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Comment by exhilaration | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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 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.

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.

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