#trs3

[simsanctuary]

⋯ as the sun came up, the twins booked it back to base camp before the family woke up!

[serendipitous-magic]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

The Party pulls on their backpacks, checks to make sure each person has a weapon.

“El said he was in a public restroom with a blue door. That’s gotta be the pool.”

Will takes Chester out, leaves him some water and cold chicken from the Wheelers’ fridge, and tells him to be good. Lucas secures a bandana around his head. Dustin paints a stripe of sunscreen down his nose. El ties her hair back.

“Hold up,” Lucas interjects, a lightbulb going off above his head. “Isn’t there a sauna at the pool? Hey - that’s my backpack. Hey, that’s my backpack!”

“You think we can get the Mind Flayer out of him? Like Will?”

“Switch with me.”

“No!”

“We have to try.”

“If we’re gonna do this, we have to move fast. If I was the Mind Flayer, I’d want my army near the thing that’s gonna let him into our dimension. He might already be at the mall. Ow! Don’t push!”  

“Gimme my backpack back -”

“Just take the pink one!”

“You take it!”

“El?”

“He’s still there... I think. It’s... hard to tell, I can’t... It’s like his signal is... bad. I can’t lock on.”

“Max, do you want the pink -?”

“No.”

-_-_-_-

I’m not gonna do the enormous tag list this time, sorry, I feel like if I can manage weekly updates it might get obnoxious. Maybe every other? IDK. Anyway, two weeks in a row! Look at me go.

[serendipitous-magic]

So question. You've said that if Byeler happened in S3, but everything else was the same, you still would have been extremely disappointed. If that had happened, would you have written RS3? Basically, is the lack of Byeler the tipping point

Yes, abso-fucking-lutely. 

First of all, did you see what they did with jopper, and how they made that ESTABLISHED STRAIGHT SHIP toxic and uncomfortable and gross and awful and bland? So, if S3 had made byeler happen, I shudder to think how grossly they would have handled it. 

Second of all, let’s say they actually did an okay job on byeler but everything else about S3 was the same. That means we still have the flat caricatures masquerading as the canon characters, the story themes that got completely flipped on their head (oh, you thought ST was about questioning the government? SURPRISE BITCH, NOW IT’S ALL ABOUT HOW FUCKING GREAT MURICA IS, WHOOOOOOO!!!!!!), the abominable writing, the shallow action-driven plot where none of the characters learned or grew from last season, the loose threads of S2 that never got addressed or resolved, the motherfucking Russians for no reason, the Mind Flayer being stripped of all actual menace and turned into a stupid brainless flesh-monster gross-out FOR NO REASON, the disgusting karen/b*lly thing, the whole thing with the boys going to the mall to help Mike buy El a present to make her forgive him, because you know, clearly that’s a great message! Girls are shallow, just buy them something if they’re mad at you and they’ll forgive you! BARF!

So, yeah, even if they had SOMEHOW managed to do byeler okay in S3, I would still be rewriting the season. And honestly, I think that if they had attempted to do byeler in S3, they wouldn’t have done it well at all. They would have butchered it. I mean, look what they did with nearly all the other ships.

[serendipitous-magic]

I was wondering if you’re still working on your Stranger Things fanfictions? I really enjoy them, no pressure just wondering. I hope you’re having a lovely day :)

Weeeelllllll... 

A lot of them aren’t *actively* being worked on. I have plenty of plans for continuing (looooots of notes that are just waiting in documents) but my time has been mostly taken up by life and work stuff and other types of projects. I will say that I do intend to finish Roll for Strength, and eventually I will go back and finish The Real Season 3. I’ll probably do more with the vampire fic too because that was fun.

It’s just gonna be... slow 😬

So, TL;DR: I intend on finishing my WIP fanfics... at some point. It’s just, by the time I finish them, everyone who was reading them will have probably moved on to other fandoms, lol.

[serendipitous-magic]

...

Okay. I’m gonna say this. Even though I know I’m gonna jinx myself by saying it.

I am going to finish the entirety of The Real Season Three by the end of this summer

(If anyone is still interested in that story)

[serendipitous-magic]

The hype and theories around the first st3 trailer > st3

TRUTH.

Honestly I owe like 75% of the plot of The Real Season 3 to what we all THOUGHT S3 was going to be like, based on the trailers.

