Stranger Things

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Rewatching from season 1 and noticed something.

Literally all of the father figures in the show are either awful, abusive, absent or apathetic.

Like, ALL of them.

Ever notice that?
  • Mike and Nancy: apathetic schlub who doesn't notice anything and is asleep standing up.
  • Dustin: absent.
  • Will and Jonathan: absent and awful (maybe abusive).
  • Lucas: apathetic; the only scene I remember of him he's more interested in the newspaper than the big questions his son is asking.
  • Max and Billy: abusive
  • Eleven: well, that one's easy. But when Hopper comes in, he's awful (yelling, too strict, controlling etc...).
The only nice and caring father figure who seemed genuinely good was killed off.

This kind of bugs me.
You forgot Bob, or as he is also known too good to live.

Hopper is a tricky one. As you say he is controlling and strict but that's kind of understandable since in Season 2 that was the best he could do to protect Eleven. It was not great but for a small town sheriff with limited influence vs. the US government and far more shady sorts he did the best he could.

Season 3 is more awkward because it's less about the wider forces and more about setting boundaries. Hopper cannot control Eleven the way most parents can their children because she has super powers. So when he imposes rules about behaviour around her boyfriend like most parents do Eleven can ignore those because she could crush him like a beer can and she does ignore those rules. I don't think the way he reacts is meant to be seen as good or appropriate but it's also relatable. He can't force her to obey his rules so he forces her boyfriend to instead.

It's fair to say he handled it wrong. But I think that's part of the point, he handled it in a manner that led to conflict but he did not have alternative ways to deal with a child with abilities that completely shatter the power dynamic. It's sort of realistic and fits with the story being told.
 
You forgot Bob, or as he is also known too good to live.

Hopper is a tricky one. As you say he is controlling and strict but that's kind of understandable since in Season 2 that was the best he could do to protect Eleven. It was not great but for a small town sheriff with limited influence vs. the US government and far more shady sorts he did the best he could.

Season 3 is more awkward because it's less about the wider forces and more about setting boundaries. Hopper cannot control Eleven the way most parents can their children because she has super powers. So when he imposes rules about behaviour around her boyfriend like most parents do Eleven can ignore those because she could crush him like a beer can and she does ignore those rules. I don't think the way he reacts is meant to be seen as good or appropriate but it's also relatable. He can't force her to obey his rules so he forces her boyfriend to instead.

It's fair to say he handled it wrong. But I think that's part of the point, he handled it in a manner that led to conflict but he did not have alternative ways to deal with a child with abilities that completely shatter the power dynamic. It's sort of realistic and fits with the story being told.

It’s why Mike is now afraid to tell Eleven he “Loves” her now.

Plus, neither have seen Hopper since Hop had that tantrum in the jeep. Emotions for both of them have become mixed.
 
Finally caught up. I've been digging it, better than S3.
I agree and the only reason that section thought he was gay was because he wasn't showing any interest in girls in season 3 ignoring the trauma the dude was probably still suffering from the past two seasons. But no that can't be it. He must be gay.

I'm just waiting for him to tell Mike how he loves him and Mike being like" I'm straight dude"
I, and I bet most of you, remember being the kids age where we were far more interested in toys and cartoons instead of the opposite sex.
 
Finally caught up. I've been digging it, better than S3.

I, and I bet most of you, remember being the kids age where we were far more interested in toys and cartoons instead of the opposite sex.
Yeah. I was a late bloomer and it sucked. All the other boys in 6th grade suddenly affected these shitty "playa" personalities, pretending like they're totally getting laid. This seemed to occur shortly after we started sex ed.

I just wanted to keep playing video games and collecting Transformers, and they all acted like they were too cool for that shit. The girls weren't much better than the boys. I didn't want to be around them anymore and the feeling was mutual.

And if you weren't lying about how much pussy you were slaying, you were called a "fag". So I hate to see Twitter labeling this poor kid as a fag.
 
It’s why Mike is now afraid to tell Eleven he “Loves” her now.

Plus, neither have seen Hopper since Hop had that tantrum in the jeep. Emotions for both of them have become mixed.
A lot of people I know went all in on the hating Hopper bandwagon after the jeep scene. I get why but I actually find it fairly well done for a scene that has no realistic equivalent. Hopper's stuff with Eleven and her relationship with Mike by and large I find fairly good as a depiction of a guy way out of his depth who often makes entirely the wrong choices but for understandable reasons.
 
Let's not forget that Hopper already lost a biological daughter to cancer, and it irreparably damaged his first marriage as it often happens when a child dies. So in a way I don't mind him being strict over Eleven.

Fairly accurate. Mostly with the clothing choices and interior decoration in the first season. The more OTT hair styles, especially on the men, wasn't really a thing in suburbia. There's certain issues with media saturation where they just grabbed something from the 80's and put it there when normies weren't really aware of it. Such as The Thing poster in the kid's room. NO ONE saw The Thing back in the day. It's a masterpiece but it bombed back then so the only kind of kids who would be aware of it would be hard core horror kids with Fangoria subscriptions where issues of Fangoria came with a poster. TLDR: first season was the most accurate.
There is a scene where Jonathan gets Will hooked on alt-rock bands of the time, and among the bands he mentions, there is The Smiths. They were barely starting to gain traction in the UK in '83, how would a kid from a backwood Indiana town know about them? Same could be said when Billy appears listening to Metallica's Kill 'em All, though that one may have the explanation that his family just moved from California.

