i have so much to say about this season but i'll try to be concise and make all my points no longer than a paragraph each otherwise i'll never stop lmao

1. i thought the season was stylistically much better than s3. i'm glad they went back to the s1/2 vibe instead of favouring nostalgia and flashy colours.

2. there was some really stand-out acting this season. i think millie is always amazing but she did such a good job regressing to a younger eleven for the lab scenes without having many lines, and there was a scene in 4x8 that i haven't seen anyone talk about where she's talking to brenner about henry which i think she was phenomenal in. this was sadie's season for sure and i just know she's gonna be booked and busy. caleb in 4x09 was literally insane i haven't been able to shut up about his performance (CALEB MCLAUGHLIN EMMY CAMPAIGN!!!!), and i'm so glad him and gaten finally got some big scenes. it's about time

3. i liked almost everything to do with vecna/henry/001 even if some of the execution in volume 2 fell flat to me. i think they answered the necessary questions about the upside down and even answered a few i didn't bother asking, like how el lost her powers. a lot of people guessed that "the orderly" was 001 (i didn't but i blame it on being way too excited to see jcb) and a smaller few guessed he was vecna but i still loved the reveal and i've seen 4x7 like four times now. i had a few plot holes i was trying to fill but upon rewatching they were answered so. i have pretty much nothing to complain about with this storyline and some parts of it were my favourite aspect of season 4

4. i genuinely had fun watching volume 1 and i liked the pause before volume 2 to theorize online and talk about the first part of the season. i think it was a really good compromise between the demand to binge-watch and the demand for weekly episodes to process and discuss. the format was refreshing and i wouldn't mind other shows doing this.

5. nancy and robin

6. 4x4 in its entirety

7. the amount of lumax content this season solidifying their place as the best ship in the show. i got excited every time they were on-screen and seeing 14 year old lucas sinclair have more emotional maturity and respect for his EX-girlfriend than most grown men have for their WIVES was truly something. he really fought for her and wants the best for her. i love them so much.

8. sometimes i am a simple woman and super on-the-nose attempts at eliciting a reaction do in fact elicit a reaction from me, and a synth mashup of running up that hill with the stranger things theme admittedly was one of them. idk dude. take it up with god i got kinda excited even though i was rocking back and forth on my bed detaching from my body and texting my sister "i don't trust any of this it's all about to go wrong"

9. jopper reunion warmed my cold heart

10. i do think eddie was kind of an Eh character in volume 1 but by the end i really liked him and i solely credit joseph quinn so thanks joseph quinn

1. the marketing/cast promo around volume two. i don't even know if calling it misleading is accurate enough? there were things that were just fully untrue and i'm not sure why they were said. the whole "five deaths", devastating massacre, "game of thrones" season (in terms of lazy writing, sure, it definitely could've been a later GoT season) being pushed was so... weird? i guarantee the complaints about volume 2 would be cut in half if it hadn't been advertised this way. most people would have nodded along and happily accepted a stranger things season that mimicked its predecessors with the whole "new, lovable character gets tragically killed while the main cast remains intact" trope they have going on. not to mention some people can't seem to grasp that the reason accusations of queerbaiting are growing is because of the cast and the duffers and not because of the show itself. the definition of queerbaiting is "the practice of implying non-heterosexual relationships or attraction to engage or attract an audience or otherwise generate interest without ever actually depicting such relationships or sexual interactions." that did happen. that is bad.

2. not a fault of the show itself but i have to mention this because it's pissing me off but there's been an astounding amount of ableism towards max and eleven this season. the amount of people i've seen full-on bullying el for her lack of social awareness and "awkwardness" is insane. congrats, if the show was real you would be angela! i just know for a fact you bully people for displaying autistic traits and then claim not to be ableist. and the way some of you are talking about max potentially being disabled when she wakes up is ..... very odd. obviously what happened to her was fucking awful (i'll get to that) but why have i seen like a million comments implying she can't have a whole, fulfilling life if she's blind? the trauma of that night will be insanely difficult to process but do you not think disabled people can be happy? i've literally seen people say she's worse than dead and not in reference to her conscience being missing.

3. the stancy plotline was a slap in the face to both characters. like genuinely insulting. sorry but even if you like them together it's objectively bad writing considering how evident it was in the last two seasons that this is the exact opposite of where their characters were going. the sudden backtrack in the face of a preexisting relationship and a well-written progression towards a platonic friendship reminds me of the stiles and lydia mess from season 6 of teen wolf, only without the huge community of shippers to justify it as a necessary act of fanservice to retain viewership. like. can this even be called fanservice when most of the fanbase didn't ask for it to happen? the laziness of steve's arc is honestly sad for someone with so much potential. we finally got a tiny glimpse into his inner thoughts distinct from his romantic interests and five minutes later they're about nancy being the mother of his six children (why would you say this to someone you dated for less than a year, two years ago?????) not to mention bouncing nancy around jonathan and steve when she inarguably hasn't been into steve since the beginning of s2. also the forced dialogue and glances from other characters noticing their "feelings" for each other were actually hard to watch. i don't think the duffers know what to do with either of them, but there has been a vocal insistence from the audience that steve is better single since last season so opposing fans AND his natural character arc is so deranged to me. it's a weird retcon for both of them though and i feel nancy was headed in an interesting direction with her career-oriented take-no-shit attitude last season. and haven't they made jonathan useless enough? having him give a subtle dig at steve in his last scene just for nancy to defend him and create tension that i'm sure will come to a head in season five... i'm just so over these three.

