Duffer Brothers forced to shoot down very bad Stranger Things fan theory
Luckily for everyone, the events of Stranger Things won't end up being a dream
Aux News Stranger Things
We don’t know how Stranger Things is going to end, but thanks to a chat that Matt and Ross Duffer (a.k.a. the Duffer Brothers) had with Metro, we do know how it’s not going to end: with the reveal that all of the exciting supernatural stories and the friendships made along the way were just a complicated, drawn-out dream. That’s apparently the basic gist of a fan theory that is so popular that Metro had to ask the Duffers about it, despite the fact that it totally sucks and would be a terrible way to end the show.
To be fair, it is a little more elaborate than “it was all a dream,” but not much. As laid out by Metro, the idea some fans have latched onto is that all of Stranger Things has really been part of a big Dungeons & Dragons game and that none of it really happened. So, like, Will and Mike and Lucas and Dustin are sitting in the basement, rolling dice to determine stuff like “meet a girl with magic powers,” “Will gets trapped in a hell dimension,” and “lots of friends and family members die horribly.”
The evidence for this, presumably, is that the Stranger Things kids like to play Dungeons & Dragons and there are a handful of Dungeons & Dragons-inspired monsters and monster names in the series… which is pretty thin. Also, Dungeons & Dragons games tend to take place in a fantasy world with specific fantasy creatures and classes, not ‘80s America with a bunch of nerdy kids. So, in this theory, are we supposed to assume that these kids decided to play a game about themselves? And they included all of these other people they know? Or some other people created all of the Stranger Things characters and based a game around them? Because both of those are terrible.
Luckily, the Duffer Brothers shot the theory down, so Stranger Things will not end in such a stupid way. It may end in a totally different stupid way (they’re all living in a snow globe, they decide that Will gets to be king because he had the “best story,” Eleven ends up marrying Robin), buy not this stupid way.
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I hope the show ends with a title drop.“Maybe things will finally get back to normal around here.”
(shrugs) “Stranger things…..”
I REALLY want this to happen. “Hey, did you see that cat with three legs? Isn’t that strange?” “I dunno… I’ve seen… Stranger things!” Wink to the camera, roll credits.
So that’s it, huh? We’re some kind of, stranger things?
Meh. I like it better when it was called Round The Twist.
“It’s all a dream” or “The characters are all really dead/are in purgatory or something” are like 90% of fan theories I see, and they’re dumb.
I always ask the question of this type of fan theory: what would it add to the story? What would be the significance of it being a dream? For example, I remember reading somewhere that some people thought that Phoebe in ‘Friends’ was daydreaming about being friends with five other people she saw through a coffee shop window while homeless and busking. Apart from the fact that she’d be spending a lot of time imagining events only tangentially related to her, what would such a conceit tell us about her? Stories are meant to tell us things. “It was all a dream” almost always doesn’t.
That’s basically what Marti Noxon said about the Buffy episode where she’s in a psych ward, that it would contradict all the show’s positive messages.
Oh I hated that. It’s not a bad concept for an episode but the “we’re not going to give it a definitive ending” aspect left a bad taste.
“That’s basically what Marti Noxon said about the Buffy episode where she’s in a psych ward, that it would contradict all the show’s positive messages.”That episode (Normal Again) wasn’t a dream, though. The fact that universe keeps going after (our) Buffy leaves raises the horrifying implication that the dimensional bleedthrough of the Slayer Buffy’s experiences ended up driving another Buffy in a different dimension which has no monsters or magic completely and irretrievably insane and the Buffy we follow will never know.
I think the parallel universe idea isn’t official, though.
I mean , it’d counteract a lot of the shittier messages too!
The most prominent example (is it the best? I dunno) I can think of is Wizard of Oz, and I think that works because the story takes place in a fantasy world. She’s very suddenly thrust into a new environment and once she leaves, she awakens right where she started; it leaves us on a note of ambiguity which only underlines the “somewhere over the rainbow”” feeling.
And that Wizard of Oz ending was actually forced on them by the execs, who were bizarrely worried that the audience wouldn’t accept Oz being a real place like it was in the books. Which were so incredibly successful that there were at least seven other adaptations in the 39 years before that film.
