recently i came out to a room full of people (as nonbinary). multiple times. but i thought will coming out to a room full of people SUCKED. because while i did it so that my theater group knows about my gender identity struggles so they know that i struggle portraying femininity in the female characters i play, and also did it in a leftist student environment in 2025, will doing it in 1987 seems so unrealistic considering the period-typical homophobia?? and then everyone having the same reaction was what pissed me off even more. WHY do they all have the same line of dialogue. hell i don't even want anyone to be homophobic i'm just asking for NUANCE! kali and vickie do not know who he is. murray probably does not gaf. neither does mr CLARKE.
to me, this scene sums up pretty well all the major problems i have with the show in recent seasons:
too many characters. st was always an ensemble show, but in the earlier seasons the number of characters was always reduced to how many characters the writers could properly flesh out and give nuance to within the limits of their production and runtime. Then, they kept adding characters, and everyone who was instroduced around season 3/4 as somewhat of a main character just feels flat. Even some of the characters that were there since the beginning feel like that (*cough* MIKE WHEELER) because they do not have the time and energy to give them any depth.
Nuance. this ties in to #1, but every character used to stand for something, every relationship, be it romantic, familial or platonic used to stand for something and be unique from the others. Now we barely get to see that, and most of the development happens off screen (when did will and max become best friends? i would have loved to have seen that! when did mike start calling joyce by her first name and what was the reason for that? again, why is the important dvelopment happening outside of the actual script?) The only nuance we get is coming from the acting, maybe directing, but the script for the scene (apart from maybe will's monologue) feels like they pulled it out of a tumblr post from 2017.
CARE and SENSITIVITY. the first two seasons, with their slow pacing and focus on emotions rather than action did such a good job at highlighting how different people of different ages and different class backgrounds react to trouble and trauma. Now a lot of the characters feel flat and stereotypical and the dialogue has lost its meaning.
PACING. what made teenage me fall in love with it was how it wasn't just the aesthetics that were inspired by the 80s, but also how the style in which it was shot in a way a lot of television isn't anymore, with, and i know i have already said this, but, a focus on slow, intelligent, horror, consistent metaphors and the humanity of it. the suspense and the balanced amount of characters and subplots left the audience some time to make up their own interpretation, all important details were shown on screen rather than off screen (or in a prequel play unavailable to most of the world outside of two major metropoles in the anglosphere.) Now the pacing is very different, it is fast, the dialogue highlights one-liners and together with the unnessecary amount of main characters it has lost its nuance in order to resemble Disney's Marvel's The Avengers, rather than media of the time period such as Twin Peaks (a show which, even though it was created by a man, also used horror and supernatural elements to portray the evils of the patriarchy but did so WELL and with SENSITIVITY and NUANCE.)
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2087
