A group of children and close friends from Hawkins, Indiana. Styling themselves after their heroes in their Dungeons & Dragons campaign, The Party works closely together to defend and save each other from supernatural threats in Hawkins following the disappearance of Will Byers and the appearance of the mysterious psychic Eleven.

• An Adventurer Is You: Mike is the leader, Will is caught up in other dimensions, Dustin geeks out on exotic knowledge, Lucas has his "Wrist Rocket," and Eleven has actual psychic abilities.
  Mike: I'm our Paladin, Will's our Cleric, Dustin's our Bard, Lucas is our Ranger, and El's our Mage.
• Arc Words: "Friends don't lie" and variations.
• Ascended Fanboy: Played straight, as the four boys of the group are Dungeons and Dragons fanatics who end up in their own fantasy-like adventure. And it also works to their advantage.
• Badass Crew: They may be kids, but they're creative, intelligent, and brave youngsters with one of them having powerful psychic abilities.
• Badass Normal: Only one of the six of them has superpowers. The rest have only courage and ingenuity, and they still kick the asses of monsters, government agents, and Russians - and that's before a second member, Will, gains superpowers.
• Bickering Couple, Peaceful Couple: Mike and El have their issues, but they're still far less volatile than Max and Lucas. Ironically, Max and Lucas wind up being the ones to go the distance, while Mike and El are permanently separated.
• Breaking the Fellowship: As the Party grows up, they start spending more time with girlfriends than with each other, something Will desperately tries to resist. At the end of Season 3, the Byers are forced to move away due to Joyce's desire to protect her children from the supernatural happenings in Hawkins, taking Eleven with them since Hopper is presumed dead. Despite these obstacles, Will promises to return to Hawkins and Eleven transitions to a Long-Distance Relationship with Mike.
  • The Fellowship Has Ended: Done with more finality at the end of the series. Max and Lucas end up moving away to another town, their love continuing to grow, and finally able to have the movie night they planned. Dustin will move away to study, but still find time to hang out with Steve when able. Will decides to relocate to the big city, finding himself in a new setting with new experiences. Mike decides to remain in Hawkins but becomes a writer to share with the world the stories of their adventures and friendship. Also, El possibly fakes her death, moving to a far-off place, never able to return to Mike, her friends or her loved ones. But in doing so, she keeps them all safe, as well as allowing Eleven to live the life she always wanted: free, without fear and no longer hunted.
• Brought Down to Normal: The Party could always depend on Eleven's powers to carry most of the weight and save the world in Seasons 1 and 2, but are forced to rely on old-fashioned planning, teamwork, knowledge, collective talents, outside help, and explosives to defeat the Big Bad in Season 3 when Eleven loses her powers.
• Children Forced to Kill: Eleven has killed numerous government agents (both American and Soviet) and interdimensional monsters during the course of her lifetime, so much that she appears desensitized to the idea of murder, though she does avoid taking lives whenever possible. Dustin is implied to have killed a Russian interrogator with an electric prod while rescuing Steve and Robin.
• Coming of Age Story: The series covers their teenage years from middle school to their high school graduation. In between all the monsters and government conspiracies, they have to deal with normal adolescent experiences like bullies, first loves, puberty, friendships changing, mental illness, coming out and losing people they love.
• Geek Physiques: The boys in the Party all start off this way in Season 1. By Season 3, puberty and life experience have tempered the geeky frames of most, with Dustin growing into his baby fat, Lucas gaining lean muscle as a result of being the most physically active, and Mike growing taller than his older sister, which is lampshaded in Season 4 when Angela and her fellow bullies comment that Mike is a "scarecrow". By Season 4, Will has also grown taller and isn't so reed-like anymore.
• Guile Hero: Being kids in middle school (and one preteen girl with powerful but limited psychic abilities), they tend to overcome adversity through cleverness, scientific knowledge, and being sufficiently Genre Savvy much more so than do Hopper or the teens. This status is especially prominent in Season 2, where Eleven's absence means the group no longer has any real protection from supernatural threats.
• Home Base: The Wheelers' basement is the usual chill spot and base of operations for the Party, especially when a Code Red is sent out to other party members.
• Kid Hero: The Party, and its ever-growing membership, all begin the series at around twelve years old. They go on to stop the end of the world and the wholesale slaughter of innocent people by beings much more powerful than themselves multiple times.
• Lethal Kid Hero: The kids in general have little qualms with killing hostile forces, and while most of them are alien monsters, Season 3 has Dustin electrocuting Dr. Zharkov with a cattle prod.
• Limited Social Circle: At first. By Season 3 they've started to break apart, with Mike dating Eleven and Lucas dating Max. Dustin notably doesn't spend nearly as much time in the group as he used to, going to a month-long summer camp out of state and later becoming Heterosexual Life-Partners with Steve.
• Nerds Are Virgins: More like "Nerds Are Dateless", as the characters are too young for actual virginity to be a concern, but it's repeatedly mentioned that the boys' nerdiness repels girls: in Season 1, Lucas accuses Mike of being blind to El's true motivations because he likes the fact that a girl isn't grossed out by him for once, Dustin gets rejected by every single girl at a school dance, and part of Lucas' motivation for trying to become popular in Season 4 is because he's tired of girls laughing at them. While the three of them do eventually get girlfriends, those girlfriends are El, Max, and Suzie, who are all outsiders or nerds themselves. Ironically, the only boy in the Party who girls like in spite of his nerdiness is Will, who would really prefer if they didn't.
• Nice Guy: They are all very friendly and likable kids.
• One of the Boys: Eleven and later Max to a larger extent.
• The Only One: The Party and its offshoots like the Scoops Troop and Hopper P.I. are the only ones holding the line against the Upside Down and its connected government conspiracies. Explained in-universe by Murray, as the general public would automatically dismiss people with wild stories that threaten mainstream order and their perception of reality, with Max being an example when Lucas tries to bring her into the loop.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni:
  • Mike is the red (passionate, extroverted, The Leader) his closest friend Will's blue (sensitive and more reserved)
  • There is also their other two friends, Dustin and Lucas. The former is more open with emotion and serves as the comic relief while the latter is calmer and more cautious.
  • The Two Girls: Max is the red (a fierce redheaded tomboy) and Eleven is the blue (introverted, tactical and mostly soft-spoken due to her past).
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Mike's leadership style generally puts the Party at odds with the adults around them, who are justifiably concerned for their children's safety. You wouldn't have much in the way of adventures if the kids always listened to the adults.
• Shout-Out: They're a homage to pretty much every kid team from the 80s and 90s, such as The Goonies, the Losers, The Sandlot team and Sam and the Frog brothers.
• The Smurfette Principle: Applies in Season 1, with El as the sole girl. Also most of Season 2, where El and Max are both main characters, but El has left the Party for a chunk of time.
• The Team: They describe themselves as Dungeons & Dragons roles but they also work together as a team. This is especially seen in Season 2 when the group helps El out despite being intentionally left out of the adults' plan to stop the Mind Flayer. Usually, Mike takes the lead, Lucas contrasts him, Dustin thinks of a plan, and Eleven is the brawn because of her Psychic Powers. Sensitive, kind Will acts as The Heart whose torment at the hands of the Upside Down drives the boys' plots in the first two seasons, while newcomer Max is the Sixth Ranger who has trouble ingratiating herself at first.
• True Companions: Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will, with Eleven being welcomed into the group first by Mike, then Dustin, and finally Lucas. Their group is referred to as "The Party" for the first time after Dustin calls out Mike for starting the fight with Lucas midway through the first season and picks up more use in the following season. The second season also adds Max, who is welcomed at first by Lucas and Dustin, who both harbor crushes on her; accepted by Will, who doesn't really care either way; and eventually by Mike once El returns. Erica becomes part of the Party by the end of Season 4 at the latest.
• Two Girls to a Team: Eleven and Max, after Max joins the Party in Season 2.
• Undying Loyalty: Especially seen in Season 2 where El goes to close the gate to the Upside Down and the other members of the Party, against Steve's orders, go underground in order to distract the Mind Flayer. Dustin explains to Steve, as if reading from a manual, that a member of the Party "needs assistance" and they're duty-bound to help. They literally put their lives on the line for one another.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: For all their yelling and bickering and sometimes punching, nothing gets between them, and nothing can stand in their way.

Michael "Mike" Wheeler

^{Click here to see his appearance in the Season 5 epilogue} "One last fight, and this whole nightmare, it’ll finally be over."

Played By: Finn Wolfhard, Max Rackenberg (young)

Voiced By: Luca Diaz (Tales from '85)

Debut: "Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers" (1x01)

The Leader of the Party. A preteen boy who tasks himself and his friends to find their missing friend Will with the help of the mysterious young girl known as "Eleven".

