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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

The writers claim [1] the story is untrue and others have apparently independently verified that scenes don't seem to have changed.

ADDED: They did apparently retro-edit around a plot hole but not what people were getting upset about.

[1] https://twitter.com/strangerwriters/status/15519011967005900...

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Its weird to have an article about the dangers of editing that doesn't clearly identify what the dangerous edit was. Seems like the hand wringing was about a scene the article-author incorrectly said was edited, so the article updated, but now the article is an empty shell of criticism without substance.

Could that same criticism not also be applied to this very news article that was retroactively edited or 'George Lucased' as the writer refers to it as.

This is the real story, but not a new one

No, because the article admits to the change:

> Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that a season one episode of Stranger Things had been edited retroactively to remove a shot of Jonathan photographing Nancy while she was changing.

From the article, here's the edit: It's a simple mistake of an expansive series costing $30 million an episode, really: the creative team set an episode of Stranger Things 4 on March 22, forgetting that it had been established as Will Byers' (Noah Schnapp) birthday in the earlier season.

So can someone explain to me why this is a plot hole? If the episode took place on March 22nd, Will Byers' birthday, we would expect... a birthday party?

It's about a close-knit group of friends. You'd expect that someone would either mention it, or Will would be upset that nobody mentioned it.

It is odd that the whole dialog among very close teenage friends doesn't mention that it is the character's birthday at all. It is kind of clear in the episode that the writers just didn't realize it.

Basically the whole episode revolves around one character's emotional difficulties and Will feeling a bit ignored by their mutual friend who is in town, all while Will's mother has suddenly left town the night before after giving a hasty, extremely vague and obviously fake excuse to her sons & other characters – read through the lens of "it's supposed to be Will's birthday" it makes all his close friends and his mother seem insanely cruel to be completely ignoring his birthday when in fact that wasn't what the writers were going for, they just didn't realize the visual date matched a line of dialog from a prior season.

But it's kind of awesome that they were trying to show how Will was feeling ignored, and the writers actually forgot that it was his birthday. It's delightfully meta.

It’s all just Mandela effect and fans needing reasons to be mad.

There’s a notable “off-season” effect in TV subreddits. When there’s no new content but people still want to chit-chat, crazy theories and over-analysis start to get popular.

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