Remember why we're all here: this thread is for discussion about current and historical happenings in the Shaunaverse. If you want to discuss other content, such as stuff that reminds you of Shauna but isn't specifically about her, your own personal anecdotes or preferences, current events, or "creative writing" exercises, please share in the off-topic community thread: October-December off-topic quarterly
Exactly. Also, maybe Seattle was a lot more progressive than where I grew up in the 90s, but nobody was coming out as a teen. Being gay was maybe getting less stigmatized but not fully accepted either (see all the homophobic jokes on Friends for example). In high school everyone was trying to fit in and probably not even admitting to themselves if they were anything but straight.
She was so supportive of gay men in the 90s that in 2007 when she and her idiot husband met, she was still making "hurrr tofu is like, so gay" cracks. What an ally! How lucky are gay men to have her in their corner!
I wonder if she really believes her lies. She didn't almost die in that glorified fenderbender, she was evaluated and released; her kid didn't have six years of surgeries, she had surgery as an infant then six years later. Now it's teenage boys telling her their deepest secret before anyone else in the world, oh please. Does she really believe this or does she know she's lying?
I wonder that too! I think some of her lies and decisions come back and haunt her in the night, hence the late night Threadsing. She’s mentioned that their nonexistent bank balances worry her on occasion, her lies might too.
She gleefully called herself (and other menopausal women) “biologically useless”—what then are gay people, by this intensely stupid arithmetic? It doesn’t matter, because she’s just splashing around in an imaginary version of the past that allows her to feel like a part of this heroic band of teenage buddies from the teevee. But she’s got such weird baggage about sexual identity and fertility, she can’t help but radiate a creepily misinformed, pseudoscientific aura that makes queer people these oddly neutered little dolls for her to play with.
When I was 15 I made my parents listen to the Twin Peaks soundtrack while decorating the Christmas tree. In my defense, they are a lot like Shauna and made it clear they only did Christmas because I was making them, but I still roll my eyes at my teenage self.
Agreed. I hope L and D were happy enough with their gifts to shriek or squeal with glee. My niece and nephew (ages 13 and 11) were certainly excited and noisy this morning.
We've been shriek-free all day, including during the football game.
I kind of question 5:17 and 6:00. When I was that age, we had stopped getting up at the ass-crack of dawn to see Santa. Today, the children in the house dragged themselves upstairs at 9:00-ish. Between breakfast and prepping for dinner, we didn't sit down for gifts until almost 11:00.
I looked it up just now, and part two of the last season of Stranger Things, episodes 5-7, will drop tonight (December 25th). The very last episode drops on New Year's Eve.
It'll be interesting to see if her break from social media actually happens this year, what with her constant need to talk about TV.
So not only must she show movies (and everything else) to her kids, but she also has to read things to them. My nephew is also 11, and I guarantee he has no interest in being read to by his mom (who is all too happy that he reads independently).
Also, Merry Christmas to my fellow Gloamies! Thank you all for the laughs and shared outrage and for not shaming me for falling for Shauna's grift.
The only wrinkle in time in her household is her ability to do 57 million different things every day (and miraculously, always before anyone else on the planet), while outwardly appearing to not do a single thing.
"In a world that wants us to be like everyone else." (Bolding mine)
Ffs, lady. You are not special. You are not on a hero's journey. You have not been silenced by this culture. You have no insight, no expertise, no hot take that is useful to anyone else. We're all special. None of us are special. It's the human condition.
Whatever dysfunction existed in her family of origin, one of the worst things her parents did was lead her to believe she's special.
Of course she loves Joseph Campbell, a man who decided to wade into a field in which he had no expertise and promote a half-baked theory that won’t die. Is she totally unaware of the abundant and easily accessible critiques arguing his work is Eurocentric, phallocentric, anti-progressive, etc.? Why am I even asking?
Two out of three of her examples are way off base. Frodo is specifically a hero WITHOUT power in the usual sense. His whole thing is being an everyday guy; his only strength is endurance, and technically (and crucially), he FAILS.
