Nancy and Jonathan hooked up mere days after she and Steve broke up for kicks. He does seem to realise that he has crossed a line, however, and demonstrates a heart of gold by going on to reveal what True Companions they nevertheless are by revealing how Tommy and Carol tried to screw him over by getting him in trouble for Barbara's disappearance.
• Karma Houdini : James Harrington seems to be this in the epilogue, clearing out and calling a Fixer from the Shop to take care of everything while basically making vacation plans.
  • Averted in that John Rainbird is a character from Firestarter and definitely not a Fixer in the way James thinks he is.
• Kick the Dog: Billy attacking Dustin.
• Killer Game Master: Mike turns into one of these against Steve when Steve joins the Party's D&D campaigns, ostensibly because Steve destroyed an intricately planned campaign by summoning a horse to ride off a cliff and crush the Big Bad. In retaliation, Steve's character dies incredibly horribly in the next session. Never fuck with the DM, kids. In actuality, Mike later admits that he was worried that Dustin was getting too attached to Steve, but Steve would find an excuse to abandon the Party and break Dustin's heart, and so was trying to drive him away before this could happen. Steve also initially seems to believe that Mike is this towards the others, but this appears to be mainly because he doesn't understand the game when he's first watching them play.
• Kinky Cuffs : When Joyce is hand-cuffing him for their own safety after the Aboleth tries to puppeteer him, Hopper thinks that "it's about as far from how he pictured getting handcuffed by Joyce as it's possible to get and stay on planet earth".
• Last-Name Basis: When Mr. Harrington shows up to collect Steve from one of the gang's exploits, he encounters Hopper, with whom he clearly has a long-standing enmity. When the two go to leave, Hopper bids the two farewell with a respectful "Harrington", which Mr. Harrington comments on with surprised approval. Hopper then clarifies that he was talking to Steve, whom he actually does respect.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • The end notes are all delivered by Mr. Clarke or Murray Bauman, directly.
  • With the monster dead the Zalgo text that serves as page breaks is replaced by Morse Code- the message? 'Hawkins AV Club Never Says Die'. Thanks Bob.
• Light Is Not Good: Along with its tendency to show up during the day the true form of the Aboleth emits some kind of eldritch light. Or possibly is the light if the Aboleth is same species as another emotion eating abomination from beyond worlds. It even refers to itself as 'the light in the darkness' compared to the Mind-Flayer.
• Like Father, Like Son :
  • Billy is unable to separate himself from the cycle of power and violence that his father taught him to the point that once Neil is out of the picture he starts mirroring his speech patterns.
  • Averted with Steve, who is noted multiple times to be doing everything he can to NOT be like his dad.
• Lonely Rich Kid: At the beginning Steve is extremely rich and extremely isolated. He ends up cutting himself off from his biological family with $400 to his name but surrounded by a Family of Choice.
• Lovecraft Country: Or rather, Stephen King Country. The eclipse Mr. Clarke mentions is the same one featured in Dolores Claiborne and Gerald's Game. Mr. Clarke grew up in Haven Village, Maine the setting of The Tommyknockers, and mentions going to the movies as a kid at the Aladdin- the movie theater in nearby Derry.
  • With Mr. Clarke in his mid-late 30's he would have been a preteen in 1958- this might not be the first time he's been in a town being menaced by a Eldritch Abomination.
• Mama Bear: When confronting a possessed neighbor trying to attack the kids with an axe, Joyce has to be held back by Hopper to prevent her from throwing herself right at the neighbor.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane:
  • Bob's appearance in Chapter 11 is explained away by Mr. Clarke as a hallucination brought on by an acute stress reaction but this is Hawkins...
  • There are a couple of instances where the generally slow-on-the-uptake Steve has unusual insight into events or other characters that he can't even explain to himself. It's possible that he's just more perceptive than he thinks he is or- given the nature of the fic-that he shines very slightly.
• MacGyvering: It's not Stranger Things without a DIY project at the end.
  • Axel made a bunch of grenades out of pipe, homemade thermite, and sparklers. Just in case Kali wanted to swing by the lab and burn it down.
  • Mr. Clarke and Dustin build a radio jammer that's essential to stopping the Aboleth from scratch out of scraps from multiple other radios and a TV.
