#see also: season three's attempted billy hargrove heel-face turn and the extended riff on the lost boys they were apparently going for

[marypsue]

pls elaborate on the realizations you had re: stranger things, characterization choices, and scooby doo? Is it that all/both easily freaked out characters are stoners, which is a common belief abt shaggy? (even tho shaggy is only a stoner in the live action movies 😒 and not the cartoons 😒 i will die on this hill 😒😒) Or something else? I am very curious 👀

Oh it was just. They took away Jonathan's entire personality and replaced it with 'weed joke', which I hated, and gave him a terrible haircut, which I also hated. And I didn't get the point of it (other than apparently they are bored of the Byers and can't think of anything interesting to do with them, which. Pick me. I have ideas. My hand is raised).

But then they also gave Jonathan a best friend who apparently is scared shitless of supernatural shenanigans but will do just about anything for his friends and a Scooby Snack, a brightly-painted logo-adorned van that the crew spend a whole season driving around solving mysteries in, and a personality transplant that's just 'weed joke'. And they do so many shot-for-shot recreations and lift so many production design and plot elements from classic films and television. And like.

They're doing an extended riff on Shaggy and Scooby. I get it. I don't like it, I think it was poorly done and that any time you have to change who a character has already been established as to make them fit into the mold of the thing you're riffing on, it's bad storytelling. But I get it now.