At least Oz didn’t feature Patrick Duffy coming out of the shower after Dorothy woke up .
I prefer to imagine that it’s Ross that doesn’t have any friends.
And why does he not just eat the other five?
It’s all Dallas fault:And everyone who saw it said it was the stupidest cop-out ever, so no way in hell any show tries that again.
Even beyond it being bad storytelling, it’s all cliche. I can’t imagine holding onto that theory and not being deeply disappointed in the possibility.
Don’t forget the constant “these properties take place in the same universe” theories. Usually because they’re by the same creators and those creators include easter eggs alluding to their other work. Instead of just treating it as a fun thing, it has to be some grand connection that will never come to fruition.
This. it went from a fun thing (oh look, Freddy’s Glove in the Evil Dead wood shed! C-3PO and R2-D2 in the hieroglyphs in Raiders!) to somehow foreshadowing of things to come that people obsessed over for meaning something bigger.
Are those real Easter Eggs? If they are, I completely missed them It seems like some time in the last 40 years I would have seen or been told about the robots in the Hieroglyphics. I apparently do not pay attention as well as some.
They are indeed both real, though in fairness I think it was Evil Dead 2 where Freddy’s glove shows up. I believe it was a returned favor for having the kids in Nightmare on Elm Street watching Evil Dead.
It’s just people wanting to feel smarter than everyone else. My least favorite is “John Mason is actually James Bond, The Rock is a James Bond movie”. The casting of Connery and some of the backstory is obviously meant as a nod to James Bond, but it’s a different character. You’re not smarter than people for seeing the obvious fact that they want us to think about James Bond when we see him.
That’s a good example.I blame Cracked. A couple of the bigger writers from that site’s heyday have a podcast together and they’ve talked about how they feel responsible for screwing up the internet in that way.
I dont care if I’m smart or not , the movie has a nod and a wink that it “might” be James Bond , and its a fun thing , Also to be fair , it’d be better continuity than actual Bond movies have.
Yeah, that’s all it is, a fun thing that people try to overplay.
Remember how mad fanboy nerds were when Evan Peters’ appearance in Wandavision turned out to be just a winking joke and not the massive intro of the X-Men to the MCU that they were breathlessly expecting?
Remember Kids , anyone with an opinion you dont agree with on a Genre show or movie is a Fanboy Nerd!! Given that the MCU was founded on after credits ‘winking joke’ style scenes that actually led to the likes of The Avengers ..it wouldn’t be impossible.
I mean Aliens Vs Predator became a thing , and eventually we had movies (the first bad, the second an atrocity that shouldn’t be seen by anyone ever), so theres that .
You’re not selling me on this.
Similarly, if you find yourself saying “this takes place in the same world as you are a fucking dunce”
I will not stand for this slandering of the Tommy Westphall Universe.
and then it was literally the ending of [DECADE-OLD SPOILERS…]…….Lost.
It literally wasn’t. It’s amazing how people still get the ending of Lost wrong.
There are plenty of problems with the Lost finale (though my hot take is that it’s the entire season which blows, not just the final hour), and it’s way frustrating that people slam it for something it didn’t even do. Granted, utilizing a purgatory-like space which represents everyone’s final passage between life and death sure doesn’t dissuade people from thinking “they were dead all along” was the final twist. But still.
“They were dead in the Season 6 flash sideways” isn’t the same as “They were dead the whole time” but yes you’re right. I don’t particularly like that storytelling touch either way and that’s why I prefer the first 5 seasons. I just don’t understand how people get it wrong when Jack says “Wait we died in the plane crash?” in the episode and his father says “No, you lived and some of you went on to live full lives” and people still SOMEHOW don’t get it.
But Jack’s father was dead, so why would we trust anything he says? Ghosts are evil.
If it had ended at the end of the 5th season, I would have better memories of the show.
Agreed! I rewatched it early this year and was surprised just how much it was cooking in the back half of the third season through the end of the fifth, as well as just how bad season 6 was from the jump.
Right? I think the ending sucked, but it absolutely was not “the whole thing was a dream.”