• Act of True Love:
  • Mike jumps off a cliff into the quarry because Troy made a genuine, timely threat of mutilating Dustin otherwise.
  • He intervenes when Dr. Brenner and his goons come to take Eleven back, stepping into the line of fire to stop them.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: After a year of not saying it outright to Eleven, Mike finally declares his love for her while she's under Vecna's curse to give her a fighting chance against her archenemy.
• Annoying Younger Sibling: In early episodes, he's seen bickering with Nancy, and she finds him bratty and annoying.
• Batman Gambit: Comes up with a successful plan to lure Billy into a trap that hinges entirely on Billy's famously short temper.
• Batman in My Basement: Hides El from government agents in a makeshift fort in his basement in Season 1.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: On their first day of kindergarten, Mike was all alone and then saw Will, who was also alone. Mike went over to Will to ask if he wanted to be friends with him. Will replied, "Yes".
• Big Brother Instinct:
  • Inverted, as Mike is Nancy's younger brother. Despite their constant bickering, Mike is quick to defend Nancy when someone theorizes that she may be a traitor and absolutely refuses to "prostitute" her to Keith.
  • He does get to show this towards Holly in Season 5, where is shown comforting her after she is bullied by Derek and creates a D&D character called "Holly the Heroic" to empower her.
  • He's much more protective of Max in Season 3, than in 2, especially when he yells for her to get out of the way from Possessed!Billy in the sauna, and when he is visibly angered and rushes to her defense when Billy knocks her out.
  • His instinct is put on full display when he helps rescue Holly's friends and classmates from the MAC-Z in Season 5. As the troops battle the Demogorgons, he repeatedly shields the kids from the carnage and tells them to keep their eyes on him so they aren't traumatized by the sights.
• The Big Damn Kiss: Kisses El near the end of Season 1 while trying to tell her how he feels. Later they kiss again while dancing at the Snow Ball during the Season 2 finale.
• Big Little Brother: By Season 3, he towers over Nancy.
• Break the Cutie: Although Mike has shown signs of depression since Season 1 ^note  Mike thinking that dying/jumping off a cliff is the best option, so Dustin doesn't get his teeth cut out is the kind of thing that puts people on suicide watches in real life , he is generally the Wide-Eyed Idealist of the Party. Witnessing Eleven's fake-out death by exhausting her powers fighting the Demogorgon sends Mike into a depression in Season 2, stuck in the denial phase and behaving more apathetic and introverted than before. In Season 3, he is paranoid about El's overuse of her powers (as it lead to her "death" last time and he is terrified of losing her again), and is ultimately proven right to be worried when she loses them. The tie-in-book Lucas on the Line shows that Mike is heavily mentally impacted by the events at Starcourt and the Byers leaving town, as well as not hanging out with Lucas and Dustin by refusing to leave his basement and turning it into "the armpit" that is shown in Season 4. Witnessing so much death, from seeing his best friend's corpse (although it later turned out to be fake) in Season 1, to being in the middle of the massacre at Hawkins Lab in Season 2, to the unknown agent man in Season 4, it's no surprise that by Season 4, his grades have slipped and he’s far from the smiling, cheerful kid he was at the beginning of Season 1.
• Bullying the Dragon: He openly taunts Hopper to his face while Hopper is trying to have a heart-to-heart about his relationship with El, which isn't a good idea with a man who can (and does) stop you from seeing your girlfriend. That said, it's Somewhat Justified considering Hopper hid Eleven from Mike and lied to him for a year, and Mike still may have hard feelings over the emotional torment Hopper put him through.
• Cannot Spit It Out: Mike often finds himself tongue-tied in romantic situations. In Season 1 he struggles to put his feelings for El into words and so decides to just kiss her instead (to be fair, he is 12 at the time). In Season 3 he can't bring himself to even say the word "love" in front of Eleven let alone the phrase "I love you". It ultimately takes a heated argument with his friends for him to admit it out loud, though with El being in the next room she doesn't hear him say it. At least that's what Eleven lets Mike think at the time, before revealing that she not only heard, but she also loves him. Even in Season 4, he can't bring himself to even write that he loves Eleven, much to her frustration. It's so bad that a Freeze-Frame Bonus on El's shrine to Mike reveals that he bought her a valentines day card that doesn't say love on it, instead saying "I like you". By the end of Season 4, however, Mike finally says it to her - nine times, in fact (see Anguished Declaration of Love).
• The Caretaker: In Season 1, Mike is the first of the boys to take El under his wing, providing her food, shelter and companionship. He also takes a caretaking role for Will in Season 2, staying with him at the hospital, holding him, and even lashing out at others for trying to interfere with him caring for Will.
• Combat Pragmatist: On the rare occasion Mike has to defend himself or others, he'll grab what's near, usually blunt objects like trophies, mop handles, or steel pipes.
• Consistent Clothing Style: Mike very frequently wears striped shirts, sweaters, and collared shirts.
• Cool Big Bro: For Holly, particularly in Season 5. When Mike learns that she's being bullied at school, he offers her comfort and decides to empower her by giving her a D&D figurine and persona called "Holly the Heroic". Turns out that he was planning on inviting her to join the Party's campaign when she was old enough.
• Cry into Chest:
  • In Season 1, Mike is absolutely distraught when Will's fake body is pulled from the quarry, yelling at El for lying to him and getting his hopes up before biking home alone crying. When he gets home, his mother notices and Mike breaks down into her chest.
  • In Season 2, his lashing out at Hopper when the latter reveals that he'd been hiding El and preventing her from contacting Mike for the last year quickly turns into this.
• Defiant Stone Throw: Mike is averse to melee but bashes a Flayed Super-Billy with a pipe for overpowering Eleven and almost choking her to death.
• Demoted to Extra: A downplayed version happens to him in Season 2. While much of the focus in Season 1 is on his and Eleven's relationship and him being The Leader of party means that he frequently is the driving force in their search for Will, Season 2 splits up its main focus between Eleven's search for her past, Will's struggle with the Mindflayer, Dustin caring for — and later hunting for — Dart, and Lucas trying to show Max the truth behind the happenings in Hawkins, resulting in Mike getting more of a secondary focus.
• Demoted to Satellite Love Interest: While in Season 1 and 2 he was the closest thing the series had to a protagonist and leader of The Party, his main role is reduced in Season 3 when he becomes El's boyfriend. Mike's plot in Season 3 is mainly focused on his relationship with El and his concern about her wellbeing, while letting go of his other relationships. While for most of Season 4, his arc is primarily about reconnecting with his childhood best friend Will, healing the damage caused by Mike's behavior in Season 3 and from their six-month separation on top of dealing with his complicated relationship with El, the most important thing he does plot wise is tell Eleven that he loves her in the final battle against Vecna. Season 5 sees him return to his role as both a strategist and a leader (in fact, he only has one scene with El in the first half of the season).
• Determinator: When he sets his mind to something, Mike rarely if ever gives up. He refused to accept that Will was dead even after the government produced a fake body, he called El for 353 days every day when everyone else thought she was dead, he routinely faces down eldritch abominations, and he always has a plan no matter how long the odds are or how many setbacks he endures. It's part of why El's supposed death in the series finale hits him so hard: for the first time, he lost someone and could do nothing about it. He's only able to fully accept it by deciding to live a full life for her sake, and later by clinging to the hope that she escaped somehow.
• Did Not Get the Girl: At the end of Season 1, everyone including the audience is left to believe El disintegrates when she destroys the Demogorgon. However, the trope is subverted as she did survive and by the end of Season 2, Mike and El are clearly in a relationship. However, it's Double Subverted in the series finale when El chooses to sacrifice herself in the Upside Down's destruction to ensure that the experiments which gave birth to her will never be able to repeat. While Mike theorizes she may have faked her death and escaped to a remote location outside of the government's reach, he knows that it's just a theory and even if she did survive, it's unlikely they'll ever be reunited.
• Dislikes the New Guy: He treats Max coldly after she joins the group in Season 2 (not from any personal dislike but because he's still reeling from Eleven's disappearance).
• Dreadful Musician: Played for Laughs. Mike serenades Eleven with Corey Hart's "Never Surrender" after which she playfully covers his mouth and begs him to stop. Mike's actor is the lead vocalist for a signed indie rock band, so that only adds to the humor.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • In one scene he's shamelessly stealing from Nancy's piggy bank, but only a few minutes later he absolutely refuses to "prostitute" her to Keith.
  • While he and Max initially don't get along at all, he is obviously concerned when she falls off her skateboard in the gym.
• Fairy Tale Motif: Mike is the brave and overall good-hearted leader of his group of friends, spurring people around him to do the right thing despite terrible danger, which resembles the nature of a Paladin from Dungeons & Dragons. In-Universe, he is often the Dungeon Master when he and his friends play the game.
• First Friend: Before the Party officially got together, he and Will were the first to make friends.
• Game Master: Arranges the campaigns his friends go on in Dungeons & Dragons.
• Good Is Not Soft: Despite his nice, caring nature, he's also rough and prone to emotional outbursts.
• Go Through Me: When Dr. Brenner arrives at the school demanding Eleven, Mike unhesitatingly tells him that if he wants Eleven, they'll have to kill him, with Dustin and Lucas instantly agreeing. Unfortunately, the conspiracy is more than willing to kill them. Fortunately, the Demogorgon chooses that moment to attack, allowing them to escape.
• Grew a Spine: Mike and his friends were bullied by Troy without resistance until Troy crosses the line by openly mocking Will's memory at a school assembly. Mike confronts an unrepentant Troy over his disrespect and picks a fight by knocking him to ground.
• Guile Hero: Mike is incredibly deductive, clever, and strategic for his age and regularly figures out what is going on in the supernatural plot lines.
• The Heart: In "Papa", Will terms him as such, gifting him a painting he'd drawn of their D&D characters fighting a 3-headed red dragon, using it as a metaphor to encourage Mike after he expresses his own feelings of inadequacy, pointing out how his character's shield bears the coat of arms of a heart.
  Will: Anyway, my point is, see how you're leading us here? You're guiding the whole party, inspiring us That's...that's what you do. And I know it's sorta on the nose, but that's what holds this whole party together. Heart. Because, I mean, without heart, we'd all fall apart. Even El. Especially El.
• Heart of a Writer: His experience as a Game Master eventually leads to him branching out into other types of storytelling, and his strategist and leadership skills are influenced by his love of writing stories. It's revealed in the epilogue that he becomes a writer as an adult.
• His Heart Will Go On: In the finale, thanks to advice from Hopper coupled with his theory that El escaped during the final battle with the military, Mike's able to come to terms with El's disappearance.
• Hot-Blooded: Whenever he's sufficiently stressed, Mike is very prone to emotional outbursts.
• Iconic Outfit: Mike almost always wears striped shirts or sweaters.
• Insecure Love Interest: Mike feels inadequate to El, which he confides to Will about in Season 4. Mike idolizes El as an incredible and brave person and feels that he is a random nerd who doesn't deserve her.
• Irony: Mike tells Will it is not his fault he does not like girls. Boy is he ever so dead wrong.
• I Should Write a Book About This: The epilogue shows that he eventually becomes an author writing stories inspired by his and the Party's adventures. Of course, he doesn't plan to tell the stories exactly, and he will never tell the story of what he believes happened to El.
• I Will Find You:
  • Mike is the most zealous of his friends in his search for Will and leads the charge. After Will's fake body is pulled from the quarry, he is the only other person besides Joyce who is adamant that Will is alive without concrete proof, only recognizing Will's voice on his walkie-talkie. Dustin and Lucas doubt him, but Mike convinces them to check again using a better radio. When Will is finally rescued, Mike is the only one of his friends to stay up in the hospital and is the first to reach and hug Will.
  • His subplot in Season 4 is crossing the country trying to find where Eleven is held captive.
• I Will Wait for You: As revealed in Season 2, he's been calling out to Eleven for 353 days, refusing to give up hope that she's still alive.
• Kick the Morality Pet: Two examples, both of which he immediately regrets and tries to make amends for:
  • In Season 1, he turns on El and shouts at her after she throws Lucas across the junkyard.
  • During Season 3, when his relationship with Eleven has taken top priority, he's often short with Will and dismisses any of his attempts to play D&D. This eventually leads to them having a fight during which he accuses Will of not liking girls, something which Will has been bullied for his entire life.
• The Kirk: He forms the middle ground between the more impulsive Dustin and the more logical Lucas, being the leader who makes the decisions.
• The Leader: Mike is the one who rallies his friends to search for Will. He's even described as one in the promos. Although he becomes more of a Supporting Leader in Season 2, he remains the most significant motivating voice behind the Party's actions, such as by suggesting the attack on the Mind Flayer's tunnels to draw off the Demodogs and give Eleven and Hopper a clear path to the Gate.
• Like Brother and Sister: With Max. Even once Mike warms up to her, they are shown to be frequently bickering with each other - if anything, more so than Mike and Nancy do as actual siblings. However, both will make every effort to protect the other, and it is clear they consider each other genuine friends. Their banter after Max wakes from her coma is a perfect indicator:
  Mike: Took your sweet time, didn't you?
  Max: (laughing weakly) Screw you, Wheeler.
• Long-Distance Relationship: How he and El's relationship is by the end of the third season — Hopper is seemingly dead and El is adopted by Joyce, but they have to move because of financial reasons. However, he is planning to call and visit El. It faces some strain after a year, as El points out that he never uses the word "love" in any of his letters.
• Love at First Sight: Invoked by Mike when he says as much in his speech to Eleven in the Season 4 finale.
• Magnetic Hero: By far Mike's strongest trait is his ability to befriend and direct just about everyone he comes across. His friendship with Will began when he noticed Will alone on the playground and simply asked to be friends, Eleven quickly finds him to be a source of safety and comfort, and even Max finds herself drawn to him despite his initial hostility towards her. All in all, the entire Party is formed thanks to Mike's inherently strong-willed personality, and none of the other members ever contest his role as The Leader.
• Middle Child Syndrome: Implied. His parents' attention is focused mainly on Holly's infancy and Nancy's teen angst, though this works to Mike's advantage when he goes searching for Will and hides El in their basement without anyone noticing. Downplayed in that while he doesn't get the bulk of his parents' attention, they still show concern for his emotional well-being and he seeks his mother's comfort when Will is seemingly dead and when El and Will are forced to move away.
• Motor Mouth: He talks incessantly, and this is lampshaded in Season 3 by El and Max.
• Muggle–Mage Romance: With Eleven, as while they are both technically human, he is a regular human while she's an enhanced one.
• My God, What Have I Done?: His reaction after he has a heated argument with Will and needles his Gayngst.
• Nervous Tics: He tends to cover his ears when he's anxious or stressed.
• Nice Guy: Most overtly in Season 1. He is notably the first of the kids to warm up to Eleven and introduce her to concepts like promises and friendship. Mike is also a loyal friend and a helpful person in general, although he picks up the Jerkass Ball a fair bit more in later seasons, though it's usually for some deep emotional reason, and he will readily apologize and make amends for his worse moments.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: When Hopper tries to have a heart-to-heart with Mike and Eleven, Mike gives Hopper attitude, which takes Hopper out of the right mood. By the time Eleven finds out what he really wanted to tell her, Hopper is presumed dead.
• Non-Action Guy: Zig-Zagged for the most part. He doesn't do any fighting per se, but he is willing to improvise a candlestick as a weapon and is willing to go above and beyond for his friends; he's also seen his share of carnivorous monsters by age 13. In Season 3, when a Flayed Billy is choking Eleven, Mike's reaction is to grab a metal pipe and hit the older boy over the head, but since Mike is a fourteen year old of average exercise who is fighting an 18 year old who regularly exercises (not to mention is being augmented by possession from a Demonic Abomination) it isn't long before Mike is overpowered and thrown into the wall by the Flayed Billy. So yeah, Mike is a lover, not a fighter.
• Oblivious to Love: Will falls in and out of love with him over the course of several years, including a (disguised) Anguished Declaration of Love and Will mentioning a first crush that he got over during his coming out. Mike never notices a thing.
• Official Couple: With Eleven by the end of Season 2. Eleven dumps him early in Season 3 when he lies to her for the first time, but she's more angry at him for lying than wanting to end the relationship. After they save each other from a Flayed Billy, they're on the road to a quick reconciliation. Additionally, Mike begins to understand that he was becoming too possessive of Eleven. By the end of the season, they begin a Long-Distance Relationship when the Byers move out of Hawkins and take Eleven after she confesses she loves him back. During Season 4, their relationship is strained because Mike is unable to say "I love you". Mike finally declares his love for her in the finale.
• The Paladin: When Mike describes the dynamics of the Party to Max, he identifies himself as such. His courage, determination to find Will, and willingness to sacrifice himself for those he loves all fit the archetype.
• Pineapple Ruins Pizza: In Season 4, in contrast to Eleven, he's disgusted by the very idea of pineapple on pizza. After he is force-fed a slice by Argyle and El, he admits that it is actually pretty good.
• Puppy Love: He really really likes El, even though he struggles to admit it to his sister. Near the end of Season 4, he says that he has been in love with her ever since they first met, at the age of 12.
• Raven Hair, Ivory Skin: Mike's the palest of his friends and his hair is solid black.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: His roleplaying campaign in the final episode, which has several parallels to the events and characters showcased in the series, is mocked by his friends because of its abrupt ending and all its dangling plot threads.
• Red Oni: Compared to Lucas' Blue Oni, Mike is more of an impulsive, hotheaded rule-breaker.
• She Is Not My Girlfriend: Dismisses both Lucas and later Nancy when they imply he has a crush on Eleven.
• Shout-Out: While the series has never been shy about its influence from the works of Stephen King, Mike's adult career as a writer (and the glasses he's wearing as he types) is a direct homage to King and his many writer protagonists.
• Sibling Team: Zig-zagged. Early episodes show that Mike and Nancy don't get along, and they're usually in separate Cast Herds, but because they've been Working the Same Case, they tend to team up whenever their adventures bring them together. In later seasons, thanks to both of them having matured immensely, they’re shown to be very supportive of each other whenever they end up paired off.
• Single-Target Sexuality: Throughout the entire show El is the only person Mike ever expresses any romantic attraction to. Season 4 in particular makes it clear that it's only El for Mike. This is why her apparent death in the series finale hits him particularly hard and he struggles to accept it over a year after.
• Standardized Leader: Compared to the rest of the Party, Mike's life is fairly drama-free (aside from getting sucked into fighting monsters and amoral organizations, that is). He's not a magnet for paranormal terrors like Will, not as nerdishly smart as Dustin, isn't the designated token in an almost all-white town like Lucas, wasn't experimented on like Eleven, and he doesn't come from an abusive household like Max. In fact, the worst personal drama he goes through is tied directly to his relationships with Eleven and the rest of the Party. Oddly, this very lack of disadvantages opens him up to attack as being soft, naïve, out-of-touch, and just, well, too bougie, which (in addition to his basic good-heartedness) seems to drive him to be the most aggressively fair-minded and self-sacrificing member of the party.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Lampshaded by Dustin and Argyle in Seasons 3 and 4, who compare his relationship with Eleven to Romeo and Juliet and directly calling Mike "Romeo". In Season 3, Hopper serves as an outside force working against them which is similar to Romeo and Juliet's story of disapproving family member(s). Sadly, the series ends with the two of them separated for good as El is either dead or has fled to far off region so the government will finally stop hunting for her and endangering her loved ones.
• The Strategist: He's good at setting clear goals for his team and organizing people into tasks.
• Strong Girl, Smart Guy: Smart Guy to Eleven's Strong Girl. Eleven is a powerful Little Miss Badass with psychic powers but, due to her isolated upbringing, she can barely speak. Mike is a smart, nerdy boy who teaches her some vocabulary.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: He can sometimes go from being patient and nurturing, to agitated and angry, all in the same breath. One example is when he softly explains to Eleven how a watch works, only to turn around and snap "Coming!" when his mom tells him to get ready for school, and go right back to a sweet tone with Eleven afterwards. He's particularly cold to Max, due to his resistance over her joining the Party.
• Supporting Protagonist: While he is the main focus of the Kids/Eleven plotline in Season 1, he takes a much less involved role as a main character in the Joyce/Will plotline of the Season 2 — most likely to give the other members of the Party some development.
• Sweet Tooth: He slathers maple syrup over his scrambled eggs in Chapter 1, which disgusts Nancy and provokes an argument.
• Took a Level in Jerkass:
  • Downplayed. Mike goes through this in Season 2 due to Eleven's disappearance. He's still kind to his friends, but he's noticeably rougher around the edges and is very hostile to Max due to a fear that she was taking Eleven's place. His parents explicitly bring this up in the first episode of Season 2, listing his behavior changes over the last year (getting in fights at school, stealing from Nancy, etc).
  • In the early episodes of Season 3, both the confidence of having a girlfriend and, presumably, the hormonal changes of puberty have apparently gone to his head a bit, as he seems rather more brash and insensitive than in previous seasons. Such actions as dissing Will's attempts to start games of D&D, abandoning Dustin during his friend's attempt to introduce the Party to his girlfriend, and laughing at Hopper when he tries some real parenting, signal Season 3 Mike as a total ass - although each of these is indirectly connected to his feelings for Eleven. Events quickly bring him crashing back down to earth, however, and he proves himself to still be a Nice Guy in spite of his mistakes.
• Understanding Boyfriend: The added trials of dating a traumatized, socially maladjusted girl with deadly powers, who is a regular target of government agents and interdimensional monsters, have not kept Mike away from Eleven.
• Undying Loyalty: Towards his friends. He'll do anything to keep them safe, even if it's a great risk to himself.
• Verbal Tic: Downplayed. He tends to repeat himself, but mostly just when he's upset.
  In "Holly, Jolly": What's wrong with you? What is wrong with you?!
  In "The Body": You made me think Will was okay, that he was still out there, but he wasn't. He wasn't.
  In "The Gate": I don't blame her, I blame you! I blame you!
  "In "The Mind Flayer":"' And you said yes. You said yes.
  "In "The Hellfire Club":"' We're friends. We're friends.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Gender-inverted. It doesn't matter if El has powers or if there's a Flayed!Billy or powerful servant of the Mind Flayer, Mike will not tolerate anyone harming his girlfriend.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: He lacks Lucas' apprehensions and Dustin's practicality. This works out for him a lot of the time, but the occasions where it doesn't hurt a lot.
• Youthful Freckles: Has a very freckled face and starts the series at the age of 12.

