shipper's paradise

I’ve been waiting to share my honest thoughts on season 4, because I hoped I would be more impressed with volume 2, but now that I’ve seen it, I’m not impressed - I’m shocked. From the beginning this season has surprised me. Sidelining main characters, overdoing the action, trying to do too much at once, engaging in stereotypes and tropes they have never used and actually avoided before, slightly bending their own canon, and the immense cringy-ness that was somewhat controlled before seemed to overtake everything on the screen. The cleverness was gone. The editing, especially the sound, was grotesquely overdone. The beautiful writing that I loved so much was gone - everything felt flat. The character development was at an all time low. It was incredibly repetitive - and if i’m being completely honest, I was bored watching parts of the season.

Everything I loved about season 1, everything that made it what it was, is completely gone. This has been my least favorite season of the show, and quite honestly, has diminished my interest in it vastly.

2 creators who stole the whole premise of this show from another student in their class at film school who wrote a script called “Montauk” (which is what the show was originally called), and have been taking content from other movies and shows to build their show in its entirety ever since…no wonder they let us down. And I don’t just mean with byler, I mean with everything. No character or plot-line was done justice this season.

And as far as byler goes, Stranger Things had the potential and power to portray ground-breaking, actually positive lgbtq+ representation to a mass audience in a show set during a homophobic time period, but instead they chose to employ and reinforce negative, stereotypical, cheap queer tropes such as unrequited pining, and refusing to address sexuality in dialogue - “gay” isn’t a dirty word, please don’t make it seem like one, and by using queer characters as a plot device to further straight relationships, especially after heavily queer-coding the first 3 seasons, and intentionally leading fans on through social media. They knew what they were doing.

So I just finished Killing Stalking. Something that I have been with since it first came out. I began crying into my pillow with a fear that I might wake up my fam. I AM A MESS RIGHT NOW. but then I started thinking, HOW DID I ARRIVE HERE ALMOST 3 YEARS AGO????!?

So then I remembered that the only reason I joined this fandom was because Yuri! On Ice ended and people from that fandom jumped on board the KS fandom.

Let’s cheers to that.