Upside Down Feminism - How Stranger Things Systematically Destroyed Its Women | by Beatrix Kondo
Long Read | Spoilers | Part 1 The Disposable Girls: Barb, Eleven, and the Sacrificial Lamb Economy
Stranger Things built itself on the bodies of disposable girls. For five seasons, the Duffer Brothers established a pattern: women exist to be spent. The equation contains three parts: Their power makes them expendable, their suffering advances the plot, and their erasure allows the story to "have a proper closure."
This is the Sacrificial Lamb Economy of old in a pop culture context. Women are currency whose deaths create stakes for men and men’s institutions. Their exceptionality demands they be sacrificed for the community, or plot, to go on as planned. Their disappearance buys resolution, and the two characters who best exemplify this economy are Barb Holland and Eleven—one killed in episode three of the very first season, the other erased in the finale after carrying the entire series on her telekinetic shoulders.
Barb: Fat Girl 1, Expendable
Barb Holland died screaming Nancy's name while her best friend was upstairs having sex with Steve Harrington. That's her entire narrative function: Fat Girl 1, killed in episode three, mourned enough to give Nancy guilt but forgotten fast enough to keep the plot moving.
Barbara Holland appears—alive—in three episodes. She's Nancy's best friend, the voice of reason, the designated Uncool Friend. She's fat, she wears glasses, she's visibly uncomfortable at a party full of popular kids. In the language of 1980s teen horror, she's already dead.
Her role as voice of reason is most explicit in episode one, at Steve's party. While Nancy drinks and flirts, Barb sits alone by the pool, visibly uncomfortable, questioning whether Nancy should even be there. She notices Nancy acting different, trying to impress Steve, becoming someone she's not. "This isn't you," she says—or might as well say, because everything about her presence screams it. She's the part of Nancy that's still the "good girl," the conscience Nancy needs to silence to become who she thinks she wants to be.
She’s not only Nancy’s external source of guilt, their previous closeness has Barb representing Nancy’s fierce, not yet compliant inner self – the part women partition in order to fit in. Part of Nancy’s guilt is our sense of loss, especially as smart women come to understand how we (may have) betrayed ourselves unawares. But the Duffer Brothers don’t understand the symbols they’re working with.
So the show kills her. Right after Nancy chooses Steve over Barb's warnings, right after Nancy ignores her friend's discomfort to pursue popularity and sex, Barb dies by the same pool. It's not subtle. When Nancy picks the boy, the friend dies — her wholeness, too. The voice of reason gets dragged to the Upside Down, and Nancy gets to move forward unburdened by guilt—at least until season two needs a plot device.
In Carol J. Clover's analysis of 1980s slasher films, the "Final Girl" survives through sexual purity and resourcefulness. Barb has the purity—she's the sensible virgin warning Nancy away from danger. But she's also fat and uncool, which in the Duffers' calculus makes her more expendable than Nancy, who's having sex but looks the part of a proper horror heroine. Never mind that Sidney Prescott in Scream (1996) already dismantled the virgin Final Girl trope by surviving despite having sex. The Duffers weren't interested in subverting horror conventions. They were recycling them, fat girl and all.
The Duffers play this straight. Barb sits alone by Steve's pool while Nancy loses her virginity upstairs. The Demogorgon drags her into the Upside Down where she dies screaming for Nancy, who doesn't hear her. Barb's death proves the Demogorgon kills, gives Nancy guilt, becomes the "missing girl" poster that reminds audiences the stakes are real. Then she's forgotten.
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The fan reaction became its own phenomenon. #JusticeForBarb trended. The collective mourning for a three-episode character revealed what the Duffers missed: audiences (especially the women in them) recognized what her death represented. They saw the fat girl killed first. They saw the uncool friend discarded. They called it out. GenX women and younger feminists know this story cycle.
The Duffers brought her back for one scene in Season 2. Nancy and Hopper find her corpse, and give her parents closure. Justice for Barb meant confirming she died badly. Barb's death established that Stranger Things would spend women to advance the plot, that the Duffers see certain female characters as inherently disposable. The series never interrogates why she had to die, why her death mattered less, why being fat and uncool made her the designated sacrifice.
Eleven: The Girl Who Saved the World (And Got Erased For It)
If Barb's death proved women could be sacrificed for narrative convenience, Eleven's ending proved even the most powerful woman couldn't escape that fate.
