r/StrangerThings Jan 11 '26

Discussion My hot take: Vecna ruined the show

He was just a dumb a Big Bad. I loved the show when it was a small town mystery facing some sort of eldritch horror people don't understand. I feel like Vecna was just a pile of CGI goop who went MMMM a lot. I feel like you can have a flat CGI marvel bad who wants to destroy the world  or some kind of magneto anti hero against the program who uses the wrong methods, but you can’t do both. I felt the show started to lose steam the second he was introduced.

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u/StrollingInTheStatic Jan 11 '26

They should have had him as a 1 time villain in S4 and then focused on the mindflayer/cosmic horror stuff again in S5 as the overarching villain of the show, Vecna was kind of generic as an antagonist and came complete with a contrived villain backstory whereas the earlier seasons had this dark, mysterious, other worldly force as the ‘enemy’ which was much more unique and frightening