THERE IS NO WAY TO DESCRIBE THIS MESS

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

even during jane's death, they focused on mike.

very much not okay bc wdym el spent maybe two weeks of her life outside the lab not in a romantic relationship of some sort with mike wheeler

Pretty sure the show emphasised repeatedly that Mike was like the ONE person who did not see the real her.... This was honestly the most absurd retcon of the entire show, and I hate that there's a generous selection to choose from.

“how do i know what i like?” has to be one of the most evil lines in the show fr wdym she’s been in a relationship… for six whole months… and is asking for the FIRST TIME how to know what SHE likes… only to experience one singular day of girlhood and friendship and self expression and then immediately be tossed back into the torture chamber

The juxtaposition of these two scenes will forever haunt me. Muppet getting an enema v a nuanced performance of heartbreak and fear. Who did they hire to coach this kid that his talent regressed so significantly?

That scene held literally no meaning beyond, hey, let's make it glaringly obvious how much we hate this little gay kid and the actor who played him. There was no pay-off, no symbolism, and no deeper meaning to this beyond shock value. Like... basically the rest of season 5. How anyone still defends the dipshit bros is beyond me.