Break The Cycle - Tumblr Posts
How to Save the World—Stranger Things 5
I’ve had some time to sleep on the episode titles and think about them, read theories, etc. and I now believe they might be real.
Hear me out: Stranger Things is all about cycles, parallels, tropes happening over and over again. The Duffers love taking a moment and repeating it in slightly different ways to prove a point. The story started with “The Vanishing of Will Byers” because we needed to place a small, innocent child in the center of our story, something to bring our character together and drive them to action. Well, that child is no longer in danger and our team is ripping apart at the seams. It’s almost like we need something similar to reunite everyone and drive them to action again.
Remember: The Duffers love parallels. Will’s disappearance brought his deeply fractured family together, uniting them for a common cause. It also brought Nancy and Jon together when their families needed them most. Now, the Byers are a united front, ready to tackle any monster that comes their way. They are the glorification of the avant-gard family. Now which family is struggling? The Wheelers. The perfect, All-American Nuclear Family: Mom, Dad, 3 kids, and a picket fence. They look perfect to the outside world, but behind closed doors, they are deeply struggling. They don’t communicate, the parents have no idea what’s happening in their children’s lives, and if they’re not careful, if they don’t come together and form a united front—they’re going to lose everything, potentially causing the end of the world. (Why? I haven’t gotten that far yet!)
Now, how do we inspire them to action? Maybe by taking the child who was born to save their crumbling marriage—the one has seen everything but, up until this point, been too young to contribute. Now, she’ll be the same age Will was when he disappeared and Mike and Will are the same age as Jon and Nancy. The Duffers are trying to illustrate the idea of “The Next Generation.” This evil, this Upside Down dimension is NEVER going to stop until someone from the Wheeler and Byers families breaks the cycle. Children will continue to vanish, the world will continue to crumble, until someone steps up and says ENOUGH. The Wheelers and Byers (parents and children) must step up and face their pasts in order to move forward.
The “Stranger Things” are not only LGBTQ+ matters, they are the skeletons we hide in the closet that literally eat us alive. They are the dark, festering parts of ourselves we don’t let anyone else see. The invisible cancers that slowly and silently kill us. Until we face them head on, until we bring them to the light, they will NEVER die. Stranger Things is about owning your past, facing your fears, and finding the light again.
So yes, Stranger Things will end with Will Byers making it home from Mike Wheeler’s house on November 6, 1983, but not in a time traveling way, in a finally letting go of that scared, pained little boy who thought the world was better off without him. It’s Mike accepting his sexuality and place in his family. His role as a leader. It’s Joyce accepting love from Hopper, who must accept that he is not actually cursed, but that sometimes, bad things happen to good people, even when they think they’re doing the right thing (Vietnam). it’s Karen and Ted falling in love again and fighting to save their family. It’s Eleven discovering that love, not anger, should fuel her powers. It’s mourning your stolen childhood while stepping into the version of yourself that child never got to be. It’s stopping the cycle and creating a better world for the Will Byers and Mike Wheelers and Jane Hoppers of tomorrow. THAT’S how you become a Hero.
How do you process being abused by the love of your life? The first person you bore everything to. You gave your entire heart and soul to. Who saw every ugly, horrible part of you. Who went through unimaginable evils with you....
Who showed you love that you couldn't accept. Who gave you trust that you couldn't return. Who's life you made harder. Who you never appreciated. Who you could only see fault in because of your trauma because you weren't strong enough.
Maybe I did deserve what happened. Maybe I deserved all the nights not knowing what girl he was out with. Maybe I deserved the bruised ribs and having seizures in the rain. Maybe I deserved the SA, if I would have just said yes it wouldn't have happened.
Maybe if I was better, or softer, or quieter, or worked harder, or did more, or fought less...
Maybe it wouldn't be 6 yrs of me falling apart.
“Not every parent is equipped with the calmness and presence of mind to react so pleasantly. Myself included. We have our own personal traumatic experiences to cope with, and unfortunately we need to reprogram them before passing them on to our own children. We will not always succeed. Breaking that cycle is a very difficult task. Life is real people. I'd love to be able to say that I didn't yell at my kids, but I was abused so badly as a child that my emotions are more powerful than my logic. If this is you, take it from me and please keep working to break that cycle. Our family's future and the world around it depends on it.”
Read this somewhere & I couldn’t relate more to this.