Stranger Things has characters who think Regan is good, and that D&D is a good game.
D&D is fun but obviously reagan :xi-reactionary-spotted:
There are many better Tabletop games, and I think some were going by the mid 80s.
Also how these kids play a game of D&D and go "the last monster we fought in the game is just like the monster in Real Life." It's getting really annoying.
I feel like Stranger Things 4 would have been better if it took place more than 9 months after season 3.
There is also zero thought about AIDS, which was a major thing at the time. Like the show is apolitical outside of "Russians bad".
Like the first couple seasons were neat as they took these 80s tropes but sort of showed a world beyond what we saw on the screen for ET and such. Season 3 was just a dumb action movie. Season 4 is just all over the place - and at it's BEST it's doing a subversion of Geeks vs Cool kids, because the monster doesn't care.
Also how these kids play a game of D&D and go “the last monster we fought in the game is just like the monster in Real Life.” It’s getting really annoying.
Are you not familiar with Chekhov's DnD monster?😅
Season 5 will be fucking lit if their DM puts them up against the Terrasque.
Tbh I haven't watched past season 2. Season 3, I watched I think 1 episode and gave up. It should have been a limited series imo, 1 season
In their defense D&D still was a good game back when they were playing it
1980s D&D: Women characters in chainmail bikinis, evil races all have black skin, THAC0
2020s D&D: Unisex outfits composed entirely of pockets, moral ambiguity and baby's first historical materialism in the plot, just roll d20 and add a number
THAC0 was 2e AD&D so it's more of a 90s thing, I believe the kids in Stranger Things were playing Basic D&D, so ten foot poles and wizards dying to a stiff breeze (and the racist Drow depiction and chainmail bikinis if they move on to AD&D)
I've only seen the first season though
Not where I'm going with this.
As the setting of 1985-86 - there were other games, and Pathfinder didn't exist yet.
I feel like the kids would have moved away from D&D by high school as they would see D&D as a game from when they were little kids, 2-3 years ago.
Who cares, just retcon history and say it was Pathfinder that invented the genre :lenin-laugh:
Which characters think Regan is good? I know Mike's dad does, but i think that character is specifically there to make fun of a certain type of WASP
Yeah I don’t think we’re supposed to be thinking Mike’s dad is a cool dude or anything lol
I think the 2nd season had a Reagan '84 sign outside every house except Dustin's who had a Mondale sign out front.
D&D is dead, all bow before our unionized trans girlbosses in Paizo and Pathfinder :rosa-salute:
Which do you choose: a corporate near monopoly or the game with goddesses of socialism and lesbian polyamory in it :think-mark:
Pathfinder is just spicy D&D. Reject d20, embrace other weirdass dice systems.
Too bad FFG got gutted like a fish and their RPG section spun off.
Compare their lineup now to 10 years ago (before they got bought out by the :france-cool:) and it's sad shit.
It is hilariously anti-communist. America in the show is full of communists building secret bases under the local mall like Scooby Doo villains. In a meta way the level of anti-communism is almost a kind of 80s nostalgia in itself, but played completely straight. I couldn't watch the show anymore because it became too much of a superhero show with a focus on boring psychic powers, but if they had dropped that in favor of even more local ice cream shops having secret entrances to Red Army bases on US soil I would be slopping that shit up with a big grin on my face.
America in the show is full of communists building secret bases under the local mall like Scooby Doo villains.
Which btw they apparently ran the mall better than the capitalists in the town could run their small town business according to the show lol.
As a communist that makes sense, but I don't think we're actually supposed to pay attention to the economics of the mall in the show. I also felt like the Soviets in the show were really motivated in a way that the main characters weren't, but I guess I'm biased
I mean they touched upon it briefly with the shots of the Main Street of the town suffering from a lack of business from the mall, and Winnona Ryder's character kinda remarking that there are no customers at her job.
I'll just trust you on that, comrade. I stopped actually paying attention to the show somewhere in season 2 I think, but it's still funny to me. I might eventually watch season 4 too.
