#I am of the firm headcanon that Nancy and Jonathan each babysat this group a lot growing up

[strangerwheelerthings]

Deep Dive Into The Heart of Nancy Wheeler: The Introduction Scene

Link to the full Heart of Nancy Wheeler Series

I can’t think of a better way to start a character study than to take a closer look into how they are introduced. Barb’s death changed everything for Nancy Wheeler, but her response to that trauma was shaped by who she already was. In order to understand where a character chooses to go, you have to understand where they came from.

The very first thing we see is a typical teenage girl talking on the phone about a boy. She shuts a door in Dustin’s face without a word when he offers her pizza. While her attitude is relatable for many teenagers, it’s not a particularly endearing intro. However, what’s interesting is the care the writers took to quickly flip that first impression on its head. The very next scene involves the Party discussing her, and how she’s changed since she started dating the ‘King of Hawkins High’. Aside from her little brother, all of them seemed to have held her in high regard before then. Her ‘turning into a real jerk’ is recent.

“Nuh uh. She used to be cool. Like that time she dressed up as an elf for our Elder Tree campaign.”

Instantly, she’s given more depth. This is an older sister who was nice to her brother’s friends. She played D&D with them at least once, if not multiple times over the years, going as far as cosplaying for a campaign. She was a little nerdy like them, very smart, and most definitely kind. Especially with knowing what we do now about the boys, it’s the only way they would admire her so much. The previous scene is recontextualized. The very fact that Dustin thought to include her in the offer of pizza implies a familiarity with each other, a relationship beyond him being the boy that her brother invites over sometimes. Her kind of rude response is sibling-like as well. That, along with the comment about Dustin being her favorite during the snowball, solidifies this understanding; they weren’t mere acquaintances. Nancy had her own friendships with each of Mike’s friends before the Upside Down, maybe not super close ones, but still present and good.

One might assume that the change was just a factor of growing up and teenagerdom, which it was in part, but both Lucas and Dustin state that there was a very recent shift in behavior. Something changed for her when Steve Harrington started giving her attention. (In all honesty, just their very knowledge of what the change was, of Steve’s relationship with her, is another sign showing how well this group actually knew each other pre-canon.) What this conversation starts to establish, aside from a small view into the depth of their relationships with her, is that Nancy was in the middle of a good old-fashioned teenage identity crisis when we met her. Her jerkish behavior was not a straight-up personality trait, but a result of typical teenage angst and rebellion.