#I don't know what's more representative of my mental state that a teacher telling me off about something so minor

[green-mountain-goose]

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[thatonesongyouretryingtoremember]

I totally understand that, but at the same time I'm wondering about the possibilities

Every time there's been a small antagonist in Stranger Things they've always met two requirements

Representing a type of reaction to Forced Conformity TM and enforce it while being affected by it

Having a backstory/life factors that reveals their motivation

This includes Billy with his parents, Jason with his girlfriend, even with more neutral characters like Kali and Eddie.

With the ONLY exception I could come up with being Troy- right?

And come to think of it, schoolyard bully who shows up for one season just to reveal the current mental state and character traits of protag sounds kinda similar to Angela.

So, the way I see it, either Troy fits this formula in a subtler or different way than the others, making Angela an outlier, or both Troy and Angela simply just fit the "inverse" bill. It would make sense for El's own "Troy to her Mike" to show up later since she's just now trying to FULLY embody "Jane" whereas Mike has been shedding his conformity.

1) Troy is a classic antag

We see the type of bully he is, straight up pointing out people's differences and pushing them around, embarrassing them, you know the drill. He tells Dustin to twist his shoulders and tells Mike to jump- he wants power over these kids.

We ALSO get hinted at his backstory when you put together the Cliff Scene and the police station scene. Troy is super desperate after the gym scene. He didn't even expect Mike to jump, he just wanted that power back. THEN we see his (blonde) mom who is obsessed with Troy's public image berating the police (good on her tbh but pls don't embarrass ur kid ToT)

Which could mean that Troy feels pushed around by his family. We see him act meek around his mother, powerless. We see his facade crack.

Which means that we A)see his mother B) see his mask fall and C)get a hint at his backstory (with maybe more to come- he's on the basketball team so he might be back???) And that's WAY more than we EVER get to see of Angela. We see her fall from grace but not her saving face. Her obsession with El but never her motivation. This makes Angela an outlier.

BUT this sequence of events ALSO contributes to theory

2) Troy is just an inverse of Mike

Mrs.Walsh and Karen/Ted both make their sons feel bad about themselves from what we see, but Mike and Troy react oppositely. Troy is always pushing eachother around- and Mike is literally doing the opposite. Right after Troy made fun of his friends, Mike rushes in to comfort them (/Dustin specifically, fuck the duffers)

Mike is also the opposite because he never approaches Troy first and he waits for Troy to leave to tall about Mr.Fantastic, whereas Troy goes to the party and starts talking shit. In the suicidal area, Mike is less confrontational and Troy is more confrontational. The exception being the gym.... with El watching.. while blonde..

Mike is careful with his words, thinking of his highest compliment superhero, which was in 1983 a unique thing to Mike rather than a popular thing, for Dustin, but Troy is not creative at all, relying on the harshness of societally established derogatory words that refer to the party's traits in an obvious way.

They ALSO have similar hairstyles to eachother with the sideswept bang.

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All that to say~~ either is possible in my mind. The next section is me suspending my disbelief purely for the sake of speculation. Because I'm mentally ill.

Angela literally has traits that she could have picked up in the lab, were she in an institution similar similar to the Hawkins one.

She always wants to be teacher's favorite, telling Miss.Gracie exactly what she wants to hear about the her intentions while also putting down another student. Yes, this was to make El feel bad, but it also was meant to make Miss.Gracie prefer Angela as a student over El. (Honestly 002-coded if he was tactful. He relief on being preferred by Brenner until his luck ran out) scapegoating El to be safe from... what? Teacher? Not Brenner. Mom? Dad? Who we never even see even though one of them probably caked the police on El?

She talks SUPER condescendingly to El. Her goal here is to make El feel small and powerless and it kind of sounds like baby talk. If she were raised in a lab, the most powerful person she would know of would be a controlling Brenner. Brenner's strategy relies on kids believing they *need* to follow him, and Angela wants social control. Cycles and all that. She doesn't make El call her "Mama" but she treats El like a child to make her believe she is incapable and *needs* to blend in- by "following" Angela. Even circling back to 002, he was like, fifteen picking on an eight-year-old. This theme of youth=percieved weakness follows El specifically in relation to the lab (minus Angela technically)

She is literally paralleled to 002 to the point she causes El to have a flashback to being cornered by 002 and killing him. I know that the Rink-O-Mania scene is not about Angela actually using telekinesis, but 002 wanting to command/control/kill El in order to exert social control over his other peers and Angela wanting the same thing lead to the same result- them "collecting" a group of peers to participate in humiliating El.

