Considering the infamous blunder of Game of Thrones’ final season, it doesn’t bode well that Stranger Things season 4 is playing up its comparisons to the fantasy series. Stranger Things’ creators, the Duffer brothers, are calling Stranger Things season 4 their “Game of Thrones season” due to the plot and characters being so spread out. The majority of Game of Thrones was notable for its ensemble cast battling completely different conflicts, with Stranger Things season 4 repeating such circumstances as Hopper is located in Russia, the Byers family in California, and the rest of the characters back in Hawkins.
Although Stranger Things and Game of Thrones being compared as two astronomically popular action-packed ensemble series is somewhat inevitable, the former show must tread lightly in how closely it compares its story makeup to the latter. Game of Thrones’ last few seasons were widely criticized for their over-reliance on shock-factor over a misguided, incoherent plot, with particular ire directed at GOT showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss for these narrative decisions. While Stranger Things season 3 avoided enough of Game of Thrones’ other shortcomings to elude any significant backlash at the time of its release, such an issue still signaled that season 4 would need to redress its shock-factor focus accordingly.
While Stranger Things’ trailers hint at a new storytelling angle on the sci-fi series, the Duffer brothers’ comments about emphasizing season 4's Game of Thrones comparisons could mean trouble for the upcoming installment. Repeating Game of Thrones’ shock-factor blunders was already a mistake for Stranger Things season 3, so comparing season 4 to the wide scale of events of the fantasy series isn’t necessarily a good sign. Rather, as Stranger Things’ story begins drawing to a close, the narrative needs to be the priority while the massive production scale takes the backseat, which is the exact issue that plagued HBO's Game of Thrones final seasons most.
Stranger Things introducing a much larger scale to its conflicts is exciting in theory but already repeats one of the show’s biggest gripes from season 3. The Duffer brothers are promoting the separation of the characters across the globe as a chance to make Stranger Things’ worldbuilding as exciting as that of Game of Thrones, though breaking the characters into such distinct, hardly overlapping groups was already criticized in season 3. The difference between the large scale of Game of Thrones’ medieval-style story was that it began as such – with the majority of its characters beginning on isolated paths across the fictional world before slowly coming together, making the series the more succinct story that it had always been building toward.
Netflix's Stranger Things, on the other hand, began with an extremely tight-knit story as the insular, fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana pulled together in the face of supernatural events. Stranger Things season 3 already changed the scale of the characters’ stories by having them so removed from one another, with the finale feeling like a crossover event within its own series. As such, it doesn’t feel like a new, exciting path to have the separation of Stranger Things season 4’s so globally divided, but rather a more extreme version of the groups breaking off in season 3.
As Game of Thrones moved to its final season, it needed to bring the characters into one location to conclude its story on a more cohesive note. However, Stranger Things season 4’s Game of Thrones comparison is accomplishing the opposite, as it’s promoting the series' appeal based on moving the characters so far apart in its penultimate season - when it really needs to focus on recreating the smaller-scale magic of the first two Stranger Things seasons. Granted, the series' Creel House storyline seems to be accomplishing this by bringing together many older and younger teens, but the seemingly ever-expanding scale of Stranger Things season 4 appears to risk repeating Game of Thrones’ mistakes of replacing narrative weight with grandiose, incoherent scenes.