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Notes -
Woke Trappings versus Woke Story
I thought Stranger Things wrapped up nicely and the finale was great. The pre-final episode received the lowest ratings and reception in the entire series, with a lot of commentators claiming the entire series was ruined, but the finale was great television. It's true the pre-final episode was not great due to the fact it was dedicated to setting up the 2 hour finale, but the overreaction to that episode is mostly driven by one of the characters named Will coming out as gay, and making that central to his personal story and character growth needed to win the entire conflict. The surface-level criticisms are true, the scene was terrible, it was LGBT propaganda, sure. And my woke radar is as fine-tuned as anyone, but I find anti-woke observers become too hung up on woke trappings rather than critically analyzing the story itself.
The Stranger Things story itself is not necessarily woke, it's 1980s nostalgia blended with fish-out-of-water, heroes journey, coming-of-age, revenge, fantasy, and all the elements that audiences tend to like and that is carried through the end. I would contrast that with IT: Welcome to Derry in which the story itself is Woke and it ruins the series.
But I think those complaining about Woke elements in Stranger Things - this never would have happened in the 1980s!, the multiple LGBT characters and their acceptance by everyone in the story, the feminism, etc. They miss the point that 1980s culture did lead to these things. Sure, the transition was slower than is symbolically represented in the show; in the show the transition happens rapidly, without resistance, and faster among the characters in the story than it did in American culture. But the fact is American culture did follow the cultural trajectory depicted in Stranger Things which warps up 1989. So the show depicts an accelerated cultural trajectory going out of the 80s into the 90s and 2000s, which are cultural changes that actually happened.
Although I do like a lot of parts of 1980s American culture, the vapidness in that culture which triggers our nostalgia reaction did lead to these things the anti-woke commentators are complaining about being featured in the show. 1980s culture led to 90s culture, and so on until we are right here. The lesson isn't "Great Hollywood will just wokify everything" the lesson is that 1980s nostalgia is not a good source of inspiration for those who oppose the cultural forces that came out of the 80s and further developed since then. Of course that insight can be backpropagated, is a 1960s muscle car a symbol of a pre-woke culture we must retvrn to, or is it a symbol of cultural decay representing vapid status games, siphoning masculine energy into meaningless pursuits, and materialistic national identity that led exactly where we are?
Whhhhaaaaat? I couldn’t have been more disappointed. It was a more sterile, uninspired, cgi repeat of the season 3 Mall fight with the MF. Vecna was just Billy except without an actual personality or complexity. Instead of an interesting set it was a boring CGI desert.
Stranger Things was a barely above garbage show from seasons 2-4; and an exercise is bloated nothing in season 5
Yeah I'm definitely speaking relative to expectations. Seasons 2-4 were barely above garbage, so this finale "was better than expected" for me, but my expectations were low.
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There's the large complaints about the CGI and horrible dialogue.
But over the last couple days the people pointing out little nitpicky things has really ruined it for me, because the nitpicks show that the writers don't even care about their own show and keep ignoring/forgetting little important details.
One of the ones that occurred to me: in the big final battle, they started unloading firepower on the mindflayer/spider, setting it ablaze. WHILE the abducted children were inside it. And this is utterly glossed over.
On top of that, the squad of Demogorgons which had, a few episodes ago, demolished a small military base, were nowhere to be found.
Clearly the Duffers didn't feel up to the task of writing a way for the main gang to fight the final boss and deal with all his minions running around in support too.
Imagine that there is a crackhead armed with a knife trying to kill you. You are armed with a garden hose. You try to fend him off by spraying him with your little 10 psi water stream, which of course does nothing and he stabs you to death. You probably would have been better off trying to take the hose and beat him with it or strangle him or fend him off somehow.
This is about the relationship between government troops and demogorgons in ST. The troops are all armed with garden hoses, they do zero damage, and they all die. They would be orders of magnitude better off taking their M16s and swinging them like clubs. Drunk Karen Wheeler armed with a broken wine bottle is more effective vs demogorgons than entire squads of elite troops.
Now imagine that you had to fight that same crackhead, except now you have a flamethrower. You win this fight every time.
You are the US government. You are going to fight demogorgons. Do you give your soldiers the garden hose or the flamethrower? It has been 6 years, since the first scene in the first episode of the show, that the US government has been fighting demogorgons and they still have not figured out they need to give everyone flamethrowers and not garden hoses.
Also note that they figured out a perfect counter to the psychic kids in the meantime. They just didn't bother to adapt to the other creatures.
Also also note that based on Brenner's notes (loved that asspull) they could close the portal at any time.
