This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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?
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link