I spent a lot of time after Stranger Things 5: Volume 1 thinking about Dustin. Was he acting like an indefensible, selfish jerk? Or was his grief over Eddie not only understandable but reasonable? My Editor-in-Chief Rotem Rusak made a moving and compelling case why we should all show Dustin a lot more compassion, but I ended up focusing on totally different question: was Dustin’s irresponsible behavior “authentic?” Would someone in his situation intentionally risk the fate of the world and his friends’ lives to troll some jerks? Would he really be lose focus while fighting Vecna? I thought about that a lot until I realized something: it’s a stupid question.
I don’t read or watch stories focused on how a person should act in them. I love them—enough to dedicate my life to writing about them—because even in the most magical/horrific/unrealistic tales the best storytellers have something to say about what it means to be human. What matters is whether a character’s actions or motivations feel authentic to their own story. But I got so deep into Stranger Things 5 that, for a brief moment, I forgot I was thinking about people in a situation so far removed from reality it’s impossible to imagine how a real person would behave. Dustin and his “party” have spent years fighting literal monsters from an evil parallel dimension, a place they’ve actually visited. How they hell can any of us know what we’d be like if we had definitive proof other dimensions exist?
Maybe you’re positive you know how you would respond if you lived in Hawkins. I am not. Not even a little. I’ll never fully recover from Netflix cancelling Glow, so I’m not exactly confident I know how I’d be think, feel, or act after seeing demobats attack my friend. Even if I magically could….so what? What was I doing? What was the point of thinking about something I inherently think doesn’t matter? I eventually figured out the answer to that, too.
The un-realness of Stranger Things makes questioning Dustin’s behavior futile because there’s no “authentic” way for him to behave after seeing his friend die fighting literal monsters. He’s both “right” and “wrong.” And yet, the very un-realness of the show is exactly why one character’s actions have aways felt wholly authentic to me, Nancy Wheeler. Everything she has done, and everything she has become, makes more sense to me the weirder life gets in Hawkins. Because Nancy’s story on Stranger Things is driven by something that feels not just painfully real, but intensifies the longer you survive. She’s become Hawkins’ leader in the fight against evil because of her inescapable guilt over her best friend Barb’s death. It’s been the terrible source of both her greatest strength and her greatest weakness for the entirety of Stranger Things.
Nancy’s guilt about her best friend’s death has been the driving force of every decision she has made since early in Stranger Things‘ first season. Before Barb went missing, Nancy was a typical teenager. She was a good kid trying to find who she was and how she fit into the world. Nancy obviously wasn’t being a great friend to Barb when she started dating Steve, but Nancy wasn’t being a total piece of shit, either. She was being a teenager doing teenager things. And even then, it wasn’t like she left Barb in some horrible situation with dangerous people. She just left her alone at a small party in their boring, safe little town where nothing ever happens.
It’s not Nancy’s fault that a portal to an evil dimension had opened on Stranger Things. Just like it’s not her fault that Barb cut her hand trying to fit in with the cool kids, and that led a demogorgon to find her.
It’s not Nancy’s fault Barb died on Stranger Things. It just wasn’t. There’s no objective way to blame Nancy for what happened to her best friend that night. It was the government. Henry Creel. Bad fucking luck. We can see that. It’s obvious. But emotions aren’t objective. Especially not guilt. It not only burdens us with the weight of shame and sadness and regret. It also takes from us. Guilt takes our ability to give ourselves grace. It robs us of perspective, the kind that lets us forgive ourselves, the kind that lets us remember we’re not perfect and that’s okay.
Guilt is funny, though. It can be so heavy we can’t shake it off, and yet it can also make us move in ways we couldn’t without it. That’s why guilt hasn’t paralyzed Nancy. From the moment she learned her friend never made it home, guilt has driven her. It has driven everything Nancy has done on Stranger Things. She made it her mission to find Barb. Then she made it her mission to destroy the monster who killed her. Just like she made it her mission to get justice for her friend in Stranger Things 2, so Barb’s parents could say goodbye.
Nancy’s obsessive/borderline dangerous resolve to get answers for her friend led her to become a reporter, but her role as a journalist quickly became secondary to her ultimate goal of defeating the Upside Down. And if there’s one thing Nancy Wheeler wants to do, it’s defeat the Upside Down at any and all costs, regardless of her own safety. No one runs headfirst into danger like Nancy. She’s entered portals to an evil dimension without a second thought. Sometimes without a first. She’s picked up shotguns and faced giant monsters like they should fear her. Like, the entire world depends on her and her alone. Even after Vecna cursed her in Stranger Things 4 and showed her horrible visions, she immediately went back into the Upside Down to face him. She’s been a woman on a mission ever since that night at Steve’s party.
