THERE IS NO WAY TO DESCRIBE THIS MESS

Forever mourning the season 3 we could have had....

They could never make me hate you, complex female character whose reaction to trauma was not pretty and digestible like how people think it should be.

Me with Villanelle 🫣

Sometimes I see how they're continuing to market this show as though it were some kind of overwhelming success and I wonder wtf kind of joke timeline I'm on. They couldn't even choose an aesthetically pleasing shot? This looks like some kind of religious cult brochure photo.

If people in the new universe are still making the same exact choices they made in the old universe (crusades, spanish inquisition etc.), then the old universe didn't have a problem of free will. S3 missed the point that humans being worse than hell was the whole joke of the book. Humans didn't need to be swayed with temptation: they already had free will and used it freely lol. Heaven and Hell were dumb corporate who thought they were doing a good job at swaying humanity but in reality they didn't sway shit. That was the whole point of the satire of the book, it's incredible that s3 missed all that and some more.

imagine setting up a villain whose powers are the easiest and most effective in-universe way to explore the internal conflicts, secrets and fears of your characters and just.... never using it to explore and develop those characters. ive genuinely never seen a fumble like this

biggest fumble of all time especially because they use vecna visions in very small doses in s5 (most effectively in the scene where hopper sees the agent orange and believes he's killed el, but also will's visions of what might happen if he comes out), but refused to expand on this in a meaningful way. they didn't even show the visions that will experienced, so we didn't get to see him grow in his resolve to come out and free himself of the shame and anxiety of what people might think of him. and characters like mike and lucas who were largely reduced down to being boyfriends and not given meaty plots of their own in s5 could have really benefitted from their interiority being fleshed out via vecna visions. vecna was right there as an easy vessel for delving into these characters' fears and conflicts, but they totally pushed it to the wayside and instead created a season where many characters felt hollow and underdeveloped

What watching season 5 felt like....

100% on board with this idea.

"it would be so good if it was good" will haunt you but "it's extremely good, except for the one or two parts which are so bad it's genuinely kind of insulting" will straight up drive you insane

bonus if the media up to this point has been so incredibly good and manages to fail so spectacularly at its own ending that it retroactively makes the preceding good parts nigh unwatchable

Good ol' multi-season slow-burn rejection. The classic way. You know, totally normal.

This is why the director deserves heavy criticism, not just rapeman. People keep saying the crew were powerless but she literally said this in an interview. Homophobic af. I'm so sick of cishets ruining our stories, telling us queer love needs to be 'nuanced' and 'subtle' as a euphemism for sanitised and hidden and unoffensive to homophobes. Fuck them all.

breaking up Rovickie and giving them no build up was queerphobic, breaking up Jancy because they thought Nancy needed independence instead of El who actually needed it after men dictated her whole life was dumb and kinda misogynistic idc, they treated Jane like a robot the whole season and stripped her of any humanity and retconned her friendship with Max who introduced girlhood to her