(no subject)

[olivermoss]

* One of the awkward things about being in the Stranger Things fandom, outside of people thinking I'm confusing fantasy with reality for thinking MK Ultra is a real thing that happened, is that it always feels odd to bring up things I feel are highly relevant. A Steddie project was stumped about what charity to pick and I was like... The Innocence Project, and it turned out no one knew who Damien Echols is.

Anyway, one of the main people who made a career out of fueling the Satanic Panic, Bennett Braun, just died and I think that is interesting to talk about, but the places I'd want to bring it up... I feel like the conversation would go oddly.

* Another awkward thing in the fandom is people asking for information on stuff that just did not exist back then. I've stopped commenting because I don't want to become 'Is this for a modern au or a late 90s au, because that didn't exist back then?' person. I don't mind ahistorical stuff in Steddie fic or pastiches and stuff, but a lot of the distinct flavor of the 80s involves what wasn't available / known / accessible. And I'll stop there before I go on a ramble about the shift towards mass produced goods and national brands while mass production was a lot less flexible so offerings were narrow.

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

It is very weird what sorts of things people assume must be true vs. what things people assume must be fiction. It's upsetting how often they are wrong about both!

[olivermoss]

Yeah, it's kinda awkward knowing things sometimes. A lot of authors seem to want to write late 90s things, which is fine but like that is a different thing.

[mistressofmuses]

It is weird to know stuff, even stuff that seems like a very surface level to me. I'm not an *expert* on a lot of stuff, or would need to look up some specifics of names and dates if I were trying to write about it. But I at least know broad strokes and could likely do the needed research if I were using real world events or settings for a fic.

But like... people who don't think that MK Ultra was a thing. Who think that very real things that we have very real evidence of is something created for a work of fiction or is "just" a conspiracy theory. People who think that the "Satanic Panic" was just a funny example of small-town paranoia that no "regular" person would ever have believed.

People who say a fic is set in a canon based on the 80s (or even 90s!) and then have a character casually pull out a cell phone and send a text...

I mean, I was born in '88, so I have no real "I was there" knowledge of the 80s, beyond getting a lot of pop culture stuff that bled over into the 90s. The 90s is what I have actual experiential knowledge of, and I could see myself making an accidental error about what year some particular thing was introduced or how prevalent something that only *technically* existed in the 80s, but... doing a bit of research isn't THAT hard, and it's often pretty obvious when someone made an effort but whoops, mixed up a release by a year or two, or maybe just took an artistic liberty in order to facilitate a plot point vs. "this is a late-90s setting that does not even look like the 80s it's pretending to be", or "this was written by someone who can't imagine a world in which they do not have a cell phone and an internet connection."

[olivermoss]

I don't remember much of the 80s either, but I've always been very into them and as an RPG gamer I was living in the aftermath of a lot of stuff.

For MK Ultra, I am extra aware of it for reasons including when the info became public I was young enough that I didn't realize it was new news. There was a point where everyone was talking about it.

As broken as most true crime content is, this is why we need good true crime and this is why people want it so much. We need to make sense and be informed. Yeah, I like dark stuff but also some of it is just things shaping out world.

I have yet to run into the cell phone thing. As I've said the biggest offended is Eddie having body piercings, which I am into, but hella ahistorical. The Duffer lean hard on those walkie talkies to have modern style communications pretty hard when you break it down.

[mistressofmuses]

The 80s were definitely still very *present* in a lot of ways when it came to the 90s, I think. Or at least it felt that way to me. Pop culture reruns, as well as yeah, the aftermath of a lot of stuff that had gone down. I wasn't a big RPG gamer, but I imagine being so was a whole different perspective.

I remember MK Ultra seeming like common knowledge for a while... and now it seems like everyone just thinks it was an X-Files/Stranger Things/etc. plot point.

That's a good point. I know that the whole true crime genre gets a lot of shit, and some of it is deserved... but there is also a really genuine desire on the part of the audience to understand what kinds of things happened, and to understand the why and the how as best we can. That's not a bad impulse to have! Especially when it does continue to impact our culture, laws, fears, etc. today.

I never encountered the cell phone thing in the limited amount of Stranger Things fic I read, but I remember I did encounter it in a Buffy fic several years ago. It was something that was supposed to be set specifically during season one, and had the characters casually texting each other for everything. Not *technically* impossible in 1997, but definitely not anywhere near the norm, and at that point it didn't work the way it does now.
Hmmm, yeah, body piercings suit the character, but not the time period!

That's a fair point: the walkie talkies do really sort of fill that "instant, easy, direct communication" niche, and really are leaned on pretty damn hard.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, 'technically possible but not the norm' is also a big thing in Sthings fic. Yes, certain things were available... if you were rich and lived in NYC. Tech, clothes, movies, books, etc and so much more just weren't available and probably wasn't even known in Indiana because the internet and online shopping did not yet exist.

