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[analog_future]

That checks out.

 

[jason10mm]

Ok everyone, the entire world is about to be consumed by another world and every human on earth is going to die literally meaning the end of the world as we know it. Let's go save the world. But before we do that I just need to say something. Guys, I'm gay.

I'm still not exactly sure HOW they know all these things. Vecna/Henry himself always speaks in fairly vague terms (lots of "the time is now", "this is the beginning", "all will end"), the kids themselves never really seem to understand stuff, the military never seems to really understand stuff, they take the scribblings of long dead mad scientists as gospel, and most of what they know are basically psychic fever dreams coming from "the bad guy".

The kids will spitball entire fanciful theories out of thin air and everyone is all "yup, sounds good!" and then they can execute an incredibly intricate plan with all sorts of makeshift technological aspects and sooooo many points of failure.

And the end stage is almost always a kid looking constipated, a bloody nose, and making hand gestures

 

[Pejo]

I had no issue with the Will being gay subplot until the Modern Audience™ approved "everyone let's stop what we're doing and listen to this" speech. I get the perceived plot relevance, but it didn't have to be done in such a performative way.

The thing that really has been souring me on this season is the never-ending girlbossing. Every female is strong, smart, quick to act, independent etc. The men are idiots with huge character flaws and need to be told what to do all the time. That "un-proposal" scene made me physically uncomfortable with how fucking cringe it was. Like some 40~ something year old white woman wrote that shit thinking it was the most clever thing ever conceived. The first season sold me this show on the "Goonies" appeal of a small group of friends getting in over their heads with a fun sci-fi retro nerd spin. Now it's the female kickass brigade featuring the one capable guy that's only been useful now that he did a class change into gay sorcerer. Dustin and Steve are the only two keeping me going, but they're mostly around for exposition drops.

I still wish Billy would have lived and joined the main cast instead of Erica or Max or especially Robin. Can't stand her.

 

[jason10mm]

I had no issue with the Will being gay subplot until the Modern Audience™ approved "everyone let's stop what we're doing and listen to this" speech. I get the perceived plot relevance, but it didn't have to be done in such a performative way.

The thing that really has been souring me on this season is the never-ending girlbossing. Every female is strong, smart, quick to act, independent etc. The men are idiots with huge character flaws and need to be told what to do all the time. That "un-proposal" scene made me physically uncomfortable with how fucking cringe it was. Like some 40~ something year old white woman wrote that shit thinking it was the most clever thing ever conceived. The first season sold me this show on the "Goonies" appeal of a small group of friends getting in over their heads with a fun sci-fi retro nerd spin. Now it's the female kickass brigade featuring the one capable guy that's only been useful now that he did a class change into gay sorcerer. Dustin and Steve are the only two keeping me going, but they're mostly around for exposition drops.

I still wish Billy would have lived and joined the main cast instead of Erica or Max or especially Robin. Can't stand her.

Yeah, somehow Jim Hopper, initially a character with a mysterious past, went from "relatively competent cop" to mostly a buffoon character who does little more than squash any initiative from Eleven. Even after all the training montages he will still revert to "I will do ANYTHING to keep you safe" over protectiveness that borders on suicidal ideation. All the S1 hopes that he was a former spook or something that could serve as the lynchpin of the government vs the kids as a joint force against the Mind Flayer/Demogorgons just fell to shit.

I hear David Harbor was really hard to work with so I think they just sidelined him as much as possible, he barely has anything to do outside of a few 2 person only dialogue scenes.

 

[Pejo]

Yeah, somehow Jim Hopper, initially a character with a mysterious past, went from "relatively competent cop" to mostly a buffoon character who does little more than squash any initiative from Eleven. Even after all the training montages he will still revert to "I will do ANYTHING to keep you safe" over protectiveness that borders on suicidal ideation. All the S1 hopes that he was a former spook or something that could serve as the lynchpin of the government vs the kids as a joint force against the Mind Flayer/Demogorgons just fell to shit.

I hear David Harbor was really hard to work with so I think they just sidelined him as much as possible, he barely has anything to do outside of a few 2 person only dialogue scenes.

Yea Hopper is such a wasted potential, but that's not really new to this season. It does suck seeing him going back to the overprotective shit again and again though, like they can't think of any other traits to give him or something.

Surprisingly, El is the only female character that I feel they handle pretty well. I have autistic relatives, and I think she plays the part pretty well, and her actions seem sincere and measured compared to how they treat Rambo Nancy or when 70 year old Dr. Kay was tossing soldiers around like she was still Sarah Conner. There was that uncomfortable training montage that they ripped from Rey (Star Wars), but outside of that, El has been solid this season.

 

[jason10mm]

Yea Hopper is such a wasted potential, but that's not really new to this season. It does suck seeing him going back to the overprotective shit again and again though, like they can't think of any other traits to give him or something.

Surprisingly, El is the only female character that I feel they handle pretty well. I have autistic relatives, and I think she plays the part pretty well, and her actions seem sincere and measured compared to how they treat Rambo Nancy or when 70 year old Dr. Kay was tossing soldiers around like she was still Sarah Conner. There was that uncomfortable training montage that they ripped from Rey (Star Wars), but outside of that, El has been solid this season.

