Please Don’t Get Eleven’s Tattoo From ‘Stranger Things’

Please Don’t Get Eleven’s Tattoo From ‘Stranger Things’ | The Mary Sue

This week in regrettable fandom news and TikTok trends, people are apparently getting numerical tattoos in the style of Eleven’s from Stranger Things. Don't.

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Please Don’t Get Eleven’s Tattoo From ‘Stranger Things’ | The Mary Sue

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Please Don’t Get Eleven’s Tattoo From ‘Stranger Things’​

You are not a number, and you shouldn’t want to be.​

By Kimberly TerasakiJun 3rd, 2022, 4:58 pm

This week in regrettable fandom news and TikTok trends, people are apparently getting numerical tattoos in the style of Eleven’s from Stranger Things. Even Stranger Things’ official Instagram account posted a picture of several wrists marked with a multitude of numbers. The problem? The tattoos that appear in Stranger Things were meant to be direct links to the dehumanization experienced by Jewish people during the Holocaust.

As @sapphicvoid puts it on twitter:

And the show knows this. Eleven is literally given a number rather than a name because she is just one subject of many at the Hawkins lab. Despite Dr. Brenner’s occasionally affable exterior, he did not care for Eleven or Kali or any of the other children beyond what their abilities could do. She was stripped of the name her mother gave her in the same way she was stripped of her hair and her freedom.

This isn’t even the only time Nazi connections have made their way into the show, either: Season 4’s Russian Prison scenes were filmed at a former Nazi prison in Lithuania, which has now been converted into a Stranger Things-themed AirBNB. Because that’s where we are as a society.

Of course, this isn’t the first time fandoms have regretted tattoos. Some Harry Potter fans got their tattoos removed in the wake of J. K. Rowling’s transphobia and some Game of Thrones fans say they never would have gotten their tattoos if they’d known how the show would end.

At the same time, getting a fandom tattoo can be empowering; our own Rachel Leishman has written about how she doesn’t just get tattoos of heroes that she loves, but of characters who meant different things to her in different stages of her life. They are a reminder to keep moving on, a source of strength for her. Other Game of Thrones fans state that the show’s ending doesn’t take away from the community they’ve made or the original symbolism of the tattoos, for them. For those fans, the tattoos have transcended the piece of fiction in meaning for them.

The difference is that many of these tattoos are specific to the fandom, whereas the Stranger Things tattoos intentionally call back to the dehumanization of Jewish people during the Holocaust. There’s been plenty of other Stranger Things tattoos that feature much cooler and more relevant iconography to the show. Season 4 character Eddie Munson has tattoos that perform a similar function of showing individuality and a general desire to rebel against those who would prefer to enforce conformity.

At the end of the day, your body = your choice. But before you go and get a tattoo intentionally resembling something literally used to identify the dead at Auschwitz, think about what the tattoo will mean to you five, ten, eleven years from now.

Will it still have the same meaning?

Or will it be overshadowed by regret?

 

[The Southwest Strangla]

Stranger things is gay

 

[Milwaukee Macho Man]

I encourage this behavior.

Nothing like a TV show, video game or pop culture tattoo to let me know you're an insufferable faggot before I even hear you speak.

 

[theshitposter]

people should get a tattoo of whatever they want. your body is your canvas
but shitty art is shitty nonetheless

 

[Albert Camus]

I don't know, my grandpa got a Popeye tattoo during WWII that said "strong to the finich".

Popeye tattoos are the closest thing a person can get to issuing an implicit threat to anyone around them short of verbally doing so.

No one fucks with a man who projects his love of spinach and goofy strongmen.

 

[Poppavalyim Andropoff]

I have 5318008 on my arm

 

[The Final Troondown]

Imagine actually getting a tattoo based off a media franchise period. It's just retarded to begin with, this faggots virtue signaling and made up problems aside.

I've got one, but I didn't just get it on a random whim of the NEW THING that came out, which is when you end up regretting them

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Stranger things is gay

The main woke complaint is that it is not gay.

 

[Uncle Phil]

Nothing like a TV show, video game or pop culture tattoo to let me know you're an insufferable faggot before I even hear you speak.

Goes double for Star Wars ones. The rebel alliance symbol shows up on tatted nerds at a depressing rate.

 

[Otterly]

I think it’s great. People these days put all their insanities front and centre. Back in my day you might have to meet someone several times before you realised they were an insufferable arsehole. Now they pit their pronouns in their email signature and tattoo TV shows on themselves and you can tell right away. Progress!

 

[Nora Freeze]

Are we sharing fandom tattoo regert stories? My friend has two tattoos of Sollux from Homestuck (the yellow Gemini one), she's a freak that goes through phases where she's 24/7 roleplaying as her Current Thing; when Homestuck was popular, Sollux was her character.
She has the sprite version as he appears in-comic, as well as him in her own art style.
She now complains about how awful and cringey it is to have Homestuck on her body.

She's our idiot, so of course we remind her it was her adult decision to get not one, but two tattoos of a thing she  knew would die off eventually.