William "Will" Byers

^{Click here to see his appearance in the Season 5 epilogue} "I needed to find my own way. But what matters is that you're still here, and you still think we can be friends."

Played By: Noah Schnapp, Luke Kokotek (age 12, Season 5), Miles Marthaller (kindergarten-age)

Voiced By: Ben Plessala (Tales from '85)

Debut: "Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers" (1x01)

Mike, Dustin, and Lucas' vanished friend. Joyce's son and Jonathan's brother. A quiet, artistically inclined boy who's very much changed by his traumatic disappearance.

• Affection-Hating Kid: Downplayed in that it isn't all affection (he's fine with hugs and friendship) but Will shows an adolescent dislike for romance long after his friends have gotten over theirs and started dating. It causes friction with Mike in Season 3 when Will doesn't get why Mike wants to "swap spit with some stupid girl" over hanging with his friends. He only drops it in season 4 when he realizes it wasn't romance he was disinterested in, but girls.
• Age-Appropriate Angst: After two seasons of dealing with literal monsters, in Season 3, Will angsts over being the lone single guy in a group of couples, and tries to hold onto his childhood and keep his friends together when said friends are more interested in growing up and going off with their girlfriends — all of which is realistic for a boy his age.
• The All-American Boy: Possesses some elements of the classic trope, like being polite, having a fort, bicycling, and being able to work a loaded rifle. However, his shy nature and interest in science, art, and fantasy board games rather than sports makes him a Downplayed case. It seems his estranged dad wants him to act more like this trope, as such behavior would be conventional in Indiana during the '80s.
• Alone Among the Couples: While Mike, Dustin, and Lucas all eventually gain girlfriends through the series, Will remains single. Justified in that he's gay in a small conservative town (and didn't even figure out he was gay until season 4), so dating opportunities are very thin on the ground. Although the epilogue does show him flirting with a boy in college.
• Ambiguously Gay: Will's sexuality has been a topic of debate during the first three seasons both in and out of universe, with bullies (like Troy and his father Lonnie) openly referring to him with homophobic slurs, as he never shows overt interest in the opposite gender. Season 4 removes the ambiguity by showing that Will is in love with Mike but is too scared to admit it to anyone, which has been invoked confirmed by his actor Noah Schnapp.
• Apologizes a Lot: Because of his reticent nature, coupled with his hardships in the Upside Down, Will tends to apologize for things that aren't his fault.
  Joyce: What have we talked about? You've got to stop it with the "I'm sorry."
  Will: Sorry.
• The Baby of the Bunch: Will is the youngest in his family and the smallest among his friends, and they all love him and are very protective of his well-being. However, he begins to break away from this in Season 2, as he reveals to Jonathan that he doesn't like to be babied by everyone. In Season 3, he has a hard time accepting that his friends are growing out of playing D&D and would rather spend time with their girlfriends.
• Bad Mood Retreat: Castle Byers, his fort in the woods by his home. When Mike accuses him of not liking girls, it's the first place he goes to for comfort. Though, he's so distraught after, he destroys it.
• Beat Them at Their Own Game: In Season 5, Will, who has been possessed and influenced by monsters from the Upside Down throughout the series, learns that he can use his connection to the Hive Mind to possess the monsters first. He possesses three Demogorgons and crushes them from the inside, temporarily possesses Vecna and breaks his leg (although Vecna is able to throw him out), and freezes Vecna during the final battle so Eleven can impale him on a spike.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Will is a polite, sweet kid. However, the very first episode shows that when he is threatened by an unknown entity, he immediately runs into a shed to load a gun, and then points it in the direction of said entity.
• Big Brother Instinct: He is shown to be protective of El in Seasons 4 and 5.
  • When Joyce takes El into their family, he's frequently seen with her when they're in school, constantly trying to reassure her and make her feel better, giving her advice, and although he's not a very confrontational person, you can see the Tranquil Fury in his eyes when the bullies start harassing her in the roller rink.
  • When he finally reunites with El in the desert, all he cares about is that she's okay and trying to take the collar Brenner put on her off.
  • When Vecna nearly impales El in the final battle, Will freezes him and rips his arm off.
• Big Brother Worship: Will is very close to his older brother Jonathan, who always looks out for him and gives him good advice. They also both share a love for The Clash.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Gradual. His eyes are pretty dark already, and the change only affects his irises (instead of the whole eye as is the norm for this trope), but as the Mind Flayer exerts more and more control over Will, his eyes grow steadily darker. It's so subtle you may not notice until he's already fully possessed.
• Break the Cutie: His time in the Upside-Down is life-altering and he never quite gets over it.
• Came Back Strong: Mistaken as such in Season 2, when the party trying to exploit his contact to the Upside Down backfires. Actually turns out to be the case in the mid-season finale of the last season, where he suddenly manifests unique (and extremely strong) abilities as a consequence of his exposure to Vecna's powers.
• Came Back Wrong: In the Season 1 finale, he excuses himself from the Christmas table to go to the bathroom, where he retches and throws up a larval creature, presumably from when the Demogorgon kept him prisoner. He then briefly jumps to the Upside Down and back, returning to the table to finish dinner with his family. Season 2 reveals that he was a host for a Demogorgon larva, and was psychically linked to the Mind Flayer, who is pulling him back into the Upside-Down to attempt to possess him completely.
• Character Tics:
  • Whenever he feels the Mind Flayer near, he rubs the back of his neck as the hairs stand up.
  • He tends to sway back and forth when he's anxious.
• Chick Magnet: Downplayed. In contrast to his friends' struggles to get girls' attention, several girls in both Hawkins and California show interest in Will, but he's not very eager to respond whether due to social awkwardness or his Incompatible Orientation.
• Childhood Friend: Mike reveals that Will was his first friend.
• Childhood Friend Romance: Season 4 reveals that Will is in love with his childhood best friend Mike, and has been for a while. Mike is unaware of Will's true feelings towards him and has been in a relationship with Eleven for two seasons.
• Closet Gay: After three seasons of being Ambiguously Gay, Season 4 has him quietly coming to terms with his sexuality and struggling with a crush on Mike, culminating in him bursting into tears of relief after Jonathan stresses to him that absolutely nothing could ever make him love Will less. No one other than Jonathan knows for certain that Will is gay, and he technically doesn't even come out to Jonathan either, though Will clearly realizes that Jonathan knows. While he doesn't say it out loud, his sexuality and crush on Mike invoked have been openly discussed by multiple cast members in interviews as part of what drives Will and Jonathan's character arcs for the season.
• Coming-Out Story: After spending most of the series grappling with his sexuality, Will finally works up the courage to confess that he's gay to his friends and family in The Bridge, the penultimate episode of the series.
• Creepy Child: The Shadow Monster occasionally possesses him to chilling effect. Helped by his frail build, pale skin, and wide dark eyes.
• Defiant Captive:
  • In Season 1, he escapes the Demogorgon, and hides from him, while managing to communicate with his mother and aiding her in finding him.
  • In Season 2, while possessed by the Mind Flayer, he manages to warn the others of its treachery (unfortunately too late) and even when it has assumed full control, he manages to communicate to the others and tell them how to seal it for good.
• Demonic Possession: He gradually gets taken over by the Mind Flayer during Season 2. Thankfully, the condition turns out to be reversible, though as the end of Season 4 reveals, Will can still sense that his possessor is out there planning his next move.
• Demoted to Extra: While the first two seasons were about saving him, he gets a lot less story focus in Seasons 3 and 4. In an unusual case of this trope, however, his screen time actually increases overall after his demotion compared to before it — the whole point is he was missing in Season 1, to the extent where his actor wasn't even considered a part of the main cast until Season 2. He fully returns to the spotlight in Season 5.
• Detect Evil: He develops a psychic connection to the Upside-Down after his rescue, which intensifies after being possessed by the Mind Flayer.
• Disappeared Dad: His father walked out on the family several years prior to the start of the series and makes little effort to keep in contact.
• Distinguishing Mark: He has a birthmark on his right arm which Joyce points out when rejecting the Hawkins Lab’s mocked-up dead body of her son.
• Distressed Dude: He was trapped in the Upside-Down, fending off an alien predator and waiting to be saved. He ultimately is saved by his mother and Jim Hopper. He becomes one again in Season 2 when the Mind Flayer possesses him through one of his visions.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: After his childhood with an abusive father, being bullied, being abducted, being possessed, struggling to grow up, falling in love with someone who can't love him back, realizing that he's gay in a very homophobic time period, and being terrorized by Vecna, the epilogue shows that Will finally finds happiness and acceptance in college, connecting with the local queer community and is even implied to have found love.
• Embarrassing Nickname: In Season 2, Will is given the nickname "Zombie Boy" because of the events of the previous season, but it's out of mockery and cruelty.
• Emotional Regression: Happens to him in Season 3, as a result of not dealing with the trauma he endured. He just wants to be a kid again, while everyone is in a rush to grow up. This causes tension between him and other Party members.
• Establishing Character Moment: Will admitting to Mike that the Demogorgon got him in their D&D campaign is both foreshadowing and shows that Will is a good, honest kid worth saving.
• Everyone's Baby Sister: Mostly in Season 2, with everyone still treating him like he's made of glass.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: Rescued from this fate in the Season 1 finale, but the final scene reveals that it’s at best partially successful.
• Fairy Tale Motif:
  • Will's stealth and skillfulness at evading danger is very similar to the Rogue class in Dungeons & Dragons, a game he and his friends enjoy playing. However, his In-Universe character is a Wizard named Will the Wise. In Season 2, his connection to the Mind Flayer definitely mirrors a Warlock rather than a Rogue.
  • In Season 2, Mike says that he's the party's Cleric, which fits his gentle personality. Clerics also act as servants for higher powers, which Will unwillingly becomes. As Warlocks weren't in 1st Edition D&D, the relationship between a Cleric and their deity is the next best analogy. Though in this case the "deity" is an abusive controlling monstrosity, and the "cleric" would rather not go along with its plan, thank you very much.
  • Is compared to a sorcerer by Mike in Season 5, as Will is revealed to be able to manipulate demogorgons in the same way Vecna can control them due to Will’s time in the Upside Down, with the episode itself being called "Sorcerer". Sorcerers have innate magic as opposed to studied magic like Wizards and tend to have greater power but much less versatility, much like how Will's psychic connection to the Upside Down is stronger than Eleven's but also limited to the Upside Down and its creatures unlike her general Psychic Powers.
• Faking the Dead: After his disappearance, Hawkins Lab produces a fake corpse to put an end to the search for Will, and deflect further intrusive attention.
• Fighting from the Inside: Despite the Mind Flayer taking control of him, he is able to tell the protagonists what to do via Morse code.
• First Friend: Before the Party officially got together, he and Mike had met at kindergarten.
• Forced into Evil: The Mind Flayer takes over Will's mind and body during Season 2, making him do things he would never do.
• Forgotten Birthday: An unintentional example. In Season 4, the date on the camera at the roller rink says March 22nd, which was established as Will's birthday in Season 2. Meaning everyone forgot his birthday. Even Joyce. No wonder why he was so miserable when they were hanging out. However, the Duffers later admitted that they're actually the ones who forgot Will's birthday. (It would after all make no sense for him to refrain from mentioning that part when listing the ways in which he feels neglected to Mike).
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Played with in Season 3. While his friends obviously do like him, their interests and general level of maturity are very different from Will's. This leads to conflict due to Will wanting to stay in childhood and play D&D while his friends want to grow up and focus on romance.
• The Friends Who Never Hang: With Max. The two of them are main characters and Party members from Season 2 onwards, yet they only speak to each other a handful of times onscreen. Season 5 finally shows their friendship a little more, with Will visiting Max in the hospital and later bonding with her over their similar experiences with Vecna.
• Gayngst: Will's sexuality is a touchy subject for him, and he spends a significant amount of Season 4 brooding about it. Thoroughly Justified by the fact that he grew up in a small, conservative town in 1980s Indiana being routinely called homophobic slurs by bullies and his own father.
• Growing Up Sucks: This defines his storyline in Season 3. Most of the party is concerned with romantic drama while Will still just wants to play D&D and hang out as a group and feels that the group's dynamic is being ruined by growing up.
• Hairstyle Inertia: By Season 5, he's a junior in high school and still has the bowl cut he's worn since kindergarten, though there's been at least some effort to make it more stylish by cutting the sides shorter and texturing the front. Lampshaded when Will admits that bowl cuts are less popular than they used to be.
• Heroic Sacrifice: His D&D character, "Will the Wise", performs a heroic sacrifice during their game in the first episode, a fact which Mike uses to convince his friends to continue the search for Will even when it gets dangerous. He is also willing to die in order to close the gate on the Mind Flayer.
• I Have This Friend: In Season 4, his love for Mike is revealed to be more than platonic, and while travelling back to Hawkins from California, Will uses Eleven's love for Mike as an avatar for his own feelings, as he's not at all ready to admit anything to his childhood friend.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: The crux of his Season 3 development; after two seasons of having to fight for his life in an alternate dimension and then getting puppeted around by an evil entity, Will just wants to return to the simpler times of he and his friends playing D&D together and having fun like regular kids. But now Mike and Lucas are both dealing with romantic conflicts and Dustin disappears for the whole season to counter a Russian invasion, leaving Will once again feeling alone and miserable, something that only sets in for the others after a heated argument.
