Biggest problem: Too gay.
I'm not kidding. I'm not a pearl-clutching puritan, and I've watched other shows and movies with an overt gay theme, and still managed to enjoy some of them.
And I'm still enjoying Season 5 of Stranger Things, but they're really laying it on thick with the accept-yourself-for-being-gay thing.
Lots of time is being given to the Robin character (the one who suddenly declared herself lesbian near the end of Season 3) and Will (who exhibited many signs of being gay all along), and the bonding over their gayness. Robin accepts her homosexuality, you see, and Will does not yet. Robin notices this, empathizes with him, and way too much screen time is spent on them chatting about "being your true self". Yawn.
It's almost 2026. Being gay isn't edgy anymore. I don't care if the show is set in the '80s -- it's being watched in the 2020s, and we don't need to be battered over the head with a gay-person-accepts-their-sexuality-and-achieves-peace story.
But it gets worse. Episode 4 ended with Will discovering that he, too, has powers, and he uses them to save his mom and his friends. Presumably these were infused into him when he was originally kidnapped by Vecna, who was shown pumping something down Will's throat in what some are calling a gay pedo rape scene. But anyway, I'm afraid we are veering toward a cheesy conclusion where Will is instrumental in defeating Vecna because he finally accepts his true gay self, and that many of his problems are tied to having repressed his homosexuality. Or something along those lines.
It just seems like more is being tied to the whole gay arc, rather than making the gayness a side story, which I actually thought it was going to be until this season.
And while there's a lot of action and special effects, there was one cringe scene where the military guys are shooting at a demogorgon IN A FREAKING CIRCLE, and somehow none were shooting each other. They spent a small fortune on each episode. Nobody on staff was around to point this out? That was distracting to watch, and took me out of the moment.
I also don't love the military villains having a building in the upside down. The upside down is supposed to be a scary, nightmarish place where regular humans don't belong, and need to escape when there. Yet somehow the military could set up a whole scientific lab there, and experiment upon the creatures they've captured? And Vecna doesn't just destroy it immediately? Mind you, one of his pet demogorgon can pretty much take out an entire military unit firing machine guns at it, so why is this thing even able to exist? Dumb, and unnecessary.
Finally, there's too much girl boss power. I was always okay with Eleven being the main hero, as she has special powers. But in a scene which delighted early-20s feminists but frustrated most others with a brain, Karen Wheeler (a regular human) is able to seriously injure a demogorgon with a broken wine bottle (lol), whereas the same creature can take machine gun fire from 20 soldiers simultaneously, and barely even flinch. Riiiiiiiight. At least give us some consistency if you're going to make the badass mom a hero.
I'll finish this off, and I'll probably overall enjoy watching it, but it would've been nice if there could have been some better story editors on scene, and perhaps an adult in the room to let everyone know that accept-your-gayness should not be the final heroic theme of a sci-fi series.
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Originally Posted by Harry Hollywood