With that said, I mostly like the use of music in Stranger Things. Jon and Nancy running away from the Upside Down to the sound of Echo & the Bunnymen's Nocturnal Me? Wonderful. The funeral of the fake Will set to New Order's Elegia? Marvelous and surprisingly fitting. The Season 2 trailer set to Thriller? It worked fucking wonders. I was half-expecting them using something like Laura Branigan's Self Control (its lyrics fit well the mood of the series), or even something by Iron Maiden or Ozzy Osbourne in the meantime. I have yet to see Season 4.1 so I can't comment on the pervasiveness of Running Up That Hill after a certain scene, and whether it worked on it. The song is cool, though.

Season two and onwards is just endless things from the 80's being thrown in there for memberberries.
This I have to agree with. The kids running around in full Ghostbusters gear, and Dustin and his long-distance girlfriend singing the Neverending Story theme when they were supposed to set up an important transmitter felt hamfisted "Member the '80s" moments. I'm sure there are other scenes like that peppered through the other seasons, but can't remember them.

The whole thing with Russia was a rather unnecessary addition and allusion to the old evil commie villains from cheesy 80s flicks as well. If it really was supposed to show that the Soviet Union was also doing MKUltra-style experiments on their own populace, they should have gone all-in with that. Instead, it appears the showrunners got afraid of the Twitteratti complaining of supposed "anti-communist" messages, when the show doesn't delve into politics at all beyond stuff that made sense in the time period. If so, people could make a case about this being anti-American due to it showing the FBI and other agencies openly experimenting and killing its own people, as well as showing some out of touch Reaganite boomers (*cough* Mike and Nancy's dad *cough*) being, well, out of touch Reaganite boomers.

I share the same opinion with you guys. Steve grew on me, thanks to excellent character development from jerkwad jock to valiant ally, and it would suck a fuck if he doesn't get some semblance of a happy ending by the time the series does wrap up. So far, he broke up with one girl, gets his mojo cut, becomes a wagie due to poor school grades and gets blueballed by not-Uma Thurman. I hope something comes out of the new season for him.
 
Let's not forget that Hopper already lost a biological daughter to cancer, and it irreparably damaged his first marriage as it often happens when a child dies. So in a way I don't mind him being strict over Eleven.


There is a scene where Jonathan gets Will hooked on alt-rock bands of the time, and among the bands he mentions, there is The Smiths. They were barely starting to gain traction in the UK in '83, how would a kid from a backwood Indiana town know about them? Same could be said when Billy appears listening to Metallica's Kill 'em All, though that one may have the explanation that his family just moved from California.

With that said, I mostly like the use of music in Stranger Things. Jon and Nancy running away from the Upside Down to the sound of Echo & the Bunnymen's Nocturnal Me? Wonderful. The funeral of the fake Will set to New Order's Elegia? Marvelous and surprisingly fitting. The Season 2 trailer set to Thriller? It worked fucking wonders. I was half-expecting them using something like Laura Branigan's Self Control (its lyrics fit well the mood of the series), or even something by Iron Maiden or Ozzy Osbourne in the meantime. I have yet to see Season 4.1 so I can't comment on the pervasiveness of Running Up That Hill after a certain scene, and whether it worked on it. The song is cool, though.


This I have to agree with. The kids running around in full Ghostbusters gear, and Dustin and his long-distance girlfriend singing the Neverending Story theme when they were supposed to set up an important transmitter felt hamfisted "Member the '80s" moments. I'm sure there are other scenes like that peppered through the other seasons, but can't remember them.

The whole thing with Russia was a rather unnecessary addition and allusion to the old evil commie villains from cheesy 80s flicks as well. If it really was supposed to show that the Soviet Union was also doing MKUltra-style experiments on their own populace, they should have gone all-in with that. Instead, it appears the showrunners got afraid of the Twitteratti complaining of supposed "anti-communist" messages, when the show doesn't delve into politics at all beyond stuff that made sense in the time period. If so, people could make a case about this being anti-American due to it showing the FBI and other agencies openly experimenting and killing its own people, as well as showing some out of touch Reaganite boomers (*cough* Mike and Nancy's dad *cough*) being, well, out of touch Reaganite boomers.

I share the same opinion with you guys. Steve grew on me, thanks to excellent character development from jerkwad jock to valiant ally, and it would suck a fuck if he doesn't get some semblance of a happy ending by the time the series does wrap up. So far, he broke up with one girl, gets his mojo cut, becomes a wagie due to poor school grades and gets blueballed by not-Uma Thurman. I hope something comes out of the new season for him.
Yeah it's hard to believe just how much Steve has grown as a character. I guess that amazes me is because we really don't get good character developments anymore. So steve is legit one of the few legut examples of a character who went form you wouldn't care if he died to hoping he at least gets a happy ending for the series end.
 
