u/Designer_Advance116

In Scream 3, she overcame her fears, confronting her family's dark past. In Scream 4, she came out on top from two assholes' attempts to remake her trauma a whole decade after peace. Another decade later in Scream 5, she helps her put an end to the cycle of violence in Woodsboro specifically, having her final hurrah getting rid of Ghostface where it all started before prioritizing her family off screen in 6.

So as much as I'm happy to see the studio finally paying Neve what her work is worth, it kind of rubs me the wrong way that Scream 7 conceptually undoes a lot of what Sidney accomplished by making her the main character again instead of a mentor, MVP figure that they save for the best moments. She's spent all these years keeping her family protected and uninvolved with the murders, she's moved on from the fear and distrust of others that was once instilled in her when she was a young adult, and she was given the peace that The Core Four was now capable and handling the violence that she and The Trio once had to live through.

And then Scream 7 happened. Now her family, save for her younger kids and the grandparents at least, are dragged into Ghostface's game. Sidney is forced to live in fear and be untrusting again. And now she's living the absolute nightmare of her own daughter and her friends being forced to become the third generation of victims and survivors.

I just feel like Scream 5 struck the perfect balance of Sidney being a mentor, one that can fight, but isn't being put through excessive suffering just for being alive. That should have been her role in Scream 7 to a capacity, but since she and her family are the focus, she's thrusted back into everything she fought decades to overcome.

Sidney Prescott will always be one of the greatest and most resilient protagonists in horror history. But Scream is a franchise partially grounded in reality. So unlike other protagonists constantly thrown into battle like, say, Ash Williams; how much is this mother of three expected to put up with until she dies? How much are her poor husband and daughter about to put up with now? With the direction Scream 7 put this franchise, it seems more and more like Sam got it lucky escaping to wherever the hell she is now.

I know that since copycats will always exist, Ghostface will never really end for good in the universe of Scream. But damn, can't we keep a story going without taking good things away from the fighters and survivors?

One of the sweeter but also incredibly random parts of season 5 was Will and Max becoming absolute besties while El doesn't really get to do much with her until the finale.

While I'm glad to see underutilized dynamics pop up more in season 5, it really pissed me off how sidelined El and Max's friendship were this season compared to before. Despite them only having 2 seconds of screen time together in season 4, you can just feel how much they care about each other there unlike season 5, where El could barely crack a smile at Max waking up.

I was thinking that maybe Will becoming friends with Max was their way of compensating for El's lack of tender moments with her (sending El's pseudo-twin brother to fill in for her in Max's scenes). But considering the direction with Will's character in this season, I feel as if maybe things would've worked better if El and Max had a proper reunion and revival of their dynamic while Will and Kali became pseudo-siblings to complete the "power triplets". 

El and Kali are already lab sisters, Will and El are adoptive siblings and are narrative parallels/twins to one another; and all three of them have powers now with Will's sorcerer abilities. So while El rekindles her friendship with Max, I think Kali could have worked as a morally gray mentor to Will, helping him enhance his powers.

Kali would still be going through a lot, reeling from her imprisonment and still hellbent on the idea that anybody with powers has to die in order for the cycle of government & military violence to end. And while catching up with El and training Will on his powers, she tries to *subtly* get this idea through their heads, because despite having always had good intentions, she's also always been willing to get manipulative and underhanded to achieve them. 

But they could have had it so that she observes the sweet moments between El & Max, Will & The Byers' that remind her of her late friends and plant the seeds in her head that The Party are a safe group and environment that she can trust and reinvigorate her hope for life in. And this all culminates in her fully caring for El and Will's safety by the end of the season, and her sublot in the finale is all about her wanting them to help track down video evidence of the MK Ultra experiments (like the ones used for the NINA project) to blackmail the military into stepping down.

And while we're at it, I also think that one of the biggest missed potential moments for a Kali-Will scene was when they had to break the gate near Hawkins Lab in 5x07 to rescue Dustin and the others. First off, why the hell did Kali have no reaction to being back at the place her trauma? Second off, if El could have always just broke the cameras and break open the metal bandages to enter The Upside Down why didn't they try that at least once when they did The Crawls?

So to fix these two problems, I'd have the group take a breather after El destroys the camera to try to figure things out; because maybe it could have been written in that the vines from The Upside Down were holding onto the metal bandages covering the gates, making it impossible for El to break them open and that's why they couldn't have used them for The Crawls. So now we have them sitting on their asses pondering and shit, and Kali is trying to keep it together being back in Hawkins Lab for the first time since she was a child. 

Will, the empath that he is, checks in on her and calms her down. And as they talk, Kali connects the dots that; since Will's ability to control The Upside Down creatures are based on his proximity to the hive mind, why not have him try to break open the metal by having him control the vines keeping the bandages in place?

So in a scene paralleling 2x07 when Kali trained El to use anger to move the train, Kali trains Will to use some positive emotion this time around, like passion or something to move the vines and break open the gate, allowing them to go rescue the others.

All of this could have fit into the story they had planned, help the audience like Kali more, and her feel more human instead of existing only to serve El's ambiguous ending.