#i cannot believe the duffers genuinely just suck at writing

[wibble-wobbegong]

no it’s the way will’s potential was thrown in the garbage and stomped on and burned alive. not just as a queer character but just in general. like there are so many unanswered questions surrounding his experience with the upside down??? they could’ve delved into any of that, they HINTED at delving into that, but at the end they reduced him to a plot device for mike’s shitty new “character development” and they couldn’t even manage to make him explicitly queer.

it’s the way el is still dependent on mike and isn’t being given another chance to grow and change on her own with the love and support of someone who actually knows who she really is and loves her for it(hopper). Mike’s monologue was about how he loved her for who she is but everything he’s been told about her for the past 8 months has been lies and their entire in person relationship was just them kissing?? el was only able to branch out without being with mike.

it’s the way mike’s character has been absolutely demolished like no other. he was just a massive dick to lucas, dustin, AND will for the past two seasons for no reason? there’s no explanation?? they just decided to make him an asshole who doesn’t exist outside of supporting his girlfriend after season 2. it’s the way mike used to be so caring and kind and inclusive to everyone only to have his entire character focused on el. and his life started when he met el?????? so 7 years of friendship with Will and so many years of being friends with Lucas and Dustin just don’t mean jack shit thanks to this girl he met in the woods one day who he literally said he was using as a weapon to find Will? it’s the way he went from “asking you to be my friend was the best thing I’ve ever done” to “I feel like my life started when I met you in the woods that day” where the first one is his life long best friend and the other is his girlfriend who he treats like shit and knows nothing about

[tibby]

I’ve been thinking about all the weirdly conservative views in stranger things lately and am wondering if your have any stranger things hot takes? I love all your stranger things and riverdale posts!

it’s been brought up before but it truly is like...baffling that this show is so pro capitalism and one of the main families are proud reaganites and yet neither of those things are criticised. i understand that that was the mood and beliefs of a lot of people in the 1980s, but they were not good things, and presenting them at face value with no criticism is lazy writing at best and something the duffers support at worst (although, honestly, i wouldn’t be surprised.)

for a show set in a small town where a large percentage of the residents aren’t wealthy (the byers family is an obvious one, but we can safely assume dustin and his mother aren’t super well off either, not to mention everyone who lost their jobs in st3) stranger things really does not like to discuss class disparity. 

following on from that: they had so much potential to discuss how corporations and Shiny Malls damage family businesses and the livelihood of small business owners, and they just...did nothing with it? like yeah the mall gets burned down and the mayor gets arrested but like. it’s never properly addressed and if i remember correctly (it’s been awhile since i watches s3, so i could be wrong) hopper even arrests some of the protestors. you know, the people who lost their jobs and businesses thanks to the mayor’s shady deal to make starcourt happen.

generally speaking, the glorification of hopper.

anyone who has followed me for an extended period of time knows i hate murray but WHY would a man that has countless conspiracy theories and who doesn’t trust anyone suddenly turn around and start preaching about how america is the land of the free and so great? murray has always sucked but his speeches to alexei in st3 didn’t even make sense for the character.

see also: erica being made a main character (yay!) but giving speeches about how america is great and capitalism is good.

the treatment of lucas and the sinclair family is a whole other post and one that isn’t really mine to write, but the way he’s treated at the hands of other characters is rarely ever addressed within the show and it’s incredibly disturbing.

the fact that they genuinely seem to think that a wealthy white woman having a shitty boss is like, the peak of misogyny. i’m not denying that what nancy experienced was bad (although, honestly, seperate from the sexist comments, if i ran a newspaper and two teenage interns tried to tell me about insane rats, i wouldn’t believe them either), but like...her storyline was not the feminist masterpiece they made it out to be. giving her a #girlboss moment was the absolute bare minimum they could do and they didn’t even do it right.

discussed this plenty of times before but nancy being a woman does not give her a free pass on classism.

feels like i’m really ragging on nancy here but like...her st3 “journalism” plot was so bad, but it didn’t have to be! i complain a lot about st2 but at least that storyline made sense for her. she was investigating the us government because its corruption led to the death of her best friend. having her and jonathan continue their investigations into the us government due to the damage and trauma they caused to them and people they loved would have made sense, and it’s not like that corruption started and ended with the hawkins lab. instead it was throwing us into the idea that nancy always wanted to be a reporter (???) and decided to get her poor boyfriend fired so she could do an article on weird rats (which didn’t even contribute to the plot at all.) maybe i’m being too harsh and maybe it is another flaw of their Time Jumps, but honestly to me it just reads as them trying to be #feminist and having reporter teens without having to criticise america any further. 

