The main problem I had with Stranger Things S3

[ImFineThankYouSusan]

Is succinctly put in Pop Culture Detective's latest video

Hopper was one of my favourite characters in the first 2 seasons but in season 3 the red flags were flying all over the place. Thankfully my nearly 14yo saw them too while watching it. My random rants have obviously been noticed 😉

If you haven't watched any Pop Culture Detective vids before I thoroughly recommend them.

i was already an adult for most of the 80s and i thought Stranger Things was pretty much spot on with the portrayal of that time.

Specifically to pick on Hopper's character from S3 and consider him/it from a 2019 POV? Nah. The guy clearly has issues, probably PTSD as well as trust issues and he lost his daughter. It is no wonder at all that he wanted 11 and Mike to keep the door open etc etc.

S3 felt very rushed to me and that's my biggest beef with it. The rest - meh.

a) It's supposed to be the 80s - attitudes were very different then b) People are complicated. Doing 'heroic' things is not in any way incompatible with being a flawed character in other respects c) Some viewers get invested in characters they like and then can't cope if the character behaves in a way that they don't like, (which is understandable but doesn't necessarily make the character unconvincing). d) Hopper has always been like that from season 1 really!

I have a feeling they rewrote season 3 when the X-Men style teenagers with powers thing didn't go down very well in season 2, maybe the plan was to head in that direction and away from the town.

It'll explain why the characterisations were rushed and why half the cast spent 5 episode in air vents.

I don't think we were meant to take Hopper's behavior uncritically. I also don't think it was poor character development- he's a man in a dangerous and stressful job with a drinking problem who suddenly went from living alone, grieving his daughter, to being the adoptive parent of an abused, traumatised girl in her early teens. If they were the only issues El was facing, then Hopper was still massively ill-prepared to deal with them- teenagers are hard work. But she also has telekinetic powers which can be used to lethal effect and was being hunted by the government. It's not surprising he's not doing a sterling job as a parent all of the time.

1. Attitudes were different in the 80s. Everyone knows that. However, series one and two managed to convey 80s really well without this weird nut-case dynamic.
2. Hopper was perfectly nice in series 1 and 2. He was flawed and heroic but not a complete twatting arsehole.
3. I'm not overly-invested in characters and "can cope" with characters changing, but changing a character into someone entirely different for needs of plot(?) is just bad writing.

Its a bit like when Mother of Dragons in GOT went all violent. It just leaves people feeling, 'eh?' When you've already got nuanced interesting characters, it's a shame they're dumbed down so much.

I thought s3 was terrible in terms of character development. Really, really bad.

Its a bit like when Mother of Dragons in GOT went all violent

She was burning people alive from Season 1, Episode 10.

I didn't watch GOT properly. :) I thought she was supposed to be nice to nice people?

'I thought she was supposed to be nice to nice people?'

Only if they bent the knee!

It wasn't just the hopper character though.

The children were all children together in s1 and 2.

S3 there was all this stuff about how boys and girls are super different, dying understand each other, aren't honest with each other etc etc

That felt to me like a really modern take. I was their age in 80s, am probably exact match. There was sexism but it was different, the stuff with the journalist woman and the horrible men felt right. But the stuff where the girls and boys are different species in early teens, no. It wasn't like that, that is new.

Also science was kind of cool then. I mean terrible films some but weird science, back to the future, flight of the navigator, ghostbusters, war games etc and so on, there was a lot of excitement about science. The teacher would have been cool with all his stuff in the garage, as in fact he was more in S1 I think it was. And it seemed that, as in the 80s, with Joyce, the kind clever science guy would be the man for her. It felt like they were going there then changed their minds.

While watching I really felt they had chucked the pretty authentic 80s stuff out the window and gone for a load of more current, and to me, objectionable stereotypes and tropes.

Yes I may have overthought it.

I was also annoyed that it was so so much more violent than the other series.

Everything is going to have re-enforced gender stereotyping from now on, it's only going to get worse. Almost every network requires it for providing funding for shows.

It's part of social engineering.

If you stop watching things that enforce gendered normality you are not going to be watching a lot of stuff over the next 10 years.

It's a type of government propoganda that works.

Without having watched stranger things I did find the video interesting as a talking point of how these tropes occur.

It's good to be able to recognise them as it is part of what keeps women in crap relationships.

See also the trailer for the new film about Leonard Cohen and Marianne. Mumsnet would respond with a quick "block him and move on".

That video’s interesting because I was brought up in the era of confrontational banter leading to romance idea where women were portrayed as annoying and screechy but this was seen as a precursor to the romance because it was almost as if they were trying to goad and provoke the man into shutting her up with a kiss.

It definitely coloured how my teenage brain saw relationships.

Interesting to see how we’re all affected.