#damn the duffer brother for not giving them enough scenes together so i could make multiple parallels

[lokiprincess]

You love me at once, the way you did once upon a dream

[jupitermelichios]

Thoughts on Stranger Things 2

Spoilers below the cut. Warning that this is very much a critique. If you liked the show and don’t want to read about someone disliking it, this isn’t for you.

First thing, why is there a season 2? Season 1 ended on a good ‘happy ending with a sting in the tail’ note. It was a cliffhanger in the proud tradition of twilight zone episodes and portmanteau horror movies. It didn’t need resolving because leaving it open is what makes it a horror story.

Steve says that him and Nancy have spent ‘a stupid number of days’ working on their Halloween costumes. They don’t wear them to the Halloween party, or at any other time. Everyone else at the party has a costume. Were the wardrobe department on strike? Were their costumes just ‘people wearing normal clothes’?

Three love triangles. Three. In a nine-episode show about killing monsters, they somehow felt they needed three goddamn hereto love-triangles. No one even likes that fucking trope okay?! Either you have kill off one of the dudes or make them an asshole, or pull a full-on Stephanie Meyer and have one of them marry a baby! And I’m refusing to give them any points just for not having Dustin marry a baby.

What purpose does Max serve, exactly? Someone somewhere explain her existence in this show without using the words love triangle. She’s a cool character, I like her, but I like her isn’t justification for adding another character into a show which already struggled in season 1 to give enough airtime to the characters it has. Nothing about the show would change if she wasn’t there, except that I would like Mike Wheeler a whole lot more.

On that subject, why is Lucas in the show? I mean, I know why. He’s there to be the black one, but someone explain why Dustin, Will and Mike all had to be white? Lucas gets a storyline this season, but it’s basically entirely disposable and separate from the main story, and he didn’t even get that in the first season. I bet the Duffer Brothers thought they were hilarious when they wrote that line Lucas has about not wanting to be the token black ghostbuster, apparently completely obvious to the fact that they made him the token black demagorgen slayer.

Someone on the writing team thinks Charlie Heaton is super hot, and I’m deeply confused by this. I mean you do you, but there’s more than one line which suggests they think he is specifically conventionally attractive, which is just weird.

I came out of season 1 suspecting that the Duffer Brothers hate women. I came out of season 2 certain of it. There are no positive female relationships in this show. None. Barb and Nancy argue all the time about Nancy wanting to spend all her time with Steve, which would be okay as a minor plot point, but then you look around the show and realise that theirs is the most positive female relationship in this. Nancy’s relationship with her mother is strained, she seems to have no genuine female friends, El hates Max for no god-damned reason (more on that later), El’s aunt rats her out to the police, her sister is a murderer, and Joyce... never interacts with another woman outside of life-or-death situations. She has no friends, no relatives, she barely speaks to Nancy and gets maybe three seconds interaction with El. The male characters all have positive relationships with other men (even Hopper gets a warrior bonds between men moment with Bob). But apparently women can’t spend time together socially, because all that sexual jealousy gets in the way.

That sexual jealousy. I’ve seen so many posts on this site saying anyone who ships the kids is an evil pervert going straight to hell, apparently not noticing that the fucking film-makers are doing it. Have this season’s plot points can be resolved down to ‘two of the pre-teens want to fuck’. El is not only rude and dismissive to Max, she actually attacks her with her powers because she had a conversation with Mike. Not making out with him, not Mike choosing Max over her, having a barely civil conversation which was mainly about the fact that Mike irrationally hates Max for daring to be a girl. Mike interacting with another girl even just to tell them he hates them is too much for El’s female sexual jealousy what all women have towards other women to handle. That whole relationship just turned my stomach to be honest, it was like every toxic trope about women Hollywood has mashed together into two interactions. I would genuinely rather we had stuck to only having 3 female characters than have the Duffer Brother’s hatred of women shoved in my face like that. It was nearly enough to make me stop watching. If the show had been longer than 9 episodes, I probably would have done.

Oh and then there’s Mike. Mike’s reactions are probably pretty common among traumatised kids who lack a support network, but the thing is, this is TV, and the show isn’t about showing how trauma affects pre-teens. If it was, I would have no issues about Mike’s behaviour. But this is a show about kids nearly getting eaten by monsters, and in order for that to hold our attention for 9 hours, we need to care about the kids. Even if it might be unrealistic, we need to see the kids being nice, so we can build up an emotional attachment to them. Mike has one very brief scene with Will, where he’s offering support and comfort. But that’s it. Apart from that he’s a dick to his friends, he’s a monumental dick to Max, he’s a dick to Hopper... he’s pretty unrelentingly unlikeable for 9 hours, which had the result that by the end I honestly didn’t care if he died or not. I cared more about Bob, who might as well have been wearing a red shirt with the words ‘will die at the 2/3rds mark to show the monsters are dangerous’ written on it.

