What’s wrong with stranger things and umbrella academy? /gen

Okay. I knew I was gonna get this and here it is.

Stranger Things:

One of the motifs in stranger things is number tattoos on the wrists of the characters imprisoned and tortured by the bad guys. And now actual real life fans of stranger things are getting tattoos similar to these and the show’s accounts on social media have even been supporting and promoting this. Because number tattoos on wrists/arms definitely have no deep historical context that this show is copying and fans making light of. /s

Also in case that wasn’t bad enough for stranger things, s4 was shot at a nazi prison in Lithuania. Let me repeat: Stranger Things season 4 was shot at a Nazi. Prison. They used it as a film site. And if that somehow wasn’t bad enough, oh yeah by the way they’re turning it into a Stranger Things themed AirBnB where you get to your the prison and eat waffles like the characters in the show! (Yes actually.) And yeah obviously they really haven’t done anything to at least pretend that they were sorry for any of this and I know for a fact that many fans do know this but continue to watch the show anyway.

Some sources on this:

The Umbrella Academy:

This one is a lot simpler to explain but it’s very easy to miss if you don’t know the context. The antagonists of tua are a secret organization of Yiddish speaking lizard people controlling the worlds events from behind the scenes. Now if you don’t know about the antisemetic origins of like. Most conspiracy theories, then the only bad thing here seems to be the antagonists speaking Yiddish. But there’s context to this that a lot of people don’t know despite Jews having spoken about it A Lot.

Here’s the part that gets harder to explain but the short of it is there is a very famous forged document from 1903 called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” basically ‘detailing’ how we Jews secretly control the banks and the government and the media and history and basically the whole world because we’re evil. Starting to sound familiar?

This is also where the whole lizard people conspiracy comes from. The “lizard people” are just stand-ins for Jews, and that is while not as explicitly antisemetic as “the evil Jews are controlling the world” that is where the conspiracy theory comes from.

Last but not least, the Yiddish part. They could have had the handler speak literally any language on earth and they chose it to be Yiddish. That was an active choice made by the writers, this is a piece of media on an extremely popular platform with a very high budget. They could have had her just, you know, not speak Yiddish, but they did. A minority language associated with this same group of people that MANY PEOPLE STILL DO believe runs the world in a similar manner.

Sources for this part:

https://www.jewishexponent.com/2020/08/06/critics-say-scene-in-netflix-series-the-umbrella-academy-promotes-anti-semitic-stereotype/

(Forgive that this article deadnames Eliot Page because it was written before he came out as trans, that should not be the takeaway you get from it.)

I will say next time you have a question like this, remember that you are on tumblr, there is a search bar, you can look up “[insert piece of media here] problematic” and find stuff. I wrote this because I know people don’t generally look stuff up because it’s easier to just ask but generally the people who are pointing it out are the ones affected and these kinds of explanations are labor we do because we know no one false will. I don’t mean to sound mean about this but I stand by it.

Am I telling you to stop watching these shows? Well in my personal opinion yes, but I don’t control you, do with this information what you will. And last thing, to anyone reading this who’s thinking “but they have good queer representation!” Representation for one group should not come at the cost of harm to another.