wasps did nothing wrong

they perform as well as expensive HEPA air cleaners, and are comparatively VERY inexpensive. all you need is a box fan, 4 air filters, a piece of cardboard, and some duct tape!!!!

and then in even LESS time we got the entirety of House MD which was an 8-season show with an average release map of 20-25 episodes (40 min long each) per season per *year*

so yeah anyone who says that it makes total sense actually for Stranger Things to have gone on this long and for the child actors to now be old enough to have kids of their own are just flat out full of it and are probably under the age of 16 because they don't remember what TV used to be like (or literally weren't there to experience it before it turned into whatever the fuck Netflix has turned it into)

like gee idk maybe it has to do with the fact that The Bear is filmed across like 1-3 recurring locations and every location is just a room in a building

or the fact that The Bear features regular people in a regular kitchen environment with a focus put on the writing and editing to create the drama

or the fact that The Bear doesn't require as much post-production editing because it doesn't employ gratuitous amounts of CGI

or maybe just the simple fact that The Bear knows it's a fucking TV show and knows it isn't productive to keep audiences waiting 4+ years for a new season made up of 4-6 films

like what The Bear is doing isn't unique, it's not "new", it's literally just what television used to be. We're deadass just not used to it anymore because TV has become this binging marathon where we sit and watch 4 episodes for 12+ hours straight.

yes Stranger Things is a different genre from The Bear, it's obviously going to require a different workload and different accommodations and it has unique and different challenges to face in its production

but it's absolutely not the first show of its kind, we owe the success of shows like Stranger Things to the shows that came before - Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, Doctor Who, the list goes on - and all of those shows that ran so Stranger Things could crawl at a glacial pace were capable of being produced similarly to shows like The Bear - with effective writing and camera work that pushed the limits of their set designs, and practical effects that could make up for what they couldn't achieve with CGI (either because it just wasn't viable enough yet or because it wasn't worth the expense).

the real irony here is that Stranger Things is supposed to be an 80's-reminiscent show, and yet it couldn't be further from the philosophies of 80's television that gave us the formats of modern TV and its cultural environment that both Stranger Things and its predecessors owe their legacies to

TV used to be this sort of liminal space where you could kick off your shoes after work / school and watch 20-40 minutes of your show in between your other obligations like making dinner, doing homework, working on other hobbies, and self-care

movies, on the other hand, were a special occasion, you either went to the theaters to fully indulge in a feature length film that was usually at least 90 minutes (but not always, some would be as little as 70-80) or you rented a VHS/DVD to watch at home for some uninterrupted family time

and while TV definitely had its own host of problems as an attention-whoring device, streaming productions like Stranger Things have really managed to find the next exploitation in the attention economy - by turning TV into a whole ass movie marathon that takes longer to get through per season than watching the entire uncut Lord of the Rings trilogy or a single 25-episode season of House MD

and not because it necessarily has more to offer - but because every episode demands your attention for 2-4 times as long as the norm of what used to be expected out of TV, and every season has a production cycle that somehow manages to take longer than it would have taken them to just make a fucking movie

i'm sorry b/c this really turned into an "old man yells at cloud" rant but it's just absolutely insane to me how much we've lost the plot of what TV is and what it was specifically designed for - quick, manageable hits of entertainment that weren't as demanding of your time and attention as movies. that was it. that was the whole appeal. and Netflix has convinced people to pay $10-$20+/month just to wait for their TV content because they decided TV should be a bunch of back-to-back movies now

we let this happen

we all let this happen

we have just as much of ourselves to blame as we do the corporate entities that took the simple and elegant concept of TV away from us

because we (as a society) keep paying for it and waiting for it until it eventually decides to give us what we were paying and waiting for

and i can't help but feel with how successful and profitable these shows wind up being in spite of the criticisms people have to make of them, there's never going to be a way back to what we lost

we thought we were just cutting our monthly cable bill but what we were really cutting was an essential limb of entertainment culture that's now being threatened by Netflix Netflix Netflix Netflix Netflix Reddit Netflix Netflix and their two favorite dimwits with beards and plain t-shirts who collectively call themselves "the Duffer Brothers"

it's been 6 years since j.k rowling started doubling down on her transphobia. (if we mark her mask off moment as her 2020 posting)

people have had six years to come to terms with it and find alternatives, there have been multiple video essays podcasts and written journalism about all of this, there are so many lists of alternatives including contemporary to the series and current fiction. even as early as 2022 people were renaming real world social groups/sport formed around their hp fandom to distance themselves from her work.

i wasn't even particularly negative, i said "stop spending money here" that's neither critical to the source material nor the fans. and not spending money isn't even an active action it's passive inaction, very easy to do.

also as someone who grew up with the book phenomenon and the films, you cannot reproduce the phenomenon that it used to be. you can find other things that give you joy but that was a very specific pop cultural time and event. the new show not only funds the cultural relevance of and bigoted political actions of rowling, it's also just inherently flawed in conception as a work of nostalgia that will always fall short in both quality, phenomena, and fandom culture.

I'm not coddling adults or teens who are tempted to engage with hp because i respect that they have the capacity to change their minds and expand their own tastes. it's not my responsibility to spoon-feed people alternatives.

I'm saying stop giving her money

i'm saying stop giving the franchise cultural currency via streaming attention

i'm saying the real people who are being made unsafe due to the transphobia and racism of j.k rowling are and always will be more important than nostalgia and fandom

I sound harsh because i was being blunt, if that comes off as negativity that puts some people off then that's okay.

there are much more hand holding options out there, (i myself watched a few video essays years ago deconstructing the bigotry of the novels and the messy relationship between fandom on identity and fiction versus personal ethics. because i needed discussions to process my own personal emotional response to letting the franchise go)

but with my own post I would hope that at least some people go "actually yeah this isn't worth my time and money" about the new show.

because it's okay to feel some negative emotions if it reminds you not to do something you actually feel is wrong.

ultimately @thewickedbohemian it's okay that you don't like my two sentence post as an approach to addressing the entire harry potter fandom. I would encourage you to visit/revisit any works that make you feel the same kind of magic that people are looking for and compile a list yourself to share, it's a good exercise and does help give people a place to start. it's not something i did with this post, it can be something you do with your own post, feel free to tag me in it and i'll reblog.

but again, i'll say it:

"STOP GIVING THE WORKS OF JK ROWLING TIME AND MONEY" "DO NOT HATEWATCH"

here's some places for people to donate

https://mermaidsuk.org.uk/?form=donate

https://transactual.org.uk/change-actions/ https://www.peoplesfundraising.com/donation/support-transactual

https://www.thenational.scot/news/26277881.jk-rowling-urges-gender-critical-groups-sue-amnesty-international/

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

even if someone WAS just lazy and simply didn't want to do anything but lie on the couch and watch tv, they should still have these things. it's irrelevant whether some people aren't actually lazy because everyone, including hypothetical lazy people, should have their basic needs met.

if we have the resources to do it, there is no defense of letting people die because they don't want to work, and much less because they can't.

then she started funnelling all her wizard book money into destroying the rights of my people and I resolved not to give her any more of my money

sometimes a trans woman wins against a cis woman. sometimes a cis woman wins against another cis woman too. yet only one of them is allowed to win without facing consequences.