“The show’s relationship to its ‘sources’ reminds me of nothing so much as the careless plunder of fantasy role-playing games themselves, Dungeons and Dragons being only the most prominent. Such games are a mode of storytelling where creatures from eight different incompatible mythologies are likely to wander through the same space, each lovingly reimagined in terms of whatever homegrown mythology the dungeon master happens to be deploying at the time, and each—this is key—dependent on the players’ united suspension of disbelief. Everyone knows that the Balrog is a monster invented by J.R.R. Tolkien, for example, and that the elf/dwarf/halfling/human/orc racial palette of most fantasy RPGs is directly burglarized from Middle Earth; but to enjoy the confrontation between the Balrog’s orc army and your party of elves and dwarves—for it to work as a game—the last thing you want to remember is who holds the artistic copyright.”
Aaron Bady is very good on Stranger Things in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Also, in the midst of things, he oh so casually drops a brilliant little critical manifesto: “Art has baggage; criticism is about rummaging through that bag to see what’s inside, and what you want to do with it.”
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