Hopper and El. The thing I was most excited for going into this was Hopper and El’s relationship. I’m a sucker for some gruff loner learns to love again parent-child bonding. It’s tropey and cheesey, and I love it. Except I didn’t get that. I got gruff loner takes out his frustrated masculinity on an emotionally vunerable child. I was genuinely concerned for El’s safety in more than one of her scenes with him. We’re supposed to think it’s all okay because he says sorry afterwards, but frankly? I didn’t believe him. I’m sure he was sorry, but I honestly did not believe he wasn’t going to do it again. I would much much have preferred El stay with her aunt, or her sister. But she has to be in Hawkins because the writers ship her and Mike, and that means a parent figure needs to be found. In Hopper’s defence, I will say that he’s not any worse than most of the other parents in this (except Joyce, who is an Almodavar style Madonna figure).

Freud would have a field-day with this show, he really would.

What character arcs does this seaon have? Nancy dumping Steve and deciding to fight back barely counts when it’s actually her returning to the character she was at the end of season one but for some reaon stopping being during the break. Will doesn’t get one, Joyce doesn’t get one, Jonathan doesn’t get one. Mike and Dustin don’t get one. Lucas and Max don’t get one. El doesn’t actually get one. She gets something that looks like a character arc from a distance but is actually her starting off wanting to help her friends, wandering around for a bit and then realising that yes, she still wants to help her friends. Hopper gets one I guess, if you count apologising for one specific fight a character arc. Steve is the only one who gets anything even approaching actual character developement. Everyone else stays exactly the same, with just their location changing to add interest. No one actually grows or changes.

Okay, putting the themes and characters aside for a moment, what is up with the pacing? Seriously. Nothing happens until episode 4, and then the last two episodes are basically wall to wall action. It wouldn’t matter much if this were being aired weekly, but this is Netflix and your show takes less than a day to watch. Most viewers are going to watch it in one sitting, and that means you have to think about the pacing of the whole, not just the individual episodes, and they didn’t at all. The ultimate finale was just a ridiculous nothing of an ending. The kids decide they’re going to burn the tunnels but just never get round to it. Seriously, they go into the upsidedown, wander around a bit, and come out. El and Hopper walk into the facility, shoot 3 or 4 monsters and close the portal no problem. Joyce is able to save Will from possession just by sitting him next to the fire for  bit. They rushed the ending so they could spendmore time filming 12 year olds kissing. And I don’t know about you guys, but I remember being 12 pretty clearly. I spent school discos doing stupid dances with my friends during upbeat songs, and sitting somewhere quiet and talking during the slow ones, and so did most of the other kids. Even the popular straight kids weren’t making out while they slow danced in public at until we were 14. This is approaching teenwolf levels of ‘why are the showrunners so into teenagers sex lives’ in places, though they do at least have the taste to cut away before Nancy takes any clothes off when she sleeps with Jonathn, which TW certainly wouldn’t have. 

Speaking of pacing, they were so desperate to get to their ‘and now the kids kiss’ moment that they totally forget they needed some kind of resolution to Mike’s relationship with Max. So our happy ending includes Mike hating and lashing out at Max any time she’s near him, meaning she can’t spend time with the only friends she has without being attacked. That was supposed to be where you put his character arc, assholes. You don’t get to set this stuff up, not resolve it, and then expect me to be happy with the ending! Max being emotionally at risk from Mike and physically at rick from El and her step-borther (and let’s be real here, step-father as well) is not a happy ending! This is what I mean when I say this season would be better without Max. Eveyrhing about the set up they gave her ruins the happy ending, and she didn’t contribute anything plotwise. She’s a good character, but the show is worse for having her in it.

The advice Kali gives El about ‘anger makes you stronger’. Every genre trope suggests that advice should turn out to be bad, and really it’s love for her friends that makes her stronger. But that’s the one goddamn trope they don’t use, and it’s the one which would have added something to the story. 

The ‘but will evil return’ final shot for this season just felt forced and cheap.”Ooo the upside-down is still there!” Yeah, we know. That’s not the point. The door was closed. The threat is over. Reminding us that the dimension is still there is meaningless, just cheap sequel bait.

Overall, there were enough moments and elements I enjoyed to keep coming back. I liked El’s relationship with her sister (even if it was just a whole bunch of toxic tropes). I liked Hopper and Joyce’s relationship. I liked Steve’s character arc, such as it was. I liked Max. I was interested to see how the various threats would resolve themselves. But considering what changed between season 1 and 2, if there’s a 3rd season I won’t be watching it. This is Hollywood tropes dressed up in Indie pretensions and pop-culture references in the hopes we won’t notice it’s the same toxic bullshit about how much women need a man that we’ve seen a million times before. Well sorry Duffer Brothers, but the fancy set dressing isn’t enough to hide the fact this show is predictable as hell in all the wrong ways.