• Incompatible Orientation: Girls throw themselves at Will but he is uncomfortable every time that happens. Season 4 cements that Will's feelings for Mike Wheeler go beyond platonic friendship, while Mike is in love with Eleven.
• Innocent Bigot: He thinks that girls don't play video games in season 2, and believes that girls don't attend science camp in season 3. In both cases it comes across less as him having any real prejudice and more that he didn't know that was an option until told otherwise. Given who his father is and his lack of female friends before Season 3, it's not surprising that he picked up some sexist opinions without really internalizing them.
• Internalized Categorism: Downplayed. He alludes to sometimes feeling like a "mistake" due to his sexual orientation but also states that Mike makes him feel like he's not a mistake. Most of his Gayngst seems to stem from his belief that Mike would never like him back and that his feelings are lesser to a straight relationship, hence him being the chief architect in pushing Mike and El's crumbling relationship back together. Thus, he is self-sabotaging his own potential happiness, which is a subtle form of internalized homophobia.
• Intergenerational Friendship: Forms one with Robin during Season 5 after accidentally coming across her and her girlfriend making out. Robin is initially worried that Will is going to expose her, but Will instead turns to her for advice on his unrequited crush on Mike.
• Irony: If Will being told it is not Mike Wheeler's fault he does not like girls is not ironic, absolutely nothing is.
• It's All My Fault: Season 5 shows that Will feels a tremendous amount of guilt for how the Upside Down has affected his loved ones, especially thanks to Vecna using him to build the tunnels in Season 2 and using him as a spy so he can find and attack Max's body in the real world.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: In Season 4, it becomes apparent that Will's attachment to Mike is a romantic one, but he chooses to help Mike mend his relationship with El rather than confess his own feelings. At the same time, he does seem to be really upset about the whole arrangement.
• Jerkass to One: A Downplayed example. While Will is one of the kindest characters in the show Season 3 makes it clear he is incredibly jealous of El's relationship with Mike, even calling her a stupid girl at one point. By Season 4 the two have formed a close sibling bond.
• Jock Dad, Nerd Son: Lonnie has absolutely no respect for Will's nerdy pursuits and mistreats him because of them.
• Large Ham: Will really hams it up when trying to lead a D&D mission in Season 3.
• Living MacGuffin: His mysterious disappearance is what kicks off the adventures for the main characters in Season 1.
• Loss of Identity: He gradually loses his memory after being possessed by the Mind Flayer in Season 2.
• Love Hurts: His feelings for Mike cause him a lot of angst in Season 4.
• Mad Artist: In Season 2, when he starts experiencing visions of the Upside-Down. First, he uses his crayons to draw a picture of the Mind Flayer. Later, he spends a day furiously sketching the dark tunnels growing beneath Hawkins.
• Man of Kryptonite: In Season 5, after learning how to weaponize his connection to their Hive Mind, Will becomes the hardest counter to the creatures of the Upside Down. He kills three Demogorgons with ease, possesses Vecna briefly, and the only creature that is outright immune to his influence is the Mind Flayer itself. Notably, the one time Vecna uses Demogorgons after this point is when Will is completely incapacitated.
• Meaningful Name: While it might not have been intended at the time, Will's name becomes meaningful in season 5 when he proves to have the mental willpower to not only siphon Vecna's powers, but hijack his body. Vecna manages to throw him out the first time, but not the second.
• Mind-Control Eyes: A subtle example in Season 2 — his irises get slowly darker over the course of the season as he gradually loses more and more control to the Mind Flayer, ultimately going from bright green to almost black.
• Mind Over Matter: While trapped in the Upside-Down, he can put this to use to a far greater extent than the Demogorgon does and manipulate his house in the real world, behaving much like a poltergeist. He's somehow able to make phone calls, set the stereo to play his favorite song, and very carefully manipulate electric lights, which very quickly convinces his mother that he's in the house somehow. In Season 5, he awakens psychic powers similar to those wielded by Eleven and Henry, using them to mutilate and kill a group of Demogorgons about to kill his friends.
• Mind Rape: Not only does he get impregnated by the Demogorgon, but he also gets possessed by the Mind Flayer.
• Minor Insult Meltdown: When he and Mike spar with words, the latter accuses him of not liking girls. In response, Will leaves in tears, and tears down Castle Byers. Considering Will is gay and in love with Mike in a very homophobic time period, one can understand why he reacts this way.
• Mister Seahorse: After the Demogorgon impregnates him, he "gives birth" to one of the demodogs. By coughing it up.
• The Mole: Due to the Mind Flayer taking control of him in late Season 2, he feeds it information about the human heroes until Joyce, Jonathan, and Nancy drive it out of him. It also works the other way to an extent, as he's able to use his connection to the Mind Flayer to help his friends and family until his personality is dominated completely. And even then, he still finds a way.
• Momma's Boy: If having your head screwed-on enough to survive what he goes through, partly thanks to how Joyce has raised him to keep going in a physical and emotional crisis by seeking support is being a Momma's Boy, then his dad is right.
• Mother of a Thousand Young: He apparently coughed up at least several dozen demodogs between Seasons 1 and 2.
• Mr. Exposition: His main role in Season 3 is to explain how the Mind Flayer works and how to tell if someone is Flayed, as well as announcing when the Mind Flayer is active or nearby.
• My Significance Sense Is Tingling: He gets goosebumps on the back of his neck and the hairs stand up when the creatures of the Upside Down are gaining on him.
• Nice Guy: Even though Will spends most of Season 1 trapped in the Upside-Down, he is still shown to be an honest and kind person. Before his abduction in the first episode, he admits to Mike that the former's roll landed on a seven and finished him off in their D&D game. When he's rescued and hospitalized near the end of Chapter 8, one of the first things he does when he wakes up is ask if his brother is okay when he sees Jonathan's bandaged hand.
• Not Quite Back to Normal: Everyone assumed that Will's connection to the Upside Down's hive mind had been severed, but in Season 5 he reveals that—now back in Hawkins—his connection is stronger than ever, letting him see through Vecna's eyes in addition to sensing his presence. In Episode 4, he awakens psychic powers akin to those wielded by Eleven and Vecna, letting him remotely kill a group of Demogorgons attacking his friends.
• Older Than He Looks: He's small, lanky, and doe-eyed, but he's actually about the same age as his friends (if not the oldest, as he's born in March of 1971). His dainty appearance is the main reason he's bullied. After Season 2, he shoots up and looks more his age, bordering on Younger Than He Looks.
• Out of Focus: Despite his importance to the story of Season 1, him vanishing and being trapped in the Upside Down means he has little actual screen-time, which is greatly expanded in later seasons.
• Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality: This is one interpretation for his lack of love life. He's the only one in the Party not to have a significant other, he spends the majority of Season 3 commenting on how love and PDA is "gross", and that he's "never going to fall in love". It also doesn't help that people have been commenting on what his potential sexuality his entire life. On top of that, he watched his parents' marriage fail too. Season 4 additionally reveals that Will was actually already in love with Mike at this point and his fear was intrinsically tied to his sexuality.
• People Puppets: He’s one of these to the Mind Flayer in Season 2. In Season 5, he's able to do it himself to 3 demogorgons due to his connection to their hive mind, lifting them in the air and crushing their bones. He’s even able to temporarily take psychic control of Vecna and break his right leg to slow his pursuit of Max and Holly.
• Precision F-Strike: While most of the characters swear like sailors, Will's swearing is limited to a single F-bomb in Season 3 (the only example amongst the kids across the series) and a "Shit!" when bullies destroy El's diorama in Season 4, which makes him swearing all the more impactful.
• Prone to Tears: He cries quite easily, and Joyce describes him as "sensitive."
• Prophet Eyes: In Season 5, his eyes turn pure white when he channels his Psychic Powers to their full extent and telekinetically kills a group of demogorgons.
• Psychic Link: His connection to the Upside Down established in Season 2 becomes a crucial asset in Season 5, allowing him to sense Vecna's presence and emotions across dimensions.
• Psychic Nosebleed: Gets a very prominent one when he unlocks his ability to control the hivemind and telekinetically kills the demogorgons threatening his friends and family.
• Psychic Powers: The events of Season 1 gave him a psychic link to the Upside Down Hive Mind. In Seasons 2-4, it manifests as visions of the Upside Down (which the party terms "True Sight") and Spider-Sense for when the Mind Flayer is nearby. Season 5 explores his powers further and confirms that he can control the hivemind if he's close enough to it, being able to turn back demogorgons and telekinetically kill them. He takes it a step further when helping Max and Holly escape by temporarily possessing Vecna and breaking his right leg.
• The Quiet One: Not to the same extent as El, but he's definitely on the quiet side. The only times he talks at length are when he's around his closest friends and family or when he's being asked about the Mind Flayer; otherwise, he usually hangs back and lets other people do the talking.
• Seers: Season 2 has him acting as one, due to his connection with the Mind Flayer allowing him to see its plans.
• Shrinking Violet: He is more soft-spoken and gentler than his friends.
• Sibling Team: Like Mike and Nancy, Will and Jonathan tend to team up when the groups come together, but they play it straighter during Season 4 when, for the first time in the show, two siblings are in the same ongoing Cast Herd, the group trekking its way across the country.
• Single-Issue Wonk: Will frequently and insistently brings up wanting to play D&D throughout the early episodes of Season 3, in contrast to his friends who are withdrawing from the game. He grows out of this towards the end of the season.
• The Smart Guy: Although all of the kids are unusually bright and Dustin in particular may be the most learned, "Will the Wise's" savvy and intuition casts him in this role in the ensemble, particularly in Season 2, where his connection to the Mind Flayer gives the insight needed to defeat it. In their game, Will is the Party’s Wizard but he’s always been referred by Mike as a Cleric, a class based around wisdom.
• The Sneaky Guy: Will is described as being "good at hiding." So good that he manages to evade the Demogorgon for almost a week in the Upside Down, whereas other victims like Barbara and Shepard get taken out in minutes. It's also implied that the Demogorgon has other uses for him.
• Spider-Sense: In Seasons 3 and 5 he can feel when something Upside Down related is happening. During this he gets chills on the back of his neck.
• Stepford Smiler:
  • In the Season 1 finale, he tries to hide that he is still being affected by the Upside-Down, even after escaping, from his loved ones with a smile.
  • Season 4 has Will give Mike several longing glances and whenever he helps Mike reinforce his relationship with El, there's a hint of sadness in his voice.
• Superpowered Evil Side: Develops one in Season 2 referred to as "the Spy", who is a part of the Mind Flayer. The superpowers manifest themselves in the Season 2 finale.
• Survival Mantra: The glimpses that show a younger him in the Upside-Down often have him repeating the chorus to "Should I Stay or Should I Go" by The Clash over and over again, seemingly in an attempt to comfort himself.
• Synchronization: His connection to the Mind Flayer/Vecna has evolved from a passive "Now Memories" sense to a full physical bond in Season 5. He physically writhes in pain when Demogorgons are injured and he collapses screaming when soldiers torch another Demogorgon with a flamethrower, confirming his deepening link to the Hive Mind.
• Time-Shifted Actor: Combined with Digital De-Aging. For the 1983 flashback in Season 5, the production used CGI to blend Noah Schnapp's features with actor Luke Kokotek's performance to create a convincing portrayal of 11-year-old Will.
• Took a Level in Badass: In Season 5, it’s revealed that Will’s brushes with the Upside Down have allowed him some measure of control over its denizens much in the same way as Vecna. This culminates in Chapter 4; Will manifests Vecna's abilities and kills all the Demogorgons about to attack his friends, and does so in multiple locations at once - which (at least when it comes to monsters controlled by Vecna) makes him even more powerful than Eleven since he doesn't depend on physically seeing them.
• Touched by Vorlons: After coming back from the Upside-Down, he has apparently developed a permanent connection with the other plane, and he starts to have visions of the Upside-Down. Considering that the Mind Flayer was able to possess him through one of these visions, it seems that his mind might actually enter the other dimension during these episodes. Additionally, Will’s time in the Upside Down, his possession by the Mind Flayer, and interactions with Vecna end up leaving Will with the power to manipulate the creatures of the Upside Down much in the same way as Vecna can.
• Trauma Conga Line: The boy grew up with an emotionally abusive father, constant bullying, and all before he was abducted by an inter-dimensional monster hell-bent on either eating him or implanting him with Demogorgon slug babies. At twelve, he had to survive alone for a week in an environment with no food, no water, toxic air, and a monster hunting for him. He is eventually found by the monster after he's too weak to escape, taken to its nest, has a living tube shoved down his throat, and is actually dead by time Hopper and Joyce rescue him. Only Hopper's timely CPR saves his life. In Season 2, he is living through severe PTSD, only to realize it's not really all PTSD, and he then gets taken over by a preeminent bastion of evil that makes him try to kill his friends and family. Seasons 3 and 4 aren't supernatural but are still fairly painful, with him growing apart from his friends in season 3 and realizing he's gay and in love with Mike in season 4, while Season 5 returns to the supernatural horror with Vecna personally targeting him. Needless to say, by the time of the epilogue, he's more than earned his happy ending.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: If he'd squished the baby demodogs when they were still tadpoles, a lot of people would still be alive... Including poor Bob.
• Walking Spoiler: It's pretty much impossible to talk about him without spoiling the fact that he's actually alive and trapped in an alternate dimension during Season 1, and that he is successfully rescued at the end of the season.