4. i'm starting to think the duffers just don't know how to write coherent romances because other than lumax and jopper (who were written horribly in s3—jopper far far worse than lumax—but i'm genuinely okay with pretending that didn't happen because some of it was unfixable otherwise) they keep pushing these stale, repetitive romance sideplots. stancy vs jancy, mileven, sorry to say it but vickie and robin too... whether you saw anything between robin in nancy is one thing but natalia and maya have chemistry and ronance actually has potential for a really cool development but it'll never happen bc the duffers aren't creative enough. i know lots of people are happy about vickie at the end and i'm happy they're happy!! there's nothing inherently wrong with them as a couple but i personally find nothing appealing about pairing two people together and making the selling point that they are the Exact Same. not only is it not a compelling romance to me but it feels extremely lazy. if i think to myself "what is the easiest way to create a connection between two characters without actually having to build a relationship?" putting them next to each other and giving them the same defining trait feels like a pretty quick answer. it's cheap to me, and i think we should be asking more of queer characters than to get just any sweet but narratively hollow relationship, when there is potential for a more complex, slow relationship with an actual foundation.

5. we should have seen more of the initial devastation of hawkins before the time jump. i want to see the "earthquake" strike. show me max's mom crying over her letter as the gate opens next to her house. show me someone else getting torn in half like jason. show me the havoc like i should have seen from something this big. sidenote, as a lot of people have said, there shouldn't have been a time jump at all. what a massive cop-out from showing what could have been some of the most powerful scenes this season? more reactions to eddie's death? a longer reaction to max's instead just nancy sadly saying her name? what happened to steve being a big brother to her and starting to form a bond with eddie? how did dustin get back? why didn't we see them realize they had to leave eddie's body there (did they?) and steve having to drag him away? SO many missed opportunities. also, yes, a main (or at least semi-main like murray) character death should have happened but i'll mention later that many of the characters i would have selected didn't have good enough arcs this season to have good deaths. a lot of rightful complaints that this season held back after being marketed as a massacre would have been appeased if we'd seen more of how horribly things ended and the weight of the loss before s5 would be better

6. some of the cgi (specifically of young eleven) and visual choices were... interesting. off the top of my head, nancy falling at the end of 4x7 looked really funny to me and that scene where vecna is looking through this red mist to find traumatized people to kill was so corny i was shocked. i don't know if they couldn't afford better voice actors to speak their inner monologues or if no one took a second look at the script and went "wow this is bad" but it was bad.

7. max is not dead. that is not a con i just can't believe i even have to say this. the people confidently claiming otherwise can slap me in the face and say they told me so if i'm wrong but god what BAD storytelling it would be if she is. why even resurrect her to just.... come back in s5 and have el be like. Yeah. sorry guys. she's dead. that's so anticlimactic i don't even think i would be sad if it were true because i'd be laughing at how sudden and shallow it is. 001 told eleven in the rainbow room that the other numbers weren't "dead" bc they were still with him—he kept chrissy and fred in his mindspace, and he was psychically connected to max when they both "died" or were severely hurt... like. their brains were linked in that moment. neither of them are dead and they're tied together somehow. it makes no sense whatsoever to let max live instead of killing her off in her actual death scene if they were just gonna casually kill her five minutes later.

8. on top of that, what happened to max shouldn't have happened. yes, there should have been a main character death. they should have committed. i'm reluctant to say it should have been steve, nancy or jonathan because if they had died after the sad, watery character arcs they had this season their deaths would've been really lame. BUT, no, it shouldn't have been max. like absolutely not ever should it have been or one day be max. i'm not just saying that because she's my favourite character but because the trope of "suicidal character realizes they want to live as they're dying" is so pathetic and tired i never want to see it ever again. max's volume 1 arc was such a perfect allegory for depression, especially the scene at the end of 4x4. early volume 2 was headed in the right track with her coming full circle to lucas's line in 4x1 where he tells her to find something to care about. she has! she cares about him and her friends and her life. it's not quite what it was and she has a long way to go and things to become passionate about but the point is she wants to be there for the inevitable "one day" when she does. it's a realistic and necessary and hopeful story, and i think having her confront the part of her that wanted billy dead and came to eventually be so wracked with guilt she thought she deserved to die too was such an integral moment of acceptance. she confesses to it and immediately after fights vecna and literally finds her own happiness to escape him. right after talking about how she wished she would disappear she fights to stay! it shows how far she's come and i'm sorry but following such an amazing climax to her s4 arc with her being brutally broken, blinded and killed was fucking stupid. despite the resurrection. max was the absolute last character where something like this was necessary.

i said this on tiktok already but i think dark edgy tv and the idea that "happy endings are overrated" has literally rotted some of your brains because to me this was a scene written for the sake of being cruel to its audience. it was supposed to prove stranger things' willingness not to hold back, but you think if something doesn't border torture p0rn it's not good enough. some deaths are written for nothing more than to prove the writers can do it, and that's what i think of this. i don't think it's some new genius concept to brutalize and kill off depressed characters in the middle of their journey to healing. even if max lives, which i think she will, i don't see a thematic purpose for doing this to her. it felt like darkness for the sake of being dark.

9. i can no longer defend mike wheeler. joyce byers voice I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU THINK THAT THING IN THERE IS BUT THAT IS NOT MY SON! not only do i think finn wolfhard has given up on playing him, he was barely inching toward being something more than eleven's boyfriend in volume 1 and volume 2 threw him right back. he's on a growing list of characters who just sort of exist when the plot needs them to and stand around the rest of the time.

ok that's all i have for now