#to understand how teh evulz his country is and how much ~better~ amurrica is which is CLEARLY the only reason he's loyal to them

[marypsue]

Anyway! While I’m on the subject of big-budget franchises with David Harbour and extremely affected Russian accents in them (she says, several days after making the first such post), I have a number of (mostly uncomplimentary) thoughts about how the Russians in Stranger Things season 3 are constructed and written and framed, but they all pretty much boil down to “Steve knocking out the Russian guard in a fistfight is classic propaganda”. 

The villains of s1 and s2 can best be described as, well, sometimes the bad guys are smart too. The Lab and the Mind Flayer are competent. They are threatening. When they work in secret, they’re very difficult to detect. Their motivations appear to be largely internally consistent, and to exist independently of Our Heroes (well, up until s3, anyway). Their actions have logic behind them and are intended to help achieve their goals. They pose a genuine challenge to and even frequently outwit or outfight Our Heroes - except when it really counts.

By comparison, the Russians in s3 are cardboard props for Our Heroes to knock down. Not a single one of them has a distinct personality beyond ‘funny accent villain’ (except maybe the Terminator expy, who is a Terminator expy). They act as plot devices, not characters; their actions don’t always seem to have a consistent internal logic behind them, and don’t always even benefit them or move them toward what poorly-defined goals they might have. Rather, they’re reduced to whatever the writers think will, in the moment, make them look Big and Bad and Scary (or Cute and Funny and Likeable, in Alexei’s case), oppose (or, again re: Alexei, assist) Our Heroes’ goals, and/or move the plot forward.

That’s plain old bad writing. By itself, it’s unremarkable. Lots of writers make these mistakes when they construct antagonists. 

But also: the Russians - who, again, are not written or presented as full, individual people with goals, motivations, and coherent internal realities - are framed as simultaneously a terrifying, irresistible, insidious threat to everything the viewer is assumed to hold dear, and weak, incompetent, bumbling buffoons. And that’s where we tip over into propaganda.

I’m sure this has been talked about at length by people more knowledgeable than me. But this, to the best of my understanding, is one of the primary ways propaganda works. It presents an enemy, defines them as an other - not a person, like you and me, not really - and establishes them as a clear and present threat. It has to make them dangerous. It has to make them scary. It has to make its audience feel personally threatened and endangered by the very existence of this other, so that its audience wants to see that other defeated, subdued, gone. They could be in your unassuming Midwestern town! They could be hiding under your crowning symbol of capitalist success! And you would never know until it was too late, and they’d already unleashed unimaginable horror on the world and way of life you treasure, destroying it forever!

But also, propaganda can’t give the enemy too much credit. Too much fear plays into your enemy’s hands, leaves your own people afraid to move against them. And, if the enemy looks competent enough to pull off the kinds of atrocities pinned to them, then they might start looking smart. Like people who might have good ideas. Like people who might be able to win. 

So the enemy also has to be shown to be weak. Pathetic. A laughingstock. Easily outwitted and defeated by, for example, four bored kids - because the least of us is still smarter, stronger, better than the best of them.

So you might show that enemy as cunning and devious enough to build a secret base and laboratory under a shopping mall in the heart of enemy territory without anyone noticing - but too stupid or lazy to outfit it with any kind of security system. Powerful and unstoppable enough to hunt down and murder a man with impunity in the middle of a crowd - and it’s notable that the only person the Terminator expy actually manages to kill is one of his own - but weak and useless enough to lose a fistfight to a teenager who has, every other time he’s fought another vanilla human, had his ass absolutely handed to him. Terrifying and insidious - but ultimately powerless and pathetic.

Anyway, that’s why I’m worried about s4 trying to take Our Heroes to Russia.

#we are just kicking hornets' nests and throwing stones at glass houses today on mary pea soup dot tunglr dot corn #stranger things #ALSO also only semi related but the show sets alexei up to be this Suuuper Geeenius #and then makes him act like just a literal child #i don't just mean 'this is a place and set of customs and language that are new to him and he's a lil naive' #i mean like literally he and ten-year-old erica are written with IDENTICAL personalities #her ice cream mercenary scene and his bratty shit with the slurpee flavour?? #like if that character had been played by a twelve- to fourteen-year-old i might have bought it #but as it stood it was just...annoying #and came off really infantilising #like this grown ass man is just too ~naive~ and ~innocent~ and ~childlike~ to fully appreciate what's going on around him #to appreciate the danger he's in and display a full range of appropriate emotions #to understand how teh evulz his country is and how much ~better~ amurrica is which is CLEARLY the only reason he's loyal to them #and as soon as he's Shown The Light he just flips to the other side with zero apparent understanding or internal conflict #like does this man have a family??? does he have parents on the other side of the iron curtain???? what does he CARE about #other than his own skin????? #they never tell us! and thus i never have a reason to give a damn! #dunno if all this was intentional or just a side effect of basing them all on late 80s action movie villains or what #but either way it's there #anyway the show has demonstrated quite neatly to me that it cannot be trusted to handle international cold war politics #with any degree of nuance or thoughtfulness or tension or halfway decent writing #and I'm not thrilled about the prospect of being asked to care about MORE cardboard cutouts #set up for Our Heroes to dramatically and demonstratively knock over #personally I also think it reflects poorly on Our Heroes when all they fight is cardboard #like if there's no real challenge in it for them and they didn't really risk or overcome anything #then it tells me nothing about who they are and what they're capable of or care about #or whether they'd fold in the face of a REAL challenge #obviously i still like. enjoy the show. but i feel like it's sliding slowly rrrrrrrright off the rails #and frankly i am Worried #anyway apparently there's a tag limit now so the remainder of my s4 predictions will have to wait for another post