Dustin Henderson

^{Click here to see his appearance in the Season 5 epilogue} "The party took a hell of a beating, but we’re okay."

Played By: Gaten Matarazzo

Voiced By: Braxton Quinney (Tales from '85)

Debut: "Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers" (1x01)

Mike's classmate and close friend. An enthusiastic, chubby boy with a lisp who aids him in the search for Will, acting as the voice of reason.

• '80s Hair: After taking hair styling advice from Steve prior to the Snow Ball, he shapes his naturally curly hair into a towering mullet. He retains said mullet until the finale.
• Affectionate Nickname:
  • "Dusty" from his mother.
  • "Dusty-bun" from his girlfriend Suzie, which doubles as an Embarrassing Nickname.
• Agent Mulder: He's a very credulous boy, usually being the first to (correctly) suggest some sort of supernatural explanation for the events of the story. He's also the quickest to come to terms with the weirdness going down in Hawkins.
• Ambiguously Absent Parent: He's being raised by a single mom, but the reason his father isn't around is never explained. The play The First Shadow shows that Walter Henderson was a total Jerkass, strongly implying that she left him.
• Anger Born of Worry: His whole plotline with Steve in Season 5 is based on this. Eddie's death seems to wake Dustin up to the fact that Steve has been constantly throwing himself into danger for years. As a result, he spends most of the season lashing out at Steve and self-sabatoging their friendship at every turn, right down to mutilating Steve's beloved car. He later breaks down and reveals that he's absolutely terrified Steve is going to get himself killed and begs Steve not to put him through that, all but saying that as broken as he was by Eddie's death, it would be even more shattering for him if Steve died.
• Badass Longcoat: He starts wearing a tan trench coat in Season 5.
• Big Eater: A Downplayed Trope in Season 1: out of the viewpoint characters, he's the one most obsessed with food, but this mostly manifests as him being the one who remembers to bring snacks when they're trekking through the woods and taking advantage of the empty school to steal chocolate pudding. He seemingly grows out of this trait, as it's nowhere to be seen in later seasons.
• Big "SHUT UP!": He bellows one just before bullcharging poor Steve.
• Catchphrase:
  • "Son of a bitch."
  • "Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod."
• Break the Cutie: Eddie's death at the end of Season 4 hits him HARD, and clearly drove home the true reality of loss for Dustin. As a result, Dustin becomes a sort of Death Seeker and even starts lashing out at Steve because deep-down he's terrified of losing Steve the same way.
• Character Development: In regard to his opinions of Steve Harrington. In Season 1, Dustin concurred with Lucas' description of Steve as a "douchebag," possibly because of a crush on Nancy. They spend some time together during Season 2, in which the duo bond and form an Odd Friendship. By Season 3, Dustin has come to view Steve as a close and dear friend he would die for. By the end of the series they have each admitted the other is their "best friend," but clearly consider themselves brothers more than friends, continuing to hang out even after Dustin leaves for college.
  • Also his attitude as it pertains to Steve's risky, self-sacrificial nature. He thinks Steve is "awesome" for offering himself up as bait for Dart and admired Steve for his bravery in the early seasons. However, after growing up and experiencing some genuine loss, Dustin comes to absolutely dread Steve's constant willingness to risk his life, and in Season 5 ends up having an emotional breakdown because he's terrified Steve is going to get himself killed.
• Comfort the Dying: Dustin stays with Eddie in his dying moments.
• Cowardly Lion: He's the party member least inclined to leap into danger and is constantly moaning and complaining whenever the gang's being chased, but he never fails to step up against danger whenever he's called.
• Cradle of Loneliness: Dustin holds onto Eddie's guitar pick after the latter dies. He later gives it to Eddie's uncle.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: Though what he's right about occasionally goes off the rails without him knowing or manifests at ill-timed moments. He is completely on point about the compasses pointing towards the direction of the portal at Hawkins lab, but didn't think to question why they later began steering them back home. He was wrong about Hopper being a Lando Calrissian... at the time he said it, since Jim does betray Eleven's location to Brenner during the finale in exchange for a shot at saving Will.
• Deadpan Snarker: He's normally pretty chill, but has moments of snark in the face of those he finds intellectually inferior — like Mr. Wheeler and Steve, who are usually on the receiving end of the odd withering remark.
• Ditzy Genius: Dustin is the most intellectual member of the Party. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of D&D, comparing the Upside-Down to the Vale of Shadows, the Shadow Monster to the Mind Flayer, and readily equates Will's "Now Memories" to True Sight. He quickly narrows down what type of natural creature Dart could be, though he ends up very wrong. He's also the most knowledgeable on how compasses work, loves books, and has a huge passion for science. However, he is also incredibly impulsive and often fails to think things through (like thinking about keeping a creature from the Upside-Down as a pet to impress a girl is a great idea). To keep with the D&D theme, he rolled an 8 on Wisdom.
• Establishing Character Moment: When playing Dungeons & Dragons with his friends, Dustin is on the defensive and urges Will to use a protection spell. This shows his practical-but-cowardly approach to situations. He is also the one who asks after the last slice of pizza, but he offers it to Nancy before taking it for himself, showing that he's thoughtful and considerate of others.
• Expy: Of Chunk from The Goonies. The comic relief, cowardly, food-loving chubby kid who gets separated from the main group early on and befriends a big, dumb counterpart (sorry, Steve!) to assist the main group later. Also ends up embracing said counterpart as family.
• Fairy Tale Motif: Dustin's upbeat personality, diplomacy at settling disputes among members of the party, and affable personality to befriend/charm/bluff people makes him analogous to a Bard from Dungeons & Dragons. He is also highly intelligent, but uses it to recall facts and lore, another specialty of the Bard (Wizards use their intelligence scores for spellcasting and have lower Lore). In one episode, he wears a Drama Club t-shirt; entertainment and the creative arts being things strongly associated with bards. In Season 3, Dustin is forced to sing a magical song to help the Party, the primary skill Bards are known for. This is also how Mike describes Dustin's role in the Party.
• False Teeth Tomfoolery: Dustin loses his brand-new dentures in an action sequence towards the end of Season 2, but has a new pair by the time of the dance. He later discards those when his new girlfriend Suzie tells him the lack of teeth makes him a better kisser.
• Fire-Forged Friends: With Erica. He sees her only as Lucas' Annoying Younger Sibling who makes fun of nerds, and only lets her join because he, Robin and Steve are too big to fit through the ducts when escaping from the Russian base under Starcourt. During their time foiling the Russian plot, they slowly overcome their petty differences and form an Odd Friendship. It probably helps that he realizes that she's a nerd too.
• Fluffy Tamer: Downplayed. In Season 2, Dustin adopts a pollywog-like creature found in his garbage, naming it "D'Artagnan" after its love of Three Musketeers candy bars ("Dart" for short). While he is able to befriend Dart, he can't really control him, which leads to the creature growing in size and eating Dustin's pet cat.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Throughout the first two seasons it's implied that he views himself as this among the Party since he was the last of the boys to join the group, but it gets center stage in Season 3 when he gets his own subplot dealing with the Starcourt Mall mystery without involving the rest of the party, because he thinks they're pulling away from him. The others reassure him at the end of the season that that was never the case. His feelings of insecurity within the group also likely played significant part in his initial connection with Steve, who seems to make him feel prioritized and encouraged in a way the boys of the Party aren't always able to do (whether they mean to or not).
• Friend to All Living Things: Dustin loves animals, and has a variety of pets, including a turtle, a cat, and later, Dart.
• Gadgeteer Genius: He builds multiple working gadgets while away at science camp, including his prized deluxe ham radio, Cerebro.
• Gender-Equal Ensemble: He becomes a part of one in Season 3, the group investigating the Russians' secret base, which includes two boys (Steve and Dustin) and two girls (Robin and Erica).
• Girlfriend in Canada: In Season 3 no one believes his stories about meeting the perfect girl at science camp, who lives in Utah. Turns out she's real and plays a crucial role in Seasons 3 and 4.
• Guest Fighter: Came to Dead by Daylight in the second "Stranger Things" chapter.
• Handicapped Badass: Downplayed. Dustin (like his actor) was born with cleidocranial dysostosis but isn't particularly inconvenienced by said disability like most examples of the trope, in fact he even notes that his lack of collarbones makes him more flexible. And just like the rest of the Party, Dustin is a badass kid.
• The Heart: Dustin is the most emotional member of the group. Whenever the other boys fight, Dustin's the one who calls them all out for being out of line and reminds them that they're friends. With Will missing, it's possible that Dustin had to step up as the replacement-Heart. He's ascribed the role of The Bard in the party, a class that makes every group member stronger. He's also one of the few characters with a significant relationship with almost every other character, and the one who has spent equal time with both the younger kids and older teenagers.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: While he's usually cheerful, it has been hinted that he has insecurities about himself. Season 2 reveals he's not sure that girls will like him for himself and is desperate enough to keep Dart as a (potentially dangerous) pet just to get Max's attention.
• Hero-Worshipper:
  • Towards Mr. Clarke, whom he treats with great reverence and always addresses by some honorary title. Overall, he latches onto an older male in every season. Mr. Clarke is an adult, but his friendships with Steve and Eddie also have shades of a mentor-pupil relationship. Is this due to lack of a father figure?
  • It gets deconstructed in season 5 with Eddie, as Eddie's death and Dustin's guilt over it caused Dustin to essentially put him on a pedestal and neglect his living friends for not being as good as he remembers Eddie being. Steve calls him on this, pointing out that not only is it unfair to him and Dustin's other friends, but Eddie wasn't as perfect as Dustin remembers him. For one, he describes Eddie as being "the smartest person I ever knew", and while Eddie was many things, intelligent was not one of them. In another instance, Dustin defends his actions against the jocks to Mike, Lucas, and Will on the grounds that they're spreading lies about Eddie. Mike rightfully points out to Dustin that Eddie never cared about what the jocks thought or said of him.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: By Season 2, the supernatural events that he and Steve have endured inform their ever-closening friendship, and their relationship is still going strong in the epilogue of the series finale. In Season 4, with the Party going their separate ways, Dustin takes to the local outcast Eddie Munson. Before they venture into the Upside Down for the final battle, the two hold each other close and swear loyalty to their gang, The Hellfire Club. When Eddie sacrifices himself against the demobats to protect Dustin, the two openly declare their platonic love for each other. Dustin also tells Mr. Munson that Eddie died a hero.
• High-School Hustler: Well, Middle School. Dustin is a fast-talker able to think quickly on his feet to manipulate people (especially grown-ups) into getting his way, or to talk himself out of trouble. His quote at the top of the section comes from a scene where he railroads Mr. Clarke into explaining how sensory deprivation tanks were late at night on a Saturday, rather than wait until Monday. It doesn't always work (such as his attempt to talk his way into checking out several books from the library when he was already at his limit) but he still has an impressive track record.
• Hopeless Suitor:
  • Dustin is implied to have a Precocious Crush on Nancy in Season 1, but she's not interested, as he's much too young.
  • He enters a Love Triangle with Lucas over their shared feelings for Max in Season 2. In the end, Max and Lucas become a couple.
• Hypocrite: He indicates Steve Harrington is very immature by citing that the Rainbow Room's distorted Upside Down toys befit his so-called arrested development. It's all but confirmed he was projecting onto him considering he's the one shutting people out and constantly picking meaningless fights with Andy Harper.
• Idiot Ball: His "love affair" with Dart in Season 2 is out of line with his otherwise prudent character, and it's clear his excitement from the discovery got the better of him — especially after Dart turns feral and he tries to contain matters.
• Innocently Insensitive: He's blunt, but means well, such as finding Eleven's powers extremely cool... and then asking her to do demeaning tricks to show them off in Season 1.
• Insufferable Genius: Over the course of the series, Dustin's track record of repeatedly being proven right about the Upside Down start to go to his head, causing him to become condescending towards others (particularly Steve) that he believes are less intelligent than him and refuse to accept when he's done something wrong.
  Dustin: How many times do I have to be right on the money before you guys JUST TRUST ME?!
  Steve: Jesus Christ, this kid's gotta get his ego in check.
  Eddie: It's his tone, right?
• Jerkass Has a Point: While arguing with Steve in Hawkins Lab, he points out that Steve is still obsessed with chasing someone else's girlfriend while the world is ending. Steve is quick to say that Nancy is simply his friend, but Dustin isn't really wrong either, since Steve thought that bringing Nancy flowers to comfort her would be a good idea after her parents were almost murdered by a monster and her sister was kidnapped, with Jonathan rightfully calling him out on it and accusing him of selfishness.
