Another thing that I find really interesting about the stranger things finale is that they are still saying the moral is “anti conformity”, but then they show the complete opposite. El, in season one, wearing the blonde wig and pink dress, was what I believed to be a very easy to see symbol for assimilation and forced conformity. El craves femininity, to be a normal girl, just like Mike craves to be a normal, masculine boy (paraphrasing what Finn said about Mike). Them standing together in the mirror, both sad children playing at being grown ups. Mike says she looks beautiful, but everything feels wrong. It isn’t real: El is literally wearing dress up clothes, pretending to be a what others tell her a woman should look like. We also see this when she looks in Nancy’s room, and she is learning how a girl should be: feminine, pink and flowery, chaste and demure. But that isn’t even who Nancy is.
The best way (and in my opinion, the only way) we see conformity actually being challenged is through Nancy’s character arc and her change in costume and hair and makeup. She goes from having long and wavy hair, to short perms, and eventually a pixie cut, from long pastel skirts and sweaters to jeans and trousers, not to mention the costuming of fire arms strapped to her.
So then in season 5, Dustin’s speech about rejecting conformity falls completely flat when, minutes before, they showed the flashback of El in the blonde wig and pink dress as a “happy” memory, of something fond to look back on, rather than a girl who was stripped of any semblance of identity trying to perform the period ideal version of “woman”. I’m not even going to go into Mike and his role within this, about his obvious queerness and forced conformity he puts onto himself.
“Fuck Conformity” means nothing to the audience when all we’ve been shown from the two main characters is just that. To reframe a scene portraying something they are supposedly against as a happy nostalgic memory. I don’t even think they watched the show they wrote ten years ago.
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