will, where are you?

R-I-G-H-T H-E-R-E

[wistfulenchantress]

"i feel like the stranger things fandom needs to learn that constructive criticism should be nicer. you liked the first four seasons. i don't understand why the hate is so passionate all of a sudden"

actually the ending invalidated all the rest of it. every single journey was ended in a way so terrible that the rest of the show is completely ruined because the trajectory was so wrong.

like, the show was good because of the idea that these characters had arcs. and then every arc ended nowhere near where it should have, and it ruined the rest of it. it wasn't just a bad ending, it was an ending that makes the rest of the show illogical, especially considering this is "how they always wanted it to end"

especially with the way they talked about el, their actual living breathing FMC who has her own wants and desires as a symbol for the magic of childhood and something that needed to die for the other characters to move on. this isn't just about bad writing, this is about revealing that you never cared about the message that we've all been taking from your work for years now.

[lostlenorahills]

when you loved a girl so much that when she died you literally forced her heart to start beating again but when she's finally conscious again your writers won't even let you properly celebrate that fact or acknowledge how her death changed you because you're not her boyfriend. so why would you get to feel that? the only things you're allowed to feel are torture and anything that revolves around a man. it's the most interesting thing about you. you're just a concept! you're childhood whimsy! you're something for men to project on and use to further their stories. you don't even have a story. what happened to you is whatever your shitty awful boyfriend decides happened to you.

[lostlenorahills]

im sorry but i cannotttttttttttt believe people are actually watching tales of 85 . figured it would happen eventually but wow y'all folded soooooo quick. i'm sorry but c o m e o n

[lostlenorahills]

"if you hate stranger things/the duffers so much why are you still talking about it??" i dont know maybe because i believe nothing good has ever been achieved by refusing to hold someone accountable for the shitty things they did???

maybe because i believe the duffers exist (albeit in a different class) in the same flawed society as the rest of us and so they were influenced to do things based on their flawed upbringing that encourages men to be misogynistic and all people to be racist?

maybe i just think it's appripriate to acknowledge that when they gained the recognition and success they currently have, their capacity to do bad things grew with their resources because now when they do something, they're not just doing something, they're sending a message as to what it's okay to do? and speaking out and saying it's not, in fact, harmless to do those things is how younger, impressionable people who look up to them learn?

maybe i think things matter. why we do them, what made us do them, what prevents people from doing them. maybe i think there's a purpose. judgement, analysis, figuring out what makes something tick and why.

if i am allowed to praise something (and to be clear, i WAS, we all were!) then i should be allowed to criticize it for its failures. if you ignore conformitygate for a second (because it's not technically canon at this moment in time) and take the finale at face value, there's a fundamental lack of respect for the story, the characters, the message, and the audience alike. i'm not going to pretend there isn't at the risk of sounding like i care too much about the thing i already admitted to caring about when i invested my time and love and money into it.

"you guys are too online, you're too invested, you're letting a piece of fiction affect you!" okay, there's an argument to be said about when attachment becomes unhealthy regardless of what it's to. personally, my day to day life is almost unchanged. but just for the record: the idea that you aren't allowed to let art sink in and change you is a confusing notion.

human brains have a lot of difficulty separating fiction from reality, even more heightened when someone is lonely.

you know who tends to be lonely nowadays? everybody, but especially people who feel ostracized from society because of their identity.

when stories are told they're told to make you feel something. characters exist as a gateway into that story. empathizing and connecting to someone who isn't real is just a very normal human experience. humanizing things that aren't human is a normal human experience.

yes, something going wrong in a story is to be expected, but something going wrong in a way that specifically forces you to confront some kind of larger bigotry is allowed to be frustrating. why wouldn't it be frustrating? if it's aggravating to run into a shitty comment somewhere random on facebook, why wouldn't it be annoying to see your favourite tv show put out a message that you find harmful?

i detached from ST when the finale came out, but every now and then, sure. yes, i do think about how poorly constructed mike and will's story ended up being (in the event that the finale is canon) and i do think about how horrific it is that torture sponge characters like jane and kali could be killed in such disrespectful ways while milquetoast GA favourites sailed by without a single consequence for their decisions because they're white men, and it does make me sad and annoyed and it makes me feel like i wasted time, money, and love on something that ultimately betrayed itself.

it can annoy you, fine, that's your right, but i'm not bad or irrational or dramatic or too attached for feeling that way and shaming people for processing their feelings doesn't make you better than them. idk, food for thought.