last nancy point but my GOD can this show stop with its weird pro gun message via her. like i understand they have to fight monsters but at this point it’s just them trying to make her seem badass and also she canonically enjoys the act of shooting a gun, which is like, lmao.

the sudden switch to “america is good, blame the scary russians for everything” is something that’s been unpacked multiple times by people much smarter than me, but like, fucking hell.

and look, i get it. i understand that most of this is just reflective of the time period and that plenty of people believed the messages that the show parrots. but here’s the thing: you cannot present these views and not criticise them. you cannot set a show in the 1980s and then refuse to address any kind of social issues and injustices outside of a few offhand comments. i’ll give credit where credit is due and admit that they made a decent effort to at least explore classism in season one, but that hasn’t really been brought up since, and no other issues have ever being decently addressed. and i probably shouldn’t expect much from netflix’s cash cow and the duffer brothers themselves, but the entire show really is....uncomfortably conservative.

[katecarteir]

why do you hate stranger things 3 so much?

Okay so it’s been a year but I’ll admit, I still don’t think I’ve ever been REALLY able to express what it is about the third season of Stranger Things that just made it so-bad but I’m gonna try. Like short answer? For a show that got it’s whole thing from the importance of family and friends, season 3 shoved all of that aside for poorly written romantic relationships. Long answer?

There’s many things but I think that the biggest thing is that even with a pretty decent “main plot” Stranger Things 3 started off almost immediately from the get out with no chance of actually being good, because right away none of these characters were still in character with who we fell in love with, you know?

Joyce Byers, who at a serious base of her character, was an amazing and extremely dedicated mother spending seven out of eight episodes seperated and unconcerned about her children even when she’s suspicious that something was going on. Her kids don’t reach out to her either, even when the literal world seems to be ending around them which is very weird for both Will and Jonathan who are super super aware of how vital and active Joyce has always been in this fight and they don’t even wonder out loud for second why she isn’t there.

And Mike- oh, Mike, sweeties, my dude, I am so sorry- has, sure, always been kind of a little prick. Very stubborn and kind of struggles to see things from other people’s point of view but there was so much more to Mike Wheeler than having a crush on El. Something just does not sit right with me that I’m supposed to believe that Mike threw down on sight for the entire first season for El’s right to be considered a friend to Lucas and Dustin and then apparently, basically, actively took part in the season three concept that she.... didn’t have any friends, and wasn’t friends with anybody except him, and that she never actually became friends with Dustin or Lucas after Mike fought them so goddamn hard about it. It doesn’t make sense! AND NOT TO MENTION, that Mike sent two seasons- two- with an obvious view that saving Will or protecting Will was the most important thing to him and it still took what like? Four episodes for Mike to realize that something was wrong with Will and even then he continuously undercut it and I don’t know who that was but it wasn’t my Mike Wheeler.

LUCAS WOULDN’T BE LIKE THAT. Aside from the whole weird thing where they set up Lucas and Max has been an actually great relationship and then they brought back that season with a showcase that Lucas and Max basically break up once a week and fight continuously to the point where they both think that’s the most normal thing in the world.I just think that- and I know I’m not the only one- is that I am glad that we got a call back to the season one throwaway line that Mike and Lucas are best friends because outside of Dustin saying that, we never really saw it. Lucas seemed to really have little to no patience for Mike at any given point, and I get that, I totally get that. Like, season one they had the same goal- save Will- but they both wanted to go about it in a completely different way (i.e Lucas didn’t really want to waste time on the girl with the superpowers they found in the woods, because he thought their time would be better spent actually looking for Will) and then in season two, Mike runs around being a total dick to the girl Lucas likes and fucks off in end of episode four without word about it and has progressively tried to keep Lucas and Dustin from what’s going on with Will for the most point (because he doesn't trust Max and he was right in believing that Dustin or Lucas would tell this total stranger about Will’s trauma.) and I totally digressed here, but because I was glad to see Lucas and Mike being friends in season three, the concept was highlight they just- went about it so so wrong. Because Lucas has never been shy about telling his friends- and especially Mike- that they’re being fucking idiots. I cannot imagine Lucas actually encouraging Mike to pursue this crack scheme of chasing after El post-break up. Especially not the way it went down, which Mike immediately accepts that El has dump him and it’s over and then Lucas convinces him that it’s not. It very much does hold roots in the poor writing of the Lu/Max relationship this season, but Lu/Max was written the way it was so that they could have Lucas in Mike’s corner and Max in El’s corner to validate and uplift the horrible Mi/leven relationship arc this season in which Lucas for sure would not be in that spot whatsoever if it wasn’t for the poor writing of Mi/leven since the second they left the Snowball. Lu/Max is very much a support piece in Mi/leven rather than its own relationship, and yet Max continues to get her own storyline this season (as... yeah... as that storyline was) but Lucas became a casualty to Mi/leven this year, and only slightly differently to the way Will has been a casualty to Mi/leven... and Mike has been a casualty to Mi/leven. If your main relationship continues to assassinate and rip dry the characters both inside and around it, then it’s really time to take a step away from that relationship and determine if its working or if you just suck at writing for no foreseeable reason.

