Let’s do it: let’s talk about the Duffer brothers’ Nancy Wheeler Problem. There are two camps of Stranger Things fans, maybe a harsher divide than any other character seems to have created (unless you’re my friends and I going rabid at the way people stan Billy Hargrove) — you either adore Nancy Wheeler and her eldest daughter-core/repressed emotional state from years of neglect energy, or you despise her because you think she’s, I don’t know, too much of a teenage girl or whatever. So far as I can tell, if you hate Nancy, it’s primarily because of her season two arc, wherein she grieves for her best friend whose death she blames on herself, eventually lashing out and breaking up with fan-favorite Steve Harrington, whose response to the death of Barb Holland is mostly let’s just forget about it, okay?
The culmination of the arc resulting in her breaking Steve’s heart has turned a large fraction of the fandom off of Nancy Wheeler — her you’re bullshit speech clearly affecting the jock even before the majority of his character development in the resulting seasons. (No offense, early Steve lovers, but you can’t deny that he isn’t at his most mature in 2x02, regardless of Nancy’s blackout.) The follow-up of Nancy leaving Steve for Jonathan seems to turn people off too — despite the fact that Murray Bauman, when he prods at the two of them, is absolutely right: they do have chemistry and shared trauma, and though Nancy wants to like Steve, wants to be the perfect girl-next-door she’s tried to be for so many years, Murray is undoubtedly also right when he calls her out for not loving Steve Harrington, who from the start represents a kind of perfect image Nancy knows she’s meant to strive for.
So, then, what is the problem, you might ask? Jonathan and Nancy are still together when we leave them at the end of season four. What’re Nancy-lovers getting so worked up about with regards to her character arc? Well, first of all, consider the last time you thought about Nancy Wheeler in any context outside of the love triangle in which she is trapped. Despite the bones of a really interesting character existing in Nancy, she very often seems to be boxed in to the will they, won’t they expectations of Jancy v. Stancy, the question of is she leading either boy on too much by nature of being A Human Woman Speaking Next To Them. Nancy’s primary motivation has always been to avoid being trapped in the loveless, nuclear family expectation her mother found herself in — it was one of the first meaningful discussions she and Jonathan had, remember — and here we are, being told by the Duffers that her worth lies in which boy she chooses. And that messaging grows increasingly less subliminal by the second; Nancy spends most of season four being pressured into returning to her initial relationship with Steve by both the characters and the writers: she often finds herself scripted to stare longingly at him or rush to his aid, the two of them acting like the only teenagers in the room (er… in the hell dimension). This make the two Barbies kiss energy culminates in the Winnebago scene, which you undoubtedly remember vividly, whether because you were swooning over Steve Harrington’s determination to give children the experience he never had in his childhood or because you were wondering who the hell wrote these lines and if they’d ever seen Netflix-hit-show Stranger Things. Both Steve and Nancy manage to be horrifically out of character in every Stancy scene this season, but it’s maybe at its worst here, as Steve shares his dreams of six little babies and then decides, unprompted, to include the addition of and they’re yours, a character moment which might make sense with a Steve Harrington who never grew as a person and understood the reasons why Nancy felt unmoored in their relationship, or, perhaps, with a Steve Harrington who hadn’t spent the last two seasons developing an appreciation for the love and support he can have from non-romantic sources (e.g. Robin and the kids). In the actual scene, Natalia Dyer makes the stunning acting choice to look like she’d sooner eat a Winnebago tire than pursue that dream, but it’s hard to imagine that was the direction she was given. In fact, in what are reportedly leaked scripts, she’s tasked with a bashful smile and the thought Jonathan who?
Look, said scripts aren’t necessarily real — in fact, given how much they’re being sold as Byler bait, it’s bordering on unlikely — but the problem is that they so easily could be. The Duffer brothers do seem to think about Nancy this way, think that she’s basically a cool-girl archetype for them to throw at men and see who sticks. It’s a problem many writers seem to have when they craft what could be a complex female character — The 100 did it with Clarke Griffin, Doctor Who under Moffat’s direction seems incapable of not doing it with its companions, Joss Whedon even did it back when Buffy aired — rather than understand where past history might be framing women’s actions, it’s easier to just flatten them out to a one-dimensional bitch whom trauma is piled on to no effect. Look, I’m not saying Nancy Wheeler needs to go to therapy in season five (that’s what fanfiction is for, because that girl absolutely does need to see a professional), but I am saying that she has good reason for being unable to stomach a relationship with the man who her brain has tied inextricably to the violent death of her best friend. Beyond that, she has good reason to not want the nuclear family that a relationship with Steve promises, being as that is the arc the Duffers started her on, and the idea that she would forget that all to grin dopily at Steve Harrington’s dream of six little nuggets is truly criminal writing.
The Nancy Wheeler Problem is this exactly: the Duffer brothers seem to prefer when their characters have the emotional object permanence of a teaspoon, rather than dealing with repercussions of past actions and the way it paints their futures. And it certainly isn’t just a Nancy problem — I’m sure we’re unlikely to really deal with Eddie Munson’s death past the brief (though incredibly touching) scene we got out of Gaten Matarazzo at the end of volume two. And look, we could get into how a really worthwhile Nancy arc would understand that she is, as is to be expected with Karen and Ted Wheeler raising her, repressed beyond belief, as well as horrified by the idea that she might turn out anything like her parents, and regularly dealing with not being challenged or supported by partners for a multitude of reasons. We could get into how that arc, then, would naturally lead into Nancy being taken aback by someone like Robin, who is unabashedly herself, who stands up for Nancy immediately, who never asks her to be someone she’s not (despite Robin’s voiced expectations last season that Nancy is, in fact, a priss). We could get into the meaningfulness of a Nancy arc, then, that ends in queerness, that ends in Robin, that has Nancy move so far opposite the nuclear family expectations of a Reagan-voting household in the 80s that she can’t even remember what she’s supposed to be doing anymore.
But Nancy doesn’t have to be queer to have depth, despite how much I’d like to see it happen. It’s just a shame that, while Mike’s repression and emotional immaturity is allowed to be understood, while he is allowed to be queer-coded (for good reason!) and to cling to his trauma bond with El, his sister is not allowed the same grace, by either the fandom or the writers. At its core, it screams sexism. So, while I’m not holding my breath for the remainder of Stranger Things to remember Nancy is human, to understand the groundwork of the arc they laid for her, I would appreciate if we in the fandom could at least try to consider her holistically, as a complete character, rather than decide we hate her for having emotions and dealing with trauma. At least, in the meantime, can we stop shipping Stancy?