The (my) problem with El is that she has no thoughts, goals, or ambitions, really. Her relationship with Mike has been confined to about 3 minutes of screen time, she hasn't really taken a leadership role despite being (so far) the most powerful psychic and presumably the one with the most information about everything. She is basically a parlor trick at this point wrapped around a macguffin of "we MUST have her!" from the military just to drive some sort of tension. The actress is old enough and capable enough to demand waaaay more screen time and be a major driver of the 'resistance' or whatever you want to call it, but like soooooo many other aspects of this show and this season, her storyline is almost totally independent of the radio tower storyline, the "dustin misses eddie" storyline, and the "will is really gay" one.

There just must have been major scheduling issues for this season, leading the writers to isolate characters, avoid many group scenes, and partition off the story into parallel threads that could be edited in various different ways for pacing. They almost should have done an episode per character, culminating in a big team up finale, rather than just give lip service to each storyline in dribs and drabs across the entire season.

 

[DrFigs]

Not really even "I love men" so much as "I don't like girls" and "I have a crush on one of you bet you can't guess whooooooooooooo".

As a tactic to defuse Vecnas ability to play their fears back at them it makes a certain amount of sense, IF that very fear had been SHOWN to us, rather than an offscreen event TOLD to us. In a show with such a long run time we really should be seeing everything, told nothing. Even a round table scene of all the characters revealing their greatest fear to break them as a weapon for Vecna would have been cool, instead we get all these little 2 person moments that just make the characters feel more isolated from each other (as these scenes are often very disconnected from anything else going on). Will coming out to Mike and Mike handling it in a mature way (probably the very opposite of how it would have played out in the 80's between 2 kids), especially if the Mike/El relationship had ANY oxygen left so its clear Will doesn't expect Mike to reciprocate, could have been a touching moment and a set up to Will sacrificing himself to save Mike. But the showrunners blew their LGBTBBQ credit with the brash and overlong antics of Robin who has tread all of this water before.

Well yeah that would have been fantastic. Everyone has a lot going on. Could've been a good bonding scene now that everyone is back together.

 

[TigerBrown]

I feel pretty disappointed with the final season. I was hoping for a big revelation about the mindflayer being the evil mastermind all along, or some other lovecraftian entity with incomprehensible motives.
This will probably be a power of friendship ending containing ambiguous deaths and/or other world lockouts for possible spinoffs. I am also guessing Vecna is being reminded that he is actually a good boy in order to stop a disastrous chain reaction.
Still watching because I think the series as a whole is good and there is still some runtime left for some twists. Also, I think there is too much banter and filler dialogue. Debuffed Eleven was also a downer for me, but I liked Mrs. Wheeler.

 

[Trunx81]

Can we all agree that the coming out of Ellen Page in Umbrella Chronicles was way worse?

 

[DragoonKain]

I realize it's just a show and is already ridiculous so you kinda gotta just roll with it, but the fact that the entire town has no idea that something weird is going on still is so insane to me. Like when they knocked at the teacher's door and needed his help and he had was like "Demons, what are you talking about?" and also Robin's girlfriend forget her name was like "Robin, you've lost your mind, you're talking nonsense. Nothing weird is going on in Hawkins everything is totally fine." You have gates to the upside down all over the place, you have insane military presence, you have fissures in the ground that were ripped open at the end of season 4, you have kids disappearing from school, you have Demogorgons running around. And most of the town still thinks it's a normal day in the life of Hawkins?

 

[Trunx81]

I realize it's just a show and is already ridiculous so you kinda gotta just roll with it, but the fact that the entire town has no idea that something weird is going on still is so insane to me. Like when they knocked at the teacher's door and needed his help and he had was like "Demons, what are you talking about?" and also Robin's girlfriend forget her name was like "Robin, you've lost your mind, you're talking nonsense. Nothing weird is going on in Hawkins everything is totally fine." You have gates to the upside down all over the place, you have insane military presence, you have fissures in the ground that were ripped open at the end of season 4, you have kids disappearing from school, you have Demogorgons running around. And most of the town still thinks it's a normal day in the life of Hawkins?

People won't even see empty child Learing centers in their home town.

 

[Superposition]

 

[ShadowNate]

The thing that really has been souring me on this season is the never-ending girlbossing. Every female is strong, smart, quick to act, independent etc. The men are idiots with huge character flaws and need to be told what to do all the time.

Counterpoint; both Max and Nancy acted with virtual no plan and did something very stupid that could have had a very tragic (and possibly catastrophic) outcome.

I don't think anyone thought of what they did as smart at any point and can't think off the top of my head something that the boys or men did that was even close to being equally stupid

 

[CastorSoze]

While we know Hopper has a history so has no problem with killing soldiers, when did Nancy become a cold blooded killer?

 

[Chuck Berry]

While we know Hopper has a history so has no problem with killing soldiers, when did Nancy become a cold blooded killer?

When the writers ran out of ideas

 

[OmegaSupreme]

Netflix gonna netflix. Somebody posted a meme about everything they do turns into gay porn eventually.

 

[bitbydeath]

We were all called gay in the 80s and 90s. It's what we did as kids.

This show is pure 80's revisionism and not how 90% of these interventions or conversations would ever go down.

My kids and their friends still do it today. Nothing has changed.

 

[bitbydeath]

So just blatant homophobia? And genAI garbage too. So funny

That's just an excuse to keep rubbish like that in shows. It's completely unnecessary.