While this isn’t exactly right, it might as well have been. It’s pretty likely that was the original intent, except everyone figured it out a year in, so they had to pivot. But that ending sure forgot that there had be seasons and new characters since about season 2.It was bad, and people slightly mischaracterizing it isn’t that surprising.
I don’t know that they had an original intent other than a rough idea of what season 1 would be when they started. I know that people like the idea of everything being mapped out but back in 2004 that’s not really how tv worked anyway. It’s not like you’re guaranteed a full season let alone multiple seasons you tend just to focus on the one you have. Once it was a big hit I think there was pressure on them to figure out some sort of larger arc. I think they had an idea of, “plane crash, weird island, people deal with their past issues” and everything other than that was, “well..maybe it would be cool if…..”
It felt like it had the opposite problem. The finale felt like it was a conclusion to the first episode or two, not of the entire season. Seemed like they had that one banked for years and didn’t bother to update it.
To the people (like me) who gave up when it was clear the writers were just winging it episode to episode , and had no idea what the actual explainable answers to the “mysteries” were; ,it might be?
Is it… “amazing”… that a show with no idea what it was doing and no direction leads to lots of different theories about what happened.
I dunno , spoilers for a 15+ years old BBC Show Life on Mars………….You can actually have a show end with the explanation for weirdness being that the character was in a coma , but you better know what you’re doing .Also it doesn’t hurt to have a sequel show expand on that , and have it be tied in to the idea of a a ‘coppers’ afterlife , where they get to work through cases before they move on to a different plain of existence(which may be a lock in , in a local pub).Or if you’re an American reboot , a suspended animation dream while travelling TO mars .
I think the original ending to Life On Mars was the worst of the lot. Ashes to Ashes made it something better. But the “it was the dream of a man in a coma the whole time” (without at least a Twilight Zone-esque bit of evidence that he was back there) is by far the worst of all possible choices.
Remember when ABC execs freaked out at the Lost episode which hinted that the whole thing was just Hurley hallucinating in a nuthouse? Even knowing how bad the actual ending was, I still get a huge laugh that apparently these guys had so little faith in Cuse and Lindeloff’s storytelling abilities that they’d A. intend such a lame final reveal, and B. casually reveal it halfway through the second of an intended minimum five seasons.
I’m still 100% sure that the plan for LOST was that they were dead the whole time from the very beginning but they underestimated how quick the internet would spreads such things in the early 2000s and spent years trying to say “No it’s not!” only to basically end it with basically that idea with a coat on.
I hate to be that guy, and this doesn’t matter, and I don’t get paid enough to write about “flash-sidesways vs flashbacks vs flash-forwards,” but that’s not the ending of Lost at all.Actually the best explanation is that half of season 6 of Lost is the carriage ride vignette from the Ballad of Buster Scruggs and the rest is straightforward tropical island polar bear hijinks.
Appreciate that there’s still people out there fighting the good fight to remind people that’s not what season 6 was about.
In 2014 Chris Carter had a pilot for an show that wasn’t picked up called The After about a Lost-type scenario with a group of people put in an ambiguously bizarre situation. I read that the big twist was going to be that the characters were…..IN HELL! Weird that a guy who was making Lost-type shows even before Lost still hadn’t figured out how much people would see through such a cliché twist.
The thing with a big twist like that is that it’s can’t be the planned ending. It needs to hit and then the show needs to plan for after. The Good Place nails that exact twist perfectly at the end of season 1 and then builds its silly universe from there.
I thought the show was good but I actually didn’t care much for that twist, not because it’s cliché but I liked the idea of trying to make a designer heaven work, and having the show reboot itself so much wasn’t what I had in mind.
Worked for The Good Place
A TV show about people unknowingly being in Hell , but only gradually realising they’re actually in Hell??..psshaw , you’d have to be in a pretty bad place to come up with an idea like that.
Nilus already pointed that out.
That’s the problem with the Internet. It’s pretty clear the reason Westworld went off the rails was that the fanbase figured out the whole thing and so the showrunners felt they had to do something different even if it made no sense just to prove the fans wrong.
