The Nancy Wheeler Issue or The Issue With Men Writing Teenage Girls
Thoughts and love go out to Natalia Dyer, who is a good actress who does the best that she can with what she’s given.
With that out of the way, I’m just going to say it: Nancy Wheeler is not a good character. Did she have the potential to be a good character? Yes, of course. I know that those who take the time to read this are going to say “But it’s not Nancy’s fault! It’s the writing!” Nancy is not a real person, so of course it isn’t her fault. Nancy could never be a real person, because real people don’t act the way that she does.
Stranger Things’s main audience is white middle aged nerdboy neckbeards. That’s who the Duffers are, so that’s who they want to pander to. They don’t care about people of color, LGBT or women and it saddens me to see so many young people thinking that the show will get more progressive, because it won’t. The nerdboy neckbeards are misogynists at heart, though they probably don’t realize it. (There’s a great video on that specific type of misogyny here) Hell, the Duffers definitely don’t think they’re sexist. They love to kiss their own asses about the “strong women” that they have on the show. Max and Eleven are children, whether the Duffers want to admit that or not, so that leaves Joyce and Nancy. Nancy is the Duffers’ high school dream girl. She’s the girl who they fantasized about as teens, when in reality, she never paid any attention to them. Instead, she was with the hot jock who they thought wasn’t good enough for her. Sound familiar?
Every nerdboy ever has a story about how the jocks made high school hell for them and how they deserved to be with their girlfriends, just because they were “nice guys.” There’s literal movies about this - Revenge of the Nerds, Weird Science, 10 Things I Hate About You. In Stranger Things, the trope is downplayed so that the audience is unaware of what they’re witnessing. Nancy is with Steve, who is everything that Jonathan isn’t. By showing Jonathan making breakfast at home and focusing on his family, the audience is immediately meant to like him and pity him. When Nancy talks to him in the hallway while he puts up missing posters for Will, we’re meant to think to ourselves, “Yes! That’s a great couple right there,” for no other reason than that Jonathan is a nice guy and that Nancy is a girl. Nothing about her personality matters. Most people didn’t like Nancy in the first two episodes because all she did was talk about Steve, but as soon as she shows interest in Jonathan, it’s different because Jonathan isn’t Steve. He’s a shy, awkward assumed virgin who deserves to have a girlfriend (it doesn’t matter who she is) just because he’s not some overly confident, stereotypical jock. When Nancy sleeps with Steve, the audience is meant to be annoyed with her. How dare she have sex! She should’ve listened to Barb, who shamed her for wanting to have sex and for basking in a boy’s attention! Ugh, Nancy, you idiot!
… but we still want you to hook up with Jonathan.
I still don’t understand the purpose of Jonathan taking those revealing photos of Nancy, because he was never portrayed as the bad guy. Steve was portrayed as the bad guy for breaking Jonathan’s camera. Even to this day, I see people saying that it was wrong of Steve to do, as if Jonathan wasn’t clearly saving those pictures to jerk off to later. And he didn’t just take the pictures, he got them developed. Nancy shows virtually no anger at Jonathan, like any other person would. She looks at him like some misunderstood loner and accepts the half-assed apology that he gives her, which is full of excuses. From here on out, the audience likes Nancy, because Nancy is being paired up with Jonathan and she’s looking for Barb, the self insert for women with internalized misogyny. Nancy never worries about Will. She never worries about how this situation is affecting Mike. She doesn’t see it as a problem to go to the funeral parlor where Jonathan is picking out coffins for Will just to ask about Barb. These are all things that no one would do, but it doesn’t matter because Nancy isn’t meant to be a realistic character. All she’s meant to be is the high school dream girl for lonely nerdboys to jack off to - just like Jonathan.
