With Stranger Things 4 volume two just about to drop, fans are both elated and terrified, as we know that the final episodes of the Netflix smash’s penultimate season are going to feature multiple deaths. The series has killed off a main character in each of its finales — though they don’t always stay dead — so it makes sense for a bunch of them to be written out this time to raise the stakes for the last ever run. But fans are desperately hoping their faves make it out alive.
The latest argument for why all of the major characters need to survive goes that they have to live into the 1990s to witness the iconic things about that decade that folks are convinced they’ll love. The trend is doing the rounds in the Stranger Things fandom on Twitter, and it appears to have started with one user declaring that Max (Sadie Sink) must make it to the ’90s so that she can become a Nirvana fan, ’cause you just know that she would be.
Likewise, Will (Noah Schnapp) would no doubt love Radiohead.
And Robin Buckley (Maya Hawke) definitely strikes us as a future Buffy the Vampire Slayer devotee.
But the award for the best take on this trend goes to this reason for why Joyce has to make it out the show alive… so she can go see Heathers in 1989, starring a talented young actress called Winona Ryder.
This tweet is liable to get fans spiraling into the mind-bending conundrum of what movies exist and which don’t in the Stranger Things universe. Did the kids go to see The Goonies in 1985 and think that Sean Astin looked a bit like a young Bob Newby? Will a middle-aged Mike in 2021 watch a doppelganger of his younger self in the reboot of his beloved Ghostbusters franchise?
Regardless of that, this meme has definitely got us wanting to see a follow-up show that picks up with the gang in the ’90s and celebrates the culture of that decade just like the original has spotlighted the ’80s. Maybe that’s the spinoff the Duffers have been teasing?
Stranger Things 4 volume two concludes this Friday, July 1 on Netflix.