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elizabethrobertajones · 2 years

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I would love to hear your thoughts on [Unidentified Media]! We can all try to be grownups and survive disagreeing with a person on the Internet if that's what happens

Okay but I really hope you don't care deeply about this to the point of offence, I really don't want to upset anyone, and people really care a lot and I get it!

It's just that, I was requested to watch the latest Stranger Things by my very non-fandom normcore friend and I'd fallen behind since I forgot the netflix password on my laptop, so I saw all the spoilers before external social pressure got to me and got me to make the effort to watch it on the TV.

I just feel like I watched an entirely different show from everyone who'd got really invested in the first half of the season and then got completely crushed by the second half. First of all, no one spoiled ANY of the main story to me. I was more spoiled on the main story by fukkin BBC Newscast interviewing Kate Bush about the belated hit single, than anything I saw on tumblr.

And I casual fan watched this thing with the expectation I needed to be able to talk to my friend about it more than Tumblr, and you'd all be a side benefit where I could get the fandom goods and slyly ship that new ship on the side and it would just be a nice little thing between us who see subtext since my friend has no shipping instinct at all and the most important detail I had to get right was recognising Friendly Orderly (thanks IMDB) as Jace from the Shadow and Bone movie she took me to a few years back.

Anyway I ended up BAWLING over Max and adoring that storyline which absolutely fucking carried the show, and Eleven and her story which was actually riveting and I could see this was something they'd seeded from the start OR had gone back very carefully to explain plotholes/mysteries they'd flagged up from the first season or two. And the whole thing that everyone else was doing was so thematically tight to that.

I did think the WHOLE Russia plot was entirely stupid and fanservice for the Hopper actor guy to watch back later as the core audience and no one else, and the whole thing would have been a normal length if they'd just REMOVED it whole cloth and got the adults out the way another way. Like, the previous season would have been excellent if the russian thing was waaaaay lower scale and borderline imagined/threadbare single rogue actors concluded in a single season, and the American government was jumping at shadows, the kids legit were always a second away from seeming like they'd conjured the whole thing as a prank and there never HAD been russians in Hawkins, and Russia as a whole remained oblivious to this, like, they didn't order it nor did they actually ever have anything to do with it. IDK maybe the russians were operatives trapped in America and trying to get home by a portal if you HAD to send Hopper there. But frankly you shouldn't. But regardless, once they actually got to the finale movie of the damn thing, it was thematically tight and made sense to the story they were telling even if it was entirely stupid and pointless and also grounded in silly tropes, apparently has caused real world harm with the concentration camp appropriating (??? aargh??!?!?!). But like, that's legitimately my only complaint with the entire season/show storywise, taken at face value and just for my enjoyment/quick impressions of what is a good story.

So, to get to the actual point, fandom has completely and utterly made up the Steddie ship because there's legitimately nothing but a few seconds of actor chemistry, like, the 4 gifsets I saw beforehand are IT. Like maybe 3 shippable exchanges of actual dialogue interspersed through 9 MOVIE LENGTH EPISODES, and I don't even think Steve was putting out the vibes that hard. He was genuinely playing as in love with Nancy and permanently distracted by Nancy even when talking to Eddie. The looking at his lips gifset where Eddie looks moments from snogging Steve would be woefully onesided because that's literally the conversation where Eddie confronts him to tell him he's still in love with Nancy and Nancy leaped into the Upside Down after him in a heartbeat.

I loved Eddie. INcredible character. 10/10 would buy again. He and Friendly Orderly were both great characters with minimal IMDB histories who I cannot wait to hopefully be cast in a ton of stuff to continue their careers post-ST and for us to adore.

But that post about how Stranger Things is written as if being a nerd is the greatest oppression one can face? Literally true. Will crying in the car after assuring Mike that his nerdiness will not stop El loving him is THEE pinnacle of this ridiculousness but you have to understand, they Empire Strikes Back'd the whole story, Which means every single plotline they harped on in this first "half" is now set up for the second. I literally can't comment on how grossly they treated Will because while it seems vile so far in a meta sense that's not where they're leaving it, and Jonathan's reassurance to him and genuinely careful writing to make it clear this was all textual stuff and NOT the actors being goofy and putting gay subtext in means that Will is subtextually gay in an INTENTIONAL way. He's been written like this because they are acknowledging his sexuality, making his story about it until he gets back to Hawkins, and very clearly setting up that he's in absolute shambles, personally, in a way that HAS to be addressed later. Him crying like that was his horrible cliffhanger to be resolved that's just as horrible as Max in the hospital: that NEEDS to be fixed but the writing has put him here, not anything the actor did for funsies.

Meanwhile the sound editing on Eddie parading around the lunchroom was ATROCIOUS and I am 100% without reading a single interview or whatever that this is because the actor voluntarily leaped off the table and wandered out of the range of microphones etc and fucked up their sound set up by treating all the cafeteria as a stage, and it was so hecking cool they kept it in and just boosted the sound in a really weird way that made it all muffled and frontloaded in a way that my TV speakers hated. I could see the improv dripping off this lad. So I don't trust a single thing fandom is saying about ANYTHING he does as intentional writing because there's like 3 things per scene he's in that I feel were actually in the script because they're on message to the themes and the rest is all adorable actor bullshit.