Going into the city to go to Tower records to hear music before buying it was a huge deal to anyone who wanted stuff outside the top 40.

But also I did my big 'how Robin could have actually seen what she claims are her favorite films' fic and, oh well. I probably should have done a full rewrite before posting. I over-editing sections that I should have re-wrote.

Yeah, cultural stuff is going to hold over. People keep thinking it's a continuity error in Sthings that there is so much 70s stuff when I think that is the most realistic aspect. I've seen other period pieced source everything to only that era and it feels very surreal to me.

The walkie talkie stuff is doing the typical genre thing of mirroring current communications tech. It's doing a lot of heavy lifting.

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah. I feel like that is somewhere where even good faith attempts at research can fail. Sometimes people look up "when was xyz thing invented/established/founded" and then just figure that date means they're good to go... when yeah, "existed for the ultra-wealthy in a major coastal metropolitan area" is not the same as "widely and easily available to your lower- or middle-class characters in a small town."

There's no law that says you can't rewrite a fic later on and post a new version of it. Granted, it's hard to want that to be a priority when you have so many other fics to write and work on, but it's not an option that's forever gone. I find that sort of thing - "the canon said this, but it's pretty improbable... so here's how it could have happened" - to be a very fun thing to explore.

Seriously, that is one of the most realistic parts! Having houses and clothing and electronics that are "so last decade" makes a lot more sense than having everything be super up-to-the-minute. People don't redecorate their houses or replace their appliances every year or even every few years (again, unless they're the wealthy NYC cliches who build their lives around their fashionable everything.) Era-defining fashion trends don't generally become era-defining until we have the benefit of hindsight... which means definitely not everyone at the time went in on all of those things.

I can understand *why* that is such a typical genre thing, but it really is obvious when you look for it! I'm willing to be forgiving, because it serves the storytelling purpose of keeping things moving and getting characters on the same page when needed, but it really IS leaned on hard.

[olivermoss]

Also, I feel like a killjoy when people get excited about stuff. Like, uh, Eddie might have loved Baldur's Gate video games but actually RPG nerds in general were very slow to take to them because it was being along at your computer and not coming to game nights. DMs in particular felt very slighted by that bullshit. It was seen as anti-social and actively rude to get into video games in a lot of tabletop spaces, like people weren't the important part of gaming. But, yeah, I decided to not bring that up. To me, Eddie seems like the exact kind of nerd who would have been really bummed out by Dustin suddenly binging computer games.

Yeah, I get that it's hard to write genre stuff without cell phone and pull in modern audiences. But, it misses that liminal experience and that pre-digital era of 'my car broke down in the middle of nowhere' or 'I missed by bus now what?' The flavor from those details can be amazing, when an author does them right.

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah, that sort of cultural thing gets really lost, too. *Now* a lot of RPG fans like both video games and tabletop, though not everyone does. But that's a good point about the animosity toward those early video games being seen as taking away from the game spaces... Honestly, the kind of thing I wouldn't have really thought about, either. (But the very first video game I played was my parents' D&D-branded "Treasure of Tarmin" Intellivision game, lol.) ~nostalgia~
It could probably go a long way to at least acknowledge that initial tension around computer gaming "taking over", even if it ultimately resolved well.

It really does change the general vibe and tone of a lot of those situations. That "what the fuck do I do now?" feeling is a lot more intense and real when you really don't have any way to contact anyone else. There's a lot of potential in fiction following a split party, where they aren't actually able to communicate the things they know with each other.
(And then there's a lot of fiction that leans really hard on trying to recreate that sort of situation, by having the cell phone conveniently die or have no service, in order to explain why the characters can't call for help.)

[olivermoss]

Yeah, everyone gets excited over the idea of Eddie liking the thing they like and I get it.

The lack of digital communication also added to the whole feeling like the world was bigger and there was cool stuff out there if you could find it. Hard to convey some of that, tho

[mistressofmuses]

I get it too, and I tend to be pretty forgiving of other people's excitement or enthusiasm about stuff... even if I don't share a particular take. That doesn't remove all the annoyance when you simply do not vibe with that sort of popular headcanon.

Oh, very much so! The world felt a lot bigger when it was more distant. In some ways, the world is much bigger when everything is accessible: you can find online communities and connections and get glimpses of lives outside of your small crapass town or whatnot. But at the same time, having that ease of accessibility shrinks the map a bit. It doesn't feel as infinite when you can reach out to it directly, instead of having that sense of mystery and discovery awaiting you, if you could just get over the next hill.