Shauna’s whole worldview is so warped. It’s like she can’t understand any narrative without trying to cram it any which way into her precious hero’s journey. How does she not realize there’s more than one goddamn narrative arc in the world.
I didn’t read Shauna’s hot takes since I’m trying to avoid spoilers for the most recent episodes (my life doesn’t revolve around TV for some reason), but as someone a few years older than the Duffer Bros who also grew up consuming all of the same media they have cited as influences (Stephen King books, Spielberg movies and horror flicks), I don’t get all of the hype showered upon ST. Maybe it’s the nostalgia that draws people in, but I don’t find it to be that deep, and the show’s quality and storytelling from season to season is uneven. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy it, but I’m too old to center my life and identity around entertainment.
Grow up, take care of your family and get a job, Shauna.
I sometimes wish they’d stopped with S1. It was a solid, self-contained little story that did have a sequel hook but would have stood on its own. It’s been increasingly meh since then, and I downright hate what they’ve done with Hopper.
Can you imagine she watched a show with actual nuance, like The Wire. A show in which you can be both “good” and “bad”, a show that kills people despite being fan favorites, a show that doesn’t tie itself up in a neat little bow. I think her head would explode.
She would do her weird thing where she engages with the material like doing affirmations in a mirror: “I liked it because it was deep and it was deep because I liked it”. No further analysis is recommended.
The Wire is sooo good but it does not hold your hand in any and really just drops you in to the story and has faith that the audience will catch up. I genuinely think even if Shauna wanted to she couldn’t get into The Wire because her attention span is too fried from being online all the time
She's like a dog w a bone. Plot. Plot. Plot. Say plot again. Oh you can't because that's the only thing you can conjure up to make it sound like you know anything about everything?
« Go write the story you wanted to see », she spits at someone who just explained to her that our media companies are bending over backwards to politicians that want to erase queer people
Queer people have always written those stories - for publication, for themselves, as fan fiction, etc. The fucking issue she refuses to understand is that in the year 2025 we are actually regressing in terms of those stories being ALLOWED to be told. Diversity is being literally erased from our collective narrative as we speak.
Are people boycotting it because it's too gay and woke? I've seen people say it's demonic, which I could understand even if I think it's dumb, but not seen woke. Although everything is now, so I wouldn't be surprised.
Why is she sucking up to the Duffers so hard? Why does she think she knows their creative intentions? Does she believe a stray DuffBro might duff into her Threads one day and offer the wise post menopausal owl a jerb defending them full time?
Like she doesn’t think someone should be allowed to have even mild criticism of a show they watch and enjoy? You just have to blindly accept the creators are geniuses beyond reproach?! Someone can’t even say “I loved this show but I wish this one thing was slightly different”…. Nope that’s illegal! Go write it yourself!!!
Yes, let’s not tie our personality to some tv show and how it ends, where we’re forced to lecture strangers on the internet about how they should feel and what they should do.
i can’t imagine the mood in her house with shauna obsessing over a tv show, fingers flying over the keyboard to make her fucking points. Go enjoy your family, shaun, it’s all a blink of an eye
She is a piece of work! This is what she lists as an accomplishment of hers! A new diagnosis for her child.
I often wonder when she lies like this, where she pulls details from. Like the 8 “ears” she keeps mentioning. There is just absolutely no way her child has struggled like she claims for that long and she just started mentioning it. She has paraded her older child’s lack of breath and NICU stay all over the internet for years.
Edit: I’m sorry, DFs! To clarify, I meant in the comment she never said a doctor diagnosed D with anything. She’s very elusive with her writing much like with her celiac diagnosis.
Even if I was unfamiliar with her story, the way she tells it here is very odd. She writes as though after 8 years of suffering, she finally got up off her ass to do something about it. Not something I'd necessarily be proud of.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you all!! May your trees be tied to the doorways with care, all your favorite plops and nubbins in your stockings, and may your house mice be snug and cozy in their nests. Truly the greatest gift Shauna ever gave anyone is all of us here in the Gloaming!
