Honestly, vol. 2 has got me feeling a little like Nancy halfway through season three. Am I right to trust my instincts, or am I just afraid of being wrong? We'll find out for sure tomorrow, but as Karen tells Nancy, "if you believe in this story...finish it."
So, let's finish it. One last post before the finale.
One thing that's become depressingly apparent to me recently is how many people don't actually understand the concept of a character arc. I keep seeing people talk about Nancy's "independence arc", and I'm just like...where?
A character arc isn't just about the end point; it's about change over time. If the character changes positively, then their story begins by establishing a flaw they need to overcome. If Nancy's arc is about becoming more independent, then that would naturally mean that she's too reliant on others at the start of her journey, and that's shown to be a problem.
And this is obviously not the case. When we're first introduced to Nancy, Dustin goes upstairs to offer her the last slice of pizza, and she ignores this bid for connection and shuts her door in his face. It's establishing her as someone who's closed off. And the more we learn about Nancy, the more this is reinforced. She's not close with her family. She admits she and Mike haven't talked much lately. She's not even fully honest with Barb, her best friend and confidant.
When Barb goes missing, Nancy's limited social circle doesn't take her concerns seriously. Steve is more worried about getting in trouble. Karen is more worried about Nancy having sex. Nancy is distraught ("No one is listening to me!"). She teams up with Jonathan, then Joyce, Hopper, and the kids, but they all want to find Will. No one is focused on Nancy's missing loved one.
Jump ahead to season five, and Nancy once again has a loved one go missing. Only now, she's got a much larger support system, and they're willing to do whatever it takes to get Holly back. This really couldn't be further from Nancy becoming more independent, but it's such a vital part of her character arc. And it will be framed as a good thing, because Holly will be saved by their combined efforts.
And that's really what this all comes down to: narrative framing. It's why I roll my eyes everything I see someone's "hot take" that "Nancy isn't Steve's reward for being a good person". It's not about a reward. It's bookending. At the beginning of his journey, Steve falls in love for the first time, but he's still too self-absorbed and fake for the relationship to last. If the end of his story shows he can have a successful relationship with Nancy now, that's narrative proof of how much he's grown. That's how stories work. It's the conclusion of a thesis. A character learning they're not entitled to someone's affections just because they're nice or good or whatever is a perfectly valid arc, but it's not the one that's been written.
In the same vein, a young woman learning to be more independent is a perfectly valid character arc. But it's not Nancy's character arc. Independence is not a good thing for her. In fact, she's at her most vulnerable when she's isolated. In season one, she almost gets trapped in the Upside Down and attacked by a Demogorgon when she crawls through the mini-gate in the tree on her own. She needs Jonathan to help her find her way back and pull her out. In season three, when Nancy and Jonathan have to separate from the group to visit Mrs Driscoll, they're attacked. Nancy ends up alone with the Meat Flayer, completely defenseless, until she's saved by Eleven. For all the "I ship Nancy with her guns" posts around, they're actually ineffective when she uses them without support. Her gun does nothing against the Demogorgon after she forces Steve to leave the Byers' house and Jonathan is incapacitated. It does nothing against Billy when she gets out of the car alone and shoots at him as he speeds towards her. In both cases, she's saved by Steve.
On the other hand, working as part of a team is framed as a good thing. When Nancy wants to go off and investigate her Victor Creel lead on her own, Steve insists it's too dangerous for her to be by herself. Robin ends up going with her, and this is a good thing because Robin is the one who thinks to read the Weekly Watcher. When fighting the Demobats in the Upside Down, Nancy and Robin fight as a team to take theirs out. And when Nancy uses her guns as part of a co-ordinated effort, they're really useful. For example, shooting the Meat Flayer while Lucas attacks it with an axe and everyone else holds on to El in season three, and shooting Vecna with a shotgun after Steve and Robin throw their Molotov cocktails in season four.