That was another 'hilarious' nitpick. "Oh, so Vecna is going to combine our world and his, creating a literal hellscape on earth, probably killing most or all humans... and we just figured out how to instantly sever the connection so he can't do that. Problem solved."
"No, you see there's like 12 kids we have to save first."
"Yes yes very heroic, but did you miss the part where everyone dies if he does this? And we have an easy solution? We'll just tell their parents the kids were already dead if that helps."
Blowing up the exotic matter solves the entirety of the problem, and the only reason the kidnapping was really part of the plot was to give them something to actually fight. It wasn't even explained how the kids helped him with this plan.
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I'm sorry, but Season 5 was garbage. Okay, maybe that is too strong. it's the Big Mac of television. It felt okay watching while watching it but is ultimately empty, devoid of meaning. They did the same trick as Episode 9 of Star Wars, except better. Think about any aspect of the plot and it all collapses into a pile of questions and contradictions.
Also, no one said shared trauma in the 1980s, which they explicitly did in Vol 2. In Season 1 the kids acted like kids, teenagers like teenagers all from 80s movies. In this season, they don't act like 80s people.
Will being gay is because the actor is gay and wanted Will to be gay. This was their Emmy scene that they thought would get them recognition. It took them too long and the wheel has turned. It's 2025, nobody needs a fucking coming out scene anymore. People are sick of gay shit and diversity being shoved into everything. It didn't add anything to the show, the character, or the scene. Would the season have been any worse if that scene was cut? No!. It's purely there for pandering. Thats what woke bullshit is pandering.
I think the bigger thing is how anti-woke the show actually is. Is Vecna as a metaphor for pedophilla? He grooms the kids. Convinces them he is their friend, before Shoving tubes and fluids into their mouths. Traumatising him. Leading to the obvious question, was this trauma what made Will gay? This has long been an argument levelled at gays, that their debouched nature lead to them grooming kids to become gay. This season is the literal embodiment of that.
I don't believe this at all. Him being gay has been hinted at since the start of the show. In the very first episode Joyce mentions that her ex-husband used to call Will queer.
No she didn't. She said he was a sensitive child. Some of the bullies said he was a fairy, and that he was off with the fairies. That was the extent of it.
Bullies calling someone gay <> someone being gay. A sensitive kid, who is into art <> gay.
Yes she did. Trivial to look up Season 1, ep. 1 ~18 minute mark:
Joy (to Hopper): Look, he's... he's a sensitive kid. Lonnie (sigh), Lonnie used to say he was queer. Called him a fag.
Hopper: Is he?
Joy: He's missing, is what he is!
That doesn't prove anything. But you're wrong to say she didn't/
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I think it was the trauma from the retcon that did it, since Vecna didn't catch Will in S1; he'd just fallen prey to the environment at that point. Though perhaps maybe the spores and the tentacles can infect you with the gay re: Robin, and why the gay characters didn't think the atmosphere in the Upside Down was dangerous when asked. They were already carrying it, you see.
Vecna as a metaphor for the show's writers. You've correctly identified that it is child abuse, but not for the reasons you're probably thinking of.
"Let's just use children as props to [ab]use because we're too lazy to write them as actual human beings" is an incredibly apt description of S5, and most of the good parts of S5 were... starring a 14 year old playing a 9 year old in full jailbait uniform for basically no reason (clearly, practical for trudging around in the forest and desert heat)[1]. You do kind of forget that after a while, but it presses the "child beauty pageant" button.
It's a grown woman wearing child-face. Which is consistent with how the rest of the formerly-kid characters act, come to think of it (it's especially jarring with 11, since that character's design means they can't hide it... even though they kind of did in S4), and probably why the writers wouldn't see much problem with it either. After all, how else are you going to convince the audience this [again, obviously grown woman] is A Child? Remember, the original cast was actually physically younger than their stated ages (and, uh, that's how it is in real life too), but if you forget why that works this is the result.
As for those nice, veiny, oral intubation scenes with Vecna... I think they were just going for shock value and stock "villain is a walking pedo stereotype". They had a schedule to keep, after all. That's not really anti-woke, though[2]. It also blows suspension of disbelief because Stranger Danger accompanied the Satanic Panic, and the latter was a massive plot point in S4- there's no fucking way those "kids" should have believed that, and yet.
And it didn't even do that effectively, because it basically destroyed that ship (and the teenage girls most interested in it) for a moralizing gotcha. Again, an example of "how adults think sexuality works", not how it actually works[2, again].
