On Loving Eddie Munson

A Case Study on Fandom and the Permission of Feminine Joy

If I had to define the summer of 2022 by a singular pop culture phenomenon hitting the zeitgeist, I would simply say: Eddie Munson.

Before the Barbie summer of 2023 and Brat summer of 2024—and I’ll note here that those were born of media that lived in honest, messy, and deeply self-examined femininity—the world went crazy for Eddie Munson. Myself included. Chrissy Wake Upis still my alarm tone.

Eddie took the world by storm. I remember the first time I saw the cafeteria scene, having a moment of really looking at Joseph Quinn and asking, who are you? While Quinn is an objectively attractive man, that alone could not explain the visceral reaction to his portrayal of Eddie.

As I spent more time in Hawkins, examining the face on my screen, I was reminded of how I felt watching Jonathan Bailey in Bridgerton. I saw a male face that was not afraid to show a wide range of human emotion. I saw a face that came alive behind the eyes when smiling. That was endearing. I cannot say I’ve met very many men in real life who hit that emotional register.

But what else was it about Eddie?

He was a misunderstood young man in a strict social ecosystem. Eddie was a character who was terrified of being seen but deeply wanted to be understood. And perhaps this was the hinge as to why he found such a ravenous fan base among teenage girls and adult women alike.

Like all things embraced by that demographic, loving Eddie Munson was deemed “cringe” almost as quickly as the world fell in love with him.

What struck me as interesting was that Joseph Quinn himself remained largely unscathed by this. His major follow-up role was Johnny Storm in the most recent Fantastic Four film. I note this because actors have often paid a steep price for being associated with characters later labeled uncool. Ahmed Best, of Jar Jar Binks fame, comes to mind. Eddie, however, became the shorthand for being cringe—not the actor who portrayed him.

I’m too old to care whether liking something makes me uncool. But I remember being young enough to be wrecked by that.

I’m an adult fangirl today, but preteen and teenage me had no awareness of the social implications of fangirl behavior. I remember realizing, slowly and painfully, that earnestness negated any chance one would have of being perceived as “cool” in the traditional sense.

I didn’t have a niche group in high school. I floated from group to group—anyone who would want to talk to me about anything. And I can say, definitively, that I was kind to the Eddie Munsons in my school. I let them talk about their music, their campaigns, their strange corners of the internet—harmless, if conceptually foreign to me.

Truthfully, the Eddie Munsons were often the only people who repaid me in kind.

We could be nerds together. We could enjoy things far too much, at the cost of carefully guarded social hierarchy—a small price to pay to live with unbridled joy.

Girlhood is exceptionally good at earnestness.

Young girls fully embody the things they love. Today, any given group of girls is likely fighting over who gets to be Rumi from K-Pop Demon Hunters. There is nothing ironic about it. Their joy is immersive, devotional, and unguarded.

But once adolescence knocks at the door, fandom becomes a fork in the road.

Not for boys, though. Boys often begin accruing sports memorabilia at this exact stage—jerseys, posters, signed balls—forms of devotion that are culturally sanctioned and even admired. I’ll admit that boys lower on the social pecking order are sometimes mocked for loving things deemed “geeky.” My piece The Bodhrán Under the Floorboards circles this tension.

Still, I can’t help but notice how uneven the protection is.

The joy of teenage girls—especially when it is loud, emotional, or sincere—is treated as disposable. Something to grow out of. Something to mock. Something to label “cringe” until it quiets itself.

I want to be clear about this: Eddie Munson was not deemed cringe simply because he was loved by teenage girls. He was deemed cringe because he represented a form of masculinity that most men are afraid to inhabit.

Eddie is emotionally expressive. He is theatrical. He is gentle with people who are vulnerable. He is frightened, and he admits it. He wants to be understood more than he wants to dominate. These are not traits our culture rewards in men, especially not when they are embodied without irony.

Eddie is also the moral hero of a town that never forgives him for being different. Hawkins ostracizes him in life, hunts him in death, and quite literally defaces his grave. It is a sobering narrative beat—one that quietly exposes who our society deems worthy of dignity, even in memory. A town that feared him decided even his corpse was too alive.

That discomfort matters.

It also explains a striking double standard. The same cultural apparatus that mocked girls for loving Eddie Munson did not respond with nearly the same contempt when girls expressed attraction to Billy Hargrove, portrayed by Dacre Montgomery. Billy—a character defined largely by volatility, cruelty, and abuse—was never saddled with the same “cringe” shorthand.

This contrast is telling.

A toxic, hypermasculine figure can be desired without threatening the social order. But a man who is emotionally legible, soft-spoken beneath bravado, and openly afraid destabilizes it. Eddie Munson is not punished because he is unattractive or uncool. He is punished because he models a masculinity that refuses cruelty as currency.

And teenage girls noticed.

They noticed because girls are often the first to recognize emotional safety. They noticed because Eddie’s vulnerability did not ask to be fixed or mocked. It simply existed. Loving Eddie Munson wasn’t embarrassing—it was perceptive.

What was embarrassing, apparently, was letting that perception be taken seriously.

Eddie Munson fandom was never really about Eddie Munson.

It was about teenage girls recognizing emotional safety and being punished for naming it. It was about sincerity being treated as a liability. It was about a culture that will tolerate girls desiring cruelty far more easily than girls desiring gentleness.

Fandom, for girls, is often a rehearsal space. It is where values are tested before they are articulated—where girls learn what kinds of love are celebrated, mocked, or dismissed outright. When teenage girls loved Eddie Munson, they were not being frivolous. They were responding to a man who modeled care without dominance, vulnerability without humiliation, and courage without cruelty.

That response was perceptive. It was moral. And it was treated as embarrassing.

Girlhood joy is rarely afforded protection. Instead, it is disciplined into irony, shame, or silence. We teach girls early that loving too openly makes them ridiculous, that earnestness must be tempered, that devotion is a weakness to be outgrown. And yet, again and again, girls are proven right—about art, about culture, about people—long before the rest of us catch up.

Eddie Munson was deemed cringe not because he failed masculinity, but because he expanded it. Teenage girls saw that expansion immediately. The backlash was never about taste. It was about fear.

If we took girlhood seriously—if we protected it instead of policing it—we might recognize that the things girls love most fiercely are often pointing us toward something better. Something kinder. Something more human.

And we might stop defacing the graves of the people who tried to show us that first.

I believe, deeply, that we are all deserving of smiling as openly and honestly as Eddie Munson did. Of letting our faces give us away. Of allowing joy to reach our eyes without fear of how it will be received.

Perhaps that is what fandom offers at its best—not escape, but incandescence. A way of lighting up from the inside when something recognizes us back. When we are moved, delighted, stirred into aliveness.

If loving something fiercely makes us cringe, then maybe cringe is just another word for being visible. And maybe visibility—real, unguarded visibility—is the bravest thing we do.

Teenage girls have always known this. Eddie Munson reminded the rest of us.