I recently made a post about how Nancy's story fits within the Heroine's Journey narrative framework (please read if you haven't already, otherwise much of what I still have to say won't make a lot of sense). Isolation being risky while social bonds are a source of strength is fundamental to these journeys where connection is the point. But as I said in that post, a lot of viewers really want Nancy to be a hero, not a heroine. And I've been thinking a lot about why that is.
It's tempting to lay all the blame on misogyny, and honestly that does play a role in it. Hero's Journeys are masculine-coded, and Heroine's Journeys are feminine-coded. Hardly a surprise most people want her to be a hero when I constantly see people celebrating Nancy's more masculine traits (her ambition, her gun wielding, etc.) while her feminine traits are ignored, or worse, seen as flaws to be overcome. And I find this saddening, because Nancy's romantic nature, girlish tastes, and compassion are all just as important to her character.
This is how we get so many viewers siding with Jonathan when he insists on continuing the mission rather than check on Nancy in the hospital after her parents are attacked. Rather than seeing this as an obvious sign their relationship is failing, people took it as proof Jonathan understands Nancy, because it matched with their reading of her as a masculine-coded character. And this plays into a larger pattern: When he's talking to Argyle, Jonathan focuses on Nancy's ambition as the thing he loves about her. He confesses that he gave away Nancy's sweater because he hates pink, a colour strongly associated with girls. There's a sense that he, like much of the audience, disdains femininity (things that would make her "just another suburban girl"), and so that part of her character becomes somewhat repressed while she's dating him.
There's such a clear difference when we contrast Jonathan's attitude with Steve's. Steve is visibly distressed at the idea of Nancy being at the hospital without emotion support and thinks she may appreciate flowers. When he defends her to his friends, he focuses on her caring nature. He is charmed by the butterfly stickers on her locker door and flirts with her using her teddy bear. He actually enjoys Nancy's feminine side.
What's really interesting about all this, is that it's baked into the structure of the narrative. And this becomes clear when we look at Nancy's storylines for each season:
In season one, Barb goes missing and Nancy searches for her. In season two, having learnt Barb is dead, Nancy tries to get justice for her friend and closure for her family. In season three, Nancy faces discrimination in the workplace and tries to prove her skills as a journalist. In season four, Nancy investigates the force that kills her friend Fred and threatens to kill Max. In season five, Holly is taken and Nancy searches for her.
One of these things is not like the others.
Yep, season three is a Hero's Journey. Crazy, right? Especially considering this is the season to showcase Nancy and Jonathan as a couple.
Now, to be clear, this isn't something exclusive to Nancy. The whole show does this weird pivot, which is why so many people point out how different it feels, even if they can't articulate why beyond the campy summer vibes. But it's more fundamental than that. The narrative structure is completely different. Joyce goes from wanting to save Will as a heroine to wanting to know what's going on with her magnets. Mike doesn't have much of a storyline at all, beyond being someone Eleven needs space from to find her own identity (probably not coincidentally where a lot of people say they stopped feeling the Mileven ship, though it is perfectly healthy in real life). It even ends on a bittersweet separation when the Byers and Eleven moved away, unable to stay in Hawkins after all they've experienced there.
Back to Nancy though, the third season does, to an extent, teach Nancy to be more independent. She still hits several of the Heroine's Journey beats as part of her larger, overall journey (the almost getting killed when isolated examples I listed above, for one), but the overall set up is still someone who is prevented from reaching her full potential by her community (her workplace and, to a lesser extent, Jonathan) and willingly moves away from them to achieve greatness on her own.
And maybe I'm giving the writers too much credit and this was a blunder on their part, but the implications are still powerful. A relationship with Jonathan doesn't allow Nancy space to be soft. She doesn't feel taken care of, so she'll fight for what she needs instead.
Okay, so, taken as part of a whole, I can really appreciate what they did with season three, but I can also see how it contributed to the confusion around Nancy's character.
And speaking of confusing, I think there's one more thing worth discussing...
Jonathan and Nancy's original character concepts. (Picture taken from @asimplejar. Thank you, I am in your debt.)
