I love Robin Buckley, but I hate what the writers did with her in season 4.
(Spoilers for Stranger Things Season 4 below the cut)
We’re introduced to Robin in season 3 and she’s sassy, sarcastic, funny, and smart, but what stands out most about her is that she’s confident.
She would joke about how Steve Harrington - the most popular guy in school - had a bunch of kids and even called them his children. She didn’t question it, she rolled with it. She would use her sass to break down Steve’s guard and that let her realise that Steve wasn’t as perfect as his reputation made him out to be and he was just as normal as she was.
Her character in season 3 was built around her confidence and her intelligence--she deciphered Russian code without knowing the language, she was intrigued by the mystery of everything that was happening and wasn’t scared when things started to get serious, she went with Steve into an underground Russian base and got beaten and drugged, and she survived it all with her humour and confidence in tact.
And then they brought up the fact that she was a lesbian, and they did that well.
But then Season 4 rolled around and they threw all of that out the window. They replaced her intelligence with bumbling, clumsiness, and confusion. They replaced her sass with awkward in-your-face unrequited gay longing. They replaced her courage with panic and fear. They took everything they’d built and flushed it down the drain.
I have no problem with Robin and Steve’s friendship, but the constant repetition of ‘platonic with a capital P’ was suffocating. They’d bring it up out of nowhere, it had nothing to do with the plot or conversations, and it made their friendship seem awkward because they couldn’t just be friends; they had to prove they weren’t a couple.
And while a bit of gay pining is fine, they took Robin’s independence and turned it into her fumbling over her words talking to Vicky, going crazy over the things in Nancy’s room, and it felt like they forgot that in the 80s she’d still very much be in the closet. But also, any smoothness or confidence she had talking to people in season 3 went out the window. Adding to that, she was able to see through Steve’s ‘golden boy’ facade but couldn't’ see through Nancy’s ‘good girl’ image; she never got flustered or nervous talking to Steve, never tried to impress him, but she does that with Nancy.
In season 3, part of her charm was she wasn’t talkative but when she spoke it was gold. In season 4 she’s just rambling about nothing until it becomes annoying for the other characters and for the viewer.
And finally, she went from being strong and confident to following Nancy and Steve with puppy eyes and fear. They made jokes about how uncoordinated she is when she runs but she was well coordinated in season 3 when sneaking into the Russian base and fighting the Mind Flayer. She didn’t get to be the fighter; she had to be the damsel in distress calling for a guy before she finally got the chance to fight back, and even then it was one Molotov cocktail.
She went from being able to decode and translate a language she didn’t know to not knowing what’s going on when researching with Nancy in the archives or at any other point in the season.
She went from being confident enough to fight Russians in a sailor outfit to being extremely uncomfortable in a bra and blouse.
They took everything about her and turned her into a ditsy, awkward, unconfident, unfeminine-trying-to-be-feminine disaster.
(Side note: in season 3 she was great when it came to looking after and dealing with Dustin and Erica, in season 4 she barely talks to any of the kids. The only positive interaction she has is when Lucas scores the winning basket and she and Steve get really excited for him.)
