Romantic Pop Idol

Vs Mike thinking he lost Will

Fandom creators spend hours of their free time to create something to make fandom thrive...for free and for the love of the game.

And what do they get? A wholeass heap of fuck all. No reblogs, no comments, no nothing. And people are surprised that creators are dropping out left, right, and centre??

"Why is there no long fic anymore?" "Why did my favourite writer stop?" "Why is my favourite artist not posting anymore?"

So, yeah, being able to crawl to either the gate or the tunnels should have been completely out of the question, let alone getting far enough away to recover in the time allotted.

And don't even get me started on how Kali, having been shot in the stomach, would have been able to cast an illusion to begin with (assuming she was somehow still alive), let alone know when and where to do it.

The only thing dumber than the ending we saw was the ending Mike came up with, especially since all El wanted was for Mike to understand her decision and to help the others understand it. Instead, he convinces them that it didn't happen, that she's still out there somewhere.

The Duffers lost the plot to their own story.

I have a friend who works in education and he told me about how he was working with a small group of HS students to develop a new school sports chant. This was a very daunting task for the group, in large part because many had learning disabilities related to reading and writing, so coming up with a catchy, hard-hitting, probably rhyming, poetry-esque piece of collaborative writing felt like something outside of their skill range. But it wasn't! I knew that, he knew that, and he worked damn hard to convince the kids of that too. Even if the end result was terrible (by someone else's standards), we knew they had it in them to complete the piece and feel super proud of their creation.

Fast-forward a few days and he reports back that yes they have a chant now... but it's 99% AI. It was made by Chat-GPT. Once the kids realized they could just ask the bot to do the hard thing for them - and do it "better" than they (supposedly) ever could - that's the only route they were willing to take. It was either use Chat-GPT or don't do it at all. And I was just so devastated to hear this because Jesus Christ, struggling is important. Of course most 14-18 year olds aren't going to see the merit of that, let alone understand why that process (attempting something new and challenging) is more valuable than the end result (a "good" chant), but as adults we all have a responsibility to coach them through that messy process. Except that's become damn near impossible with an Instantly Do The Thing app in everyone's pocket. Yes, AI is fucking awful because of plagiarism and misinformation and the environmental impact, but it's also keeping people - particularly young people - from developing perseverance. It's not just important that you learn to write your own stuff because of intellectual agency, but because writing is hard and it's crucial that you learn how to persevere through doing hard things.

Write a shitty poem. Write an essay where half the textual 'evidence' doesn't track. Write an awkward as fuck email with an equally embarrassing typo. Every time you do you're not just developing that particular skill, you're also learning that you did something badly and the world didn't end. You can get through things! You can get through challenging things! Not everything in life has to be perfect but you know what? You'll only improve at the challenging stuff if you do a whole lot of it badly first. The ability to say, "I didn't think I could do that but I did it anyway. It's not great, but I did it," is SO IMPORTANT for developing confidence across the board, not just in these specific tasks.