• Negated Moment of Awesome: Dustin think that he's crippled the monster only to find that everyone is exactly where he left them and nothing has changed- as far as *he* can tell. Cue a Heroic BSoD.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: If the Aboleth hadn't sent Billy to try to take out The Party Dustin never would have figured out how to save the town.
• The Nicknamer: Quite a few.
  • Billy frequently calls Steve 'princess' and refers to Nancy almost exclusively as 'Snow White'
  • Steve nicknames El Supergirl.
  • Murray refers to Steve, Nancy and Jonathan as Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and Velma, Shaggy and Scooby.
  • Axel doesn't refer to anyone by their name. He still calls El Shirley Temple, Mick gets Mickey Mouse, and he calls Billy Hargrove 'Tuff Turf'.
• Not Too Dead to Save the Day : Bob Newby, superhero.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: A couple of characters notice that Steve is prone to this, particularly Dustin who scolds him for doing a thing where he "acts dumber than he is" and Hopper who notes that he pretends to be 'sort of an idiot sometimes'. Likely ingrained as a defense mechanism along with his Stepford Smiler tendencies by his family and his time with Carol and Tommy rather than something he knowingly does.
• Ominous Mundanity: Dr. Owens believes that, in his line of work, the most dangerous people have the least remarkable names. When he is introduced to Mr. Bates and Mr. Cuff from the Department of Scientific Intelligence, Dr. Owens is immediately wary of the pair's intentions.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. While there is only one Steve there are three uses of James. James 'Jim' Hopper, James Harrington, and Steven James Harrington and at least three Bob's or Bobby's mentioned. Nancy frequently references background characters names with initials- indicating another person with the same first name.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: At the end, after everything has calmed down, Mr. Clarke's girlfriend makes a comment about not knowing exactly what the heck just happened... and realises when his response isn't to immediately start enthusiastically hypothesising, and is to just hug her quietly, that he (a) knows exactly what was going on and (b) is very disturbed by that knowledge. She decides not to pry any further.
• The Power of Friendship: Dustin thinks off-handidly that maybe they can defeat the monster with the power of friendship when he doesn't know what else to do. That's pretty much what ends up happening.
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner: "Faberge organics, dickhead."
  • Defied by Billy Hargrove during his No-Holds-Barred Beatdown of Steve Harrington at Sattler Quarry. Instead of delivering the posturing one-liner that Steve and Billy's friends expect him to, Billy starts the fight by walloping Steve in the ribcage with a sock loaded with gym locks.
• Precision F-Strike: Mr. Clarke doesn't swear to the point that even his internal monologue tends to not use anything stronger than 'heck' - so the one "Oh, shit" when he encounters the monster for the first time comes off as one of these.
• Putting on the Reich: The Shop is just as immoral as Hawkins lab and employs scientists that were part of Operation Paperclip.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Hopper and Mr. Clarke.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Dustin delivers one to Billy, comparing him to other characters that have suffered abuse and making it clear that he thinks that Billy is just a sadist whose Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse.

• Science Hero: Dustin and Mr. Clarke end up saving the town purely through their combined knowledge of earth science and radio technology.
• Sherlock Scan: Steve gets one from Murray who tells him he has abandonment issues and it's a real 'Cat's in the Cradle' situation.
• Shipper on Deck: Murray still seems to be shipping Nancy/Jonathan, judging by his immediate antipathy to Steve.
• Shout-Out:
  • Doctor Brenner would like everyone to follow Standard Containment Protocols at all times.
  • At one point, Dustin enthusiastically gushes to Steve and his friends about this "weird British show" he caught on PBS involving a guy with a long scarf, his blonde assistant and a robot dog flying around time in something called a police box. More specifically, Doctor Who fans will recognise the story he describes as "City of Death".
  • Steve owns the infamous crop top from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).
  • Billy and Neil both use the phrase 'take your medicine' in relation to handing out a beating- a phrase frequently used by Jack Torrance in The Shining
  • The Aboleth says that 'there was a hole here but it's gone now' a famous piece of graffiti from SilentHill2
  • In the final battle, Mike gives Nancy the character class of "gunslinger" even though, as he notes mentally, it's not a type which can be found in Dungeons and Dragons. It is, of course, a class in another fantasy epic involving travel between parallel worlds which may be of interest to a universe inspired by the works of Stephen King.
