Did you gorge yourself over Thanksgiving? At 11&more, we binged—on food and Stranger Things 2. For some of us, it was a long overdue catch-up to the rest of society; for others, it was an excuse to re-indulge our guilty pleasure. When we came together to discuss our impressions in excited babble, the conversation turned to the series’ wonderful child stars and what it means as they grow up and mature—attracting praise, admiration…and interest in their burgeoning sexuality.

Monica: Do you think the stars of Stranger Things are being sexualized? This article talks about the various ways that fans have been reaaaally interested in Finn Wolfhard (Mike)—from shipping him with It co-star Jack Grazer to essentially propositioning him online.

Joy: Yeah I’d heard about fans doing that. I haven’t seen It but I love Finn in Stranger Things! He’s immensely talented and a very good looking *KID.*

It’s creepy AF when adults ship 14-year-olds, although I suppose it’s somewhat inevitable, and far less creepy, when adolescents watching the show are doing it. Didn’t we all do that when we were 12/13/14, obsess over whatever good looking actor close to our age was in the spotlight?

In a certain light, it’s less unnerving than a 12 year old fan with budding sexuality obsessing over a 30-year-old star (which, let’s be real, we all did at 12).

Stars have to get used to being the objects of a gazillion strangers’ sexual obsessing. The weirdness here is because these are child actors on the verge of not being child actors.

On the one hand, I think it’s fucked up to sexualize child actors/models/etc. On the other hand, I feel that adults have largely consented to at least being public figures. But this in-between point of early adolescence is a very different sort of thing to think about.

It’s interesting because at 14 Finn will be at the stage of figuring himself out…and because I really like this actor I very much hope that he comes out of what will be the inevitable Hollywood meatgrinder at least semi-normal. Would suck to be growing up and figuring out your sexuality in the spotlight. Adolescence is uncomfortable and embarrassing enough without having every little thing put on blast; you don’t really know what you’re about in any sense, especially sexually, and people need space but are under scrutiny to figure it all that out.

Jia Jia: Haha, I have literally been googling Finn Wolfhard the past week. And I’m also really keen to see how Noah Schnapps (Will) grows up, because he was amazing this season and a really good-looking boy boy. Millie Bobbie Brown (Eleven) is also smoking as a badass.

From Interview Magazine

I agree with what you’re saying about the discomfort and ambiguity of that in-between space. I feel that our society’s actually pretty hypocritical in many ways.

On the one hand, we’ve got a bourgeois conformity thing going on where we draw hard boundaries around fluid things e.g., child/adult, platonic/sexual, so we get outraged by the concept of someone ogling a 14 year old but are ok if we’re talking about an 18 year old (even though an 18 year old can still look very young and a 14 year old might look quite mature). On the other hand, we’re putting people like Finn and Millie in photoshoots that deliberately capitalize on their burgeoning sexuality.

From i-D magazine

I’m ok with people shipping characters. That’s pure fantasy. It’s trickier when they’re shipping the actors themselves—it’s still fantasy for the shippers but you risk impacting the actor’s actual reputation and image of themselves if you start wishing for stuff that they’re not comfortable with e.g., hoping they’d be this or that sexuality, that they’d be into this or that person.

I think people just have to be sensitive that the Internet’s a public space and that these are still kids trying to figure out who they are; shipping them can complicate that journey and that’s not cool.

I do think it’s gross though when people publicly proposition the kids—a model got slammed by Finn and fans recently when she tweeted that he should hit her up in four years. That’s basically no different from the sexual harassment stuff that’s been emerging recently, where someone with power (in this case, the power of being older and more sure of yourself) says or does something that makes the other person feel powerless or taken advantage of.

***Mild Stranger Things 2 relationship plot spoilers***

Joy:  One of the things that I thought was fascinating and weirdly well done in the most recent season of Stranger Things is how they dealt with the emergent sexuality of kids on the bare verge of being not kids anymore.

They didn’t try to make them teenagers before their time, but they also didn’t shy away from the fact that at that age everyone is obsessed with dating…though you generally don’t know what to do with it once you’ve gotten said date.

Watching the show as a 33-year-old I didn’t feel creepy watching them kiss…it felt like that not-quite-chaste-but-not-quite-fully-sexual thing you do at that age. I teach eighth graders on Saturdays and summers and it reminded me of watching their posturing and awkward flirting with each other, when one of them tells me she has a girlfriend now, or when I overhear sexual jokes or stories. I know they’re starting to work themselves out as sexual beings, but I don’t want to be too much privy to their worlds because I still see them as pre-adults in some ways, but very much kids in others.

That’s how I felt about how they did it in Stranger Things—it’s clear the characters are starting to figure out their sexuality, but, as an adult watching kids on screen, I don’t want to see that in its fullness. I felt they showed the appropriate amount of intimacy for the characters and the age….but it was not far from that line; extending the kisses even a few more seconds might have started to seem weird and uncomfortable. That’s appropriate to that age, toeing a really vague line and always at the point of teetering from one side of it to the other; from a storytelling standpoint I thought it was masterfully done.

I wonder how that goes from the actor side of it! If you phrase it this way, it is a little…interesting…that it’s a part of these 14-year-old’s jobs to kiss people on screen. By the time you’re a teen you’re used to enacting sexual behaviors for the camera, no big deal, but I find myself wondering if the first kiss for at least some of these kids was on screen.

Ahalya: I’d heard that on Beyond Stranger Things, Sadie admitted she hadn’t known beforehand about her kiss scene with Caleb…and she was quite uncomfortable about it but was basically pressured into it by the directors. This caused quite a backlash on social media about exploitation of young actors, especially women.

Jia Jia: Yeah, I read that the kiss in Season 1 was Finn’s first (am assuming that it was Mille’s too?). In the Beyond Stranger Things interviews on Netflix, Millie has a hilarious description of Finn during their kiss in season 2—said that he was like a ventriloquist and would say without moving his lips, “I’m comin’ in” to warn her he was going for it!

Also, I think the Duffers brothers are huge geeks—Millie described them as her big brothers who are a bit socially awkward and who she can yell at—so they’re kind of like overgrown teens in a way, and therefore great at writing that dynamic.

And that’s what I find to be the charm in the series too. The kids are really adorable, but they’re also charismatic and increasingly sensual. And somehow, that mix feels authentic the way the story’s written and acted.

Ahalya: I think they capture the awkward transitional phase perfectly too and it’s inevitable some of these actors are going to be sexualized /shipped/obsessed over, since they are in that grey area between child and young adult. I do think it’s a little disturbing if they’re pushed to do things they’re not comfortable with on set though …that doesn’t help the situation and makes them feel more exposed as opposed to protected from some of this harmful attention.

I loved the new season overall though!! I ship Hopper and Joyce (perfectly age appropriate for me) 🙂

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By Ahalya, Jia Jia, Joy, Monica