It really felt like the Westworld showrunners were reading all of the fan theories online after season 1.
I think the same thing happened with GoT. Once the internet figured out R+L=J, it took a lot of the wind out of GRRMs sails and caused him to lose interest.
GRRM wrote for the ‘80s Twilight Zone, and I read him say that it was harder to write good twists than it was for the original because audiences had gotten smarter(and this was before the World Wide Web).What’s really amazing about the R+L=J theory is that the first known reference to it is in a Usenet post from 1997.
Not just pretty clear, they outright fucking admitted that they arsefucked S2 just because the writers all hung out on the Westworld reddit, and specifically wanted to outsmart those gigafans.
I can see how people could consider this, at least. Duffer, Duffy, it’s similar.
Wait, are these the guys who’ve been stealing my cattle?
The evidence for this, presumably, is that the Stranger Things kids like to play Dungeons & Dragons and there are a handful of Dungeons & Dragons-inspired monsters and monster names in the series… which is pretty thin.See also: the vast majority of fan theories.
“There was a tree in one shot where the knot in the tree looked sort of like a devil face, so it MUST mean the big bad is Mephisto!”
So, in this theory, are we supposed to assume that these kids decided to play a game about themselves? And they included all of these other people they know?Weird self insert fanfics unfortunately exist.
“What if instead of getting bullied we were the heroes of this story, but nobody knows we’re the heroes and we’re super chill about it”
It’s a stupid theory, but also, why are reporters asking about it? The Duffer Brothers wouldn’t give away their ending even if it were true. Why is a dumb fan theory, possibly not even seriously considered by the people who put it out there, worth talking about to the creators? Just because something is on the internet, doesn’t mean it’s interesting.
Because entertainment journalism is and always has been extremely dumb.
It’d be kind of funny if, say, 10 years from now the Duffer Brothers did one of those oral history things and said that they had planned on the “It was all a D&D game” ending but some fans guessing it and/or the collective eyerolling of other fans that followed got ‘em to change their mind.This is the first I’m hearing of it, and while I agree it’s dumb, as far as fan theories go it at least has some things going for it, especially in the first couple of seasons when the main characters kept referring to each other by their respective character classes, and the monsters *are* all straight out of D&D, which is a weird coincidence. Just because it’s dumb doesn’t mean it isn’t what the Duffers had planned. It’s not like we’ve had many examples of big franchises sticking the landing in recent years.
“Just because something is on the internet, doesn’t mean it’s interesting”- The AV Club
For publicity. Keeping people talking about your IP is good no matter how miniscule
I never thought anything could ever top an Autistic Child and his Snow Globe as the most unwarranted ending to a series, but people keep trying!
I would love it if they made it part of the Westphal universe. It already includes the X-Files.
The whole show and all its characters only existed in the mind of a tightly wound convenience store clerk who was reading the novelization of Stranger Things.
“Hey, try not to strange any things on the way through the parking lot!”
I’m just so tired of all these Stranger Things!
well, what if it was some beings in the upside down playing an rpg set in our reality?
“forced to”
Adult Will wakes up next to Susanne Plechette, no Japanese food before bedtime for him anymore!
Clearly Eleven is an actual angel and once everyone is safe she’ll disappear and everyone will agree to do away with D&D forever.
And that is how the Satanic Panic started
That just reminds me of how much the ending of BSG competed with the ending of Lost for most disappointing.
It was basically the Douglas Adams’ Restaurant at the End of the Universe ending played as if it were serious — the ancestors of humanity are incompetent aliens!
I’m honestly shocked that the BSG one seems to get more of a pass when it was orders of magnitude more disappointing.
The Bear Mcreary soundtrack did A LOT of heavy lifting to be fair.
Thank you for getting the reference. Someone in the greys clearly didn’t.
lol I’m guessing you weren’t allowed to watch Harry Potter?
we all know its going to end with eleven raising her hand and using her mind powers to defeat the fluurropggh
Not that I believe it’s what is actually happening but the theory I heard was it was adults playing themselves as kids in the 1980 in a horror themed TRPG. Playing “D&D” in this context usually is someone unfamiliar with the fact that there are a million other role playing games out in the world in a huge variety of genres and settings. Been playing these silly games for 30+ years and have played “myself” in a few of them Usually it’s a good concept for a fun one shot(and works great for horror, fun for a Halloween themed session) but I also played myself in a long running time travel campaign in a game system I can not remember the name of
Granted I hate fan theories (they’re always literal and rely on pattern recognition), but I wouldn’t dunk on them with such an ungenerous misinterpretation as Barsanti has.
