Let's talk about Nancy
This kind of goes along with my post What they always did that they didn't do.
But it still bothers me.
Don't hate me, but Nancy was never my favorite character or my focus. I wasn't as invested in the Jancy Stancy triangle, but I did appreciate the strength of her arc after Barb's disappearance.
After that one mistake she never forgave herself for, she dealt with things head on. She confronted Steve, confronted Jonathon, confronted the lab, the misogyny at the Post and the dangers of the Upside Down with the same tenacity and fearlessness. And she was kickass with a firearm.
Nancy was a natural investigative reporter who'd do anything for a story. She falsified documents, lied and broke into spaces she wouldn't be allowed into to discover the truth and protect the people she cared about.
In 1, it was her idea to bait the demo and draw it away from Joyce and Hop. In 2, she was the one who saved Joyce and Will by going that last step to press a flaming hot iron against Will to get rid of the MF particles. She took a recording device into the lab. She followed the rat story no one else cared about. She lied to the Pennhurst guy and dove into the lake after Steve without a thought. In the book that released during season 5, she investigated a toxic chemical scandal in Hawkins, in spite of her personal traumas and ptsd.
In 5 she didn't investigate anything. Even though the military was acting very suspiciously and bringing tons of inventory into the UD on a regular basis while locking them all inside the town. She didn't try to get a story out to the world via Murray. She didn't follow that inventory list she had in her hand to get to the truth about the fact that they'd made an entire lab in the UD and, if we believe Kali, it was one that was filled with dying pregnant women in need of assistance.
-She sent Hopper alone into the crawls in the UD, in spite of her multiple trips there and skill with a firearm.
-She rolled her eyes but ignored Steve's heavy-handed flirting and Jonathon's weird competitive behavior. Steve and Jonathon fought about her throughout the season, and in the Abyss, Steve and Jonathon mansplained her to each other and bonded over her. Other than the melting room, where she had an honest conversation with Jonathon, she hadn't dealt with any of her own issues.
*let me repeat that. She never had a conversation with Steve alone, the entire season, to tell him the nugget plan wasn't the one for her. She let Jonathon do it instead. Does that sound like a Nancy behavior to you?
-Mike was the one to find the Holly clue and get her to ask her mother about her imaginary friend.
Yes, she killed some military at the Mac Z and was bait for the fake MF, but for the most part season 5 Nancy was a giant ball of reactive anxiety and stress. She was reacting to the fear Vecna had instilled in her with his vision instead of dealing with it.
The Holly situation could have been painted with a Barb brush. Nancy's shot at redemption, because we know how Barb's death haunted her.
The secret military instillation in the UD could have been her Watergate. I'm talking the real political Watergate Woodward and Bernstein reveal, not the lover's lake gate. She could have been informing the rest of the town via an underground radio station about what was going on and started a rebellion. Something. Anything. If she had, then Karen's impassioned plea for her to send her story in 3 to a bigger paper and make people listen to her would have meant something. It felt like it would, but it ended up going nowhere instead.
Just like Mike and Will and El, Nancy's arc was decimated in the final season.
They still dressed her up like Linda Hamilton in Terminator or Sigourney in Alien and gave her a bunch of weapons, and they still had two guys fighting over her to prove how special and irresistible she was, but her female badass story line? That was taken away.