Curate, connect, and discover
I think what scares me the most about fandoms like MARVEL and Stranger Things is the amount of people who think that just because there are unrealistic concepts in most of the movies/episodes that all of it is unlikely to be “relatable” or “realistic”, when, in fact, that is not the case.
Civil War is between a bunch of superheroes with advanced weaponry and impossible abilities. But what people don’t seem to realize is that the very thing they’re fighting over is so much like our world and its politics that you don’t realize how much damage you’re doing by taking one side over the other. If you’re Team Iron Man, you were actively for a law that would limit the rights of enhanced individuals (voluntarily or not) just because of how much “destruction” they caused trying to save the world from worse threats. And, we can see that by the end of the movie, the “rogues” were trapped in the Raft (a highly secure prison made for villains like Rhino, Electro, Shocker, Goblin, etc.) and Wanda, a sixteen-year-old who was manipulated into being experimented on, was even in a straight jacket. They were locked away because they tried to fight for their rights as enhanced individuals against men who either: were not advanced, or had the privilege to take their powers off (Iron Man and his suit). While you may consider this as fiction and nothing more, this is real to lots of people all over the world who are fighting for their lives and rights every day against men like Ross and Tony.
The same applies to Stranger Things, that, although is based around monsters and scientific concepts that are near-to-impossible in our reality, still contains themes that may be relatable to struggling children and adults. We see that in the very first season with the Byers family, and how they were all traumatized by Lonnie and his mental/physical/emotional abuse. In the second season, we also saw the relationship between Billy and Max, which ultimately led to multiple fanfics trying to portray Billy as anything but a monster. A manipulative, romanticized monster whose actions were brushed off simply because of his troubled childhood.
“It’s literally fictional/a fictional character. It’s not that deep.” Maybe it doesn’t apply to you or anyone you know, but to many, those topics are a constant in their lives.