"i feel bad for the duffers they worked on this so long and now everyone's shitting on them" i'm sorry for being old and jaded but can we actually be so fucking serious for a second?
they are not children being bullied for wearing a weird t-shirt. they are not misunderstood. they are not innocent. they are not underdogs. they are not cases of someone with no power or pull being treated with unwarranted harshness. these are not fanfiction writers doing this as a hobby who just happened to mischaracterize a couple characters in their one-shot wattpad fic. and as tempting as it might be because of netflix's controversial state of being, you can't blame netflix for it either, because they have repeatedly stated that netflix did absolutely nothing to censor or sway them in any particular direction and have been nothing but compliant and downright lenient with them.
i desperately need people to understand that these are real people. they're real life grown adult men who were put in a position of absolute power over their creation and used it this way. this was their choice. they did this on purpose.
they treated their cast in weird, sadistic, disgusting ways, all in the name of putting out a story whose message is so deeply antithetical to the core concept of the show that even people who don't think about the content they watch critically didn't have a good time watching it.
they mythologized a little girl whose entire story was about how badly she wanted to able to be a normal person and told her it was the most morally correct thing for her to die, after spending the entire show blatantly ripping away her autonomy. they forced us all to watch her agonize and grieve and mourn the fact her body has never once been hers. they made a meal of it every single time she was forced back into the position she hated. they stuck her in a relationship with a boy who never understood her, and continuously ripped her away from the people who could, and then tried to gaslight us that he was the only person she had. they have her father figure reduce her to a potential mother after she's never even been a child.
they brought back her sister, an indian woman who'd escaped abuse, to "right a wrong" and the wrong? that she got to live. that she got to define her life on her own terms. that she'd found people who loved her. that was the wrong they righted. they vilified her for her anger and then vilified her for her despair. she was both wrong to fight back and wrong to give up. they treated kali like she deserved to die. like she was always expendable.
and then jane's last act is rewritten by a white man with no character for himself, because everything he used to represent was stripped away by his complete and utter lack of a story. she's reduced to a mage, like always, and he gets to decide what happened to her. her entire life was people stealing her choice from her and then he does it again.
they don't care about erica. they don't care about lucas beyond his relationship with max.
they waited until the second the girls of the show were legal to start sexualizing them in unnecessary, out-of-character ways, including the girl whose entire story has deep-rooted allegory for CSA and grooming in it.
and speaking of csa and grooming, they repeatedly showed children being assaulted for the shock of it and nothing else. when they weren't doing one thing to will, they were doing another. he went from one horror to the next with no relief, and the arc they ultimately decided on? hey, it's okay that you're not loved! better luck next time!
the amount of disrespect every character other than dustin and steve get is crazy. i'm not even saying they wrote dustin or steve particularly well (as someone with immense steve harrington fatigue i literally couldn't) but they're the only characters who got a legitimate attempt at some sort of coherent resolution due to the fact i do genuinely believe the duffers love those characters above any other (excluding munson. talk about fatigue, ugh) so i'm being generous. they got what they wanted and they got a genuine emotional moment that made sense. this really can't be said for any other character.
by the end, hopper is a one-dimensional angry man caricature with an arc that's so rehashed they could've done 65 seasons and it'd still be ongoing. joyce is an overprotective mother who forgets her kid's birthday and age and also that she has more than one kid unless she needs a spare parent, and is satisfied to let her angry husband yell at her Extra Son.
nancy's hyperindependance and trust issues are solved by her... breaking up with her boyfriend aka further distancing herself? as if that was ever the problem? jonathan might as well not even be considered a person, he's just "the thing dragging nancy down" which they must've just pulled out of a hat. his eldest daughter treatment went all the way to the writer's room. they couldn't give less of a fuck about him.
robin's romantic arc was just to prove to will that romantic arcs exist, but that neither of them will ever truly get to benefit off that, because she was just a gay mentor there to teach him he's allowed to be gay, he's just not allowed to get what he wants. vickie was just a lesson. she fell in love off screen, bonded off screen, got together off screen, broke up off screen, for the benefit of a male character. typical other than that you don't usually see a woman's story be used to absolutely obliterate a man's story.
max is... girlfriend. lucas is... boyfriend.
erica isn't holly so we're not supposed to care about her. they will still try and make her seem like a heartless, cold, petty person, though.
holly is bland, not compelling, and just a very mediocre remix of her siblings who already had more interesting arcs that were botched, so we have no reason to expect that one season where she's aged up for no reason so she can be arbitrarily targeted FOR NO REASON is going to be NEAR enough for her to be a real character. and we have even less reason to trust the duffers would even land the plane if they did somehow give her a personality, which honestly, they really didn't. it was tell-don't-show the whole time because there. were. no. stakes.
the audience did not care about holly. the wheelers barely cared about holly. nothing in this entire season mattered.
all this to say, sympathy for the duffers is "cute" but it's stupid and it's a waste of emotion. these are adult men who wrote racist, misogynistic, homophobic, ableist material and put it out to their audience. they spent 400 million dollars to put this oobleck into the world. to put out these messages that not only refused to refute the things they said they would, but actively reinforce and perpetuate those exact ideals. and they got rich off it! they're living large with zero repurcussions.
and then there's the minor fact they failed as writers in every conceivable way. it was poorly written slop. boring, unoriginal, tasteless, unfinished, plot-hole infested slop.
and by the way, they talked a BIG game. these men are CONFIDENT. overconfident, smug, self-assured men who told everyone they were geniuses. they had that rick-and-morty copypasta level of arrogance. they said they were giving people hints. they said everything mattered, everything was wrapped up, everything meant something, and then half of the scenes meant nothing. they were just thrown in there so the duffers could act cultured about how many references they could throw in. "look at all the media i consumed. that'ss how you know i have a big smart brain." you know who else did that? the writers of the big bang theory! all you need to do is throw in a laugh track with every homage, copy, parallel or reference.
then when people started criticizing them they made excuses that they were sick and gave shitty explanations like "it happened off screen" what did? the intrigue? the part of the plot that makes sense?
they spent all that time hyping up how dark it was and it didn't even scare me, and i'm easily scared. this season had the most lackluster, uninteresting example of horror it's ever had. we all knew the horror part has been getting less impressive as seasons grew, but season five was beyond disappointing, especially with how they described it.
i have to genuinely wonder what the fuck went wrong with them, and i'm not just talking about as writers, but as people. did they have some sort of mid-life crisis? is it closer to arthur conan doyle or the simpsons' writers?
did they flanderize their characters beyond comprehension and lose sight of who they actually were because of an inability to change the status quo, or due to what the audience wanted? or did they genuinely start to loathe those characters and their impact? was stranger things their sherlock and the final season was his letter to john?
if you want to feel bad for someone, feel bad for the cast, who up until season five, were a part of something that they could actually have pride in, and now they're the faces of what happens when a writer turns against the story they're writing and starts rooting for the bad guy to win.
congratulations to vecna and nobody else.