hi !!

so im gonna delete this later but i'm just publishing it on here rather than an announcement so i can use the new poll feature lol (but also feel free to comment if u feel like brainstorming w me)

lowkey spoiling my own fic here but i'm gonna try my best not to give too much away

basically i'm in my s3 planning era bc i am so close to being done w s2 but where i am in the story is so sad rn i do not have the mental capacity to deal w that rn so instead i'm compiling every idea/actual creative writing pieces i've done and organising them into chapters so i can hopefully (once they're organised) have a regular publishing schedule

my dilema is this:

peyton and parker's mother.

she's been absent from s2, bc in the story she abandoned them at a young age (as i've written about) but narritively, she's very much part of peyton's story bc of how she made a name for herself in hawkins. people throwing peyton's mother's reputation in her face a lot, abandonment issues. how cruel her mother was. why her relationship with her dad means so much to her, her jealousness when it comes to nancy's relationship with karen. why joyce is so important to her (and parker tbh).

peyton is a mommy issues mess basically!

and i originally has a plotline in which their mother would come back in s3, after learning of bob's death, to try and take parker, but not peyton as peyton is almost 18 by s3. very family drama, lowkey shameless vibes. kinda traumatic for peyton bc she hates her mother, seeing her again would bring back all these past memories. potential flayed storyline if we really wanna put peyton through it in s3 oops

but also s3 is so filled w action, i don't want to take away from peyton's found family plot with joyce and hopper by introducing a new character and bringing back past trauma that she would ultimately have to deal with in s4. there's also already a lot of shit that she goes through in s3 (billy, joey, hopper etc) so to add her mother to it might overload the plot?? i'm just pros and cons-ing here

option 2 would be to never see peyton's mother. she doesn't return to hawkins. she would continue to haunt the narrative for peyton, maybe even die off screen with peyton only finding out bc of a letter, something left in the will. or just never come back into peyton's life at all. something kind of more realistic to an absent parent. they don't always come back. a big part of peyton's unresolved trauma that furthers her abandoment issues

also to give peyton a break from parent loss, bc she loses her dad at the end of s2, and hopper in s3 (though yeah not really but she doesn't know that yet), so if i went with the whole absent parent comes back only to get killed off cliche storyline it could overshadow that

idk i'm brainstorming here lol

basically i'm kinda just stuck, and again would build off of these so hopefully it's not too spoiler-y (as non spoilery as i can get for writing a season that came out in 2019 lol)

so vote if u want! new chapters soon i hope <3