• Jerkass Realization: After spending the first half of Season 5 on a self-destructive angry streak and lashing out at everyone in the wake of Eddie's death, Dustin is finally snapped back to reality after learning that his theory about a shield generator existing at Hawkins Lab was "terribly, catastrophically wrong," and is overwhelmed by the gravity of his mistake. Not long after, he has the cathartic emotional breakdown he's been resisting all season and begins acting more like himself again.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He's foul-mouthed, abrasive, and becomes downright arrogant as the series progresses. That being said, Dustin cares deeply about his friends and will dive into danger to help out when they're threatened.
• Keet: He's the most excitable of the boys.
• Kind Hearted Cat Lover: He locks Dart in the storm shelter because it killed his cat Mews.
• The Leader: Takes up this role for the Party in Season 4 with Mike stuck in California. His decisiveness and knowledge guide the group, and even some of the older characters, well against Vecna.
• Long-Distance Relationship: His girlfriend, Suzie, lives in Utah.
• Love Hurts: He got a crush on Max, but saw that she chose Lucas. He looks at her wistfully when she dances with Lucas at the Snow Ball. He gets over it once he meets Suzie at science camp.
• Love Makes You Stupid: His decision to keep the (very dangerous) Dart as a Pet Monstrosity is because he wants to impress Max. Steve notes how stupid this is.
• Magic Music:
  • Played for Laughs near the end of Season 3 when Dustin is forced by his girlfriend Suzie to sing a duet of the theme from "The Neverending Story" with her over the radio so she will give him the code to open a safe housing the keys Hopper and Joyce need to shut down the new gate. This happens while everyone listening in is in mortal danger. Lucas and Max later make fun of Dustin with their own rendition of the duet.
  • As of Season 4, Episode 4, when Max is held in Vecna's trance, Dustin learns that music will break the spell, and is the first one to find the tapes and ask which song to play. This is more Truth in Television and Shown Their Work, as it's true that parts of the psyche respond to music differently from other stimuli.
• Mama's Boy: He's very close to his mother, and they have a good relationship. Dustin swearing on his mother's life is what gains Eddie's trust, following him going into hiding after Chrissy's death in Season 4.
• The McCoy: He is easily the most impulsive member of the group, often blurting out whatever is on his mind. But he is also the most emotionally aware and idealistic one, often being the first to try to lighten the mood whenever tensions run high.
• The Navigator: Among the boys, Dustin knows the most about compasses and realizes that they can use them to find the Gate. Lucas even refers to him as the "compass genius".
• Never My Fault: Steve points out in Season 4 that Dustin, who gradually becomes increasing vainglorious from Season 3 onwards, will refuse to admit that he's wrong, and believes that him showing a bit of humility every once in a while wouldn't go amiss. Unfortunately, this reaches a breaking point in Season 5, where after spending his time provoking the basketball team and getting beaten up, causing a delay during a scheduled crawl, he shifts the blame on Steve for not being able to prevent a power surge, who promptly explodes and practically begs him to admit that he's wrong. Dustin does willingly admit he was wrong later in the season, when his theory about the shield generator proves incorrect and the gravity of his mistake sinks in.
• Never Split the Party: Dustin admonishes Mike over his fight with Lucas and tries to get both of them to work together, and he cites an incident in a Dungeons & Dragons game they played where trolls picked off the party when they split up.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Definitely shows some of this with his fascination with Dart.
  Dustin: An interdimensional slug? Which is awesome?
• Not Always Evil: In-universe invoked trope. After the boys find out that Dart is from the Upside-Down, Dustin invokes this trope to stop Mike from killing it. It's Zigzagged how right he is, as Dart does become dangerous, but still has a soft spot for Dustin later on.
• "Not So Different" Remark: In Season 3, he notes how Erica, who has been mocking the boys for being nerds since Season 2, is just as nerdy as they are because of her genius mind and her love for a certain fantasy franchise.
• Odd Friendship:
  • Forms one with Steve in Season 2, with Steve gradually becoming his Big Brother Mentor. They end up developing one of the strongest bonds in the series.
  • He forms one with Erica in Season 3, over their love of fantasies and their snark.
  • In Season 4, he's particularly close to Eddie, who's even more different from him than the former two.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Max, Lucas, and Will still make fun of his Neverending Story duet months after it happened.
• OOC Is Serious Business: He's always seen in one of his signature baseball caps, except for formal occasions (Will's funeral, the Snow Ball). The one time he's seen out of it in casual wear is after the battle against Vecna, showing how much he's affected by Eddie's death.
• Plucky Comic Relief: Even in the most dire situations, Dustin tends to be the most lighthearted out of his friends.
• Positive Friend Influence: For Steve, who was already becoming a better person but a bit adrift after being dumped by Nancy. Helping Dustin gives Steve an opportunity to connect with someone he doesn't have to impress and can simply be himself around, while gaining a sense of responsibility and someone he can truly care about. Becoming friends with Dustin seems to have been the final push Steve needed to officially become a kinder and more accepting person. Dustin is also likely the first good friend Steve has had in a very long time (if ever).
• Precocious Crush: He's implied to have a crush on Nancy in the first episode, going so far as to offer her pizza. She's got a Love Triangle of her own and doesn't really reciprocate, but she does dance with him at the Snow Ball, saying that out of all Mike's friends, Dustin was always her favorite.
• Proud to Be a Geek: An unabashed science nerd who revels in his less-than-mainstream interests, something he proclaims he takes honor in during Season 4.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Gaten Matarazzo has cleidocranial dysostosis, so Dustin does too. It gives the bullies one more reason to pick on him. Could be seen as a downplayed version of invoked Disabled Character, Disabled Actor, as neither Dustin nor Gaten is particularly inconvenienced by their condition. Lampshaded when Steve has a Captain Obvious moment:
  We're missing collarbones, not eyes.
• Real Men Wear Pink: He's able to provide an accurate and surprisingly detailed recap of one of the My Little Pony TV Specials off the top of his head, specifically Rescue at Midnight Castle, although invokedhe explains that he's a fan because of the fantasy elements as opposed to the ponies themselves.
• Sad Clown: His cheerful, goofy personality hides a great deal of social insecurity.
  • This becomes most evident at the Snow Ball dance. After building up his confidence and putting loads of effort into his appearance, he is rudely rejected by all the girls he asks to dance. He is so broken by this that he retreats to the bleachers and cries alone. Seeing Max, his crush of Season 2, dance with Lucas probably doesn't help either. Luckily, he's rescued by Nancy moments later and the pair share a dance.
  • In Season 4 he's absolutely shattered by Eddie's death. With the Party drifting apart, Eddie was the only person Dustin could count on during high school.
• Secular Hero: He's an agnostic, according to his devout Mormon girlfriend, Suzie.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: In his Odd Friendship with Steve, he's the nerdy Sensitive Guy to Steve's confident and jockish Manly Man.
• Shipper on Deck: Season 3 has Dustin trying to pair up Steve with Robin. He's also much more encouraging of Steve trying to get back together with Nancy in Season 4, in stark contrast to how he remarked on their relationship with antipathy back in Season 1.
• Signature Headgear:
  • He's almost always wearing his red, white, and blue baseball cap.
  • By Season 3, he replaces the above hat with a green and yellow cap he got from his time at Camp Know Where. The Season 3 finale episode shows in a Freeze-Frame Bonus, that his girlfriend from Utah, Suzy, now has it. This implies that during their time at the camp, he gave it to her.
  • Season 4 has him wearing a "Thinking Cap."
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Swears the most out of the kids, often using "shit" or "sonofabitch!".
• Skewed Priorities: In Season 5, he is focused on keeping Eddie's memory alive by continuing Hellfire, even though it draws unnecessary attention from the school bullies. The rest of the Party want to blend in more because they're busy resisting a military occupation and trying to save the world from Vecna and they really don't need any extra attention on them and their activities, while he accuses them of selling out. He skips out on a crawl to pick a fight with some bullies, resulting in it going wrong and stranding Hopper in the Upside Down.
• The Smart Guy: Dustin not only has an encyclopedic knowledge of science and D&D, he's good at doing research and using analogies to help the group contextualize and solve problems. In the season 5 finale, it's shown that he became their high school valedictorian and got a full ride to college.
• Sour Outside, Sad Inside: In season 5, it's clear that Eddie's death has made him a lot more cynical and angry at the world, making dumb decisions to try and keep his memory alive, becoming a lot more insufferable about his intellect, and lashing out at his friends whenever they show any concern for his behavior or call him on his recklessness. Yet at the same time it's abundantly clear that it's out of his inability to handle the loss and it's later confirmed that he's so angry at Steve because Steve constantly risking his life makes him terrified of losing him too. He finally drops it when he and Steve reconcile.
• Speech-Impeded Love Interest: Inverted. He is a central character in the show with a notable lisp, and in Season 3 it's revealed he has a girlfriend in Utah, Suzie.
• Speech Impediment: Has a prominent lisp because a few of his front teeth are missing.
• Stalker with a Crush: He and Lucas spy on the new girl (Max) because they are enamored with her after she beat their high score on Dig Dug. She finds this rather annoying at first.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: How Dustin describes his relationship with Suzie, in Season 3, due to the distance and disapproving parents.
• Static Character: Of the Party members, he changes the least from seasons 1 through 4. Mike develops into a devoted boyfriend, Will struggles with his sexuality and develops as an artist, Lucas takes up basketball to try to get the Party in with the popular crowd, El learns about the world outside the lab and explores her sense of identity, and Max becomes depressed and socially withdrawn due to the trauma of Billy's death. Dustin just grows into more of the same: a lovable, talkative nerd.
• Sweet Tooth: When the boys are preparing to search for Will, he brings an assortment of snacks, much of it junk food. When the group is later hiding out in the school gymnasium during S1 Chapter 8, Dustin decides to go find where lunch lady Phyllis hides the chocolate pudding.
• Themed Tattoos: A variation in the epilogue. After he grows up and goes to college, Dustin gets a replica of Eddie's bat tattoos on his arm as a tribute to his fallen friend.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: After Max chooses Lucas, and multiple girls reject Dustin at the Snow Ball, Nancy steps in to dance with him, showing up the girls that rejected him and reassuring him when the girls grow up, they'll be lucky to have him.
• Took a Level in Cynic: Watching Eddie die, then seeing most of the city continue to falsely vilify him, and in some cases even blame him for the disaster that struck Hawkins, and his other friends doing little to nothing to keep Eddie's spirit and the Hellfire Club alive has clearly had a big effect on Dustin in Season 5. He's much more surly, serious, combative, and argumentative than he's ever been depicted as before, provoking the basketball team and ignoring the advice of his friends to de-escalate, feeling like doing so would be disrespectful to Eddie's memory. Deconstructed when Steve finally has enough of Dustin's self-destruction, and gives him a blistering "The Reason You Suck" Speech, laying out that Dustin has been driving people away and bringing violence on himself, and how his recklessness is at least partially responsible for their current predicament when they needed him most. When Steve brings up Eddie's death and outright tells Dustin that Eddie brought it on himself, Dustin hits his Rage Breaking Point and violently attacks Steve, who overpowers Dustin very easily. Steve decides that if Dustin wants to keep acting like a cynical loner who'll just blows off his living friends while remaining focused on "keeping Eddie's memory alive", even attacking his own friends in a blind rage, then their friendship doesn't mean anything to Dustin anymore and blows him off. In the last minute before Steve could do something that would've gotten him killed, Dustin stops him and finally drops his cynic facade, tearfully confessing that he doesn't want to lose his friends like how he lost Eddie and apologizes for his behavior, reverting back to his old persona.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Downplayed. While still a well-meaning kid overall, years of gaining confidence and more or less proving himself right renders him a bit more sharp-tongued, irritable, and conceited after Season 1, compared to the (foul-mouthed) Nice Guy he was previously. This culminates in Season 5 where Dustin is shown to have become a lot more sullen, snarky and unpleasant, due to Eddie's death weighing heavily on his mind. He's shown to be dismissive of Steve asking him for help on how to deal with technical difficulties over the radio, intentionally provokes fights at school by flaunting his Hellfire Club shirt despite it being unpopular, and acting petty and dickish towards Mike, Will and Lucas, his closest friends. It's all but stated that Eddie's death is weighing heavily on his mind, and thus influencing his behavior. This gets deconstructed as Dustin's recklessness causes several problems for his friends, even resulting in one of their crawl missions to go awry due to Dustin's absence, as he was beaten up by bullies he provoked earlier. He even instigates a physical fight with Steve, who eventually has enough of Dustin's attitude and calls him out for his self-destruction.
• Trademark Favorite Food: The nougat in 3 Musketeers bars, a trait he shares with Dart.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: There's no way of knowing how the story of him and his friends would have unfolded if he hadn't challenged Will to that race at the start of the series.

