Chapter Text
Nothing has ever happened in Hawkins, and nothing ever will.
Nothing that couldn’t happen in any other small town, at least. Hawkins is everywhere and nowhere, a cross-section of small town USA in the eighties, coloured in the wearily wholesome shades of middle America, instead of the dusty ochre of the sunbleached southwest; the oppressive, eternal grey of the north Pacific coast; or the damp, dark green rot of the deep south—every version of the same town dying the same slow death to the creep of modernity, the heady rush of progress, and the grinding indifference of good old American capitalism.
In Hawkins, the energy lab is—was—just an energy lab, just research and development, and when a poorly covered up chemical leak killed one local and caused the cancer of however many others, its closure was a Pyrrhic victory that took the local economy down with it. The lab closed up, the lab rats left, and the town whose industries had mostly existed to serve them suddenly found themselves with no one to serve but themselves, and the empty shell of a building too specialized to be of interest to anyone else, unless those interests were underage drinking, illicit drugs, and crude graffiti.
When a hasty developed and shoddily constructed mega mall was greenlit by the town council to try and draw people back and drum up new business, the fire that resulted seemed like punishment for the sheer hubris of any attempt to resist the ultimate fate of smalltown America. Whatever insurance paid out was subsequently gobbled up by the lawsuits that followed, and those whose loved ones were killed in the fire used whatever the class action got them to uproot their lives and flee far, far away, to other towns with different versions of the same problems.
There’s nothing remarkable about Hawkins. It is an unremarkable place filled with unremarkable people, and even its tragedies are mundane in the scope of smalltown American tragedies. Galveston. Centralia. Hinkley. Flint. Things like this have happened before, and things like this will happen again. The terror of Hawkins is everywhere and nowhere. Its dramas are small and their actors merely human.
But sometimes, those are the better stories.