Purple
(She/Her)
So I am halfway through season 4 of Stranger Things, which is a thing we have for some reason, and... it really sucks?
Like, I think we can all broadly agree that the first season was honestly pretty darn good, but the second season was just kind of a soulless retread that started to really show the cracks in everything and... OK I actually kinda liked season 3 since it kinda went in a weird direction with what movies to riff of and doubled down on Steve's totally-peaked-in-high-school-and-is-now-a-weird-wholesome-dork-who-hangs-out-with-kids deal.
But, yeah, I'm kinda hating everything about season 4 here. And spoilers abound I guess.
Really quickly, we jump in with our tradition of referencing a conspicuously copyrighted D&D monster being fought in a D&D session before a vaguely similar monster from another dimension shows up and we call it that as a nickname, and this time it's freaking Vecna. OK you don't fight Vecna. Vecna is not in the monster manual, he's a dead guy in the backstory for a campaign setting.
Also, we're going from "hey here's a spooky alternate dimension full of weird unknowable freaky monsters" to "here's some guy. He goes mwahaha and kinda does the Freddy Krueger thing" and that is... just such an astounding step down. Plus he lives in a big church surrounded by bats and keeps manifesting grandfather clocks. This is a super lame villain (also "mwahaha I specifically murder people with PTSD" kinda leaves a bad taste in my mouth).
Also? Before we jump into that first D&D session the protagonists' new GM is going on a big tirade against the whole Satanic Panic thing, but like... OK literally the last three times these kids got together and had a big D&D campaign going, something close enough to get nicknamed appropriately to the monster they were building up as a really particularly scary thing to fight wandered over from another dimension to mess with them, and I dunno, if that happened to me I wouldn't dismiss the whole Satanic monster summoning propaganda out of hand, and maybe consider switching over to like Runequest or GURPs or something.
Also we're still totally doing the whole thing where every girl is just naturally mortal enemies with every other girl which is kind of a big pet peeve of mine.
Also the kids have all become weird gangly teens with terrible haircuts and mostly seem to have turned into huge jerks, which really kinda destroys the whole Kids On Bikes appeal, and also makes me wonder if it's even still the '80s.
And then there's the elephant in the room I feel kinda bad for even pointing out but... Millie Bobby Brown can't act. This has always been the case, but real early on it worked out because hey she's playing the weird psychic science lab escapey with no real world experience, and being all shy and cryptic and unemotive worked, but here we've kind of advanced to the point where she's largely playing a normal semi-awkward girl in high school dealing with arbitrary Mean Girls and relationship angst, and it is... really really hard to ignore.
Plus there's kind of the same issue that's been persistent since the first season where they went from having 3 different storylines each with a different vibe for the three age ranges of characters to just kind of a jumbled mess where half the cast isn't particularly involved in the plot at all and the other half are all dealing with the same thing, with the same tone but arbitrarily split into random mini-groups. Actually hell now that I think about it it's really just Robin and Max dealing with stuff and everyone else is just kinda puttering around the background so far.
Like, I think we can all broadly agree that the first season was honestly pretty darn good, but the second season was just kind of a soulless retread that started to really show the cracks in everything and... OK I actually kinda liked season 3 since it kinda went in a weird direction with what movies to riff of and doubled down on Steve's totally-peaked-in-high-school-and-is-now-a-weird-wholesome-dork-who-hangs-out-with-kids deal.
But, yeah, I'm kinda hating everything about season 4 here. And spoilers abound I guess.
Really quickly, we jump in with our tradition of referencing a conspicuously copyrighted D&D monster being fought in a D&D session before a vaguely similar monster from another dimension shows up and we call it that as a nickname, and this time it's freaking Vecna. OK you don't fight Vecna. Vecna is not in the monster manual, he's a dead guy in the backstory for a campaign setting.
Also, we're going from "hey here's a spooky alternate dimension full of weird unknowable freaky monsters" to "here's some guy. He goes mwahaha and kinda does the Freddy Krueger thing" and that is... just such an astounding step down. Plus he lives in a big church surrounded by bats and keeps manifesting grandfather clocks. This is a super lame villain (also "mwahaha I specifically murder people with PTSD" kinda leaves a bad taste in my mouth).
Also? Before we jump into that first D&D session the protagonists' new GM is going on a big tirade against the whole Satanic Panic thing, but like... OK literally the last three times these kids got together and had a big D&D campaign going, something close enough to get nicknamed appropriately to the monster they were building up as a really particularly scary thing to fight wandered over from another dimension to mess with them, and I dunno, if that happened to me I wouldn't dismiss the whole Satanic monster summoning propaganda out of hand, and maybe consider switching over to like Runequest or GURPs or something.
Also we're still totally doing the whole thing where every girl is just naturally mortal enemies with every other girl which is kind of a big pet peeve of mine.
Also the kids have all become weird gangly teens with terrible haircuts and mostly seem to have turned into huge jerks, which really kinda destroys the whole Kids On Bikes appeal, and also makes me wonder if it's even still the '80s.
And then there's the elephant in the room I feel kinda bad for even pointing out but... Millie Bobby Brown can't act. This has always been the case, but real early on it worked out because hey she's playing the weird psychic science lab escapey with no real world experience, and being all shy and cryptic and unemotive worked, but here we've kind of advanced to the point where she's largely playing a normal semi-awkward girl in high school dealing with arbitrary Mean Girls and relationship angst, and it is... really really hard to ignore.
Plus there's kind of the same issue that's been persistent since the first season where they went from having 3 different storylines each with a different vibe for the three age ranges of characters to just kind of a jumbled mess where half the cast isn't particularly involved in the plot at all and the other half are all dealing with the same thing, with the same tone but arbitrarily split into random mini-groups. Actually hell now that I think about it it's really just Robin and Max dealing with stuff and everyone else is just kinda puttering around the background so far.