![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It is a great example of what Wax assures me is generally the case with Stephen King - and of course is fairly common in horror in general: that the stories are about real-life horrors. It is about bullying, and the little gang of teenagers is entirely made up of marginalized people. There's a fat kid, a black kid, a Jewish kid, an abused (female) kid, a hyper/annoying/ADHD kid (Richie), a small 'sickly' (overprotected by hypochondriac stifling mother) kid, and a kid with a stutter.
I was thinking about this recently watching some interviews with the cast of Stranger Things, which draws a large portion of its pastiche and references and genre from Stephen King, and an interviewer said something about how fun the sort of weirdly up-beat tone is when the kids are going into battle against eldritch horrors and diving into the hell dimension and shit. Maya Hawke said that she actually had thought about this a fair amount, because reading the script you'd think it looked scary as fuck and potentially hopeless and that ther character should be really terrified, but the writer/creator/director Duffer brothers always respond to her questions with something like "Nah, you're... you're pretty confident."
The one thing that Stranger Things is about more than anything else is trauma, but there's other stuff. Season 1: runaways, absent parents, bullies. Season 2: Specifically PTSD symptoms (apart from just trauma again); bad parenting; gaslighting/denial (or rather, not listening to children); institutional/government malfeasance; domestic abuse. Season 3: White supremacy and misogyny, fascism; cults; but also I think Russian espionage maybe... almost as itself: potentially both the Cold War and the contemporary issue of election interference. Season 4: Trauma and child abuse and bullying again, institutional incompetence and government corruption/coverups, Satanic Panic and witch hunts.
It's not as coherently or deliberately about things as Stephen King typically is, which is probably partly because it's got a lot more of its focus on producing nostalgia-pastiche. But it's also on the larger level about a generation of traumatized children who are growing up terrorized by certain knowledge that their world is on fire and many encounters with potentially apocalyptic danger and doom, while day-to-day life carries on with a nightmarish assumption of mundanity and often a complete lack of acknowledgement of their trauma or oftentimes the danger that they're in. And on that level, the existential threats to the American children of the 80s - nuclear war, the AIDs epidemic - pale in comparison to the existential threats facing the American children of today: climate change and its escalating natural disasters, white supremacist and christofascist takeover of the US being attempted, school shootings, and now (since the release of Stranger Things 3) the global pandemic and children being forced back to school in spite of it and without comprehensive air filtration and circulation or mask and vaccine mandates.
I was thinking about this recently watching some interviews with the cast of Stranger Things, which draws a large portion of its pastiche and references and genre from Stephen King, and an interviewer said something about how fun the sort of weirdly up-beat tone is when the kids are going into battle against eldritch horrors and diving into the hell dimension and shit. Maya Hawke said that she actually had thought about this a fair amount, because reading the script you'd think it looked scary as fuck and potentially hopeless and that ther character should be really terrified, but the writer/creator/director Duffer brothers always respond to her questions with something like "Nah, you're... you're pretty confident."
The one thing that Stranger Things is about more than anything else is trauma, but there's other stuff. Season 1: runaways, absent parents, bullies. Season 2: Specifically PTSD symptoms (apart from just trauma again); bad parenting; gaslighting/denial (or rather, not listening to children); institutional/government malfeasance; domestic abuse. Season 3: White supremacy and misogyny, fascism; cults; but also I think Russian espionage maybe... almost as itself: potentially both the Cold War and the contemporary issue of election interference. Season 4: Trauma and child abuse and bullying again, institutional incompetence and government corruption/coverups, Satanic Panic and witch hunts.
It's not as coherently or deliberately about things as Stephen King typically is, which is probably partly because it's got a lot more of its focus on producing nostalgia-pastiche. But it's also on the larger level about a generation of traumatized children who are growing up terrorized by certain knowledge that their world is on fire and many encounters with potentially apocalyptic danger and doom, while day-to-day life carries on with a nightmarish assumption of mundanity and often a complete lack of acknowledgement of their trauma or oftentimes the danger that they're in. And on that level, the existential threats to the American children of the 80s - nuclear war, the AIDs epidemic - pale in comparison to the existential threats facing the American children of today: climate change and its escalating natural disasters, white supremacist and christofascist takeover of the US being attempted, school shootings, and now (since the release of Stranger Things 3) the global pandemic and children being forced back to school in spite of it and without comprehensive air filtration and circulation or mask and vaccine mandates.