Contrast S1, where as you said, the characters acted fucking normal. The kid characters in particular weren't just cheap throwaway props, especially and most relevantly Will, who exercised agency and intelligence every time he was actually interacting with something (and even better- every time he takes the advice of adults- suffers overwhelmingly negative consequences of doing so instead of using his fucking brain; this was a massive plot point in S2 and basically every season thereafter, because [the writers needed a prop, so they made sure] he never learned). And it's not like the writers forgot how to write a character like this, since Derek (of all people) does this every time he's on screen.
[1] Adventuring outfits don't look like this, they look like this. One would expect an artist who draws the latter character nude on occasion to have the more sexualized design, yet in fact the opposite is true.
[2] But it is what traditionalists will think is anti-woke, because they're usually incapable of noticing that "forcing an adult outlook on kids with respect to sex" is the specific mode of abuse (and is correctly called out as a bad thing when it happens to Will in S1), rather than suggesting the actual act itself. It's a very feminine mode of sexual abuse, which men don't usually understand (they can only identify suggestions of the actual act).
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I feel like this show should have ended after season 2. Lots of people say season 1, and I get it, but I liked season 2. Sure they delayed the reunion until the end so L could go on a side quest with a bunch of spinoff characters nobody liked, but whatever. They wanted to show that L could make it out in the world on her own and wasn't obliged to go home unless she really wanted to. Then we got a cute happy ending where L got her forged birth certificate so Hopper could be her dad and she went to the big dance with Mike.
What a nice cute story. Maybe lagged a little in the second since everyone hated the spinoff kids, but whatever.
All this other business though, I just don't know. I don't see why I need it.
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I stayed up late to watch the finale last night, and I broadly agree.
I've have my beef with the direction they took Will in. I'd been predicting since then that Will's gayness would consume the entire story, and by the end he'd be defeating the main villain with the power of homosexuality.
I'm happy to say I was wrong, for the most part. Yeah, the climax, such as there was one, of the second to last episode was Will's coming out, with absolutely everyone being super cool with it. Which is a far cry from the grittier "Man, people were pretty blunt and even bigoted in the 80's" attitudes of season 1, or even season 3. At the end of the day by season 5, it was current year in 1987 or whenever the finale is supposed to be taking place.
That said, the final episode still delivered more or less. The story proper is wrapped up in a fairly straight forward 60 minutes, and then we get another 45-ish to indulgently say goodbye to all the characters. When most shows give you a quick 5-10 minute "where are they now?" montage, it was nice to not feel rushed.
I didn't feel like Will defeated Vecna with the power of homosexuality. I think Dustin had been the main character since season 4, maybe season 3, and I was ok with that. Finn Wolfhard has been phoning it in since he started doing movies and I'm not sure anyone cared about him and 11 anymore. Season 4 might have been the best season since the first one, but at least season 5 didn't completely shit the bed. It was missing a lot of the slice of life "this is what the 80's were like" trappings of earlier seasons. Even if many of them were imaginary. Then again, it was basically the back half of season 4 which set it up. Slice of life had been well and left behind.
I also think it was trapped in development hell, and had been through so many damned rewrites, that they'd lost track of what they were even doing anymore. So a lot of the thematic and character threads seemed to have fallen between the cracks. Most of the distinct character dynamics seemed to have been lost besides the love triangle between Steve, Jonathan and Nancy. Everything is just subsumed into this group "Gosh aren't we all just swell friends?" vibe.
I guess at the end of the day, it didn't ruin the show for me, which is high praise these days.
The show has a common through-line where all the characters forget their development between seasons and they spend half the runtime just getting back to where their relationship should logically be. The only season that's exempt from this is S1, and it actually features all of the characters as it actively forces control out of the hands of the adult characters a lot of the time[1] (compare S5, where they're been reduced to stock characters that forgot all their development).
I get that some of that is due to bad luck- writer's strikes, the uncommon cold, etc.- and the fact that a lot of the dynamics rest on the cast not aging out, except they did. So "a delayed X may be good someday, but a bad X is bad forever" can't apply and "well, let's just get it over with" is how it goes down.
They should have all drowned in the Cum Room, to be honest. And given that we already got a "if you didn't understand whatever the fuck that dialog was, it's your problem I guess" from the writers...
Hold on, Mike was actually in Season 5? I mean, I guess it's no big deal, he's only the main love interest for two of the characters [2] so it's natural he'd be absent.
Also, I watched Fire and Ash over the same period of time and enjoyed the contrast between that and Stranger Things: in F&A, characters get punished for their stupid, unforced mistakes. Sully is an objectively bad leader (as are all leaders in the Blue Man Group- the RDA is most just busy jacking off in a corner for this one), there are serious consequences to this, and it was great.
