Honestly, I just love how a significant portion of the Stranger Things fandom is coalescing around anger for how El was treated. Regardless of her relationship status, regardless of whether you ship her with Mike or Max or no one at all, so many of us recognize the gross injustice done to her.
In a universe where practically EVERY MAIN CHARACTER gets to have their happy ending, gets to survive and grow and live with their loved ones, the traumatized girl who was born into captivity, treated as a lab rat, as a tool, as an experiment, who had to fight and scrape and claw for every shred of happiness she was able to achieve, is the one who has to give up everything in order for the others to "grow up" and "move on"?
Like what the fuck kind of message is that?
Yes, I know she's a character, I know she's not a real person, but her treatment is emblematic of how women and trauma survivors are treated all the time. They're the ones who have to sacrifice themselves, they're the ones whose histories are rendered as "inconveniences" for others to have to be burdened with and gosh it would just be so much easier if they would just disappear and stop being so inconvenient so we could move on. /s (wish I didn't have to add the sarcasm tag, but this is the internet in the year of our lord 2026)
It's misogynistic and it's ableist and it reveals that the Duffer Brothers care about nothing about actually lifting marginalized and outcast voices. They just want the brownie points for having a "strong" female main character, but didn't want to actually consider how to properly honor her as a character, never mind as a human being in the universe she lives in.
(I'm not even going to get into the racism and gross treatment of queer stories and other bigotries because I'll be here all day and will melt into a pile of rage.)
I said it in a gc and I'll say it again here: the Duffer Brothers are the Joss Whedon of Netflix and we should treat them accordingly.