[f4therlesssss]

fool me once that’s not very nice why would you do that to me

[lostlenorahills]

the problem i sometime have is i have started to believe in conformitygate (i just find it too suspicious that the only time we aren't told how el's sensory deprivation chamber is set up and how the water gets in it is the one time that we need that explanation for the story to stay intact. hosegate existed because of the absurdly laden intentionality of those tub filling shots, and yet we see nothing now, in the alternate dimension where there is no water? that's weird enough for me, frankly, even without all the other evidence.)

but i also still very much want to complain about the ending as if i dont because i'm still mad . i dont think conformitygate happening is even going to make me less pissed. dont get me wrong, it will be cool. arguably one of the coolest moments in pop culture ever.

but i will still have had to spend all this time in a nebulous space of this being the ending. it still hijacked and ruined people's holidays. it still made me feel like an idiot for believing in their writing. i still had to see another dehumanized woman little girl kill herself for the sake of the world.

and sidenote: my biggest opp with conformitygate is i really hate anything where i have to look like a clown and lower my guard and give red flag men the benefit of the doubt. because regardless, they are out of touch egomaniacs and they treat their cast fucking weird.

conformitygate isn't really going to undo all of the weird racist choices they've made over the years (those are simply too deeply embedded into the ST universe to reverse last minute) and i'm not sure if it's possible for it to validate their obsession with showing simulated csa on screen this season either. i think i'm going to be watching with jaded eyes regardless. even if they give me everything i want and will and henry's connection is finally resolved, and mike wheeler comes out as gay, and byler kisses, and el is safe and happy and loved, rejoicing with max and kali, and then hopper gets a shock collar superglued on him so he can never yell at another woman or child ever again, i think i might still feel so exhausted about it.

and that does make me doubt to an extent, because why would you associate the ending of your show with such vitriol and disappointment? why would you make such a show of how groundbreaking your show is going to be and then willingly lead an angry mob to your doorstep?

and then i remember: absolute fucking egomaniacs. pulling this off would be impressive. it would solidify them as these geniuses playing 4D chess, who are so ahead of the curve they'd make any sacrifice if it made for a compelling story. and that would be too appealing to pass up, i think. especially since they've dropped so many clues telling us they know about false endings and they have stated netflix essentially gave them full freedom to do absolutely whatever they wanted.

tldr; i do believe conformitygate is real but i want to complain as if i dont 😂😂😂😂😂 is anyone else in the same boat or am i just insane

[princessamericachavez]

The concept of the Hawkins gang forever being a little unsettling to outsider’s eyes.

There’s the obvious, of course, the fact that they are dangerous people who handle tense situations with off putting ease.

One parent gets a little violent mid baseball game and Steve is there, steady, voice firm, shielding the teen referee with his own body and there’s something about it that makes the man back off. Only after the fact does he seem to realize that he’d grabbed a bat, casually, as if ready to swing it if necessary.

They send little naive intern Nancy Wheeler to cover a student protest and actual war reporters think she’s one of their own within seconds of seeing her on the field. There’s something haunted in her eyes and a firmness in her stand, the way she eyes the riot police’s weapons carefully… like she’s ready to take them.

Robin seems like all rainbow and sunshine’s upon first meeting her but the first time her new friends take her to the club the can’t help but notice how her demeanor changes under the flickering lights, how her eyes dart to the exits and her body tenses as if expecting a fight. They assume there just aren’t any gay clubs in Hawkins, that maybe she’s still on edge.

It’s the teacher that notice something off with Jonathan, because he mostly keeps to himself. But there’s something in his scripts, in the images he pitches, in how he portrays horror and violence and pain that makes them worry. It’s the way he doesn’t flinch away from it, actually, that he forces you to look. It’s not even cruelty but normalization. But then he’s the nicest to other quiet or shy students, and makes a point to ensure everyone is accounted for after a night out with his few friends. They don’t know what to make of it.

The kids aren’t exempt of this either.

Mike’s is almost a given, as a writer, the horrors he builds in his world attract thousands of readers, but his mentors squirm and wonder where sharpness of his descriptions come from. People have commented on how he can describe the exact smell of fear and spilled blood.

Lucas’s is more quiet, the steadiness of a foot soldier. He’s all smiles and warmth with his new group of friends until he sees someone being pushed around from the corner of his eyes and he’s stepping in, a firm hand on a shoulder, a steady shove against a wall, a whispered warning that doesn’t require repeating. There are no empty threats there.

There’s something more eery about Will and his new friends definitely notice the way he seems to know where everyone is at all times, how you just cannot sneak up on him, how his eyes go distant sometimes like he’s searching for something he can’t quite reach anymore.