What I can see is a character who they wrote as The Alpha Nerd, the Baddest Badass in this very persecuted subgenre, the man who makes it all worthwhile to be a nerd, the pinnacle of the mountain that these dweeby kids might climb. An accumulation of all that makes the younger ones cool all crammed into a single character. Mike's Heart, Dustin's funniness, Will's creativity, like even sass for sass with Lucas's sister??? Metal is the Nerd Music and you know he's in it for the Lord of the Rings references. And he's KIND to these little uns, even when it seems almost overbearing in the cafeteria scene he doesn't make it about bullying them he still manages to be aggressive but turn it around to a positive conclusion so they're not "in trouble" or ostracised for asking for a replacement for Lucas.

In short, I don't think he was actually meant to have as much characterisation as was brought to the role, and so him being written as an aspirational character makes him like. The Gandalf of D&D, and the rest of them the awed Frodo he's mentoring and setting them off on their journey, to a new level of pure geekdom, the untoxic pinnacle of what this personality trait might be, the unbeatable nerd who can't be bullied, who rises above it, who, of course. In the end will be SO cool that his outro is the bassest badass thing a nerd ever did see.

He was DESIGNED for his one true memorial to be a painting airbrushed on the side of a van showing his final concert, a la wizards on vans. That's his vibe, a living breathing Too Metal To Exist painting from the side of a van you smoke weed in.

It's just wildly unfortunate that he was so good at the role everyone adores him, and is always shipping around for ships they like, and he interacted with Steve twice while Steve was in a relationship quandry since his one true love is technically dating someone else still, leaving him single and open to interpretation (ish). Throw in the bananas good chemistry Steve and Robin have on screen and you get so much more character room to flesh him out so of course he is one of the better characters. And fandoms love shipping the two white boys who look at each other once.

I feel genuinely bad that people feel queerbaited and angry at the end of the season, but I think all the characters they feel were slighted (except Eddie) are being set up for a part 2 which lifts them up, while for example Max was an absolute MVP of the season but it looks like she may be getting a rest now for carrying the story after her FANTASTIC work in this half, so now we can maybe explore Will's story some more, for example, because he got so much less. El's the only one who really needs to be super character explored every season and they consistently do that because, well, she's the mainest plot character and fascinating. But this slanting towards one or the other character while leaving out others has helped lift up a sense that it shit all over certain characters, and Eddie counted as a main enough character to even be included in that group.

He never was, he just was a convincing side character who was adorable and badass so of course people want more of him. But it's not like something happened to make the writers just randomly decide to kill him after the first few episodes aired and they didn't put in a ton of queercoding and they didn't write parallels with him that would seriously mean that he was in contention as a love interest - his only major relationship was with Mike and Dustin and since Mike wasn't there, Dustin carried the end of his story alone (and it was lovely, and, again, made me cry but not bitter tears of resentment, just good tears of sad catharsis and loss of a nice character and grief well-written in the aftermath). If anything they said LOOKED like it was a parallel for love interest stuff, it was to boost our understanding of the main characters and to help us relate back to Eddie in turn by shorthand relating him to the ones we were already invested in (though again, so charismatic these are lines the writers only hypothetically needed if he'd been flatly acted XD)

Anyway as you can tell I think he's amazing, I just can't interact with a single post about him because every single one i've seen has severe poisoning with fandom anger, shock, queerbait allegations, intense Steddie shipping and denial and bringing him back to life etc, all of which are valid normal fandom things for any character, except the overnight aspect Netflix gives us and the ENORMOUS vitriol and also everyone's past fandom baggage like, literally overnight made a blorbo who's floating in a cesspool of stuff I don't agree with and don't want to interact with because I fundamentally don't see it that way and there's no dang normal content about him being cute and funny in an environment where he's not fandom's latest martyr on the My Gay Blorbo Deserved Better And You Murdered Him For Being Gay, JUST LOOK AT HOW THEY TREATED WILL, YOU ASSHOLES.

So, um. Having a normal one over here enjoying a show on the surface level while skeptical and not particularly wowed by the writers' deeper messages beyond "friendship good, family good, love good, everyone happy and successful when love and friend and family" which is, the basicest take ever but also guaranteed to make me cry if done with true authentic belief (and it was) but also in no way inspiring to make me go any deeper on fandoming given the weird worldview exposed by psychoanalysing literally anything that a male character who seems to represent an aspect of the writers does that is not clearly actor improv, and yet also having free access to Deep Fandom due to my entire dash posting this stuff :'D

#stranger things #long post for ts #wank cw #sorry fandom I am just not here on this one #also I mean re: the final point about love they sure hit an ableist trope about neurodivergence #I don't know nearly enough to comment on I've just seen others better placed dto discuss such things #talking about other villains in other media that I recognised the trope #but yeah villain motivation baaad D:#these tags are nothing to do with anything I discuss under the cut I just always have 1 more thing XD

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