Oh man, you should check out the comic book Die. It’s very much about that. And the creator made a game based off of it.
So it turns out they were playing a World of Darkness game in 1993 the whole time!
The twist is they were playing Werewolf but the Storyteller really sucked
did not realize stranger things still had shooters making fan theories.
It’s a dumb theory BUT I do have to point out that we do now have IRL numerous TTRPGs based on the premise of basically Stranger Things as a campaign setting i.e. Kids on Bikes, at least one Call of Cthulhu scenario I’m aware of, and I’m sure other shit out there.Bad idea for a show but not a bad idea for a game.
while it is undoubtedly a bad theory, it would be hilarious to then see the 30 year old 8th graders around a table
It turns out the real stranger things are the friends we made along the way.
“Also, Dungeons & Dragons games tend to take place in a fantasy world with specific fantasy creatures and classes, not ‘80s America with a bunch of nerdy kids”Not endorsing the theory but Isekia is a thing. And Stranger Things would fit in well, right down to the nerdy kids becoming friends with the popular kid and generally winding up with the “Pretty Girls who are also super cool and like them without asking for change at all”
Better ending: the whole thing was Bob Newhart GMing an rpg.
Fuck it, go all in and do a St. Elsewhere ending. It’s all been an autistic kid looking at a snow globe this entire time.
The whole story was just Bob Newhart staring at a snowglobe, which also turns out to be a story Hawkeye is telling a psychiatrist in a mental hospital. A psychiatrist played by… Hurley! Cut! Print it!
With Hal from Malcolm in the Middle .
So, in this theory, are we supposed to assume that these kids decided to play a game about themselves? And they included all of these other people they know?Yes. This is a thing that table-top RPG players do literally all the time. This is like scoffing at the idea that people who play video game RPGs (or sports games, etc.) with character creaters recreate themselves in-game.
Riverdale S3 spoiler (I guess, if that is a thing, or even a show people on this site watch)…My partner and I were convinced that what was happening was that when people took Jingle Jangle and played G&G, the events of the game would unfold in real life. Like, taking that drug and playing the game actively warped time/space to make life accommodate the game. However, it being Riverdale S3, that was not true and it was just a tease that never led anywhere and JJ was just a regular ole drug. As for ST, there is no way they do anything like this – the D&D aspects were just an easy narrative reason for figuring out what the Upside Down things were and theoretically how to beat them since there was nothing else to consult and otherwise you are left with 4 kids trying to figure out how to beat an unknowable enemy, which seems like it would get messy fast.
I’d love it if some well loved current show that’s about to wrap up it’s series run took all of the bad/questionable series ending and rolled them into one big “Fuck You” to the fans. So the Stranger Things series ending should be an autistic kid looking at Hawkings through a snow globe but it’s revealed that it’s really Bob Newhart waking from a dream in bead with Suzanne Pleshette but they are in prison for not helping a stranger. But then a guard loving looks over the cell block one last time as he turns of the lights and goes to all black then Don’t Stop Believing starts to play.
Fuck it , a pull back reveals… that its a halfling , some elves and a few humans in a bar on the Sword Coast , finishing a role playing board game set in The Realm of Earth called Stranger things (80th edition) . And then the Dwarf GM tells them “Aye , that was fun , but I cannae believe ya got Barb the Barbarian killed off at the start , she was supposed to be a high level character to help yer party , that’s why the game went ohn’ so damn long , thats why ah had to make the wee baldie girl so powerful , it was basically Deus Ex Machina’s all the way with her or we’d be still be playing this six bloody months from now !! ” The inn’s resident bard starts strumming “Master of Puppets” as the screen fades to black .
Better than whatever the show’s actual ending is I’ll bet.