The Strangest Things about Stranger Things
Hawkins has some more problems on the way
In the 80’s, kid adventure movies took the world by storm. The Goonies, for example, is still well-known and a popular movie night choice today. Kid adventure movies are almost universally well-received for their humor and heart. Nothing has captured this spirit in the last ten years quite like Netflix’s Stranger Things series has. Set in the 80s, Stranger Things focuses on a group of plucky, nerdy middle schoolers as they confront otherworldly monsters and shady government agencies in an effort to save one of their friends. The show is popular among critics and audiences, and, as of today, has a fourth season on the way. However, the show fails to touch on the strangest things that are going to happen to these kids. Spoiler alert, if you have not seen the show yet, stop reading here.
First of all, their values are going to be completely out of whack. I’m not saying that they’re going to become racist or anything, but the actual things that they value are going to be screwed up. The main gang (Mike, Dustin, and Lucas) regularly use their Dungeons & Dragons knowledge to stop terrifying otherworldly creatures. Translations between D&D and the actual monsters are not exactly one-to-one, but the tactics and strategies the kids use against their fictional foes are vital to their efforts to save their friend in the real world. Why bother putting effort into school anymore when the only skill that actually made a difference in a life-and-death situation was from a tabletop game? Think about it like this, how much more would you value your Call of Duty prestige level if you used your in-game skills to save someone you love from the Taliban? Nothing they learned in school had any meaning when it really mattered. More likely than not, in the future they will treat calculus like the garbage it is.
Adult life is going to be really hard on the Stranger Things gang. I think it is safe to say that none of them walk away from any of these adventures without significant PTSD. We know from season two that Will Byers is experiencing side effects from being held captive in another dimension, and he is receiving treatments/being experimented by the government. However, none of his friends are being treated in the same way. Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and the rest just have to go back to school and pretend like nothing happened. That is going to be the toughest part. These kids have seen unimaginable horrors and are legally unable to talk to anyone other than their equally traumatized friends about it. Even if they were allowed to talk about their experiences, there is no system set up to help them. No psychiatrist is ever going to believe that they combated no less than three inter-dimensional horror movie monsters. Doctors will likely attribute their stories to some other factors. In a psychological setting, children telling stories of banding together to fight monsters probably comes off as an analogue for some other shared traumatic experience. Their teacher buddy, the one that helps Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will run AV Club, might be heavily suspected of molesting them (or some other shared adult figure). And through all of that, they still will not be getting the help they actually need.
PTSD is far from the only problem they are going to have in their adulthood. Imagine this: the single most important, exciting, and challenging thing you will ever do in your entire life happens to you before you are old enough to drive. From the age of thirteen, everything else for the next seventy or so years is just downhill. That is the reality for the Stranger Things gang. Bad news, kids, nothing is ever going to be as thrilling as seeing your first female friend use her terrifying telekinetic superpowers to kill a bunch of government agents and then banish an actual monster to another dimension. Video games, girls, movies, school, none of that will realistically be able to excite the Stranger Things kids after their adventures. What is dating going to be like for these kids?
Mike: Hi, I’m Mike Wheeler.
Girl: Hi, Mike, I’m [Girl]. Tell me about yourself.
Mike: Oh, you know, I helped kill like, three inter-dimensional carnivorous hell demons before I was old enough to drink. Since then it’s been pretty hard to get excited about pop culture, or world events, or my dead-end 80s movie theater job. Yeah, my life peaked when I was in seventh grade. I’m just always bored, you know. Nothing is really fulfilling anymore. I doubt you’ll be fulfilling in any way, because the first girl I liked could also crush people’s brains with her freaky mind powers, and I’m pretty sure you can’t do that, so this date doesn’t really matter to me. Nothing does.
Girl:
These kids are never going to get any job satisfaction or happiness from anything that does not match up to the standard of excitement that was set when they were THIRTEEN YEARS OLD. They are always going to be desperate to chase the high they got from slaying the Demogorgon. Oh, speaking of chasing a high . . .
Our friends from Stranger Things are growing up in Hawkins, Indiana, in the mid-eighties (Ronald Reagan is up for reelection in season two, so it’s in 1984). We don’t know what Mike’s dad does for a living, but we know that Will’s mom supports two sons working as a retail clerk at a hardware store, so they must be living in a middle-class, blue collar kind of neighborhood. Guess what their socioeconomic demographic is experiencing today. If you guessed “the worst opioid epidemic the world has ever seen,” you would be right. According to the CDC, in 2017, 68% of drug-related deaths in the United States involved a prescription or illicit opioid. That’s 47,600 deaths. I don’t know exactly what the Stranger Things kids’ chances are, but I wouldn’t bet on them being alive or out of rehab today.
Thank you so much for reading another one of my ramblings. Like always, feel free to reach out with suggestions for the next post!