Thinking about Steve Harrington and why I really love his redemption arc, and I think one of the big things is that, like… he doesn’t really get anything out of it? He gets his ass kicked in every season. His girlfriend dumps him (after cheating on him, depending on how you interpret everything that went down with Nancy and Jonathan). He went from the being the most popular guy in the school to a loser, a joke. His social circle consists of middle school students. The next girl he falls for turns out to be a lesbian. He couldn’t get into college and is working a shitty minimum wage job in an embarrassing uniform. In his words, he makes three bucks an hour and he has no future.
Like, he’s never rewarded by the narrative for becoming a good person, and he’s never given any Freudian excuses for how much of a dick he was through most of S1. He just realized that he was being shitty and decided to do better. I appreciate that.
