There's something so sad about the way El just wants to be a normal girl. Since season one. She sees a pictures of Nancy and for El Nancy become this version of a normal girl she'd like to be. Nancy is pretty so she asks Mike if she's pretty too. She wears Nancy's dress, gets a wig that has long hair because normal girls like Nancy have long hair. When Mike told her that she could live with his family and Nancy could be like her sister she asks him if he'd be her brother because Mike is Nancy's brother and she wants to be like Nancy. When El runs away in s2 and ends up in Chicago and she walks through the streets she smiles because nobody is looking at her weirdly, nobody thinks she's different. All they see her as is a normal girl walking through Chicago.
El desperately wants to fit in. She lets Kali and her friends dress her up the way they are dressed so that she looks like them, Kali says she's part of their family now. El fits in with them until she doesn't anymore. She tries to fit in, behave like the other girls when she's in Lenora too, pretends her grades are good, that she has a lot of friends, that she fits in, goes to do all the things normal girls like Angela do on the weekends.
She wants a home, searches for it in Mike's house, in Hopper's cabin, when she is with Becky, when she is with Kali, in Lenora. El wants to fit in, be a normal girl and the only time she gets it is in s3 when somebody for once doesn't tell her what to do and instead tells her to just do whatever she wants, wear what she likes, dump her boyfriend if she feels like it. Max frees El from the idea that she has to do certain things or look certain ways just to be normal. She makes El feel normal because she lets her be herself.
It's so sad how she doesn't ever get that again. It's literally been her main want since season 1 and she gets it exactly once and then never again.
Idk what exactly I want to say with this post. I've just been rewatching and realizing how much of her story is about wanting to be a normal girl. How much she does to fit in. Be with Mike, change her appearance, pretend she's good at school, pretend the people who bully her are her friends. A lot of that can be explained with other reasons but the main reason for why El does all those things is because she wants to be normal. El wants family, a home, all those things everybody else usually gets, simply by being born. But she never had that and for some reason it's so hard to find. Find people who actually want her for her, who understand her and love her exactly the way she is. It's just. Really sad to me