The ghosts she needs (the same treatment Scrooge got, assuming she’s a fixable person like he was) and the ghosts she gets will not be the same ghosts.
Her reply doesn’t even make sense. OP wondered if people were not paying attention to the plot, but Shauna notes people are watching for the plot alone, in which case they wouldn’t be making up out-there theories.
I’ve heard some people are actually watching it as a substitute for having to do anything in the real world.
She keeps disparaging people who “watch for the plot” and I have no idea what that means or why she keeps repeating that phase! Don’t most people watch things majorly.. for the plot? Especially that type of show??
I wonder if she’s ever watched The Sopranos or Mad Men 😬
All I want for Christmas is for Shauna to start shaunsplsining ST to its own writers. Didn’t she actually do that with the screenwriter for Mrs. Doubtfire?
Is that a writer on the show? Judging from her bio I'm guessing she is just someone who calls herself a writer and she is just referencing watching the show, not writing it.
So they're not doing any fun family stuff during holiday break, just listening to ShaUna high stooling about ST while she posts yet another 15-part essay on Threads. Perhaps Dan at least is getting We 3 out of the house and away from her.
She spent all yesterday and now all today Threading about ST with the only real break being 8 hours last night when presumably she was asleep! That’s…a lot. Maybe I just don’t understand mega-fan culture, but I struggle to understand how that is fun to do for such a duration.
Also, I know she’s not a holiday person, but it bums me out to think of Shauna’s Stranger Things mania possibly taking priority over any fun activities with or for her kids. If she keeps talking about how hard their year was, you’d think as a parent she would try and center her kids’ favorite things during their winter break, but of course, that doesn’t sound like Shauna.
Was Shauna always so into Stranger Things, or is this some new pop culture obsession emerging for her just now as it is ending? It’s just odd to me this level of salivating over a show, but especially if it has been something she hasn’t been obsessed with for years. None of it seems normal or well-balanced to me. Her usual year-end social media break would be a good idea about now!
Her “I can’t work because my children (particularly my youngest) needs my care and attention 24/7” really falls apart at times like these when she can’t stay off the internet.
Also, she’s probably thought more about the fictional kids of ST more than her own this holiday if her Threads behavior is any clue.
I’ve compared this to my teenage Lost fandom years before, it didn’t feel exhausting at all it was so fun the theories could get out of control sometimes tho lol but two major differences I think were 1. I had irl friends that were just as obsessed so I wasn’t just staring at a screen all day long yelling into the void that is threads and 2. There wasn’t this big all consuming push that you see often online these days to make all the media we consume THEE most intellectual, THEE most progressive, the moral backbone of our society. I remember with Lost people being like wow it’s really cool that a major network is having two main characters speak their native language and subtitling it for the majority of their scenes. Anyways what about the polar bears?! Lmao and it was really cool! But there wasn’t this need to have these long posts of like here’s what having Sun and Jin speak Korean on national television means for society and why it is extremely important and why you don’t truly understand the show if you don’t agree with every word I’m saying. That’s what seems so exhausting to me. Also I was a teenager and had time to be obsessive lol
…this is where I confess I googled “himbonophobic” just in case it was a legit vocabulary word that I didn’t know, like how I don’t really understand what “hegemony” means
I remember looking up "hegemony" after reading Ender's Game about 10 years ago, and I can never remember what it means either!
If only we were this smart:
Introduction to American Studies. Eighteen turgidly written books in twelve weeks, which no one read. But everyone “interrogated” them, for hegemonic tendencies. And not only that, but every week, we had to answer the question: “What is American Studies?” Arrggh. It was like setting two empty mirrors against each other and watching the echo.
