The original post: /r/television by /u/Rarecheeses843 on 2025-12-29 00:47:27+00:00.
Here are 6 negative parallelisms featured in the most recent episode (S5,E7) of Stranger Things. I am happy to acknowledge that one or two of these are debatable:
“It wasn’t a fight. It was a damn massacre.”
“This is not a war. It is a search.”
“Not crash. Merge.”
“She told her I don’t wanna save the world, I wanna end it.”
“She’s not a human. She’s a monster.”
“It didn’t come from him. It came from me.”
I wasn’t originally going out of my way to look for these, but around a third of the way in there was a scene that struck me as so stilted and oddly written (it was the one where some soldier starts disrespecting Dr. Kay for no clearly discernible reason) that I couldn’t help but start writing them down.
Sadly I don’t have time to go through the whole series and see if the writing this season features significantly more “not x but y”’s than in the past. Maybe somebody reading this is unemployed or retired and very nerdy and hates AI and wants to step up.
Finally, I do acknowledge that negative parallelisms are a perfectly human rhetorical technique that good (and bad) writers can use.
But 6 in a single episode feels like a lot.