  • Will recites the Litany Against Fear from Dune in order to keep calm while projecting into the Upside Down.
• Shown Their Work: In regards to the 80's, parasites, the Vietnam war, Dungeons and Dragons, MK Ultra and radio science.
• Simultaneous Arcs: The last chapter has everyone in different places (and dimensions) regardless of Dustin's plan to Never Split the Party .
• Spanner in the Works: Once again, Nancy and Jonathan (with the added help of Steve) manage to completely ruin the day of a top secret US weird-science project, this time almost by accident. On hearing of this, Dr. Owens ruefully suspects that if they just abandoned the Cold War espionage games and dropped Nancy and Jonathan into Moscow "to see what shakes out", the entire Soviet Union would surrender within a week begging for mercy.
• Stepford Smiler: Steve seems to have internalized that his main worth as a friend/son stems from being emotionally uncomplicated and undemanding. A big part of his arc is realizing that he can open up to his friends when he's unhappy and that they'll stand by him.
  • Both times Steve goes to his mom when he's upset she basically tells him to ignore it and everything will be fine. The second time she explicitly tells him he should smile because he 'looks just like [his father] when he frowns'. The reader gets the definite impression this isn't the first time that she's said this.
• Summon Bigger Fish: Will does this to the Aboleth when he uses his presence in the Upside Down to alerts the Mind-Flayer that it's there. There's a reason it's been going out of its way to avoid anything related to Will Byers.
• Take That, Audience!: A couple of mild ones to people who think that Billy Hargrove is really a Jerk with a Heart of Gold instead of a Jerk with a Heart of Jerk. One even delivered by Billy himself as he mocks a frightened Nancy with the fact that some of the girls at school just think that "he's misunderstood".
• Take a Third Option: El in Chapter 11. She can't save her friends while she's fighting the Aboleth even though she may be able to kill it once and for all. She takes the third option and uses her powers to Watch and drags The Party's minds with her into the Inbetween.
• Thin Dimensional Barrier: Thinny's are implied to exist in-universe by Subject Six.
• Trapped in Another World: The Party ends up partially trapped in the Inbetween.
• Troll: Murray Bauman trolls Steve relentlessly when the teens visit him for information.
• True Companions: Everyone, by the end.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: Nancy/Jonathan/Steve
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Played for drama; one of the effects of the influence of the Eldritch Abomination is people barely reacting to or even noticing horrific and disturbing events happening right in front of them.
• The Vietnam Vet: Both Neil Hargrove and Jim Hopper.
  • Neil was part of the helicopter crew that intervened during the My Lai Massacre and according to Billy's mom, was never the same after.
  • Hopper was part of the Siege of Huế, one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the war.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Steve and Jonathan spend most of their time together sniping at each other.
  • Nancy characterizes Steve and Dustin's dynamic as a mix of 'brotherly affection and mild verbal abuse'
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Steve desperately craves any kind of validation from adults due to his actual parents being emotionally distant and demanding, something that doesn't go unnoticed by Hopper.
• Wham Line: “Because her father is here, goddamnit. She’s Sara Hopper.”
• What You Are in the Dark: Used word for word in Chapter 11 when The Party get stuck Inbetween.
• Would Hurt a Child: Billy only hesitates to beat up Dustin because he thinks that Dustin is barely worth the effort.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Zigzagged, as it's more a case of wouldn't hurt specific children; it's made clear that the Aboleth is willing to feed on the young, as references to missing children throughout the story suggest, but for some reason it doesn't target Will or his friends. It's not out of benevolence or mercy, but fear; eventually Will realises that the reason the Aboleth is avoiding anyone connected to him is because it knows full well that the Mind Flayer is watching Will and his friends closely, and it's terrified of the Mind Flayer. So Will decides that the best way to ultimately defeat it is to attract the Mind Flayer's attention...
• You Shall Not Pass!: Said pretty much word for word by Dustin when he's protecting his unconscious friends from Billy Hargrove.