Welcome to the 80's!

I'm sure they've interacted off and on since their brothers became friends - anytime both families were near each other, whatever - as well as having known each other forever, the way everyone knows everyone else in small towns. She knows and has at least some affection for Will himself as her brother's little friend,…

I enjoy that they don't hit us over the head with a brick about it, and just let nancy kind of go around making important decisions based on the facts she's given with a surprisingly clear-headed pragmatism that you never really see out of "80's Final Girl" in sci-fi or horror films. She really grew on me during the…

Hopper's willingness to actually put together all the puzzle pieces that don't quite fit, evenw hen he doesn't have access to any part of the larger puzzle, is the best thing about him.

Yeah, I love the family that just as a unit is like, "the basement belongs to Will and we don't go down there" no matter what. Really? Mom doesn't pop down to clean sometimes or just check out what her preteen son is up to? Ever?

Yeah, he struck me as a situation of "Man, that's why you keep using Government Stooges and don't outsource to some random guy who doesn't have skin in the game."

Either they try to murder the main characters out of sheer spite or they get ~corrupted by the evil~ of the REAL villain or both. King has a thing for writing messed-up bullies into every book possible.

One of her finest moments on the show, and Joyce being 100% the devoted mother. Winona Ryder's performance became immensely better throughout the series as her character's writing gets more nuanced.

If it helps, i was bullied very intensely and occasionally violently during elementary school and middle school, and let me tell you, teachers ALWAYS found a way to be conveniently absent/not paying attention when it happened, and somehow ALWAYS found a way to show up right when I'd get so worn down I fought back.

His bad endings are generally spectacularly awful, while his good endings are just… good (Pet Sematary being the obvious, horrifyingly good exception there - I think Carrie as well). I think we all collectively tend to remember the bad endings more clearly because of that, or at least associate them with his writing…

Hm. I'd be willing to think that way about the term itself, but the rampant, casual homophobia of small town life was very much there at the time. That wasn't a new concept.

Yeah, I know that … and man not a day goes by that I don't wish we had more of the documentation left from what they did so we could see how crazy it REALLY was.

I've repressed most of Pet Sematary so I always forget to list it, but yeah, that ending is so perfectly concise and such an emotional blow.

I feel for Karen, but I also think there's an insular quality to her - when Barb goes missing, she's initially far more concerned about the idea that ~Nancy had sex omg~, which is of course the last thing she should be concerned about in Nancy's mind. Nancy tries to confide in her mom about very real terror and is hit…

I read someone arguing that the deputies don't work because "no deputies are really that dickish and stupid about everything" and I'm like… um, yes they are. Not all of them, but especially in A Small Town Where Nothing Ever Happens, important stuff gets glossed over ALL THE TIME by cops that just don't give a damn.

I'm not entirely disagreeing with you - out of the 4 kids, he really has the weakest writing/characterization. The rest of them feel like they're still fully realized people when they're not around each other and Lucas really doesn't. But I think "the skeptic" is a pretty big archetype for stories like this, so…

It also starkly illustrates the differences between adults and children in another way - Joyce falls apart because she is a grown woman who knows Things Like This Just Don't Happen, and she is fighting her own brain (and the brains of every adult she knows) while trying to reconnect with/save her son.

She's not his daughter. I think they use "Papa" as what all the experimental kids would call him so that A. they don't call him by his NAME, which might make him connect with them emotionally, and B. so that even if any of the kids ever escaped, they couldn't tell anyone who had them, they'd only be able to say "Papa".

Yeah, the "private lives" of the kids being the reason they don't talk to their parents makes perfect sense. Then you have the parents not really asking the kids anything because it simply doesn't occur to any of them that 12 year olds would A. know what's going on or B. know enough about it to be helpful. Which is…

Yeah, I think it was one of those things that is sort of out of the ordinary, but Barb's mom never had any reason NOT to trust her with Nancy so she went with it. I had a couple of friends like that when I was young - although I was the Barb in that scenario. Their moms would have let them stay over with me on a…