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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?
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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