Stranger Things Season Three

I liked the first season of Stranger Things, and the second grew on me.

The third season was difficult to watch. There was a lot of yelling and strobe lights and violence, which gradually escalated to the point where there wasn’t much else. I love horror movies and don’t mind violence when it’s weird or unexpected or choreographed in a visually interesting way, but the third season of Stranger Things was filled with a lot of bog-standard punching and shooting.

The first three episodes in the season set up a few compelling story threads, but they’re all dropped in favor of the punching and shooting. There’s a beautiful conversation between two teenagers in a mall bathroom in the second-to-last episode that made me cry (kind of a whole lot), but a lot of the dialogue was shouted in anger or panic. I fast-forwarded through huge chunks of the last five (of eight) episodes and scrolled through animal pictures of various social media platforms during the rest of the time. In other words, the “exciting” fights and chase scenes of the third season were profoundly boring to me.

The reviews were generally positive, and I found myself wondering if this is what people really want. Did someone complain about the character development and worldbuilding in the first two seasons? I assumed the violence was filler for a decay in the writing quality, but were people genuinely pleased that there were less feelings and more punching? I’m happy to look at a piece of media and say “This isn’t for me,” but…

When I was a kid, I loved three things: dinosaurs, space, and science. My parents were religious and very conservative about gender roles, however, so they were constantly taking things I liked away from me and saying “this isn’t for you,” whether it was a radio I enjoyed taking apart and putting back together or a cheap plastic Godzilla a friend gave me for my birthday. I remember being so confused, like, Why isn’t this for me? Who was being hurt by the fact I liked it?

Between Hollow Knight not having an easy mode and Justin McElroy’s painful review of Night in the Woods and the third season of Stranger Things, I’ve recently been feeling like my sense of “this isn’t for me” is less of a personal decision and more of an externally imposed set of arbitrary social standards regarding who certain types of media should belong to, and it’s frustrating.

Moving On

Between one thing and another, I've come into possession of a small pile of evidence that one's success in fandom is disproportionately dependent on the amount of time and energy spent on social media. I'm an introvert with a more-than-full-time job, and I have neither the time nor the energy to spend multiple hours every day on Twitter and Discord. If you want your work to be recognized, however, that's what you need to do. The quality of what you create matters, but only if you know the right people. In other words, fandom is essentially a high school popularity contest. I had always suspected this, but finding multiple sources of concrete evidence was disheartening.

I should probably clarify that I'm not personally butthurt about any one thing in particular. All of my social media accounts are carefully curated walled gardens, and I'm surrounded by good people. And it's not as if professional spaces for creative people are perfect, obviously. I've just been feeling like fandom is a bit silly recently; and, if I'm going to be doing "work" on social media, then I want it to be useful and productive.

Now that I've begun my foray into professional publishing, I've been amazed at how tangibly rewarding it is. It's not easy, of course, but it's also not a situation where having thousands of followers and millions of notes on Tumblr benefits my life in exactly zero ways. It's also nice to know that, if a social media platform disappeared overnight, then my work would still be out there. As much as I appreciate magical screens that glow in the dark, I fucking love print media.

I've therefore decided to try to wrap up my ongoing fandom projects by the end of 2019. I'm going to work on and post one currently-unfinished story every week until all my draft folders are cleaned out. I want all of the fan art and fan comics I have lying around colored and posted, and I want all of my art commissions to be squared away. It's been a lot of fun, but it's time to move on.