It’s Dustin who catches people off guard more often, because his outgoing and easy demeanor stands out the most amongst his nerdier colleagues, but he’s warm and sunny and makes a point to make everyone feel welcome up until the moment a line is crossed. That line is simple and it’s kindness and the moment it’s lost there’s a fire in the kid that turns him into the protector of the shy ones around him. It takes watching him throw a single punch to know it isn’t his first brawl.

Max on the other hand has always been ‘a handful’ according to every adult in her life and if they thought a year and a half in a coma would smooth down her edges they were dead wrong. If nothing else, she seems more reckless, more forward, particularly in the skating world she gains the reputation of being a little too fearless, like she forgets sometimes that she can get hurt, that she’s not immortalized in someone’s dream.

No one would dare mess with the girl from the cabin at the edge of town. She’s quiet and reserved and sweet… she still manages to make friends at the local tavern and becomes an excellent teacher particularly for kids who are struggling with language and learning, but there’s a sharpness in her eyes, like she can peek into your soul, that makes grown men weary and older women whisper about shadow dreams and dark paths.

And then, and then, things happen when you put them together in a room.

Most people wouldn’t be able to put into words what it is about them that sets their primal instincts off, like they are suddenly in the presence of predators. Hunters. Something in the way they eye the exits, how they stands shoulder to shoulder, how all their heads snap as one towards any surprising noise in the dark, how they seem to communicate with a look, how they fall in line like a platoon. A pack.

If they weren’t so young, some might think they are veterans, old war buddies.

But they are so young, from a small sheltered town in Indiana. What war could they have fought?

[lostlenorahills]

i was writing another post that was longer and a general indictment of the duffers' writing but i decided this point shouldn't be shoved in between a bunch of other rambling

context: i was writing about the way the duffers give characters trauma but never do anything meaningful with that trauma.

discussion of (some of) the racism the sinclair siblings experienced from their own writers. eddie munson critical.

billy's attack on lucas is racially motivated. despite what the audience wants to believe, this is very obvious and nobody with even the littlest bit of media literacy could deny it in a believable way.

in that same season, he calls mike out for tokenizing him in a way that turned out to mean nothing for either of their characters (other than reiterating that lucas is very brave, though it isn't framed that way in the show) it was ignored when people thought it was foreshadowing, but now that season five's out, they just... made mike be like that. he didn't change, wasn't expected to change. authors don't make characters apologize for behavior they find no issue with.

there are generous hints about racism in lucas's season four story that are there to make you scared for lucas, but only to capitalize off of that discomfort for the sake of the horror genre. he's never allowed to have a voice and talk about them. in fact, eddie munson, someone who's supposed to be shepard to all freaks, actively sidelines lucas, chooses to view him as stupid and inane (remember: his revelations with steve and chrissy are only possible because he didn't have one with lucas! he needed steve and chrissy to teach him athletes aren't all horrible. hm.)

eddie talks about him behind his back and encourages his friends to ostracize him.

when he finally decides to apologize for this kind of behaviour, who does he apologize to? is it lucas, who's proven over and over that you can be both smart and nerdy and also athletic? nope!

of course not! it's steeeeeeeeveeeeee harrington!

not only does he get no apology from eddie or his friends, lucas is essentially ridiculed for wanting to find a way to lessen the burden of the racism he faces every day. this is a "wrong" thing for lucas to do, despite the fact it's the only time he gets to talk to another black person his age.

and despite the fact it's a pretty well-known fact in the brain-having world that the world is the least forgiving towards black women & girls, erica is reduced to just a vehicle to spit out one-liners. the other character with this purpose is murray, and even murray is given more to actually do.

(which, by the way, priah ferguson repeatedly said in the ST rewatch that she was uneasy about her dialogue because she did not enjoy saying these mean things and was constantly worried about hurting the actors' feelings. but this is the role they gave her.)

am i saying literally every black character has to be completely sanitized and polite at all moments? no. am i saying it's suspicious when the only black girl they let on screen for any amount of time is used for this purpose and nothing else? yeah, dude. it's a little weird. and if it's a hard road to navigate ("model minority" mindset and feeling the need to look a certain way to your peers) nowadays, imagine how hard it was in the 1980s.

i doubt they even knew why they wrote her this way, to be honest. i doubt they thought about her characterization much at all. typically when characters are made out to be insulting, there's some kind of vulnerability to be found there as to the reason.

i could see a world where a character like erica is, say, frustrated at being smarter than all of her peers but being constantly talked down to anyway, so she makes sure that people who talk to her know she won't be treated like that.

but they'd never do that because that would involve her having a personhood, and "erica's tough, nobody's worried about her!" blah blah blah.

also, i know it didn't end up canon, but here's what lucas was described like in montauk.

