quote:I'm not at all trying to tell you that you're wrong or stupid for not liking the show as much. What I'm doing is explaining things that you may have missed due to the fact that you clearly didn't enjoy the show as much as some of us, which may have caused you to be less engaged. You offered up specific criticisms of the show that fit into the narrative of the show.
I'm ****ing sorry I said anything. Heaven forbid you say you didn't think something was the greatest thing ever on this board.
You didn't like the tone or the ending. Those are valid reasons for not liking the show, but you offered up specifics, some of which were off the mark.
Being upset that Barb didn't garner more attention - valid, but that concern is not likely to come from the characters of this show (Will's three friends, Will's Mom, Will's brother). Her role is to be a sympathetic character for the viewer, and to add weight to the story that something bad actually happened to good people. Otherwise it'd be an off-screen father/son, and Benny from the diner that died.
Nancy abandons Barb - She doesn't. She searches for Barb from Episode 3 (when Barb is known to be missing), until Episode 7 (when Barb is known to be dead). She goes into the forest, knowing full well there's a monster out there, climbs into a tree knowing full well that its where the monster came from, all in the pursuit of Barb. I'd say knowingly risking your life for your friend is showing pretty great concern.
Nancy and Mike's parents curfew rules are inconsistent - They say specifically in the show that no one is going to be out and about at night until WIll is found. Will is found dead due to an accident, there's no more concern of a kidnapper/killer, therefore their concern relaxes.
El, the monster, and the town are randomly thrown together - They're not, the thing that ties it all together is that the Hawkins Laboratory is right outside of town. El's psychic powers are a result of the lab's activities, the monster entering our dimension is a result of El interacting with the monster. You can argue how believable El getting psychic powers via psychedelic experimentation, or the monster being released due to psychic interactions is, but it is a Sci-Fi show after all. The point is that the monster and the psychic girl are not random.
You missed that El is almost certainly not dead, so its not unreasonable to think you missed most of these other things.
As a further aside, it is the intent of the content that determines the genre of a show/movie, not the content itself. You say that because the story ends on a sad note that it makes this show a horror. Harry Potter ends on a relatively sad note (lots of people die), but that doesn't make it a horror. You said that the slugs make this a horror, the same way that the aliens bursting through people's chests in Alien made that a horror. The intent of the chest bursting was to scare you in Alien, that's why its a horror. The intent of the slugs is to foreshadow not scare. Ron spits up slugs in Harry Potter too, and no one would confuse Harry Potter with a horror film.