This determination permeates everything she does. The sweet young teenager we met in the show’s first episode is long gone. She’s a warrior. Stranger Things fans know her stare. Her walk. Her no bullshit approach to any problems. Even the way she moves is awe-inspiring. Poor Fred could hardly believe it when he went off on a story with her. There’s nothing that scares Nancy enough to make her stop and worry about herself. There’s a battle to fight, and no one fights it with the courage of Nancy Wheeler.
Not because she isn’t scared, though. She’s always scared, not for herself, but of anyone else dying because of something she might have done or because of something she didn’t do. She thinks sleeping with Steve got her friend killed. She thinks that because she wasn’t a good friend to Barb her friend died. It’s unfair to herself, but it doesn’t matter.
It’s also not the only thing she’s scared of. Nancy is terrified to stop and face her guilt. She’s always moving forward to outrun her past. It’s why Vecna’s attack on her parents broke her for just a moment. Earlier that night, she was leading the charge, the party’s unquestioned leader, tactician, and metaphorical backbone, the one they all knew would jump on a grenade in the foxhole before she got up and led the charge on the person who threw it. But in that hospital, for just a moment, she had to stop and wait to learn if her parents survived.
While she waited, she had to clean the real blood off her hands, which she believes have long been stained by Barb’s. In that bathroom, like in Stranger Things season four, when the news reminded her of her friend’s death, like when Vecna preyed on her trauma, Nancy had to stop and look at herself and remember it all. It was brutal, a sad scene made even more effective by Nancy Dyer’s moving performance. And what did Nancy do when she went back to the waiting room? She blamed herself. Again. She blamed herself for something she wasn’t responsible for. Of course she did. If there’s one thing the guilty do well, it’s feel guilty. All the time. Forever.
You can try to hide from guilt, but you can’t outrun it, no matter how fast you run into the Upside Down. Your friend can never drive through a portal fast enough for you to leave your guilt and all the terrible weight that comes with it behind. That’s why you run faster. That’s why when Vecna pulls you into his dimension, when he uses the thing you most want to avoid against you and makes you see your dead friend in that pool, you respond by going back at him even harder. It’s why you organize crawls (while also trying to make sure the people who follow your plans are never really in danger). What else are you going to do when the world is ending and it’s all your fault?
I don’t know if anyone on Stranger Things is acting authentically because the characters on Stranger Things are facing a problem none of us ever will. Maybe Dustin is the only one of his friends behaving in a way that makes sense. Maybe he’s a selfish, shortsighted asshole. It doesn’t matter. But for Nancy, the less relatable her situation gets, the more her reaction to it feels real. Guilt makes you feel unworthy of what you have. When you feel guilty about those who didn’t survive when you did… well, that’s how you get Nancy Wheeler.
Nancy Wheeler’s story on Stranger Things might involve monsters and a dark parallel dimension, but her story is truly about the terrible power guilt wields over us. It’s about how, no matter what we do, no matter how we try to atone for our “sins,” no matter how much good we do, no matter how selfless we try to be, we can never escape the horrible thing that can drive us to try so hard to make things right. Some of us can never get away from blaming ourselves.
Barb’s death was the start of Nancy’s story on Stranger Things. Vecna knew it in Stranger Things 4 and thought he could use it against her. He was wrong, but Nancy’s guilt is even more present in Stranger Things 5 as the show nears its end. What happened to her best friend that night hasn’t just stayed with Nancy, it has shaped her. For good and for bad. For all of the pain it causes her her guilt has also let her grow in its own way. She’s become Stranger Things‘ bravest hero and leader because she feels like anything but.
I can’t know how I would react to learning about demogorgons and a parallel dimension of evil, and yet, I now in her shoes I’d feel just like Nancy Wheeler. Because while her life of monsters might be impossible to imagine, her guilt feels real exactly because guilt has nothing to do with what’s real or reasonable. Guilt, and how it makes us feel, has nothing to do with facts or reason. It turns our world and who we are upside down.
We don’t know where Nancy’s guilt will ultimately lead her or what will happen if she stops long enough to deal with the pain she can never outrun. But wherever Nancy Wheeler ends up when Stranger Things ends, it will feel authentic. Her story always has.
Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow him on Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.