SPREAD THE WORD!!! THE PEOPLE ARE FINALLY WAKING UP!!!
THANK YOU. Also adding more disgusting shit and problematic things:
Them putting Noah in super high cut shorts in season 3 for just no... no reason. Also having Will shirtless a little too often in season 2.
Them thinking Karen cheating with a 17 year old highschooler was hot.
Only forcing Sadie and Caleb to kiss in season 2 because Sadie was uncomfortable with having her first onscreen kiss. Sir, that was a child, why were you pushing her into that.
Them putting Noah through 12 hours of filming super emotionally charged scenes - the van scene and coming out scene - which was a RIDICULOUS amount of filming time (genuinely Stanley Kubrick bullshit), and in the coming out scene Noah reported feelings of dissociation and he was basically having an actual panic attack for the entire duration of the scene. As a gay man in real life who went through this before, now he was having to go through the same trauma for his character in front of his castmates - some of them in the room he barely even knew because their characters never interacted and/or they weren't even on set at the same time until then.
The Duffers basically telling Noah to shut up when he tried to make suggestions for his character's story, and Noah reporting feeling intimidated to "step out of line".
Overworking Millie so much that she collapsed into Finn's arms in the Sauna Test fight against Billy. They used that take.
The original script where Steve was supposed to sexually assault Nancy.
They keep making Mike sexist for no reason. The whole comment about women being a "different species" in season 3 and now apparently in Tales From '85 they're going to have him excluding the new character Nikki from the party for no reason?
Why is El in a relationship before she even knows how to tell what she likes?
Why were there so many rape allegories and then none of them were handled with any ounce of respect. Just. why anything
The weird ass "good taste" comment they had Mike make about El wearing a wetsuit in season 5.
Thinking Will coming out from the fear that Vecna might use his sexuality was empowering. What. the. fuck.
The fucking piss fetish. Seriously. Why are there 8 million references to piss. El forcing Troy to piss himself. The direct focus on Will pissing in the toilet in season 2. The soldier pissing on the wall in season 5. Steve pissing off the side of the elevator in season 3 and focusing directly on that. Most of it never even had any real plot relevance so now it's a rogue element - why the fuck is it there.
They also tried to get Dacre Montgomery as Billy to call Lucas the N word, but he refused.
And to all the people going "well you guys never said anything before for ten years, you only find it weird now because your ship isn't canon".
No.
Just.
No.
I've found a lot of this stuff weird for a long time, but I think conversation around it didn't happen as much because people thought there would be plot relevance to some of the things listed or people were in denial of it being "that bad" because our enjoyment of the show for what it was won out over the weird vibes. It's not great of course that there wasn't much conversation about it before, but yes, the finale being so bad and the Duffers showing more and more of their true colors at the end of the road WAS the straw that broke the camel's back so to speak and that's why you're only seeing conversation about it now. It wasn't that no one ever talked about it before, people just thought the Duffers couldn't actually be this bad, or at least they hoped not.
Another thing I noticed is the way the characters of coloured got less backstory/arcs in general.
• Kali, mentioned once in S2 and then sidelined before being brought back in S5 just for them to traumatise her more, get the audience to hate her by suggesting there is a spy (and never shutting it down when people got very hateful with suspecting it was her), and then having her killed by her oppressors
• Erica, sassy black woman stereotype (which is also reflected in her mum from that one scene with Lucas asking his dad for relationship advice)
• Lucas, wasn’t as fleshed out as the other characters in earlier seasons (we barely saw his family + their relationship compared to the rest of the party) and in the later seasons he is flattened to just his relationship with Max.
• Jane/El, the sexualisation of a character who is meant to be ~16, why is she running around in a skin tight wetsuit for the majority of the season 1) that must be so uncomfortable, 2) they could’ve easily made hopper carry a pair of joggers/a jacket to give her afterwards. Also the crop top jumper from training which while more likely to be something a 16yo would wear, why was it chosen ‘to show off her figure’ that just isn’t needed for a character of that age
There is definitely more overall and for these characters but it’s late rn so I may add more
