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PaperclipPerfector  18hr ago (text post)   676 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 22, 2026

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Finished the final season of Stranger Things this past week. I think I'm agreement with the general consensus that it was a step down from 4th season. The first two episodes were strong and had some cool ideas (a base in the upside-down, etc), but somewhere around the third episode they started to lose the plot and I decided I had to stop thinking too hard about things and just roll with it. That said, I loved the 40 minute "18 months later" epilogue that provided closure, more or less, for all our characters. Was this accomplished with transparent emotional manipulation backed up by an iconic soundtrack? Yes it was, what's your point? When the door to the Wheeler's basement closed for the last time and Bowie began playing over the end credits, I felt all the things I was supposed to feel. Judge me if you must.

But considering that Stranger Things started ten years ago, it occurred to me that we're due for the 90s nostalgia period pieces to start hitting any day now. So I started wondering, what would a 90s version of Stranger Things look like? By that, I mean a broadly sci-fi story that exploits the cultural memory of slightly-nerdy nineties kids the way Stranger Things exploits the cultural memory of slightly-nerdy 80s kids, building a plot around copious references to games, movies, common childhood experiences et cetera.

Off the top of my head, in no particular order:

a) Console/PC gaming and the internet were all coming into the mainstream in the nineties. I spent hours playing Civ 2 on the family computer.

b) I'm not a huge comic reader, but I do have the sense that comic books (as opposed to movies based on comics) were at peak popularity.

c)UFOs and government conspiracies were both pretty big, though I'm not necessarily sure they were or less popular fiction fodder than they were in the previous decade.

Vampire the masquerade was a big nerd thing at the time, especially in the artistic side. Anne Rice was still taken seriously too. Horror in general was a surprisingly big deal then compared to now.

Somebody introduced me to Warhammer for the first time in the 90s. Thank God I didn't take to it.

In the 90s, the nerd/punk overlap mirrored the nerd/metalhead overlap of the 80s. The live music scene was going through something of a golden age with the festivals starting back up in earnest (Lollapalooza, Lilith, HFStival, Woodstock 99).

Cell phones existed, but not everyone had them and they didn't work well. As I write this, how much of this 1980s nostalgia is a top-down consensus campaign by writers who just don't want to deal with how cell phones negate 90% of the easy ways to create danger and tension in a narrative?

how much of this 1980s nostalgia is a top-down consensus campaign by writers who just don't want to deal with how cell phones negate 90% of the easy ways to create danger and tension in a narrative?

If it means the shows have 80s music I really couldn't give a damn :)

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