By: Alex Tilton

When I was a teenager in the ‘90s the internet was new. Social media didn’t exist and the news didn’t care what anyone was saying in online forums. Now, everyone with an opinion can broadcast it to the entire world. Entitled Fans (EFs) scream their heads off on social media about how they’ve been cheated, and they spread conspiracies about missing footage and studio meddling. I also had some complaints about SF-5, but I have a superpower that helps me avoid the histrionic reaction the EFs are having: I can just change the channel. It’s a power that the Stranger Things EFs need to learn. They also need to learn that being a fan of something does not convey ownership. So in this article I’m going to argue against what I call ‘booking by proxy’.

Booking by proxy is when the creators of a story cave in to EF screaming and rewrite the plot to appease them. This generates a lot of problems, the first and worst being that you are no longer in control of your own creative product. You are now at the beck and call of a fundamentally unpleasable angry mob, because you made the mistake of negotiating for hostages.

Secondly, allowing whiney EFs to book by proxy encourages other whiney EFs to do the same. The more often this works, the more legitimate it appears to be.

Third; caving to EFs ruins stories by removing all tension. If the audience knows for sure there’s going to be a happy ending then there’s no reason to worry about the character’s safety, and consequently no reason to care about the plot. If you knew a basketball game was going to be a massive blowout, would it be worth watching? The uncertainty is your whole reason for being there.

Fourth; EF whining ignores the realities of writing, producing, and filming. Stranger Things Season 5 took 3 years to be released, and it must’ve been an enormous task. Stories had to be written, sets had to be built, funding had to be secured, actors had to be recruited, and then they had to actually film the damn thing, then there was editing, post production and a hundred other tasks. But EFs tend to interpret anything they don’t like as a personal attack.

So, the EFs conversation about SF-5 revolves around a conspiracy theory about deleted scenes which they believe were removed to appease homophobic studio executives or to reduce the episodes running times. This is certainly possible, such things do happen. Whether it happened here or not I don’t know. What I do know is that it took an army of people and several years to put together the last season at a cost of 460 million dollars. A massive undertaking like that requires vast amounts of prep work, and once the train gets rolling it can be difficult or impossible to stop it, reroute it, or change the contents.

In spite of that, there’s a change.org petition where EFs demand that Netflix “release the uncut version” because they’d “devoted years of their life to this show”. This petition currently has over 369,000 signatures. Clearly, a lot of people are furious about how this season went down. And SF-5 certainly has problems worth complaining about. Here’s a short list:

1) The villains lack a well-defined and sensible motive.

2) Major plot twists come out of nowhere.

3) The narrative is fragmented because there are too many characters with not enough to do.

4) There are so many ‘I just had a great idea!’ moments that they become predictable and boring.

5) Conflict between the main characters feels manufactured for the sake of amping up the drama.

6) The town of Hawkins has been taken over and quarantined by the army, but the military has completely failed to notice a cell of heavily armed resistance fighters based out of a radio station, and the resistance has no trouble at all smuggling weapons in and people out.

7) The actors who were kids when this show started are now in their early 20s playing high school students.

8) Characters with superpowers conveniently lose those powers whenever the plot requires it

9) The military knows that fire will work on the monsters but pointlessly insists on using guns anyway losing dozens of men in the process.

10) Neither Vecna nor the military have succeeded in killing any of the good guys yet because they’re all wearing impenetrable plot armor.

I’ve said many times before that sticking the landing is hard. And the ending of a show this popular was never going to please everyone. There are legitimate complaints to be made here, and the EFs aren’t wrong to point them out. They are wrong when they assert ownership of a thing they had no part in making and demand that the people who did make it should now change that thing because ‘we deserve it’.

This should need to be said, but sitting on your couch watching a TV show for years does not entitle you to dictate how that show ends. If the ending is crap, then it’s crap. Call it what it is…and just change the channel.