And like, I guess it’s fair to talk about Max here since it’ll be any easy transition in the sense that- Max Mayfield a casualty to Mi/leven. Like that meme with the people holding hands and it says “my character survived the Mi/leven relationship of 1985” and its Max Mayfield and Dustin Henderson. NOT TO SAY that Max’s character isn’t all over the board, it is a lot harder to decide what Max would or wouldn’t do regarding Mike and El. Because.... we never saw anything with the Max/El relationship outside of Max wanted to know her, and El absolutely wanting nothing to do with that because Mike smiled at her one time and El saw it. Mike and Max is actually a different story, and the more complicated relationship I guess? El/Max was good, even if I didn’t agree with all of the advice that Max gives El (particularly the we make our own rules concept, I fucking hated that and I’ll get there. Oh, I’ll get there.) BECAUSE Mike and Max are just... the Sharpay and Gabriella of Stranger Things. They feud all season for whatever reason, they make up and find common ground at the end, and then it starts back up and they hate each other with no explanation to the understanding that they found. And it wasn’t funny, there wasn’t anything about their rivalry that was funny or amusing or even really served a purpose outside of the fact that they needed to showcase the whole Lu/Max and Mi/leven crap so Mike and Max could be friends because the couples needed to be against each other so Max already needed to hate Mike prior to El coming to her for advice, and therefore the rekindling of their potential friendship at the end of season two was re’cont for that purpose. And it really wasn’t necessary because Max would have had enough going on without being in the middle of the weird Mi/leven break up, and losing her boyfriend. I think a huge like, obvious issue with Max is that season two Max left a lot to be desired. Understandably, season two was a lot bigger than the Duffers had time for so they ended introducing characters (Billy and Max) that we didn’t get to develop in their introductory season enough that where they ended up in season 3 was logical or sensical at all because Billy did nothing except be an evil piece of shit two years until the end where he decides to stop himself from killing this little 13 year old white girl and dies and suddenly he’s a hero who sacrificed himself for the greater good when he really didn’t. And seeing Max horrified and traumatized to him does make sense to an extent, she has known him and lived with him for a large chunk of her life and seeing that happen to anybody would be traumatizing. And people don’t get to determine how someone would react to their abuser dying, because you are not that person and you are experiencing what they are experiencing. HOWEVER, Max did not receive enough explanation from a writer or viewers’ POV for her defending Billy or believing Billy could be good to make sense when she spent almost all of season two avoiding her relationship with Lucas because she knew that Billy was racist and violent and horrible. Max grieving and being traumatized over Billy’s death and quite literally seeing his body, but her actions up to that point didn’t make much sense because not enough writing went into Max as a character since the beginning because she is a victim of the classic Too Many Characters, Not Enough Screen Time to Share.

Ha. The relationship between El and Will really needs to be it’s own point before I even get into them as characters. It’s so... It doesn’t make any sense to me why Will and El are like that. And I guess it does or it can trace back to Mi/leven. The idea that Mike purposely kept El from having any friends and Will would have been a victim of that, and the fact that Will very obviously likes Mike and that showcases in him... not like El??? because they’re dating. But I’m not sure how I’m supposed to believe that Will and El don’t have a connection? El saved Will’s life t w i c e and I’m supposed to believe that he hates her because she’s dating Mike and therefore that doesn’t matter to him and he calls her by a number instead of a name and he overly just seems extremely indifferent towards her at best. But I actually do believe, the lack of an Will & El dynamic is (besides being a totally missed opportunity) was like... blank brained of the writers, I think they genuinely just didn’t think about it because they were really caught up in the relationship drama this season they just didn’t bother to develop El and Will. Which is dumb, because of the whole “we’re supposed to believe that Hopper & Joyce are a good ship” but also supposed to believe that Will and El have never spent any time together AND THEY KNEW THAT THEY WOULD BE L I V I N G TOGETHER at the end of the season and they still nothing to give them any relationship growth at all, and if anything took away what little potential hits of a dynamic they had from the first two seasons. For the sake of what does not sort of look like a queerbait of Mike/Will OR best case scenario (still bad!) a love triangle between the three characters.