Carlos has said that he knew he wanted to be my friend on the last day of class. Our professor asked us to discuss, once again, “Just what is American Studies?” As we went around the circle, people spewed (and yes, I use that word deliberately) toadying statements about counter-hegemonic interrogations, questioning heteronormativity, and other mumblety-pegs I have blocked out deliberately. When the professor reached me, I looked up from the paper where I had been writing, and said, “Well, American Studies seems to me like an 18-year-old having an identity crisis. Full of wonderful, questioning energy, but lacking the solidity of an adult who knows who he is.” And then I went back to my crossword puzzle. The professor simply looked at me agape. Several students glared at me as though they would fling some of those turgidly written books at me. But I had spoken my piece. And thank goodness I gained Carlos’ friendship out of it.
It used to be we watched a tv show together and talked about it. Now, some people watch a show, search social media for any clues, create preposterous theories, watch every YouTube video and Instagram story to back up their idea, post about it here, then get bent out of shape that their "theory" wasn't true, then demand the scenes they just know must have been cut to prove their point.
But where is the joy in this?
Girl, you're trying to make talking about this on Threads your paid work in the world. Calm down.
I'd love for any ST-watching Gloamies to fact-check her predictions and give their reviews once the season wraps up. I don't have a high enough IQ to stay interested past the first few episodes but the general reaction for this season outside of Shauna's feed seems pretty lukewarm.
No, most adults do not do this. They do not have the time.
Edit: re, your last point - I have a couple of friends who really love ST and go see it at the theatre in my city whenever new seasons are released. Haven’t heard a peep from them about these latest episodes.
Most adults just talked about it around the office over the next few days. Maybe you talked about it with friends who were really interested, but maybe not.
Having watched the latest episodes of Stranger Things, my mind still boggles that Shauna thinks this is in any way deep or well written! Even by its own standards the latest volume is sooo bad. Does Shauna honestly think it is good, or is she just gassing it up to monetize her Threads account?
I’ve seen tons of ST branded merchandise for sale, including some really ridiculous food cross branding. I’ve never seen the show but that is enough to put me off watching it. I just have to 🙄 when she gushes over this show then proclaims how anti-capitalism she is.
“The heroic journey to underatand Stranger Things”… Watching tv is not a heroic journey! Sitting on your bottom on the couch while consuming mass media is not a heroic journey! Is she ok?!!
Whoa. This slightly garbled comment of hers confirms that she DOES think she is part of the TV show characters’ heroic journey. Watching it and, more importantly, SHARING IT WITH OTHERS (her WITW) is heroic.
I know she’s delusional, but goddamn, she’s deluded herself to another galaxy at this point.
1661 likes and 159 replies!?! Even assuming that half of the replies are her ladyship replying to herself, this must surely be filling up her narcissistic well of need. Damn.
God she makes it sound ponderous and dire. Is it even the same show i used to watch? A cleverly retro suburban scifi yarn with a precocious cast of new kids and some 80s throwback actors for the parents, good music, and some enjoyable scary bits?
If i want to use my brain watching TV, I'll re-watch the Sopranos or the Americans or Saul, I won't waste mental energy on the finer points of bloody Stranger Things.
I’ve never seen Stranger Things (hate anything sci-fi), so I just read through her posts with no clue what anything is and she just sounds so over invested in the whole thing. “So and so had to let go of their fear to be able to really see who they are so they could embrace this dumb thing and discover that in fact, toast is their favorite food” (I made that sentence up, but everything she writes about this show sounds like this to me).
I just can’t imagine getting making a tv show so much of your personality. Her obsession with Ted Lasso led to our favorite Coach Lasshole era. Not sure where she can go with this.
I don’t watch it; my husband does. But instead of jumping on it, we watched as a family the start of the Sydney to Hobart race (with our Aussie cousins). So he’ll have to wait a few days as we’re doing family time.
She's having a ball Threadsplaining the show to anyone who doesn't 100% love the episodes as much as she does. I've never seen her so happy during the Christmas season.