I dropped it after that episode and am unwilling to watch the finale- if the show doesn't give a shit about its characters, why should I? The lack of shitposting about it on 4chan is notable and suggests a substantial jump in quality, but I've had enough and will just read the synopsis later. Though, that reminds me that I really need to catch up on both the movie and S2 of Made in Abyss.
[1] The fact that they knew to do this demonstrated that this was actually going to be a decent show that was going to use its characters properly- specifically the kid characters, who generally tend to be underdeveloped. I mean, even Will got a massive amount of development in the opening scene of S1 simply by going straight for the gun (and by being generally intelligent with the tools he had)- you'd expect him to get even better than that in the later seasons but he actively regressed until the final crybaby "i DoN'T lIkE gIrLs" (and accepting being cucked out of his role in the story by Joyce for half the season) state in S5.
And sure, S5 has some of this... but only when Holly and Derek (and to a point, Max) are involved. Hell, it'd have been funnier (and ironically, more mature) if Derek was secretly gay; "suck my fat one" indeed.
[2] Which is why I'm actually glad that ship is dead- Will age-regressed hard, and it would have been weird and creepy as a consequence (which is partially, in my opinion, why that emotional scene was doomed no matter what else they did). I guess being a bottom bitch (in the ending) is natural for what his character ultimately became, but what a fucking disappointment. The same thing's true of 11 but for different reasons; she only aged physically, not mentally.
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Anti-wokes are mostly just temporarily-embarassed wokes, what else is new?
What, hiding behind Muh Social Issue to excuse/justify bad writing? That wasn't really a widespread thing in the '80s [or at least, if it was, the media like this has been consigned to the dustbin where it belongs], so doing that in what bills itself as an '80s highlight reel is... going to cause some whiplash, to put it lightly.
That said, though, there are a few good stereotypically-'80s series that proceeded to get worse and more flanderized as time went on (I'm mostly thinking of the slasher movies here) into the point of unrecognizability, perhaps it is indeed period-accurate.
No, the justified reaction is that this plot point was fucking stupid, because...
...Will doesn't have any meaningful personal story or character growth. Not that there was much of that post-S1 anyway for any of the other S1 characters, but Will didn't even get an establishing character moment in S1 or S2 beyond "be the MacGuffin" (and the growth [or active de-growth, for that matter] he did get in S2 kind of erased what little he had in S1), and that's ignoring all the retcons.
So he's in the unenviable position of both being a perfect vehicle for Author's Pet Cause without really having earned any of it. But then, that's also a hallmark of modern culture too, so maybe that's actually period-accurate and I'm just complaining too much about it; now if you'll excuse me, I have some Doritos to eat.
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To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the trappings ARE the story.
Inserting elements such as gratuitous gay characters, black characters in medieval European settings, women who are stronger and smarter than every man around them, and all the other woke tropes demonstrates adherence to an ideology. It's fundamentally no different from the Soviet greengrocer who puts a sign in his window saying "workers of the world unite." It creates the illusion of consensus which then becomes reality since people who disagree with the ideology get the feeling that dissenters are rare.
*Czechoslovakian greengrocer
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I think it’s less a reaction to the anachronism of it, or wokeness generally, and more that the trope has just become so heavily overused that it’s just kind of an automatic eye-roll moment. Even for viewers who aren’t particularly conservative. We’ve basically been doing this once per show since Buffy the Vampire Slayer
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Stranger Things has been circling the drain for many seasons. It did its woke turn several seasons ago by making Robin a lesbian, which made Will's Big Gay Reveal anticlimactic. The best line in the finale is a repeat of young Will saying "I just want this to be over" shortly after the climax; he speaks for much of the audience, I suspect.
Keep in mind that the Duffer Brothers are younger than the characters they created; they are not Generation Xers; they're early millennials, born in 1984. This was not a story made out of nostalgia for a time period they remembered -- rather, only a time period they'd heard of. To the actual class of '89, Heather has Two Mommies was a joke; to the Duffer brothers, it was assigned reading. The show started out more as nostalgia for Spielberg movies rather than the time period itself.
I really think that only the first season was good. The second one had its moments, and everything after that was trash.
Yeah I only made it like halfway through Season 3.
Season 1 was a genuinely good piece of media but would have been completely fine as a miniseries/anthology. Continual stake escalation didn't really work for the vibe.
I keep telling people that but no one IRL agrees with me. Everyone is addicted to hearing "but what happened to characters after!!!" and few writers manage to write the stakes down or at least sideways in a sequel, the appeal of "recontextualizing" a perfectly good original as being only one part of an overarching, higher scale and higher stakes narrative is too strong.
What was nice about Stranger Things from the start was not the characters, it was setting and vibes, those could and should have been preserved and the characters ditched.
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