Yeah it's hard to believe just how much Steve has grown as a character. I guess that amazes me is because we really don't get good character developments anymore. So steve is legit one of the few legut examples of a character who went form you wouldn't care if he died to hoping he at least gets a happy ending for the series end.
That was one of the things I really liked about the first season: Instead of running off and getting killed by the monster like most characters of his achetype would, he sticks around to help, survives, apologises for being such an asshole and generally becomes a better person.
 
Steve evolved organically imo. He went from douche to reluctant babysitter to genuinely putting his life on the line to protect the kids. His selflessness is appealing in a way that positively subverts initial expectations about his character. You never would have thought the smug douchebag with good hair would have turned into a protective, caring person willing to die for his friends. I appreciate what they've done with him, if nothing else.
 
Rewatching from season 1 and noticed something.

Literally all of the father figures in the show are either awful, abusive, absent or apathetic.

Like, ALL of them.

Ever notice that?
  • Mike and Nancy: apathetic schlub who doesn't notice anything and is asleep standing up.
  • Dustin: absent.
  • Will and Jonathan: absent and awful (maybe abusive).
  • Lucas: apathetic; the only scene I remember of him he's more interested in the newspaper than the big questions his son is asking.
  • Max and Billy: abusive
  • Eleven: well, that one's easy. But when Hopper comes in, he's awful (yelling, too strict, controlling etc...).
The only nice and caring father figure who seemed genuinely good was killed off.

This kind of bugs me.
Hopper had a speech relating to this in the last episode.
The final boss is going to be god.
 
Finally caught up so I can actually sperg about the show with you guys rather than try to avoid threads like these before I get things spoiled.

I've such a love-hate relationship with the show after the end of Season 2. Season 1 was incredible and caught me completely off guard by not actually being the leddit bait tier 80s reference show that I always imagined it as, Season 2 was mostly a retread but whatever, it was nice comfort food and if you got to the end of the season you could realistically end it there with no MAJOR issues. But oh god Season 3 was where the show jumped the shark HARD with stupid plot threads, a radically expanding cast, flanderisation of everyone etc. The reason it's taken this long to finally get around to the show was because every single person I knew who watched the show told me that Season 3 sucked and that was enough to convince me it wasn't worth trying and honestly they were half right.

Like I'm expected to believe that in a single year RUSSIANS have constructed a major mall in the middle of bumfuck nowhere and created a top secret science lab underground too? I'm expected to believe Hopper, an ex-Vietnam vet would shoot all rounds into the chest of a Russian without a single shot in the head? I'm expected to care about the most retarded relationship arguement in the whole series between Mike and L or Hopper being flanderised as angry man? The season was what I always imagined Stranger Things to be: An 80s nostalgia show that sprawls out due to shitty writing and uses the very same shitty tropes that it tries to mock for irony reason; or to put it bluntly, Leddit the tv show. Member New Coke? Here's a fucking monologue that mocks advertising of it while offering nothing of substance. It's worse than product placement, it's fake product placement to extend a scene for no reason.

Season 4 so far is pretty good but is suffering from script bloat (hence why these episodes are getting slightly longer and longer and the final two episodes are gonna be as long as a feature movie) and I've really started abusing VLC's 1.5 speed playback to hammer through some of the scenes that take forever. The entire Russian arc could have been cut completely and nobody would have had an issue with it, it only exists as a way of removing Joyce from the story and is the plot thread with the most retarded immersion breaking scenes (surviving a fucking plane crash? Hopper running through the snow with a broken ankle? Joyce somehow magically having $40k in her accounts despite being poor as fuck throughout the whole show? Lets not forget the season 3/4 thing where for some fucking reason the US military storms this secret compound under a mall and somehow Russians manage to kidnap Hopper AND escape easily?).

Also I'm genuinely surprised that the writers haven't had the balls to kill one of the major characters in order to move the plot along and stop having to break up the kids into small packs. What exactly does Will or Jonathan offer? Hopper and Joyce could have absolutely died in the explosion under the mall and not a single major thing would have changed. Instead they just kill off minor characters like Bob or Billy and pretend to be a high stakes daring show.

Overall I'll probably watch Part 2 for completion sake but if they throw a Season 5 at us I'm out.
 
Rewatching from season 1 and noticed something.

Literally all of the father figures in the show are either awful, abusive, absent or apathetic.

Like, ALL of them.

Ever notice that?
  • Mike and Nancy: apathetic schlub who doesn't notice anything and is asleep standing up.
  • Dustin: absent.
  • Will and Jonathan: absent and awful (maybe abusive).
  • Lucas: apathetic; the only scene I remember of him he's more interested in the newspaper than the big questions his son is asking.
  • Max and Billy: abusive
  • Eleven: well, that one's easy. But when Hopper comes in, he's awful (yelling, too strict, controlling etc...).
The only nice and caring father figure who seemed genuinely good was killed off.

This kind of bugs me.
Sounds pretty period accurate to me. The boomers weren't really into parenting. Kids were almost hated and ignored. Ever head the term latch key kid?
 
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