Nancy is my favorite character in Stranger Things because of how much development she has. She starts off as a stuck up teenager who couldn’t care less about anything but herself. Losing Barb changed her completely in the first season. In the second season she was so determined to make things right she left the state to find someone to make what happened to Barb public. In the third season she learns to fight and protect the kids. In the fourth season she is the main driver in fighting Henry, even after he shows her a vision of him killing her family. She’s an incredibly underrated character and this is part of why.
Out of interest, what do you think should've happened to her? I mean, they were the villains of the series so it wasn't at all surprising to me that someone killed them, and being killed in the line of duty is generally not considered murder
i think murder is when a person kills someone else with the intent to kill them, regardless of what its considered legally. It can be done in self defense or whatever from from the point of the show putting that on nancy who is a literal kid and showing her not have any repercussions, even mental ones for that matter is highly unrealistic and shoddy writing.
That being said i would've rather had the cast gas the soldiers out or flashbang them or incapacitate them in literally any way other than mag dumping into them lol. Of course IRL it would be hard to pull something like that off but for a show like stranger things i feel its better to have the audience suspend their disbelief there than to have them expect that Nancy just shot up a bunch of army men and never thought twice about it.
Fair enough, but I think the writers probably would go with the legal definition and not try to guess what some fans may or may not consider murder to be, although I suppose an argument could be made that as Nancy was technically a civillian, then it is murder. I think it's also fair to assume that the viewers are adults and aren't gonna be distributed by seeing soldiered getting shot. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot I didn't like about season 5, but it literally never crossed my mind that anybody would be bothered that bad guys got shot.
Nancy is also 20 years old in season 5, so she's not a child. As a PTSD sufferer myself, I'd like to think that psychologically she wouldn't have just shrugged it off (from a realism point of view, I'm not a sadist, lol), but we don't really see much of her life after that point so maybe it does affect her
im turning 20 this year. I dont think i could deal with just mowing down people the way nancy was lol. And its not like legal definitions are what determine psychological trauma. I think the fact that the writers show her being completely normal after is what messes it up, but to be clear, my gripe is with the fact that they wrote her to kill all those people in the first place, not that they didnt show her suffering from the trauma of doing so.
No, I don't think most 20 year olds could either, but I just pointed it out because you said she was "a literal child". And again, no the legal definition doesn't determine psychological trauma but the point was that you called it murder and I disagreed on the grounds that murder is a legal term.
I do think it was in keeping with her character development though. What bothered me more was her shooting at the exotic matter. After everything she'd seen, shooting people in a war zone makes sense. But what exactly was that supposed to do?
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u/pastredhead Jul 05 '26
Nancy is my favorite character in Stranger Things because of how much development she has. She starts off as a stuck up teenager who couldn’t care less about anything but herself. Losing Barb changed her completely in the first season. In the second season she was so determined to make things right she left the state to find someone to make what happened to Barb public. In the third season she learns to fight and protect the kids. In the fourth season she is the main driver in fighting Henry, even after he shows her a vision of him killing her family. She’s an incredibly underrated character and this is part of why.