Yeah it got pretty boring in 2 and it was pretty meh in 3, 4 seems to have tried to tighten the story a bit but idk
Season 3 and especially 4 is full of the laziest anti-communist and Russophobic tropes. All Russians are cartoon villains with no personality besides cruelty and vodka, its always winter in Russia, everything in Russia is run-down and ugly, etc., etc. The one nice Russian guy just wants to escape and become American but then he's killed by, you guessed it, an evil Russian.
It makes sense to the storyline that the USSR would be poking around in the same stuff that the yanks are. Maybe something interesting could have been made of yanks and Soviets having to pool their knowledge and cooperate to fight the otherworldly monsters but the writers passed on that chance and did two seasons of cardboard cutout red scare bogeymen instead.
It's 80s nostalgia, so the Red Scare angle was bound to work its way in at some point. But season 3&4 really cranked it to 11.
Season 3 was basically Red Dawn.
Season 4 has a bunch of "Soviet Torture Camp" scenes that are totally divorced from the main plot.
Season 4 has a bunch of “Soviet Torture Camp” scenes that are totally divorced from the main plot.
Season 4 in general feels like the writers realized they had too many characters and not enough things for them all to do, so they shipped off a bunch of them to random fucking locations to dick around in.
The first 2 seasons the CIA are the bad guys doing sketchy shit, the last 2 seasons the KGB are. There's no serious anticommunist messaging but some people here lose their shit if they see a negative portrayal of the Soviet Union.
ok so is stranger things canceled or can somebody explain? I didn't interpret Stranger Things seasons 1-3 as "anti-communist" also there's basically no context here. Haven't seen S4 yet.
It wasn't until S3 that they had Russians be actual villains on the show. That is a Red Dawn scenario where they create a secret base in small town USA and allow the monster big bad to find a way back into our world.
However the show does begin with the US government experimenting on children, separating children from their parents, mass surveillance, and murdering civilians to protect their intelligence assets. Not to spoil S4 but let's just say the US government steps it up a little bit in terms of doing bad things.
The show isn't really attempting to make a statement. It has anti-Soviet stuff because it's the 80s and Cold War. It has anti-CIA stuff because government experimentation is part of the premise. It's not doing either of these to make a broader statement about either topic. It's purely aesthetic. The show has no real political content.
Here's how little political content the show has, it completely ignores racial dynamics in rural Indiana during the 1980s. We have black characters saying and doing things they would never say or do during that time because Netflix wants a diverse cast. They want the diverse cast but don't want to bog down the show by exploring those racial dynamics. They will explore cartoonish Red Scare shit and Satanic Panic stuff, but not the race stuff. I mean ignoring the race stuff is being political, but it's also an example of how the show tries to ignore meaningful political content. I think at one point the show had black parents saying the cops need to question their kid more. This is 1986 rural Indiana. What a silly thing. Not only that but it was a white parent who piped up and said "You want cops to arrest our kids?" to the black parent.
Of course it's still a political thing but they're just regurgitating political things from the 80s without any real thought. It is aesthetic in that communism isn't going to be hurt by Stranger Things being anti-communist. It's aesthetic in that they're just copying something they don't understand because it was the cultural moment of the time. You can make a knock-off of Rocky III without personally and individually being anti-communist. I'm not defending the show. Watch it or don't, it doesn't really matter. I pirated it, I don't pay for Netflix. But I don't think it's dangerous propaganda that's going to hold back socialism from happening. It's definitely an ignorant show though and the writers should try harder.
The one character’s older brother is a violent bigot but then he gets reformed as a hot lifeguard the next season so they can do the MILF arc
It’s very much a whitewashing of the 80’s both literally and figuratively. I don’t think we should expect complete historical accuracy in all depictions of race across all media. I do wish that if they weren’t gonna touch on racism that they should have entirely not touched on it rather than kinda sorta touched on it.
How does Lucas feel about his girlfriend’s older brother physically threatening him because of his race and then just kind of not addressing him? We’ll never know. And that’s a big part of why it oughta be all or nothing. And preferably with someone who actually knows what the fuck they’re talking about
Then there is the gay stuff. Like hey we want gay characters because the people watching might be gay but let's not talk about the AIDS epidemic and societal attitudes towards LGBTQ people or anything. It's just a quirky personality trait that our main characters are all okay with. Just enough friction to have the gay characters there so the show has identity but no real criticism or exploration of the time. It's a very vapid show.