Lucas Conley, twelve, is Mike's best friend. He lives only a few houses away. He is scrawny, short, loudmouthed. Initially a source of comic relief, his character will darken and deepen over the course of the series. His wealthy parents are in the midst of costly divorce; vitriolic arguments are a daily occurrence. As a result, he will grow angry, and destructive. His attitude will land his friends in danger more than once and put his friendship with Mike to the test.

for the record, he's the only one of the boys who's described using any of these words: loudmouthed, comic relief, angry, destructive, attitude.

key words for the rest of the boys:

dustin: geek, overweight, bullied, supportive parents, bickers with lucas, interests,

mike: cute, bullying, insecurity, escapes, description of interests, gETs tO KiSs a gIRL

will: sweet, sensitive, sexual identity issues, not normal, innocent, bullying, escapes, uninhibited, abandoned, descriptions of interests

the other boys get descriptions of their interests and their personality (and no, comic relief is not a personality) lucas gets to "land his friends in danger"

sometimes even the decisions you don't make say something.

[flickergatedaughter]

oh my god. he was her only boyfriend. jane never got to experience true romance and romantic love outside of mike wheeler. a closeted gay boy in love with someone else.

she got so excited seeing that pic of ralph machio because she had a crush on someone for the first time. did she ever go on a date with mike, besides secretly making out all day everyday in her room? did anyone ever buy her chocolates? what were her favourite kind of candy? did anyone ever make her a mixtape? what kind of music did she like? did she ever get to go to the cinema? what the hell was her favourite movie?

we know she missed hawkins' spring flowers, but what were her favourite flowers? roses? lilacs? lillies? was the second bouquet of flowers she ever got, at her funeral? what kind of flowers did everyone buy for her funeral, when they realise they never asked?

[lostlenorahills]

pro tip: don't ever think about terry ives who had her sweet perfect baby girl jane stolen away from her and did literally everything in her power to save her from the life they wanted for her because no matter the cost she had to save her from him and she was so close, she found her, but they caught her and they took her mind away from her and left her trapped in a collage of the very worst time in her life, the sequence leading up to the end of her life as she knew it, and then after years and years she finally gets to see her again.

but only for a moment. for one tiny little moment of jane's life, she got to be her mother again. yes, she wasn't entirely all there at the time, but even despite the fact there's only enough of her mind left to replay her trauma she still reaches out and communicates and tells her what she needs to know in order for her to find what she actually needs: family, answers, and above all, another woman who will actually understand her and who'll want the best for her. and she does.

and then after they have everything possible taken away from them, every single essence of their personhood and all their autonomy, they both die in the godforsaken pit that brenner made for them, misrepresented not just to the characters but the audience itself, the core of who jane is stripped away for the sake of a male character's cgi tears because apparently the only thing sadder than a young girl's suicide is a young girl denied an unfulfilling romance.

terry will just keep sitting in that chair playing it over and over again, and her sister will keep watching her. do you think deep down on whatever level she's conscious, terry knows her daughter is gone? does she know brenner won? or is she still, just a little bit, some part of her, waiting for jane to walk back through that door?

but hey, she was just the personification of childhood! she didn't matter!

[bylerworld]

i can't believe vecna had the ability to know both el and will loved mike and therefore could weaken them by attacking him and then decided to take holly instead like talk about a stupid ass villain who put this boring guy in charge

[lostlenorahills]

"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.

[lostlenorahills]

it honestly shows such a fundamental misunderstanding of their own character that the duffers even THOUGHT jonathan saving steve would be shocking to any extent. it borders on bastardization. it's blatantly written with this general-audience filter and i hate it.

rant below. note: anti-steve harrington, anti-duffers

firstly, to anyone paying attention, they'd already proven themselves to be more interested in surface-level "badass edit" moments than actually ever doing something that could genuinely endanger any of the characters they'd personally attached themselves to.

they couldn't even commit themselves to killing off ted fucking wheeler, the least consequential character in the show. they couldn't even kill off murray, whose purpose is just to never shut up with the one liners he thinks are snappy and sassy but really just come off as vapid and repetitive, despite how little that would have mattered in the grand scheme of things. their response to accusations of a bloated cast was to add twelve kids, dr. kay, and a bunch of military men that all joined together to make a truly underwhelming, uninteresting, clunky swerve into madness.

