Jonathan starts out the story with a very close-knit family unit, a mother and a brother who all love each other deeply but who have already faced a lot of hardship. this leads to him having a very batten-down-the-hatches, circle-the-wagons kind of approach to life. his circle expands (minutely) as the story progresses, to include Nancy and Argyle, but he always has a limited list of people he cares for, and his goal is to protectĀ them. heāll make sacrifices forĀ them, heāll shape his life withĀ themĀ in mind. his whole universe shrinks to fit the few people who matter, and everything else fades awayāincluding the possibility that those people could find happinessĀ inĀ the wider world. the world is a threat, something to be guarded against. you canāt take on the world and win, itās not going to change for the better no matter what you do, you just have to keep your head down and deal with the tragedy of it. heās seen monsters, heās known loss. he knows all too well that the picture-perfect happy family is an illusion painted over resentment and cruelty, or even just an illusion painted over the complications that come with loving flawed people. any other outlook is naivetyāthis is why Jonathan has so little patience for Bob Newby, who is decent but simple, buying into all the things that Jonathan has already seen arenāt unbreakable. and this is why Jonathan walks away from Steve and Nancy kissing in the high school halls in season 2, not out of jealousy, just out of impatience with how juvenile and unrealistic it seems to him. theyāre playing into the image of what teenagers are supposed to be and do, the path theyāre all meant to be on, and Jonathan doesnāt have any time for that. the image is a lie. the path where you try to fit into the world and put down roots there can only destroy you. when Will feels bombarded, Jonathan doesnāt tell him that heās going to be happy and people will come to understand him; Jonathan tells Will thatĀ heĀ understands him. Jonathan will do absolutely anything toĀ be there for the people he loves; the world will do nothing for them but break them. their happiness, if they find it, is going to have the quality of escape: stepping outside the stifling boundaries of whatās expected and hiding out in a Castle Byers, somewhere they can be safe with the people they love, away from everything that wants to hurt them.
Steve starts out with a couple of merely surface-level friendships and no close family; heās an only child, he has nowhere to direct his love and devotion, and no one giving that unconditional love to him. heās already won everything small town high school life has to offer him, reputation and good looks and unsupervised freedom. when all of that is revealed to be vanity of vanities, useless trappings laid on top of an empty cynical life, he too sees monsters and comes to know loss. but his reaction to it is different. in season two, Steve still sees some value in going to a party and wearing the costumes he and Nancy worked hard on. he sincerely misses his girlfriend after an hour, without any cynicism, without needing to appear cool. heās thinking about getting a job with benefits, so he can be someone to rely on. and as soon as anyone steps into his peripheral vision, Steve loves them. he loves Dustin who orders him around, he loves Robin who makes fun of him, he loves the kids who donāt listen to him, he loves Nancy who broke his heart. his perfect popular ordinary life was emptyāso he fills it up with real things, that are still very much realĀ ordinaryĀ things. he gives ice cream to the kids and watches movies with Robin, he remembers the song that the carousel horse plays, and through it all he keeps on looking for love and believing in love. the more darkness Steve sees, the more fully he throws himself into the world. itās after heās come very near to dying that he tells Nancy his deepest wish is to have a big family and see the world with themāhe wants to bring MORE little people into existence and then he wants to introduce them to the whole of the world. he wants to have adventures with them, ordinary people in an extraordinary world, forging through it all together. and then, itās in the oppressive hell of the upside down, where darkness is literally all around him, that he confesses that the dream is still tied up with herānot some picture-perfect fantasy, but a grounded hope, rooted in his real and abiding love for her, as he really sees her. the world is dark, and wilder and more complicated than it appears. but Steve finds his hope in the most ordinary thing there is: a husband and wife and their children. heĀ isĀ the sane man in a mad world that G.K. Chesteron talks about: the normal boy who becomes the fairy tale hero.Ā
so what about Nancy? Nancyās outlook on darkness and the world is very much āride out and meet themā. she sees evil in the world, and chooses to face it head on, and then, as much as possible, she tries to shoot it in the face. not for nothing does she tell Jonathan in season one when he asks what they should do about the demogorgon, āI want to kill it.ā sheās not just being dramatic. sheĀ meansĀ it. what Nancy most wants, from the moment she discovers the tragedy and violence of life, is to eliminate evil in the world. she wants to kill the demogorgon, she wants to root out the unprincipled men who let it loose and see them punished for the harm they caused, she wants to banish the mind slayer even if she has to chase him out with a hot poker, she wants to set vecna on fire and then pump him full of hot lead.
and so, initially, Jonathanās perspective seems attractive to her, because he too is aware of precisely the evil that she wants to fight, whereas Steve seems to still be appreciating the shiny surface, the veneer of normalcy and happiness that has ugliness underneath it. āitās all bullshit,ā she tells him. she canāt play the role anymore, she canāt pretend everything is fine when everything that she once knew was poisoned by death. and not only is Jonathan aware of the darkness lurking under reality, his rejection of it is so total that heās willing to reject the entire world along with it. he so hates the evil that Nancy wants to fight that he will turn away from everything else to hide away with just her and Will. thatās romantic. it is! eros loves to say āyou and me against the worldā, and the romanticism of that does win out in season two. Nancy picks Jonathan and the escape he offers, picks him because he sees the same world she does. but as the story progresses, we see that their worldviews donāt align perfectly. theyāre not in agreement about how to deal with the world. Jonathan wants to get through his internship with a minimum of conflict and go home to his family; Nancy wants to prove herself, change peopleās minds, make a lasting difference. Nancy is starting to imagine a life she can build with him, Jonathan can only see what he already has and wants to preserve.
so what we see starting to happen in season four is Steveās perspective is becoming more and more appealing to Nancy. sheās surprised by that, and I think confused by it. it doesnāt make any sense to her, but suddenly his hopes and dreams donāt sound like bullshit anymore. the picture he paints for her of the life he wants soundsĀ nice,Ā especially because he knows what heās talking about; heās been quietly practicing for it, taking care of others younger and weaker than himself, attracting no attention and asking for no reward. itās not bullshit, itās not naiveāitās the dream she had before everything fell apart, and now it could be real. and why does Steveās hope become steadily more and more attractive than Jonathanās escape?Ā because Jonathan can only retreat, into the safety and solitude of the Byers homestead or into a cloud of smoke. Steve can enter into the world and transform it, light it up from within. Steve canĀ act,Ā andĀ Nancy is a woman of action.
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