p-zombie

That scene between Joyce and Jonathan, where she asks him to go on the mission instead of Will, that wasn't just a random moment. There's Hopper who patronizes him, Nancy who clocks all of it and looks concerned. It was a small moment but it was enough to remind the audience of Jonathan's parentification and the obligation he feels for his family. Suddenly the GA was talking about it, blaming Joyce for not treating her sons equally, feeling sorry for Jonathan for the first time since season one, people who are not even in the fandom were making tiktoks about it. For years it was something that was only discussed by Jonathan's 25 fans and now it was everywhere.

But then we never saw a follow up. Why? Like my dear friend @share-the-damn-bed says, the Duffers write with checklists. If that scene was only about Jonathan they would have found a way to give him a one minute scene with Joyce, but I believe that storyline was dropped because it didn't serve a purpose anymore. Once they got to write episode 6 they chose to cave to the Reddit majority who wanted "independent single Nancy", while also leaving her ending ambiguous enough that both ships could decide what happened in the future. And once they chose that ending they needed to come up with reasons to justify it and that's why many things in that conversation felt ooc, they didn't come to a conclusion based on the narrative but they retconned the narrative to reach the desired conclusion. They needed Nancy to be the one who didn't know what she wanted while Jonathan did, their problems were only caused by the shared trauma which apparently compelled them to plan this future together. So Jonathan's series-long arc conflict between his desire for a life with Nancy and the obligation for his family needed to go.

And now Jonathan gets the best ending out of the older teens (probably also to overcompensate for his arc being abandoned) while Nancy gets the worst one (yes Robin is underdeveloped but she never had an arc to begin with). She hasn't learned to tone down her tunnel vision and compromise, she doesn't get to be independent and work towards her goals with the person she loves by her side, something she had already accomplished in season 2. She regresses and still doesn't know what she wants two years later in the epilogue, technically we know for sure that she doesn't want Hawkins and 6 kids while Steve very much does, but some viewers can still appeal to that uncertainty to give her that Hallmark ending in their minds.

And you can also tell that jancy was the ship they were committed to by how they got so many little moments in the finale that were explicitly romantically coded even if they were broken up, while the other ship only got crumbs (mostly subtext) until the end of volume 2, after that they didn't need to keep the pretense of a love triangle for engagement and they dropped it completely.