 

[CircuSphere]

If I ever got a tat it would be either one of those 'branching trees of life' with a "you are here" but I would have to find a real good artist who could pull off the fine line work and also incorporate it into something more artistic than a circular diagram... or maybe an Escher sleeve... like the waterfalls or stairs.... or if I did something really cool like hike the Appalachian, I could get a tat of the range, if I set a killer time in time attack I could get the track and the time... but who am I kidding, I never did anything that cool and I'm getting old.

Tats are cool if you have taste and money or a good story to go with them, otherwise nah. Also every band, artist, IP/franchise will betray you eventually... Dead artists only.... and even then what is it going to like to have the 'one ring' tatoo-ed onto your hand in a few months.

 

[Allanon]

There is a difference between individuals willingly getting number tattoos on their body because they like something or someone and entire groups of people forced to be giving a barcode to replace their name enforced by the government with horrific consequences associated. Conflating the two is not 'showing respect' to Holocaust survivors or victims, it's insulting them. It's dumb to get a tattoo of a fictional property but it's also dumb to get a tattoo about your favorite alcohol brand or some girl you'll only date for two more months. Regrettable tattoos isn't anything new.

On a slight diversion: I am so utterly exhausted from this constant Nazi hysteria. Nazis lost. There was almost no chance they could ever have won, much less in a lasting way. It's been close to 100 years since they lost. The handful of Nazis left in this world are geriatrics who can do no harm to anyone and statistically probably never did anything themselves. Let it go. People would not have cared immediately after the fall of the Reich if you used some warehouse that the Nazis used to use. This forced hysteria is doing more to venerate Nazis than vilify them, treating their things and the places they used as if they're some kind of sacred ground that can never be soiled by other human hands, invoking their name like a curse that people shrink from in fear.

If you hate Nazis, you should mock them. They were stupid enough to think your skin color meant something, they massacred their own people for no good reason, and they were so pathetic that even with vastly superior technology they fell flat on their faces and got crushed in their attempt to conquer the world. Hitler either died like a coward in his own bunker afraid of the consequences of his actions or hiding in some backward country afraid to show his face ever again. They thought it was a good idea to wage war with Russia in the winter. They're pathetic and should be mocked, not feared for generations. And if you really hated Nazis you'd want to do things that'd irritate and hurt them, like make fun of their delusions, not things that would make them proud like fear to even set foot in even the most meaningless corners of their property.

 

[Megaton Punch]

I didn't even know Eleven had a tattoo because I don't watch that horrible show, and I still somehow pegged this as a muh holocaust article before even opening it. My third eye has been fully opened and I cannot even comprehend my own power.

 

[CervixHammer]

lol at this happening twice.
probably three times, there's no way some idiot didn't get the numbers from LOST on an arm.

 

[Kulee Baba]

I think Consooomers who'd mark their body with pop culture crap are embarrassments.

 

[LurkTrawl]

To think that I've never wanted a tattoo nor saw the point as there's nothing tackier I can think of than getting one to commemorate something.

Good on you if you got one and you're in the armed forces or lost a loved one or something like that, but I always saw it as depreciating the sentimental value of whatever it is supposed to represent. Just shows how vacuous these idiots are that they didn't even put in the cognitive effort to analyze why they're permanently marking their body, essentially, for a corporation's product.

 

[NJBear]

I have my Bitcoin address tattooed in White on my arm so visitors to the park can send my a donation.

 

[Sithis]

I've seen precisely one tattoo in my life that I genuinely thought was something worth getting inked onto skin and it was a paratrooper infantry tat worn by a man who had literally killed for the right to wear it.

That being said I am all for this trend of currentyear politics colliding with eternal consoomerism in ways that are twisted to be about the jews

 

[Red Hood]

At least that feels somewhat more acceptable since popeye was an unofficial mascot off the navy (im assuming gramps was navy?)

A strangers thing tattoo is just straight up "i do what the tv tells me" consumerism

He was actually an Army infantryman in the North African/Italian theater.

Popeye tattoos are the closest thing a person can get to issuing an implicit threat to anyone around them short of verbally doing so.

No one fucks with a man who projects his love of spinach and goofy strongmen.

I hope you forgive me contributing this to random.txt

 

[The Foxtrot]

The handful of Nazis left in this world are geriatrics who can do no harm to anyone and statistically probably never did anything themselves.

This is something that irritates me every time the Juden cry "OMFG WE FOUND A NAZI IN HIDING!!!!".

No, you found a man that's in his 80s/90s, who managed to start a family in the decades since the end of the war, who may or may not have been involved with any part of the Final Solution almost a century ago, and therefore you're snatching up a great-grandfather at the end of his life who couldn't give a shit what you do to him. Not some hardcore, fearsome war criminal. An old man who's likely already dying anyway.

Any of the actual perpetrators who actually envisioned and planned the Final Solution have long since perished or been executed. Any of the actual hardliner members of the NSDAP (the ones who could have actually restarted a serious National Socialist movement) have long since perished, been executed, or have renounced their beliefs.

Let's face it, the only "real Neo-Nazi" organization that's actually doing something beyond being lolcow material is the Azov battalion in Ukraine, and they're being pumped up by the West solely to fight Russians.