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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. But unless you execute that perfectly, you actually damage the original. If you avoid scaling up, a lesser sequel does not damage the original, look at Back to the Future; part 3 is certainly lesser, but it can be ignored entirely if you want. It does not cheapen or weaken 1 and 2.
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.
Not just that, they're addicted to "BUT whut happ'n to the characters before?!" See the obsession with lore and prequels as well. I want a well-written self-contained story, which is anathema to Hollywood and many viewers, so it's another reason I've chosen to exit tv/movies/streaming/etc.
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