Stranger Things

The Duffer Brothers have explicitly described D&D as one of the show's major inspirations.

• The kids' party structure → Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Will, etc. each fill different "party" roles.
• The Upside Down adventure structure → essentially treated like a gigantic D&D campaign.
• Monster naming → Demogorgon, Mind Flayer, Vecna.
• Vecna himself → directly borrowed from the D&D villain.
• How the kids understand supernatural events → they use D&D monsters as analogies for things they don't understand.
• Dungeon Master mentality → the Duffers have compared the writers to DMs, throwing increasingly difficult challenges at their characters.
• Character archetypes → the kids' D&D roles reflect their personalities in the real world.

The Duffers actually described Stranger Things as being like a massive D&D campaign where the role-playing takes over their lives.

The Duffer brothers have named It repeatedly, and the show is built on its skeleton:

• A group of bullied children who are the only people who understand the threat
• A small town whose adults are useless, complicit or absent
• A monster that lives beneath the town and feeds on what the children are afraid of
• A bond formed in one summer that the story keeps returning to

The casting closed the loop: Finn Wolfhard was cast as Mike here and then as Richie Tozier in the 2017 film of It. The graph already holds E.T., The Goonies and D&D pointing at this show; It is the one that supplies the horror rather than the bicycles.

• Kids on bikes
• suburban America
• government experimentation,
• mysterious supernatural child
• friendship
• 1980s Spielberg tone

The Duffer brothers have named Akira, alongside Firestarter, for Eleven: a child taken young by a government programme, identified by a number, whose power arrives with nosebleeds. The lab, the earlier subjects who did not survive, and the pursuit through an ordinary town all come from the same place. The graph already holds E.T., The Goonies and D&D as sources for the show; this is the one that is not American.

• Group of adventurous kids
• Adventure mentality
• Kids solving a mystery adults don't understand