I'm not sure what the 002 comparisons mean quite yet, but the point is

There are so many signs of Angela being SUPER fucking defensive all the time and for WHAT? We literally NEVER find out! Even when her parents call the police we never see them scold her for starting trouble or berate her appearance for having a broken nose, literally ZERO hints at her motivation.

Her motivation could be coming from peers like Jason or Eddie, with Eddie being bullied and Jason being the basketball captain who probably has to keep up his image because he is already in that spotlight, but I DOUBT Stacy or Jake would ever say so much as a WORD against Angela. Kids don't shy away from laughing at El with her, but it's not like anyone's ever stood up to her let alone gone after her.

So what about Angela doesn't fit in that makes her a victim of forced conformity? That would make the school hostile to her if she didn't have these defenses We see symptoms of a mask, but no cause. Or what is her life at home even like, if that's the cause? And most of all- why the FUCK is her bullying shown through the lens of El's relationship with Hopper? The diorama? Hopper. The Rink-O-Mania? Hopper. She acts obsessed over El, but from the few days we actualy see, she is fixated on Hopper. For WHAT???

Obviously, there are other ways to answer that question, but if she isn't plot relevant we will see none of her in ST5 bc she's in Lenora Hills.

Her and Patrick both got neglected- but technically Patrick has at least a little chance because he exists in Vecna's mindscape, an inevitable setting next szn. And even if we don't see his Vecna Vision, we still know the subject matter is his father, but we get no such concrete evidence in Angela's case, nor is she ever shown in a sympathetic light like literally everyone else is.

ANYWAYS this is just what's been rotating in my brain. I think it's a really cool concept, and this doesn't even touch on El's self-image of she found out Angela was Jane, and it *could* fit into the plot AND the narrative(more on that later), but I'm not sure enough to call this any kind of "theory" per se.

Going insane.

Um. Probably nothing BUT

I saw a post explaining how El probably cut her hair to look like Angela's because Angela was a popular girl with lots of friends and a boyfriend. And they're probably right! It makes sense.

But the thing is. El wasn't trying to become Angela or make purple think she was Angela.

She was trying to become Jane, the opposite of her kind self. Yk. That blonde girl. Who wore normie clothing. Who canonically either left the lab young or got motivation to do so young (whichever Kali meant by her "disappearing", escaping or getting moved away from her sister)

Like I don't think so think so but like. I'm.

Just please talk me out of this because I'm already getting obsessed and I don't want my heart broken when Angela isn't Jane

God this is something that's actually been driving me insane for a hot minute now???

Because when El lies to Mike, she tells things exactly the inverse of what they actually are. Angela is her best friend. Math is her favorite subject. Things are idyllic.

Angela is El's exact inverse.

Angela is blonde/blue, wears makeup, wears her right hand ring on her 4th finger, wears a watch on her left wrist, she's popular, and she's successful in school. El is brown/brown, doesn't wear makeup (normally), wears her right hand ring on her 1st finger, wears Sara's blue hair tie on her left wrist, she's not popular and she's struggling in school.

When she's meeting Mike at the airport, she's totally trying to be Angela. She's got makeup on, and she's armed and ready to lie to Mike to make herself seem like an Angela 2.0...and just like last time El tried to impersonate a blonde girl, it quickly falls apart when El can't pretend to be that idealized version anymore.

Every time she gets close to being this version of herself, it falls apart because that's not her.

I'm not sure that Angela physically is the other El, like I can't confirm or deny, but she's either that or she's another iteration of this recurring representation of the alternate timeline. That said, the further we go along, the more the speculative versions seem to diverge. El started off in Terry's memories actually being blonde, then she put on the blonde wig, then she essentially stepped into the shoes of Hopper's blonde daughter, now she's trying to be this next blonde girl...but she cant actually be blonde.

There's definitely something here, I'm just not sure what the extent of it is, yet. It could be entirely symbolic of El trying to be normal, or we could be finally encountering El's alternate form in the season where timelines are concretely introduced.

I'm really not sure, but for safety's sake I'm staying in the "I don't think she's Jane" camp until I see something more concrete.