Duffers defy bloodthirsty tyrant Millie Bobby Brown's call for more Stranger Things deaths
"This is Hawkins, not Westeros," Matt Duffer said in response to Brown's semi-joking assertion that "We need to have the mindset of Game of Thrones"
For a show about extra-dimensional threats that want to eat, possess, or just generally fuck up the human race, Netflix’s Stranger Things has had a relatively small body count across its four-season run. Sure, a number of Russian soldiers have probably bitten the bullet over the last few seasons, and there are always a few sacrificial lambs who pop up early in a season to show that the latest Dungeons & Dragons-named villain means some very gooey business. But the actual death count for named characters has been relatively low, for all the calls for justice for Barb or Bob or Billy. (Pro-tip: Don’t have a B-name in the Stranger Things universe.)
And thus have series creators Matt and Ross Duffer earned the wrath of star Millie Bobby Brown, who issued a (mostly joking) call for more blood in a May interview she did with The Wrap, alongside co-star Noah Schnapp. Noting that the cast of the series has apparently gotten so big that it’s getting hard to take group photos, Brown called for a great tide of blood to sweep Hawkins, IN in the show’s fifth and final season, culling the herd of well-meaning cops and cub reporters and so, so many nerds. “We need to have the mindset of Game of Thrones,” Brown asserted as Schnapp called for a “massacre scene” to add some stakes to the series (and also, presumably, cut down on the craft services line). Brown didn’t exclude herself from the calls for faux-murder, either, all but daring the Duffers to kill off Eleven at last.
Now, all of this was clearly intended to be mostly tongue-in-cheek, but the Duffers did end up responding to Brown’s accusation that they’re “Sensitive Sallys” who don’t want to kill anybody off. Appearing on the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, Matt Duffer noted, “This is Hawkins, it’s not Westeros” and added that the show tries to make every death “realistic” and give it weight. (An assertion that we’ll note holds more water for season 1's Barb than season 4's Chrissy, but so it goes.) “There is logic behind it,” Duffer said, “And has nothing to do with my sensitivity.”