[serendipitous-magic]

Gonna update The Real Season 3 tonight on a whim after writing all day lmao

[serendipitous-magic]

I didn't think ST Season 3 was that bad until I read The Real Season 3 and now it's absolutely replacing the Netflix version in my head. People actually LEARNING from the shit they went through the past two times and WORKING TOGETHER? That's a concept clearly lost on Netflix

There was... a lot wrong with what they did to S3, in my humble opinion. Not even necessarily from a fan POV, but from a storytelling POV. The characterization was flat, overblown, over the top, and abominable. The characters were not only completely unrecognizable, but paper-thin caricatures, all of them reduced down to a handful of exaggerated traits (Joyce basically became “yelling lady,” Hop became “bumbling barbaric DadBod Cop who says things like “i’m the chief of police, I can do whatever I want,” which like??? Those aren’t even original traits of his character??? They didn’t even reduce him down to a handful of his original traits, they literally just changed his entire??? Character???? What the fuck?? What the fuck????)

Not to mention the plot. Structurally, it was awful. It was action-driven, with too many villains (that didn’t make sense or have any thematic weight), it didn’t carry on the same themes, tones, or even many of the same plot points from previous seasons. An 18 year old in a Screenwriting For TV 101 class could have put together a better season. It’s like the writers were like “you know what we’ll do? We’ll just crowdsource. We’ll just give the loudest fans everything they want.” And they did. The majority of the ST fanbase FUCKING LOVED mileven in S2? They made S3 all about mileven, to the point that the relationship devolved into toxicity and became flat, forced, and really uncomfortable. People wanted to see more Erica?? Well, good, because she’s a main character now for some reason!! People liked Dustin and Steve working together?? Cool, because now that’s ALL YOU’RE GONNA GET!!! 

They literally just forgot a lot of the thematic through-lines of the first two seasons. Like. Theme? I don’t know her.

Also the loose ends. Where’d they go? No one knows! Remember how Brenner might not be dead? Nope! Remember Khali and the others? Nope! Remember how the Mind Flayer was actually a sinister and complex villain, with logic and goals and a solid rule structure for how it can operate and what it can and cannot do? Nope! Now it’s a goo-monster that possesses literally just anyone and everyone and turns things into slime. ..... fucking what.

Not to mention how goddamn problematic a lot of it was, coming from a social angle. Like, first of all, let’s not even get into how they were going to make Robin straight with a crush on Steve until Maya Hawke suggested they make her a lesbian - AND that, coincidentally, Will stops being a character right around the time that Robin comes out in the show. HMMMMM, THAT’S FUCKING WEIRD, IT’S ALMOST LIKE THEY DECIDED “EH, ONE QUEER IS ENOUGH, AMIRIGHT”???? Hate that. Haaaaaaate that. 

And how Jopper became so cartoonish and toxic and unhealthy, it was just... sad. It was just really uncomfortable and sad. This is the relationship we want to be modeling? Really? It wasn’t even “realistic relationship struggles” or “a realistic example of how a strong relationship can go south because human relationships are extremely complex,” nope. It was just. They just yelled at each other and put each other down and were mean to each other, and it was just... really disheartening to see their relationship reduced to fucking that.

AND the cartoonish, over-the-top portrayal of Nancy’s sexist coworkers. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a conversation that needs to be brought up in media, but this shit was just bloated and cheesy and honestly probably did more harm than good. Again: caricatures. Caricatures everywhere.

And Mileven being so uncomfortable and toxic? Making out 24/7, not acutally, yanno, talking or having a relationship outside of making out, and then Mike being like “I know, I’ll buy back the emotional girl’s affections!” EW EW EW EW EW. And making it all about high-school drama in the most gross and shallow way... “I dump your ass...” .... I.... Look, I don’t ship mileven romantically (here’s why) but I ship their friendship so fucking hard from S1 and S2. And S3 really, really dealt mileven a hard blow. Like everything else, it became so flat and uncomfortable. 

ANYWAY, that became much more than I intended (it’s been almost a year and clearly I am still incensed about what they did to this story), so I’ll just say:

After I saw S3, I was like “... I have to fix this somehow. I have to give these characters and this story that I love so much a wrap-up that does it a little bit more justice than... whatever the fuck just happened.” So I made this plan to re-write it as a fix-it-fic, and here we are.

Also, I know it’s slow. I know, and I am so very sorry. I get myself into way too may projects and then none of them get any progress. 

I’M SORRY ascfcszgcdsgvxc

Anyway yeah there’s yet another rant about S3 that I didn’t plan on making but here we are, lmaooo