Things Should Get Stranger

Let's Go Conformity Gate!

This is not a theological piece, but this is where I write, so . . . forgive the departure. Then again, what’s not theological? Call it a cultural reflection.

If you don’t know what Conformity Gate is, this one’s not for you.

---

It was the year of our Lord 2000. The teaser for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring dropped. Some of us lost it. Could it be? For the first time ever, there would be a big-budget, high-production-quality, fittingly epic fantasy movie (a trilogy, even!), and they decided to start with the GOAT. No more crappy, cringy flops. No more assuming that fantasy can’t sell. Peter Jackson went for it.

Living through the debut of Fellowship was surreal for those of us who knew what Tolkien had done. It was unbelievable that in our lifetime, the rest of the world might finally get a sense of why the fantasy nerd fandom was so diehard. Sci-Fi had been mainstream for decades. But there was a mysterious gap. Conan the Barbarian, The Beastmaster, Willow—these fantasy flicks had done well in the 80s. Then the 90s gave us dross like First Knight and Dragonheart, as well as low-budget miniseries and direct-to-DVD embarrassments. Where was the fantasy equivalent of Star Wars?

The release of X-Men in 2000 was a sign of the times—comic book fandom and fantasy fandom compose a Venn diagram with a massive overlap. Apparently, a generation of creators was convincing the money people that there was profit in telling these stories well. Then LotR was one of the highest-grossing film franchises ever. And the MCU took off. And the rest is history. Behind the success, however, was the coming of age of a generation. There are a lot of Millennials, and we grew up on this stuff. Between Tolkien’s amazing writing and the success of the movie trilogy was the slow but inexorable expansion of the fantasy fiction section of Waldenbooks that Tolkien, along with C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Robert E. Howard’s Tales of Conan, and other lesser-known sword-and-sorcery authors, had birthed. Readers read. High fantasy’s following grew.

Then Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson gamified fantasy storytelling with Dungeons & Dragons, and a whole new dimension of fantasy fandom appeared. Those of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s reading these books and playing D&D knew their unbelievable potential for cinema, despite our relegation to nerd subculture. And we got to see it all play out once we grew up and became consumers with income.

Now we live in the era of Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and The Witcher. And we finally got a D&D movie that didn’t suck. But something sad happened as fantasy won the day—which I think usually happens when a subculture becomes mainstream (I reserve comment on the catastrophe that is the MCU). It wasn’t just the loss of being in the know, though we all feel that when our favorite indi artist gets popular or that unknown author we read back in the day lands on the bestseller list. More than that, it felt like a loss of innocence, a loss of the childhood that no one else could understand without being there, rolling dice late into the night, making obscure Tolkien references. These fantasy stories were a whole internal world that had become crowded with bystanders and looky-loos.

Enter Stranger Things and the next generation of creators. Now we weren’t just the consumers. The Duffer brothers (two years my junior) created what we needed: they infused a fantasy/sci-fi story built around a D&D scaffolding with nostalgia. They captured the feeling of those years, full of awkwardness, freedom, and imagination. Of course, Stranger Things couldn’t be more mainstream. That’s not really the point. My kids experience Stranger Things the same way I experienced The Wonder Years. It provokes a familiarity that makes no sense. They wish they had grown up in the 80s. I get it.

And now we’re hours away from the moment of truth. Either Conformity Gate is real, or it isn’t. The realists say there is no way. Netflix would never allow it. Episode 8 is the end, and the fans are crazy. Maybe so. But I’ll say this: the evidence for a different ending is compelling. And if the Duffer brothers didn’t build all of those clues into the story, then, with all due respect, the fans are better writers. Fan fiction is never better than the real thing. So at the very least, we’ll get one unprecedented result. But what the story has accomplished so far makes me think they understand the opportunity to pull off something far bigger. And that this is the moment to do it. Lord of the Rings shouldn’t have worked either; it was too expensive and too risky. So give us what only this generation of creators would dare. Break the mold. Do the unprecedented.

As for episode 8, it’s not just a bad ending (like Game of Thrones); everything about the story signals that it’s the wrong ending. Part of telling this story, the main reason for the nostalgia, is the reality of the loss that’s coming. It’s not a TPK, but it’s not a happy ending. Things were never what they seemed. How could they not give us a secret, surprise ending? Vecna lives. That’s canon.

#ibelieve