How things change. For Nancy, especially. I'm sure we all know the story by now. Steve was originally intended to be an evil rapist douchebag who dies a karmic death until the Duffer Brothers met Joe Keery and were so charmed they rewrote the character. Which is wild when you consider this passage from Carriger's book on the Heroine's Journey:
A serious mistake many storytellers make with the Heroine’s Journey is in choosing the rape of the heroine herself as the inciting event. Because this is not the severing of a familial network (it’s happening to Demeter and not Persephone, so to speak), the resulting narrative can feel disingenuous, even polluted and clumsy.
The heroine acts to save others.
Her own rape as a motivation for action not only breaks a core narrative contract with readers, but it shows a gross misunderstanding of what rape actually does to the human psyche and what it means to the victim. In other words, stop using rape as a plot device to motivate your heroine. It’s tired, overdone, and it doesn’t work.
Basically, changing Steve's character made Nancy a much better heroine. It seems they always planned for Barb to be taken (it's in the Montauk pilot script available online), and yet she's not even mentioned in the outline above. By taking out the completely unnecessary rape, Nancy's desire to save Barb becomes her unambiguous motivation.
Beyond that, though, Nancy's journalistic instincts are among her greatest strengths. Having her trust evil proto-Steve, despite the obvious red flags, diminishes this part of her character. In the version we got though, Nancy sees the goodness in Steve, even when everyone else is telling her that he’s a douchebag. She forms a real connection with him, and this, plus her caring nature, are enough to inspire him to turn his life around. For a heroine, this is so much more powerful than the karmic death they’d originally planned.
As much as art can be objective, this is objectively a much better story.
And yet, I see so many people clinging to the original, or something close to it. "Nancy never loved Steve, she was just pretending because she wanted to be popular" or whatever it is people say, as though that doesn't completely undermine Nancy's redeeming Steve.
Firstly. I will fight anyone who truly and sincerely believes Nancy's arc over the first two seasons can be boiled down to: Nancy is pretending to be someone she isn’t (by dating Steve) but learns to embrace being her true self (by dating Jonathan). I mean, what is that?? Such a deep and empowering message. Be yourself by dating the unpopular kid. It's extra galling considering how often we Stancies are accused of being sexist or reductive. If there's a group who reduces Nancy to a love interest, it's certainly not us.
Secondly. If season one Nancy is so concerned with popularity, why is she so secretive about her relationship with Steve rather than trying to leverage it for social capital? Why is she still so focused on her grades, to the point of studying with her flashcards in the school corridors? Why does she insist on including Barb? Why does she still approach Jonathan to give her condolences when Tommy and Carol are so blatant in their scorn of him?
None of it makes sense. In the original Montauk pilot script, they have Nancy grimace when she drinks beer because she doesn't like it but wants to fit in. They deliberately changed this when they rewrote the story to Nancy successfully shotgunning a beer and having fun playing in Steve's pool, because that character trait no longer applies to her. And the thing is, we know the Duffer Brothers can write a convincing character who has this flaw, because this is literally Steve's arc. We see how his behaviour changes for the worse when his friends are around. We see how he pretends not to care because that's uncool. The whole point is that Nancy shows him something better, because she's so sincere in her caring. This doesn't work at all if she's stuck in the same problematic behaviour pattern as him.
But as I said in my other post, for an independence arc to make sense for Nancy, Steve needs to be part of the restrictive Ordinary World she willingly leaves as part of her Hero's Journey. Which means her character flaw needs to be tied to him. Except, Nancy's big flaw is her closed off nature. Her inability to communicate openly with people. Her refusal to be honest, with both others and herself. And Steve challenges her on these issues, because he wears his heart on his sleeve (as opposed to Jonathan, who is even more avoidant, as evidenced by all the lies we just saw them confess to during their break up). Giving Nancy some time by herself to sort her feelings out makes perfect sense, but leaving her alone (or independent, if you're going for a more positive spin) at the end just gives her a chance to stay avoidant forever.
Hardly seems like a happy ending to me.
