I love your insights of the show! Thoughts on Billy? Do you think in the case he survived, he could have been part of the Party, the Scoops Troop or the Monster Hunting trio? Also, in which family situation would be Max on season 4? The writers will touch the matter she's still living with abusive parents and was left with unsolved feelings overall?
Hi Anon! Thank you so much, that’s really nice to hear!
In order to try to uphold my reputation as a straight shooter I will preface this with the fact that I truly viscerally, despise Billy and consider the idea that you naturally love or should forgive someone for truly horrible behavior on the basis of them being family, or that he was probably secretly a good brother to Max despite literally everything we see being contrary to that to be legitimately concerning.
That said- I DIDN’T hate Billy as a character in S2- I mean, I did hate him obviously because he was repulsive as a human being but I really liked the inclusion of him in the show and he was a great version of the over-the-top brutal-too-old-for-high-school-looking-classic-1980′s -Henry Bowers-style bully (Omg...I just realized...are there Henry Bowers fangirls? You know what, don’t tell me I don’t want to know) and that was awesome .
And then...S3. Oh, S3 Billy. This is the only time I will ever type these words but... Billy (and the audience in general) deserved better solely because literally everything about the character development was so stunningly lazy. Why is he getting along better with Max? Why does she give a shit about him now? (because they’re family is not being accepted as an answer at this time) Just shrugging and shoving ESSENTIAL character development that fundamentally changes a core relationship dynamic between seasons is insane and then making him a mind-controlled husk of a hive mind instead of a Renfield with some measure of agency makes sure he doesn’t get real development during the season since he’s spending most of it literally not himself. And then to take what could have been really interesting aspects of the character (the complexity of the cyclical nature of abuse, the conundrum it could have been for El if the fact that he was at the very least emotionally abusive to Max and had tried to hurt Lucas had actually been examined instead of brushed under the rug and how she should feel about that as someone that survived horrific abuse from a father figure and very much DOES NOT want to hurt people and if she sees parallels with Kali, more into how the Mind Flayer’s MO is practically Silent Hill-level representative of the psychology of being dominated and the parallels with his father, etc. etc.) and reduce it to ‘Look, he used to be a cute a kid before he was abused. He had a mom!’ which is basically the ‘The sky is blue and water is wet’ lowest common denominator of manipulating sympathy for violent offenders and abusers...
Lazy.
I’m not even going to get into the fact that his big character moment was basically the ‘Save Martha’ scene from Batman V Superman.
Do you think in the case he survived, he could have been part of the Party, the Scoops Troop or the Monster Hunting trio?
No, in all three cases. He has either beat the ever-loving shit out of or threatened to beat the shit out of one member of all three groups for absolutely no reason. This is a poor basis for a friendship.
I guess at least Robin and Erica don’t know him, though I honestly can’t imagine Robin would be able to spend more than twenty seconds tolerating his hyper-masculine bullshit without wanting to commit homicide. And I won’t even go into why he and Erica obviously wouldn’t get along because Dacre Montgomery will swing down from the rafters to tell me ‘people like that’ just means he hates nerds that wear bandannas.
Also, in which family situation would be Max on season 4? The writers will touch the matter she's still living with abusive parents and was left with unsolved feelings overall?
Hm. I don’t think there’s any evidence that Susan is abusive- passive and complicit in abuse obviously, but not actively abusive and S2 Max seemed to mostly be afraid of Billy, not Neal, which obviously doesn’t mean he never would/will harm her but indicates to me that Billy was singled out in the household.
I honestly don’t know what we’ll see of Max’s family even though it would make sense to sort of be a big deal that didn’t stop them from shoe-horning her character development in between seasons last time so...
Thanks for the ask Anon! I hope it was satisfying even though I obviously have pretty strong personal takes on this one.