For a show that had two seasons dedicated to the importance of Will Byers, it was kind of weird to see him so shoved aside this time around. And this isn’t to take away from El’s importance. It’s not an argument over her being the main character- although I think it’s important to note that they original plan for this show was for her to die in season one, and while I’m glad she’s alive and they changed that, we can’t deny how that decision itself would completely alter the path every single character (especially characters like Mike and Will in particular) would have made. BUT FACTS ARE, this entire show started because of Will. That is something that cannot be argued. The Vanishing of Will Byers was the kick off of this entire thing, and every single main character aside from possibly Steve Harrington, are in this fight because of Will Byers. Not because of El. And yes, El is most definitely the ~stranger thing~ and the titular character of the show, it’s fucking ludicris to try and imply that Will is not pretty much as just as important as El. And so for season three to undercut everything about that and use Will as detection device (that only gave you about 15 seconds warning) and have his actual emotional storyline dropped in the 4th episode and only come up again in the sense of refusing to even hear apologies from Lucas or Mike, is the epitome of bullshit.

I’m just going to start off here by saying, I like El, I do. BUT- I’m very aware that El is a victim of her surroundings. She doesn’t have much of her own personality, she has from the beginning allowed herself to simply accept what other people tell her and do that. Say that, repeat it. The Best Time for El as a character was with Kali and her deepest moment of like, personal reflection is when she said no to going with Kali because she needed to go back to Hawkins and save her friends. That really set up a lot of really good growth for El, the idea she was becoming her own person and that she could move forward as herself, who she is, who she wants to be. And I understand the trauma behind her and why she has such an unstable sense of self but it was still disappointing to watch her revert back to following by example in her personal life while continuously forced to be seen as leader in any situation. She follows Mike’s example in the beginning, with Hopper and being super obnoxious but she’s also very quick to jump back over to Hopper’s side when addressing Mike later and burshing off what he’s trying to tell her (i.e your father threatened my life and I didn’t know how to proceed from that point and I’m sorry I lied to you) and she also word for word quotes Max a lot. Including situations which the boy she’s supposedly in love with expresses his discomfort in her. When El reveals that she’s gone into the the void and watched the boys doing whatever, Mike quickly jumps to point out that those were “against the rules” aka personal boundaries that have obviously been set between Mike and El for a reason and she shoots back that she makes her own rules, like Max said about a pretty different situation nonetheless, and invalidates what Mike is trying to say in that moment again. It also doesn’t really sit right with me that she plays dumb with Mike in that grocery store will he is clearly having trouble declaring love for her (which says a lot about how Mike feels) and then bringing it back up three months later, and using it as a justification for kissing him and declaring love towards him after he has said he didnt even remember the conversation she’s referencing from three months earlier and she does not say “I love you” she says “I love you, too.” Which is so very different, because it is her literally acknowledging that she sat there and played dumb (not didn’t understand, which is totally different, but did understand and wanted and enjoyed him struggling to say something) and they threw it back at him as a validation of their relationship- yet it was something he was unable to say to her. I think a big issue with El, is that she has somehow become somebody above being criticized for her actions. What was wrong with Mi/leven this season is not 100% an issue with Mike Wheeler, El very much had a hand in that destruction and with how the season ended, I don’t doubt that she was will  have an even larger hand in the problems going forward because El is smart, and she understands shit, but she pretends that she doesn’t when it’s works for her. Being around Hopper and to even greater extent, the things she lived through in the lab, El is very aware of how to manipulate people and it’s a behaviour she is going to have to unlearn. She might not even be completely aware of just how wrong it is but nobody is going to tell her what she’s doing because I don’t even think it’s realized that she’s doing it and fandom itself chooses to ignore that she’s done it.

And I don’t know how a show that could create the iconic character growth of Steve Harrington is also writing all these other character development blunders, full stop.