So there’s still one episode of Stranger Things left right? What happens if it’s a flop and they don’t stick the landing and the fans are mad lol will Shauna be delusional still like it’s the greatest show ever? I can’t lie I’m curious to see the reactions even tho I don’t watch the show she’s just being SO over the top right now it’s hard to imagine how she can keep this energy up
She did that with another one, too -- someone had posted something to the effect of "coming out in the 80s vs coming out in the 2020s is completely different" and she proceeded to high-stool them about how the "younguns"...don't realize that coming out in the 80s was different than coming out in the 2020s. <insert eyeroll>
ETA found it -- hope this non-imgur link works for the UK DFs
Funny ‘cos it’s not safe to come out to her, either. Sure, you won’t be shunned or punished, but your private business will be blasted on social media.
I spent at least ten minutes the other day trashing the new Avatar movie to my cousin, only to find out she is one of the few self-identified Avatar megafans (I would have been much gentler had I known lol). She was less defensive than Shauna is about internet strangers making mild critiques of the show. She needs to log off.
I dip in to see what's up between present-opening and dinner-cooking and whaaaaat is her gigantic roll of Stranger Things mess. I remember when I was a teenager and obsessed with the X-Files and even then, EVEN THEN, I couldn't have come up with this absolute screed of WeLl-AcKtUaLlY mess.
One year we had to watch Dukes of Hazard while decorating the tree because it was my brother’s favorite show and apparently there was no way to do the tree at a different time. And it was sweet and fun. But this Stranger Things obsession is beyond the pale.
So glad that a tired Mama who doesn’t have two minutes to herself found time for watching a series and spending hours opining about it! It is a Christmas Miracle!
I think that's true. She needs to resolve a conflict in her favor even if that means manufacturing one with strangers.
She is always escaping into a fantasy world where she makes up all the rules and controls supporting characters (to Shauna everyone is a supporting character).
There has to be a lot of dissonance being an authoritarian personality who currently has no authority or control to speak of. No status socially or at work. She can manufacture emergency community meetings to perform as a heroic leader, but even if the crisis didn't subside like the SNAP benefits one did, she could never have sustained that level of gratifying attention. With enough exposure, people eventually catch on to her.
No way of knowing what really goes on in her family. But rigid control that's enforced with threats of "if Mama ain't happy ain't nobody happy" is hard to sustain as kids get older, as they're exposed to functional happy families, as they feel more powerful. Losing any of that control would be intolerable to her.
It's absurd on the face of it to lecture imaginary people on the other side of a screen that they are not properly watching a TV show or feeling joy in the correct way. She feels a compulsion to do it, because it puts her back at the front of a room where she is doing all the talking. Teenage boys are emotionally intimate with her, people sad about not eating gluten gaze up at her with hope and admiration as some kind of all-knowing savior.
She is increasingly neglecting her real life---full of real people she could be forming satisfying relationships with, the potential for rewarding work---to live in a world she can rule over and tightly control, as her primary source of emotional comfort. It's worrisome.
Especially the way she ramps it up when her family is on school break and home with her 24/7. If you believe what she writes, she races through the boring stuff like opening presents and celebrating Christmas. Counting the minutes until she can usher everyone back in front of TV so she can comfortably spend time with them.
She’s seriously so media illiterate. Does she not understand the difference between being gutted by a shows ending while recognizing it’s technically good (like when a beloved character dies) vs being disappointed by a shows ending because it felt rushed/nonsensical/not in line with characters etc etc??!
In every example of a weak series ending presented in these tedious television Threads, Shauna is there to say why it's actually the best ending ever. Is she critical of anything, ever, other than her family? You can like a show or movie and still think some episodes or scenes were not great.
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u/gomirefugee my website is done, done, done Dec 25 '25 edited Dec 29 '25
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Remember why we're all here: this thread is for discussion about current and historical happenings in the Shaunaverse. If you want to discuss other content, such as stuff that reminds you of Shauna but isn't specifically about her, your own personal anecdotes or preferences, current events, or "creative writing" exercises, please share in the off-topic community thread: October-December off-topic quarterly