cutgate this conformitygate that it’s probably a sort of combo of the two, let’s be honest. this is rewritegate
just the combo of ross’s wife divorcing him and the political climate getting more rocky in the U.S., and thus netflix starts pushing against byler being the end all be all.
leigh was almost certainly a part of the creative process. it’s not like ross went home and just didn’t talk about his story, and it’s not like he didn’t accept input from his wife. when things went to shit and they divorced (early in 2024, right around when filming for s5 started) that extra input was gone, ross is left with nothing but his own idiot dumb man brain and his twin brother’s equally idiot dumb man brain.
that combined with the continually worsening political climate, it probably involved a rewrite of the ep 6-8 scripts. netflix execs likely approached the duffers about changing their story, likely referencing to the largeness of the show and the unconventional ending.
the duffers said they fought for certain things with netflix and didn’t win them all. i would guess that’s why the ending is the way it is, it’s likely why it feels off, why they still have that “fuck conformity!” speech from dustin while it’s the most conformist ending ever. every character is pressed into this perfect mold of whatever stereotype they fit into. lumax is just “the couple,” dustin is “the smart one,” will is “the gay one,” it’s all so fucking weird. and then you have mike, who we never get the pov of past like… s2, and somehow he’s the narrator again. he’s supposed to be the writer of this story and the clear main character who’s now writing the endings for them all. it feels out of place because it doesn’t feel earned after the ending we just got, and it doesn’t feel like him. it’s too conventional, when we knew that mike pushed against the rules his whole time growing up.
so we get this hyper meta ending, where there are little details that would almost make us believe none of it is real, and perhaps that was intentional and its conformitygate, or maybe it’s just a bad combination of factors coming into play during the writing and filming of season 5. ross’s divorce, netflix execs, and the worsening political climate almost all played into the shit ending of stranger things, and it’s a shame to know that it’s likely true and there’s likely an alternate ending out there somewhere, scribbled in notes and tucked away in little journals.
if this story followed a true writing process there would be evidence to an alternate ending under lock and key somewhere. maybe in ross’s nightstand, maybe hidden in the dark recesses of matt’s filing cabinet. there are likely scripts we’ll never see, dialogue that will never be spoken, and scenes that will never be filmed. no cut footage, no pre-filmed alternate ending, but rather an ending that would never see the light of day because of the influence to conform. and that makes me sick and it makes me upset that the duffers couldn’t even try and write a good ending after all that. it’s like they gave up and said “well whatever we’ll still get our billion.”
it’s my only comfort, really. the idea that this show really was very very good, and part of that was because of good people and good influences. you lose those and then yeah, you really do just have two cishet white idiots sitting in their basement writing a sci-fi story. it’s a shame we got turned into noise in the end when byler was clearly intentional. there’s no saying it wasn’t, there’s no acting like it wasn’t deeply etched into that story from the beginning. and s5 doesn’t add up and that’s not a sign of it never having been in the cards, but rather a shitty spackle job over the engravings scribbled across the wall. it feels covered up because it probably was covered up.
rip byler. you would have been too good for the GA anyway.
