What people seem to crave is a work of art that's meticulously planned from start to finish and filled with crevasses that they can explore endlessly with their community. Which isn't really compatible with the constraints of big budget TV as it is with literature.
Also I've never seen the show.
I thought the problem is that no one gets pussy in it
I also haven't seen the show
I thought everybody in the show was gay, that was the thing people were complaining about.
What's the problem with that?
Just statistically weird that the whole town was gay.
Yeah thats a bit weird. Glad I didn't watch the show
I think it just wasn't a good show. I feel like most of the actual series promo was centered around how well they recreated the 80s aesthetic, whoa they made a mall food court! whoa hair metal and D&D! Stranger Things Perfectly Captures 80s Childhood Nostalgia In Upcoming Season Trailer
but I don't think they ever actually sat down and wrote an overarching storyline with logical plot development and themes or any other intentional narrative components, and if you told me they did I would not believe you
Considering that tv has usurped reading as the longest form of media people consume I could see disappointment being the reaction to most tv shows in the foreseeable future.
I think season 1 stands out as being pretty decent on its own.
Everything else after was just progressively worse to the point I didn’t bother with the last two seasons.
And like season 1 came out nearly 10 years ago. It basically was a different show.
I think 2016 Netflix saw the traction of the show and took the approach Disney does and over broadened the appeal to create a cash cow franchise to milk indefinitely. And clearly it worked, but took away everything interesting about it in the process.
the problem was at some point (season 3) it became a superhero show, not a horror show. in the end everything is wrapped up nicely and evil is vanquished but no sacrifice is made, which is usually what redeems a superhero ending.
for a true horror ending, the horror can’t be eradicated, it can at best be learned to live with (e.g. Da Babadook), but the horror must always continue to leak through. this could’ve been very well done if the writer’s had realized the analogy they’d created which is that the upsidedown is the internet.
I have no faith in the showrunners being able to do this tactfully in a subtle and clever way. Most likely it would have been hamfisted and obnoxious like The Boys is
Season one ended with the horror being "defeated", but then Will had some green sludge dripping out his nose indicating it was something he'd have to live with. Then they made four more seasons.
The little girl also sacrificed herself in the end of the first season, right? I only watched that but it was 10 years ago
If you're thinking of the main girl, no she became like the superhero character throughout the show. They killed off a friend of a character in season one but that was it.
yeah but they were never real sacrifices bc she comes back
Booo
Maybe shaped by the fact that we are still in the age of the MCU (admittedly at the end)
also a bunch of grown women were really upset when the teen boys didnt end up kissing :(
Considering how long the coming out scene was maybe they assumed that they would defeat the final villain through gay kissing because it was deathly homophobic.
I don’t understand that. Mike obviously liked Eleven since season 1
The Sopranos and Breaking Bad weren't planned out whatsoever, but they still have communities of people scrutinizing them, talking about them, posting dumbass memes, etc.
Stranger Things is a higher level of slop than the prestige cable dramas that predated it.
Making up shit as you go is what most showrunners do but Vince is probably the best at it
Maybe Stranger Things is just way more tied to the genre than those 2 and so is limited by what it could be.
I know this post is just a bit, but I genuinely can't watch TV anymore because the writers never plan beyond the current season. I mostly stick to movies now.
I still think the Japanese/Koreans got it right by having their shows have 11/16 episodes.
I've seen it, the problem is that the whole season was a downgrade from the previous one, it went from fun middlebrow tv to slop and looks like every other netflix CGI slop too (previous seasons used practical effects, the visuals now look fake and ugly).
It wasn't as bad a finale as I hear game of thrones (which I've never watched either) had, just underwhelming and a waste of Winona Ryder. Like, why does the bald sex pest Fleabag guy who was 100 percent some writer's self-insert get more screen time than Winona I just kept hoping he'd be eaten by a demogorgon
Grown women who are mad the boys don't kiss are weird though. I've seen lots of "people find female homosexuals more acceptable than male ones" cope which is funny in light of the fact that the most popular show of the last couple of months has been that one about gay male hockey players
I think there should be a rule that shows can't show physical romantic affection between characters who were children in the beginning of the show.
Bloomslop
Raises the question of what TV would Bloom watch.
It makes sense if you think about it in terms of parasociality. Endlessly overanalyzing TV shows is a variation on thinking Taylor Swift is your bestie.
I think readers still got them beat on that front. We're not at the point where people rummage around private text between showrunners for more insight to their work.
Ulysses is over-schematised (and is meant to appear as if from beyond time) but he still had to write it chronologically. It's not like it was a Pynchon novel he was cooking up in seclusion for a decade. And also it was serialized in 'The Little Review' until the obscenity thing happened and the cops started seizing the issues, which was pretty late into the book.
True enough. Still, I think there is a massive difference between a work from the mind of a single author vs the multiple chefs involved in the production of a massive tv show.
Joyce was actually a big part of the finale.
Oh brother. This guy stinks.
I think part of it is that the seasons took SO long and the writers pretended they had a brilliant plan, with a like, “oh no detail is too small!” approach, so lazy writing and continuity errors become Big Deals to people disappointed with said lazy writing looking to make sense of it.
Maybe, but maybe it was just a poorly paced final season.
Maybe. It is weird that they made a theory about a secret final episode using conspiratorial logic that would be at home in a Pynchon novel.
I'm not a fan of either but I agree with you.