Running out of time and one liners.

I watched Stranger Things without anything close to intimacy of the 1980s base material - I was fairly familiar with a couple of things, and could identify at least one major homage-via-subversion, but for the most part, I simply wasn't aware of it. (A co-worker said it must have been weird, and I said it was, because I could go ahead and focus on the story.)

What I did have a deep familiarity with, having recently finished it, was Buffy the Vampire Slayer - which made for a very interesting follow-up media experience. Because more than 1980s movie and horror tropes, the proximity of the two codified a very specific pattern of supernatural fiction focusing on the exploitation of young girls and women.

Of young girls and women as dangerous beings with phenomenal powers, trained to be weapons for those who are indirectly responsible for their possession of their powers and can't access them directly, unwillingly fighting against supernatural forces without full knowledge of the scope and scale of that fight, who are denied full personhood by their trainers and keepers but find it instead granted and gifted by their peer group where they find themselves embraced and welcomed as who they are, even with the accompanying fear of everything they bring with them, both supernatural and otherwise.

It's not a one-to-one match by any means. I doubt it was done intentionally. It does make for something to consider, given how closely the parallels run. I'm certain there's more like this out there that I just haven't read or watched yet, just as I hope there's going to be at least a handful of peer-reviewed papers on this topic editing their citations now that they've got another TV show to write about.