Stranger Things (Netflix) TV Show • Page 106

If hooper was the best part of season 3 then season 3 sucked

 

ok jake thanks for your valuable input

 

You're welcome

 

Hopper was a racist, sexist walking tower of toxic masculinity this season.

Really hurt the impact of his supposed death, because he became some incredibly unlikable you wound up rooting for him to die.

 

Even taking a super generous view of how Hopper was written, there are still SO many things that were better in practically every way during the season. If the first half had done him any justice it would be a very different story.

 

Robin was easily the best part of the season

 

One thing this show does extremely well is introduce new characters and make you care about them just as much as you do the original characters

 

Went to the Starcourt Mall today. It’s super weird inside as all the businesses are closed. Just an empty mall to walk through. Shame they didn’t keep any Starcourt stuff

 

Some have rumored that Netflix didn't leave the Starcourt mall there due to Georgia's strict new abortion laws, which multiple companies have threatened to leave the state over

 

Something definitely happened behind the scenes since the original plan was to keep it going.

 

So was it a mall before or something they built for the show? My understanding was it was the latter

 

It was an abandoned wing of a real dying mall that they renovated to look like it was still in the 80s. Coincidentally, the mall itself was originally built in the 80s so it was pretty perfect for them. The mall still exists, it's just very empty

 

Hopper acting shittier was a huge part of his character development. It would make no sense for him to just naturally be nice and not incredibly insecure to the point of lashing out. The note at the end makes this explicit but even without that it’s pretty clear given what we know about his backstory

 

How does a regression in character develop him further? He's been growing for two seasons only to be worse than he was in season 1.

I can understand him being angry with Mike. Teenagers are little shits, and Mike was being one. But he was so toxic towards Joyce and now we're supposed to "ship" a relationship with a verbally abusive man who instantly accused her of standing him up on a date that she already made clear was not a date? Idk. I always really liked Hopper and still want him in the show, but the show did him dirty this season

 

How has his character regressed? It’s gone exactly where it naturally would go. There’s nothing more unnatural to him than being close to someone, so when he gets close to Joyce and El he has no idea how to respond and lashes out. Again, this was made abundantly clear in the season premiere.

To say he was angry with Mike is to completely misread the situation. Mike could have been an angel and he still would have been a shithead to him, because Mike’s presence interferes with his relationship to El.

Him acting shitty is not a “regression” — that’s such a lazy analysis of the situation.

 

It’s going to be a long few years in this thread, isn’t it?

 

Why do you make posts like this? What do you think this adds to anything?

 

A few VERY long years.

 

Really not following why you're choosing to be such an asshole here

 

Oh yeah, that’s whats happening. It’s definitely not that an argument we’ve been over to death a dozen times before is being dragged up again out of nowhere only to immediately dismiss the very real criticism of toxic tropes as “lazy”.

 

I think it was more the fact that they've had a friends type relationship for years (it sounds like they were close in high school too) and they fight and argue like old friends that are so comfortable with each other that it's almost like a brother-sister thing but Hopper feels more for her. And considering he basically shut himself off emotionally from everyone after his kid died/wife left him, he has noooo idea how to take it to the next level with her, so he just resorts back to the brother-sister relationship where they just lash out at each other and yell at each other like bickering fools.

And all that is compounded with him figuring out what it's like to have a teenage daughter and want to protect her from the Lab people, AND have her boyfriend basically treat you like a joke.

In other words, I found him super grating/annoying, especially early in the season, for a lot of the same reasons people have laid out here....but I also think it was meant more to show how badly he's handling being a dad and being in love again after so many years without both of those things, and not meant to paint him as like a sexist toxic masculinity type. Like the toxic masculinity is obviously there but I don't think they're trying to say "This is who he is", but more "dude's kind of a big man child right now trying to deal with these emotions he hasn't dealt with in like decade" or however long its been.

I know that I certainly do hope we're not waiting until Episode 8 or 9 to have him be reunited with Joyce or the kids. Obviously him and Joyce were on better terms by the end of the season but I'm gonna want more than just 20-30 minutes of him acting like a normal human being with her and the kids before they go all happily ever after kiss between him and Joyce. Though I guess the argument could be made that the letter repaired a lot of that, as it's a way for Joyce to see that, despite all the immature whining he was doing, he really had taken her advice to heart and listened to her.

 

Most of the entire past page has been about Hopper's character development, so I don't get how you're coming to the conclusion that it was "dragged up out of nowhere."

And I did not "immediately dismiss the very real criticism of toxic tropes as lazy." I gave a pretty clear explanation for why I think it's lazy. We can disagree but at least someone like RyanPM will talk about it like an adult.

And even if all you're saying is true, that doesn't mean you aren't also being an asshole for no reason, which you are.

 

I have no idea how they’ll be able to hide his involvement next season. I almost wish they’d just come right out and spoil it in the first trailer or something to save us from countless clickbait articles.

I’m sort of expecting something between El’s return in S2 where it was immediate and El’s reunion with Mike which was at the very end. I’ll definitely be surprised if we don’t see him for most of the season.

 

It could potentially be interesting if, along with the necessary timeskip, they started next season in medias res with all of them already knowing that Hopper is alive. Could avoid dragging us through that as if we didn't know where it was going and could be an opportune way to use some sequel tropes that they've avoided by using basically the same structure every season