Why were there no major deaths in Stranger Things Season 5 finale? The Duffer Brothers justify their choices to avoid a Game of Thrones-level ending

The Stranger Things Season 5 ending managed to shock viewers, but not in the way one would expect. Fans had gone into the season finale theorizing for weeks about which of the leading characters might meet their end in the finale. From Eleven to Will Byers and even Steve Harrington, fans were convinced that somebody was going to die.

And it was surprising, to say the least, when nobody died, and even Eleven, who appeared to have been engulfed in the black hole, received an ambiguous ending in the final few moments of Stranger Things Season 5. Critics of the show have asserted that it was playing too safe by having none of the major characters die, but the Duffer brothers defend that it was never what their show had been about, and they were not going to give that up for the sake of some emotional payoff.

"We could’ve definitely killed some people; it’s just not what we want to do, and it’s not, to me, what the show is, or what the show is about."

Keep reading to find out how the Duffer brothers justify their choice of no major deaths in the final season.

The Duffer brothers open up about no major deaths in Stranger Things Season 5

The stakes of Stranger Things Season 5 were the highest they've ever been, and even then, all of the major characters have managed to make it out of the final fight without dying. Most fans of the show were expecting multiple deaths in the final season, but the Duffer brothers explain that they had a definitive ending in mind for their show, and major deaths were never in the cards for the final season.

They assert that for them, Stranger Things has always been a coming-of-age story, and so it was never going to be a bloodbath, or a "red wedding scene" in Game of Thrones, a comparison that they've often drawn. They went on to explain that when they considered TV finales that managed to stick their landings, the one thing that stood out in common between those finales was the fact that they stayed true to what the show ultimately was.

"You go through every character, and you talk about it, and we did that exercise, and once you go through that, you realize that it was wrong for the show and the story and these characters and this coming-of-age story that ultimately we're telling."

So, this was a north star for them when they sat down in the writing room to flesh out the ending for Stranger Things Season 5. They revealed that in the writers' room, they've gone over all the possible endings and all the ways that the story would've been affected if they'd killed one of the characters and, at the end of the day, arrived at the conclusion that they just didn't want to do that because it's not what the show was about:

"You follow through, and you run it through, and you go to the end... Generally, when we did it, it sort of dismantled the whole thematic structure of Stranger Things....And so, whatever the noise is or bloodlust, at the end of the day, you have to go, 'No, we need to be true to what Stranger Things is and always was from season 1 on.'"

So, to be true to the Stranger Things Season 5 story, the season finale, despite all assumptions and expectations, featured no major deaths except Kali and Vecna, as even Eleven appeared to have managed to survive.

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