I am absolutely fascinated with the cultural response to this show…I’ve never seen it but I’m tempted to watch it for curiosity’s sake, though what I already know about it I don’t like very much.

There seems to be a lot of casual misogyny in the show (Eleven, Max, and Joyce mostly existing to be shipped). A few years ago I watched a Pop Culture Detective YouTube video about the trope where a boy/man stalks a girl/woman he likes until she caves. Apparently that trope is in Stranger Things, with a black boy stalking a white girl. So there’s a racist element to that, too.

Another thing I can’t stand in media is when it’s set in a certain era, yet doesn’t seem to say anything about that era. Why is Stranger Things set in the 80s? As best as I can tell, it’s because the directors are nostalgic for their childhoods. I feel like this show is also the prefect example of how nostalgia is often incidentally or explicitly a tool for fascism. Like, they have to put ~Cold War~ stuff in there and be relentlessly anti-communist. Why? Because the 80s were like that! And people are like “it’s just accurate to the time!” Maybe so, but why choose to include this specifically? There are also people using this excuse to be rather homophobic, claiming that gay people didn’t exist in the 80s, or weren’t as common. AIDs pandemic aside, this also proves how nostalgia is a tool for fascism. The general public has very warped views of what certain time periods were like, and it’s not totally due to ignorance on their part, it’s because an agenda has been pushed, typically by the far right. Also apparently the two gay characters in the show (one canon and the other heavily implied) were treated like garbage in the most recent season. So there’s that!

Eleven is the only character in the show who really interests me, since she seems cut from the same cloth as characters like Rei Ayanami, Anthy Himemiya, Crona Gorgon, etc. which I am an absolute sucker for (in case my pfp didn’t make it obvious). But I genuinely cannot do high school romance (with one exception…Revolutionary Girl Utena my beloved…and that show is less about romance and more about cycles of abuse and how these fairy tale ideas of romance perpetuate them), especially when the narrative makes it seem like the be-all-end-all. Like, isn’t Eleven a girl who escaped from a lab where she was being tortured and experimented on? I feel like with that premise there’s so much to explore with this character and yet they shoved her into a relationship and made that her main deal, as best as I can tell. Like, when I was in high school I had a massive crush on one of my closest friends but now that I’m several years out of high school I can’t believe that actually happened. It seems so, well, juvenile. Every few weeks I remember the whole ordeal and I’m like “was that real?” Lol.

Sorry for writing a novel…I guess I just needed a place to collect my thoughts about this show.