TW: suicide mention, abuse
Please see plots with nuance! Kali represents abuse survivors who believe the only way to break the cycle of abuse is to kill yourself. She literally says "end the cycle" IN her monologue about it. That is a very real person that needs to be disproven, not an antagonist. She has always been represented as misguided, not ill-intended, and that's important.
This is about her and El learning that there are other ways to break the cycle then to cut it off. An extremely important lesson. So many survivors out there want so badly to break the cycle over ever risking perpetuating it, that they do do this. She represents THEM.
She has tried to bring El into her ideology and that is bad. But she is not bad. She is misguided and hurting. And she just needs to learn too that peace is possible. That the only answer isn't pain or death. That suicide is not a noble sacrifice she's making for future generations' safety from her. There are options.
Kali Prasad is a misguided, suicidal, child. She's like 19, that's a kid. Just like Hopper called her. She doesn't want to do this. She just doesn't understand she doesn't have to. She has never been able to escape pain and abuse, even when she thought she did for a while, she was taken back. And that was RECENT. She is still deeply hurting from it. Discouraged, distraught. She had hope that things would turn out alright, that she was finally free, and that hope was betrayed, crushed. Now she doesn't trust that that thought will ever be true. She was free from Brenner, then he died, then she was still taken back into abuse. No one from the original lab, not even in the original lab. If getting rid of all conditions of the original abuse doesn't free her, what will? I understand why she believes what she does.
But she REPRESENTS those who do. She is misguided, and influencing others towards her harmful ideology in the process. But she is still just a protagonist who needs to unlearn the beliefs she internalized from abuse. Hers are just severe, and you're worried about their affects on other people, I understand. But she is abuse representation too and her lesson is important enough that you need to treat it as the protagonized one that it is. There is such a thing as bad ideology from a good person. She is well-intended. She genuinely believes it will never end. Her actions make sense, then. Are empathizable. It's the belief that's flawed.
El needs to realize that this is exactly what she begged Hopper not to do, forgive him in her understanding of why one would make that sacrifice, and choose not to make it herself, to come home to him.
Kali needs to realize there are other ways. That you have the power to break out of a cycle without simply stopping it in its tracks. You can be free and alive and others can be. Those things can coexist. She doesn't see that now.
BOTH these lessons are important and need to be learned. And if one of the representations of them is not treated with the empathy she deserves, they will not be internalized properly.
Kali herself said she worries she's a "bad influence". In one of the first scenes she's in. She doesn't want to hurt El. She doesn't want to hurt anyone. That's why she's doing this. Kali is TERRIFIED. Terrified of every hurting or being used to hurt anyone ever again so much that she is planning to end her own life.
Treat her as THAT girl. Because that is who she is. That is who she represents.
She shared her misguided belief with El. And proposed to El a choice. The choice is still El's, Kali is not forcing her. But the belief needs to be corrected.
We have been watching Stranger Things for too long to not have learned to extend empathy for the internalized beliefs caused by abuse and any non-abusive behaviors they may affect.