Making Strangers Things about the AIDS epidemic would not make sense at all. Its a small town setting, how in the world would they ham fist it in?
I didn't say make it about the AIDS epidemic. When I said "talk about" I don't mean the characters literally stop and have a conversation about it. I just mean the writers can put little stuff in. Mad Men is a good example of a show that does period cultural attitudes in a non-hamfisted way. If you want to point out that Mad Men is a high-class prestige drama and not some capeshit sci-fi schlock like ST, then consider Umbrella Academy S2. It's also made by Netflix and they did a whole plot about time travel where a black character goes back to the 60s. She joins a Civil Rights movement. They didn't avoid it.
Saying the CIA/US government bad was what Regan ran on - hating ALL governments is a thing. The difference is that in America - there are good people in the government sometimes, while in Russia - everyone is inherently stupid and evil.
Season 4 has done NOTHING to subvert the EVIL RUSSIANS narrative.
The show isn’t really attempting to make a statement.
It has anti-Soviet stuff because it’s the 80s and Cold War.
"it's just an aesthetic" is an easy way to sugarcoat anything with a propaganda function.
It's propaganda in that everything cultural in the US is propaganda. It's not propaganda in that the CIA paid people to write a show shitting on communism. They don't have to do that, it's already part of the cultural milieu. It just bleeds in whether it's intentional or not. Especially when it's a bunch of progressive professionals trying to have a corporate career while aping cultural moments from the 80s.
I'm not very good at communicating what I'm trying to say, but I'm not saying that the show isn't saying political things. It's just that they're saying unexamined political things in order to get to their goal which is 80s nostalgia. I'm not saying it's just an aesthetic so everyone here must agree to like it and that it's good. I don't think the writers are sitting at NF HQ rubbing their hands together over a plot to make communism look bad. It's crass, it's naive, it's ignorant of history. Which is why it's making money for Netflix. Because those things create inoffensive (to most people) entertainment and allows companies to avoid controversy. The goal of making money off the show has more to do with why it's anti-communist than specific ideological goals of the writers or Netflix executives.
At least they finally put a tamper on the smoking. I was starting to think Big Tobacco has been funding some of these period shows just to up smoking in the popular culture again.
Weren't "the bad guys" in season 3 just the Soviet Union though?
Yes. They had a secret base under the mall that brought in the aliens
And the one naive Soviet dude goes to a shitty carnival and has cotton candy and it makes him understand the joys of capitalism
The writers were in third grade when they watched the source material
This is the real answer. I don’t think this show is trying to say anything, it’s just nostalgia and aesthetics of 80s film. The Soviets are the bad guys because that’s who the bad guys were in the movies and TV the writers watched as children in the 80s.
I had successfuly erased that fucking dumb scene from my mind.
Thanks.
It’s fun slop, but you have to go into it with 80s nostalgia that lets you accept that the Soviets are basically just cartoon villains.
I said this elsewhere, but in season 3, all the real world, non-fantastical problems are critiques of Capitalism. Even the "pro-capitalism" little girl goes from describing Capitalism to Project Child Endangerment.
Now this could all be a part of pacing and leading storytelling where you have to give the viewer what they expect to lead them where you want. But then, I noticed this last night after finishing my rewatch, when Dustin is radioing Suzie he interrupts her reading of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin. So even if there's anti-communism going on, I suspect there's a comrade on the writing staff.
Or just a liberal that likes appropriating communist shit.
Out of curiosity, I checked Google trends and there was a small spike in searches for Earthsea in July 2019 when Season 3 was
announcedreleased. So that's cool, at least.Oh, yeah, totally possible too, but there are a lot of left leaning writers in Hollywood.
I did notice the line but couldn't think of what it was from. I just remember thinking it was funny because of how bullshit it was.
well, it's a TV show about kids who have scary adventures first of all
btw they also turned the prison into a stranger things themed tourist attraction where you can sleep in the cells for fun
cells that jews were executed in
