as i’ve mentioned eight hundred times, i got really into Stranger Things again over the last year, and i’ve read, conservatively, a metric shit-ton of fic about it. one of the things i’ve been really enjoying is the relative presence of long, plotty, canon-related fics. so this is a fic rec list for those! plenty of these are ship fics, and the shipping is heavily weighted towards steve/eddie, but not entirely, and my focus was more on ‘interesting plot’ than on romance. fic lengths range from 30k to over 200k. i cannot promise that the way i grouped these fics will make sense to you, but they make sense to me and hopefully they give you some idea of what kind of fics they all are!

alternate seasons

canon rewrites and canon divergence

season-4-related fix-its

so as i've been telling basically anyone who's asked what i've been up to lately, i finally watched season 4 of stranger things (i finished it a week ish ago). it's funny, because i was feeling so obligated to watch it when it came out and when everyone started talking about it that i put it off for ages, and was surprised to remember that oh yeah i actually like this show. (i was also surprised to find it had been over a year and a half that i'd put it off, rather than the nine-ish months i was SURE it had been since s4 came out, but here we are lol.) so this is half my reactions to s4 and to the fandom (not entirely positive), and half like... just generally poking at what i do like about the show and why i enjoy it, because i was doing a lot of mulling that over as i got back into it.

we will NOT be talking about how many words of stranger things fic i've read in the last two-three weeks because i'm not tracking my fic reading this year so i can pretend to remain in blissful ignorance. thank you ever so much in advance.

anyway, i have no conclusions to draw here but please come talk to me about this if you have thoughts or feelings about ST s4 or if you just want to react to anything i said! i keep tripping over the fact that this is a brand new season of canon for me and like fucking two years old for everyone else lmao.