🎻 : a helpless dancer.

And they had the gall to self-insert with Mike and say, “Hey guys—imagine an ending where she didn’t die! Imagine an ending where she was finally free after a lifetime of being imprisoned and in hiding!” Oh, but even in this hypothetical “good” ending, her brown sister still dies. Of course.

They very lazily resolved Jane’s fear that she was a monster, and then had her call the next generation of innocent abused children like her “more monsters” which was entirely out of character.

The children who did get their happy ending were “normal” and shoe-horned into the final season.

We talk about the Will Byers humiliation ritual… what about the Jane Hopper humiliation ritual?

After a fight in which her boyfriend triggered memories of her abuser (while too busy focussing on his “relationship” problems with his platonic bestie) he brings her cold eggos and refuses to apologise for not being supportive of her struggles. He makes it about him. He calls her ridiculous. She begs for him to verbalise his affection for her—write it even—and is then thrown into another prison where she is re-traumatised by her abuser, only for said boyfriend to chauffeur her away after days of homoromantic heart to hearts with his best friend.

They had her wear a fucking collar. Her abuser was the one to unlock it. They didn’t even let her remove her own literal and metaphorical shackles.

Mike professes to her while kneeling at a fucking pizza dough freezer as she’s being choked out. No eye contact. No intimacy. Because his gay best friend reminded him to. She never even gets to respond to this monologue in the canon series, because I guess her feelings don’t actually matter.

Even in her final moments before death, her character was reduced to her love story with the boy who found her in the woods and kept her in his basement. And he still couldn’t say “I love you” back for some reason.

She was never free. She went from being trapped in the lab, to being hidden in Mike’s basement, to being hidden in Hopper’s cabin. She got in trouble and yelled at for leaving these confined spaces and doing normal teenage things. The only exception was when she made herself useful to them by using her powers, endangering herself, and often to the point of physical exhaustion.

Her father figure supposedly learned to allow her more freedom at the end of season 3, but he returns to being over-protective, angry and condescending at the beginning of season 5, undoing all character development.

And we’re expected to thank these men for “taking care of her” all these years, when everything she ever accomplished was no thanks to them but to her own merit, her own desire to do good, her own zest for a life and freedom she never got to have.

Was she… really just used as a tool to help Hopper process his daughter’s death? Was she used as plot armour to ensure our characters could survive the supernatural antagonists? Was she used to give Mike Wheeler something to do other than play games in his basement?

And you know what? After the way they treated Jane for 5 seasons I will state that the choice to have her wear a skin-tight swimsuit for half the fucking final season was insane.

It's November and everyone else is layered up. She could have easily worn a shirt or sweater over that swimsuit when she was not actively in water. I wouldn't be surprised if Millie insisted on wearing the sweatpants at this point. Why the choice to parade her around in that non-seasonable skin-tight clothing?

And after she wore a fucking collar of all things in the previous season—a collar only her abuser could unlock.

She goes from a flimsy hospital gown to her first "outfit" — a sopping wet t-shirt and nothing else, that she attempts to strip out of in front of the boys. I thought there was possibly some deeper subtext there about her upbringing. Apparently not.

It was the Born Sexy Yesterday power fantasy. It was an abused little girl attaching herself to men, constantly dehumanised, over and over, with no vindication. A fantasy about a beautiful and powerful girl who is constantly finding herself trapped.

I'm... in awe. I was engaging in good faith when the entire time her character was indeed being sexualised, even from childhood.

Similarly, a young Will Byers is graphically sexually assaulted in the season's opener and it is simply... never addressed. We see him be orally assaulted multiple times throughout the series, even communicating distress regarding this invasion of bodily privacy, and the writers seemingly don't provide any justification for it.

Portray characters who represent abuse victims. Utilise the supernatural for this purpose so it less confronting to watch. That is fine. But please for the love of god, make it mean something.

Once again, I engaged in good faith when they showed these things, including when they had Troy comment on Will's disappearance, insinuating that he had been sexually assaulted and murdered by another gay man.

All that only for him to be re-traumatised in the next season. All that to show him in a flimsy hospital gown just like Jane, tied to a bed as he thrashes in agony to exorcise the entity inside his body that... never actually left him.

He was described as "sensitive" and "delicate" young gay boy—in the Duffer's own words—and was consistently shown restrained or on his knees, his body used by other entities. All while he yearns and pines for the boy who makes him feel safe and gives him courage.

every possible take abt the gay kid being used to develop the straight relationship has been said a hundred times by now so i won’t comment there, but let’s talk abt the blatant misogyny that was jane’s ending.

the duffer brothers saying that jane could never end up with the party because she represents the magic of childhood, and they had to leave her behind in order to grow up. saying they didn’t want to take away her powers because it would make her lose that symbolism, eternally tying her to the state of childhood (if she is alive), while the rest of party gets to go on to adulthood? the magic of childhood represented by a girl who had hers stolen from her? the symbolism of mike being the one to watch jane’s last moments and later on being the one to close the basement door after their last campaign (both of those actions metaphorically closing the threshold between the party and their childhoods).

jane acting as mikes tether to his youth. jane having to die so that he could grow up. jane never breaking the cycle of abuse. jane never gaining back the autonomy that was stolen from her. jane who was abused and referred to as a number and given about a year or two of freedom in the sixteen years she was alive being symbolic of the magic of childhood. jane’s powers forcing her to be a symbol for the themes of a show rather than a human, just as they forced her to be an object and a weapon in the lab.

jane’s ending being left open and the last we hear of her being from mike’s theory. jane is a symbol for mike’s (and by extension the party’s) childhood. he is the last one to theorize on where she is, and her ending is left ambiguous to the viewer so that he, the storyteller, can interpret it in his own way. we, as the viewers, will never see what happens from jane’s perspective or gain closure in our own right—we can choose to believe in mike’s theory, or we can choose not to. and sure, you can interpret this as her finally being free from everyone hunting her and demanding an inside view on her life, even us, but how can we interpret that positively when it’s been established that the party and their friendship is the heart of the show? a party that she was a member of before that too was taken from her.

NAME 5 WILL BYERS DRAWINGS

Straight people, queerness is not you but different. You are attempting to empathize, and that is very nice, I am not faulting you for that part, but your own experiences cannot be accurately, credibly, projected onto Will's because you lack the nuance to understand them. It is not "you but flipped". It is its own minority identity and experience with nuances you do not and will never be able to understand inherently, just like any minority a person is not apart of.

It doesn't center homophobes. It doesn't center straight people. It doesn't center anyone but queer people.

Pandering to homophobes is centering them. But so is writing a "ha! In your face!" And it's still centering straight people to write it to explain it to them.

They did not explain it. Because that was never what it was for. That was never who it was for. It was never for the people who didn't already know.