When Nancy chose Steve at the end of season one, everyone and their mother praised the Duffers for not having her dump him for Jonathan. But when Nancy got with Jonathan in season 2, everyone was immediately happy. The general public had no interest in Nancy aside from her relationship with Jonathan and the ‘Justice for Barb’ craze. If it didn’t involve either of those things, it didn’t matter and so that’s what the writers did: they gave the general public that god awful season 2 storyline. I’ve written numerous posts about how Nancy was turned into a manipulative abuser, but the scary thing is that I don’t think it was intended to come off that way. It was intended to come off as ‘We sh ouldn’t care about Steve and Nancy breaking up, because they’re the reason Barb is dead.’ The general public said that for a year, and guess what? Nancy said it too. Congrats, y’all wrote the Stancy fight scene. In season 2, Steve is supposed to be seen as an inadequate fuck up, who’s not smart enough to be with Nancy. That’s why we get the scenes of Jonathan and Nancy talking about authors and alternative music - to show that Jonathan is deserving of Nancy. Jonathan has done nothing to prove that he is deserving of Nancy. Everything he did in season one was for Will. This season was the opposite. He ran away with Nancy for no reason. He knew that Will and Joyce frequented Hawkins Lab often for Will to get checked out, and yet he still wanted to take them down and it truly was for no other reason than to get with Nancy. Nancy is well aware that exposing the lab could get her and her family killed. Does that matter? No! Because Justice for Barb! And the plot with Murray was disgusting and I truly don’t know how anyone liked it. Murray got Jonathan and Nancy drunk and encouraged them to have sex, despite them being minors. It was a total fanfiction storyline that anyone on ao3 could’ve written better, but that doesn’t matter! Jonathan got to sleep with Nancy! And this time when Nancy has sex (despite her cheating on Steve), we’re proud of her because it’s not about her like her sex with Steve was. It’s about Jonathan, the self insert nerdboy.
Nancy is never called out for the way that she treated Steve. Nancy is never called out for abandoning Mike. It is never brought up that by telling on Hawkins Lab, she put her loved ones’ lives at risk. Her faults aren’t focused on, unless we are shaming her for having sex with the popular boy or for doing stereotypically feminine things. When Nancy holds a gun or makes out with Jonathan, the audience supports her because she’s doing a stereotypically masculine thing and dating the boy that we’re supposed to root for. This is just part of the immense misogyny problem on Stranger Things that fans tend to ignore. The sad thing is that I cannot blame all of this on the show being written by men. Women everywhere, including women reading this, ship Jonathan and Nancy. They refuse to see the problems in Nancy’s character. They don’t understand that society and the show are teaching them that this is how they should be. In the season 2 finale, we’re meant to judge the girls who say no to dancing with Dustin, even though girls have every right to say no to a guy that they’re not interested in. Nancy asks Dustin to dance (in another nerdboy wishfulfilment moment) and informs him that girls at his age are dumb - a message that the audience is meant to agree with. Nancy stans love to say that anti-Nancys hate teenage girls, when in fact, the show hates teenage girls. Nancy hates teenage girls. We never hear that boys at that age are dumb, because once again, it doesn’t matter. Nerdboys everywhere can pretend that the pretty, popular girl danced with them and that the girls who rejected them were stupid for saying ‘no,’ which is problematic in itself.
It’s disheartening to see my take on Nancy being referred to as ‘sexist,’ because if we’re being honest, Nancy’s entire character is sexist. She’s who the Duffers are telling women that they should be. She goes from being a feminine character, to showing more masculine characteristics. She goes from dating the popular boy, to dating the loner nerd. Her entire life revolves around men. The Barb storyline was only written because of the “In a world full of Nancys, be a Barb” culture that slutshamed Nancy for having sex. Those same people certainly didn’t shame her for having sex with Jonathan, because Jonathan is the untraditionally masculine boy that all women should want (you can read a great essay on this here). Nancy isn’t a character. Think about it - we don’t know anything about her other than that she’s good in school and a ‘badass.’ Jonathan has lots of characteristics - he loves Will, he loves photography, he loves reading, he loves alternative music. Do we know any of Nancy’s interests aside from her crush on Tom Cruise? No, we don’t. All we know is that she gave fulfillment to the Jonathans and Dustins of the world, and that’s all that matters in the end, because nerdboys are all that matters to Stranger Things.