it's pointless. no character is that attachment more evident than steve harrington, who essentially only exists to be a ditzy audience-stand in and a perpetual sidekick. he has had no real trauma in his life, especially comparatively to the rest of the characters. his depth is surface-level and it's long since peaked. they got so enamoured with seeing him as a perfect, lovable doofus they ran out of successful arcs to give him, and there have consistently been no genuine stakes since the duffers refuse to do more than kick him around a little.

somehow, despite being the least sympathetic character in terms of what he's ACTUALLY been through canonically, he's garnered the most audience sympathy and has been rewarded the thickest plot armor as a result. he's a head-trauma magnet who never has to deal with anything that comes along with head trauma. nothing happens to have consequences, it only happens so the duffers can pretend they risked something.

and more importantly, prior to the jizz cave breakup, jonathan might make the occasional petty comment here and there, but a) wouldn't you, when you see that steve harrington gets to be handed everything on a silver platter, act like an asshole, and then all he has to do is change up a little bit and everyone's willing to give him even more? jonathan doesn't get the leeway of that "he was bad, and then he changed!" because he was already "good" (and by good i mean that he does not harm others, only himself)

he and will are cut from the same cloth, so most of the things you could say about will you could say about jonathan. he's a poor, parentified, traumatized abuse survivor. he's giving, he's self-sacrificing, he's caring, he's compassionate, he's 10x the ally formerly-homophobic-bully steve is and was laying the groundwork for will's self-acceptance since season one

he was already starting from the moral ground that steve gets praised for reaching /eventually/ and if the duffers couldn't even handle golden boy steve after that point, what hope did the perpetually-forgotten jonathan have? they show no care for his character in his breakup, he's ignored by his mother, he barely talks to his brother, nothing he does is for him, his arc is never realized but it's treated as complete.

i think part of it is that the duffers do not know how to handle a character who harms inwardly without ignoring or torturing them. if a character is the type to lash out, hurt others, they get to write how other characters react to them, how they're hurt, why they did it, if they apologize or don't. the duffers aren't interested in exploring those same avenues with characters who, even in their hardest times, refuse to hurt other people. for them to even consider paying attention to a character, they have to be willing to hurt someone or something else. to them, that's all that story is.

all that to say he's not the kind of character who would let someone fall to their death regardless of his own feelings about them, and we have no reason to believe he would.

for them to think jonathan would even consider it, they'd have to believe a) jonathan on some level attributes the breakup to steve and b) he's petty enough to let him die for it. the idea of them writing jonathan and not even understanding that he would literally never do that drives me crazy. there's no evolution there.

jonathan gets no credit for being as good as he is and it's so infuriating. they had so many potential avenues for jonathan to be fleshed out but he's never actually shown to be resentful of all he's given up or all steve's been given. he's just sad in a way that stays forever unresolved because the duffers can't muster up the care to actually tie up any of the loose threads dangling off him.

but whatever! i'm cool! not bothered at all!

[lostlenorahills]

ok so i haven't been on tumblr in a minute and i haven't seen the finale outside of a few gifs but is there actually just. water in the upside down now?

if this was explained in the episode then sorry, i can only make out what i've explicitly seen giffed and i haven't seen any preparing the tank gifs. but i'm pretty sure almost every other time el's deprivation tank is prepared we get this very specific lengthy scene of it or explicit information about it being prepared beforehand, or at least i can't personally remember a time when it wasn't, so if they didn't that's super sus. i mean that was the entire inspiration of hosegate wasn't it? noticing how particular the shots were because it was so unnecessarily specific.

or did the military set it up? why would they just have one on standby? sorry i just cannot bring myself to watch even a second of the finale to answer these questions. i am WEAK

[bitofanupsidedowner]

ATTENTION BYLERS: exclusive stranger things leak! spoiler ahead!

EPILOGUE BOYFRIEND REVEALED

notice he is wearing a KEY NECKLACE. it is very subtle so you might have to squint!

[ontheswingset]

the fact that will was like “you can’t compare me to a wizard haha this is real life :D” and mike was straight up, without hesitation, like “yeah, you’re right. not that you’re not magic, i’m just not being lore accurate. you’re actually a sorcerer, my bad. you were born magic” just casually like that. i can’t get over the fact that we have this conversation in canon.

[lostlenorahills]

i love a passionate kiss i love an intense kiss i love a steamy kiss i love a this-might-be-my-only-chance kiss but what if when mike finally kisses will it's calm and gentle and we get to see his relief. what if we get to see everything finally make sense for him. what if we get to see him realize it's ok to want this. what if it looks like peace. what if it's the most easy natural thing in the world. inevitable.