#just trying to not think about this stupid show during some enriching recreational reading

[toseesoclearly]

Do you know where your children are?: '80s moral panics, DnD, and "think of the children"

(cw for suicide and homophobia)

I was doing some completely unrelated-to-ST reading of Lyta Gold’s Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality (a really good book looking at the current wave of book bans and cultural anxieties about fiction and especially fiction’s impact on young people in their larger histories, recommend it completely outside this particular nugget it contained). The book happened to contain some info about how DnD got folded into the ‘80s Satanic Panic that I didn’t know:

“Before…the 1990s, the moral panic du jour centered around tabletop role-playing games, especially Dungeons and Dragons. These games allowed for imaginative play that lay outside the usual boundaries of 'reader’ and 'writer’: they let stories unfold that, by definition, couldn’t be read or monitored by parents in advance. Within the rules of the game, kids could invent anything they liked: they could experiment with identity, playing as characters whose gender didn’t match their own; they could fantasize about the strength and power they lacked in real life. The anxiety about fantasy role-playing games spiked right around the troubled turn of the 1980s, and was quickly folded into the larger 'Satanic Panic’ of the era. Many Christian parents were concerned that art that made reference to the demonic–such as heavy metal music, children’s fantasy novels, or Dungeons and Dragons–might be literally demonic, and that spells cast inside the realm of the game could actually raise hell in real life. But concerns about the immersive power of Dungeons and Dragons and other fantasy games began elsewhere, outside the specific frame of Christianity and demonic entities; the nerve it touched was nationwide. The whole country was gripped in the late 1980s by 'stranger danger’: a fear, like something out of a fairy tale, that children might get lost, or stolen away.

In one notable 1979 case, a student at Michigan State University vanished into thin air. James Dallas Egbert III, a sixteen-year-old prodigy, was brilliant, socially awkward, and struggling. According to most accounts, he snuck into the university steam tunnels to commit suicide; when the attempt failed, he hid out at a friend’s place while the frantic search for him continued. His family brought in a private investigator named William Dear, who decided that the true culprit must be Dungeons and Dragons…Dear claimed the teenager had been playing a live-action version of the game in the steam tunnels…Egbert in fact resurfaced a month later, in Louisiana, but the urban legend lingered…”

According to Dear’s account, Egbert was struggling with coming to terms with his sexual identity, social issues on campus due to his age, drug addiction, and extreme parental pressure to excel in school. And while he was found in 1979, he ultimately died of suicide not too long later, in 1980. 

Interestingly, DnD might have taken hold in the dominant narrative of the case because it was the only detail that Dear was willing to share with the press while his investigation was ongoing. He kept mum on Egbert's involvement with the gay community at MSU and his struggles with substance abuse because he didn't want to alienate potential sources or allies.

Obviously the tunnels here evoke some ST imagery, but I’m hesitant to draw too many direct parallels between Will and Egbert. His story was ultimately very sad - and, because of how sensationalized it was at the time, it remains hard to know what was true.

Plus, if this specific case was consciously on the Duffers’ minds, it seems likely Mazes and Monsters, the 1982 made-for-TV movie roughly based on the case (though very fictionalized), would have been on the ST4 Video Store Friday whiteboard. ST4 is thee Satanic Panic season, after all, and Mazes and Monsters is an extremely weird cultural curio as both full-on anti-DnD propaganda aired on broadcast television and a very early Tom Hanks’ on-screen credit. 

But I think that’s beside the point - I’m not bringing this up to look for possible hints about what’s coming for Will or any other character specifically in ST5, but to point out how baked-in Will’s specific “outsiderness” is to the show’s entire thematic arc about the ‘80s United States. What’s interesting to me is how this shows how interrelated that era’s anxieties over kids and their “safety” was with homophobia. Even in this instance, when it looked on the surface to be about nerd stuff.

From Gold again: 

“[Anti-DnD] organizations claimed that role-playing games were satanic partly because they needed an external reason…for the unhappiness and anxiety that they saw in young people growing up in the 1980s. They needed to believe that their children’s anxiety and discomfort–especially discomfort with repressive sex norms and the pressures of capitalist competition–could only be the rest of an evil force that came from the outside.”

More than any other character in Stranger Things, Will is our stand-in for the kid that middle class Reaganite parents are afraid their own children could become: he is being raised by a single working class mother, is “sensitive” and has unfamiliar, nerdy interests, and does a tidy speed run of the imagined dangers they think are coming for their kids (sudden random disappearance, "satanic" possession, gay thoughts). (/j on including that last one there. couldn’t resist.)

This is why the Duffers believe Will’s ST5 “emotional arc” is what will “tie the whole series together.” His self acceptance is the ultimate rejection of the idea that these things make him wrong - and therefore the ultimate rejection of the “forced conformity” of the ‘80s which, as we know, is what's truly killing the kids.