Who asked me for almost 18.5k words on Steve and Nancy from Stranger things? No one? Just me? That’s fine. This was how I wanted to spend my time the last two weeks anyway.
I’m not great at introductions. I’ll just start this off with a bold thesis statement: Nancy and Steve have been intended as an endgame couple since season two. “Erin,” you might be saying, “season two is a stretch. They broke up so she could be with someone else,” while you not-so-secretly think that I’m losing it. To which I would point out that, yes, Jonathan and Nancy were one hundred percent intended to be the endgame couple at first. However, things shifted when they decided to keep Steve alive and give him his own character arc and development. They were turning Steve into someone that could be a good partner for Nancy and it doesn’t make a lot of narrative sense for them not to come back to each other in the end.
I’m getting away from myself. My point is that doing an immediate rewatch of the entire series after season four came out, I could see the shift that I hadn’t noticed before, so I want to talk about it by dissecting almost all of their interactions in every season with so many screenshots, because that’s just the kind of person I am.
Disclaimer: I just like picking apart narratives for fun. If you disagree/don’t ship it/hate me for writing this, that’s fun for you, but if you don’t have something constructive to add, let it die. There will be some talk about Jonathan and Nancy’s relationship in here as well, because it’s important to the narrative, but all the talk will be serving the thesis statement above. (I’ll also probably repeat points a few times because this is long and I lose track of things like that. And this is BARELY proofread by me, so I’m sorry.)
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