I’ve thought a little bit about a Stranger Things rewrite.

Right up front, I haven’t seen the final season, and I have no plans to. My enthusiasm for the show waned during the gap between the third and fourth seasons, and my commitment took an absolute plummet once I watched the fourth season, which I found an overrated exercise in witless nostalgia bordering on self-parody. What I know about Season 5 I’ve only gleaned from the reviews I’ve watched. That out of the way, I’m gonna share my ideas which have been slowly percolating for a few years now.

I love Season 1. It’s a solid season of television, and I’ve no serious problems with it. Season 2 isn’t as good as the first – it’s a bit bloated and disjointed – but overall I feel it’s good enough to remain in continuity. So my rewrite would serve as a soft reboot, overhauling only Seasons 3-5. Admittedly, my ideas are sparse; beyond a whole lot of streamlining, I don’t have too many concrete ideas on how I’d handle it. But here’s what I have:

Keep the tone and verisimilitude of the first two seasons intact. No overindulgence in '80s nostalgia, no MCU-style banter or action sequences. Keep things mysterious and horrific.
Season 2 had El go goth. This development was undone in the actual third season, but in my version of events, she would’ve carried forward with it. Her friendship with Max would be based on them both being outsiders who don’t fit in with the other girls in school. Now while Max’s style/tastes are firmly established, El’s aren’t. When Starcourt Mall opens, Max isn’t enticed by its wares, but El, whose entire world until fairly recently has been captivity in a laboratory, is mesmerized by the shiny baubles and gaudy clothing and mouth-watering junk food. Thus a rift begins forming between the non-conformist Max and impressionable Eleven, who still craves friendship with other girls and begins altering her style to make herself more acceptable to the normies. Here we can critique the “greed is good” consumerist mentality of the '80s instead of celebrating it. And you better believe the Sisters of Mercy’s “Some Kind of Stranger” would play in an episode.
The Soviets would be kept as tritagonists, but the cartoonish villainy and pro-capitalist rhetoric would be jettisoned. They’d still factor into the events of the refurbished Season 3 somehow, but they wouldn’t have a secret base under the mall.
Hopper would die at the end of Season 3.
Jonathan and Nancy would cease to be main characters. Jonathan would probably remain a recurring character if only due to his connection with Will, but Nancy would be written out and never come back, possibly early in Season 3.
I’d keep Vecna, but rejigger a lot of his backstory. I’m of two minds of what direction to take with him. He could remain 001, but would not have known Eleven prior to his exile to the Upside Down nor had any previous connection to the Mind Flayer. Or perhaps he’d be an avatar of the Mind Flayer, a humanoid extension of its will created in the aftermath of Season 3 to better interact with humans.
I’d make Will asexual instead of gay. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t like having the unfounded speculation of the bullies who picked on him proven correct. Will doesn’t have to feel same-sex attraction to feel alienated from his peers and uncomfortable in his own skin; a lack of sexual attraction altogether can be just as distressing, with all his friends finding partners while he remains alone, willing but incapable of establishing a similar relationship, and as a consequence feeling defective. Perhaps Season 4 could feature a faux Will/El/Mike love triangle. In Lenora Hills, El tries moving on from Mike and getting on with her life, so she and Will start dating, only to find no spark between them. Mike can eventually learn about their stillborn romance, putting serious strain on his friendship with Will and fueling Will’s anxiety. Overall, following this route we can show that human sexuality doesn’t fall into a neat heterosexual/homosexual binary, that you can’t judge by appearances, prejudices, and stereotypes.

I have no serious plans on tackling this project, so this is likely as detailed as this outline’s going to get.