Lucas Charles Sinclair

^{Click here to see his appearance in the Season 5 epilogue} "Suck it, Armstrong!"

Played By: Caleb McLaughlin

Voiced By: Elisha Williams (Tales from '85)

Debut: "Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers" (1x01)

Mike's childhood friend, next-door neighbor, and classmate, who is apprehensive about the prospect of collaborating with Eleven in the search for Will.

• '80s Hair: He has a short but very distinct fade when he starts high school as an attempt to fit in with the more popular kids. By Season 4, it's grown to a spectacular late-80s flattop.
• Agent Scully: To contrast Dustin, Lucas tends to show the most doubt and is the most distrusting of Eleven and her powers.
• Badass Adorable: Is willing to strap himself up like a soldier, climb trees, and scout out a government facility if it means a chance at saving his friend. All while not being old enough to drive.
• Badasses Wear Bandanas: Lucas is a very action-oriented member of The Party, and dons a camo bandanna whenever things start getting dangerous.
• Beta Couple: Even though they're said to have constant (unserious) breakups, he and Max are comparatively more stable than the other kids' relationships. Out of both the Party and the teenage cast, they're the only couple still clearly together by the Series Finale and it's heavily implied by Mike's wrap-up narration that they'll go the distance and start a life together
• Beware the Nice Ones: When Jason's thirst for vengeance threatens to doom Max, Lucas stops trying to be a people-pleaser and gets into a punch-up with the Jerk Jock.
• The Big Guy: Lucas is the strongest and most physically capable of the boys.
• Big Ol' Eyebrows: He has a thick pair of unobscured eyebrows, which come in handy for the Fascinating Eyebrow.
• Birds of a Feather: He and Max are both caustic and snarky individuals with hearts of gold. It's no wonder they get along so well.
• Black and Nerdy: He's black and a nerd like the rest of his friends. In Season 4, his nerdiness starts to bother him, and he tries out for basketball in the hopes of fitting in with a more conventional crowd.
• The Blind Leading the Blind: He's Mike's love adviser in Season 3. While both are young and inexperienced in relationships, and much of Lucas's advice is immature and backfires on Mike, Lucas has managed to maintain a steady if on-off romance with Max, and unlike Mike, spots a tell from Eleven that indicates she dislikes being broken up as much as Mike does and wants to get back together.
• Blood Knight: In their opening D&D campaign, Lucas encourages Will to strike down enemies with fireballs instead of using protection spells. In Chapter 8, when the boys defeat the Thessalhydra in a new game, he's the one who gleefully cuts off its seven heads.
• Blue Oni: To Mike Wheeler's Red Oni. First most evident in the fact that he doesn't want as much to do with El as everyone else, preferring to stay out of it; even more evident in Season 3 when he and Mike have girlfriends, and Lucas is much more chill about letting Max have her own way, while Mike is much more impetuous.
• Brats with Slingshots: In their pursuit to find Will in Season 1, Lucas wields a wrist rocket in case they run into the Demogorgon. He doesn't use it until Chapter 8, but proves to be a very good shot, as every rock he fires hits the Demogorgon, though this has little to no effect on it, until El steps in. He also uses it again in Season 3 against Billy during the sauna test, stunning Billy with a direct hit to the face, and in the finale by shooting balloons to distract the Mindflayer. In Season 5, he tag teams with Mike by slingshotting fuel at the Mindflayer, which Mike ignites with a flare gun.
• Bruiser with a Soft Center: Lucas is tough and no-nonsense, but he still has a sweet side and takes care of his friends.
• Brutal Honesty: Doesn't mince words and says what's on his mind. He also never hesitates to criticize someone if he thinks they're wrong. Friends don't lie, indeed.
• Cassandra Truth: He relays the supernatural events of Season 1 to Max, and she initially thinks it's just an interesting story.
• Catchphrase: "Theoretically".
• Character Development: In Season 1, he starts out as wary and distrustful of Eleven and her abilities but grows to trust and befriend her by the end.
• Childhood Friend: As Dustin points out, Mike, Will, and Lucas basically grew up together. Dustin joined after.
• The Comically Serious: Often comes off as such, especially around Steve and Robin.
• Crazy-Prepared: When preparing to fight The Demogorgon in Season 1, he brings a lot of weapons, including a slingshot, though they're all completely ineffective against the monster. Played much more effectively in Season 3 when Lucas spots a large display of dangerous fireworks during a store raid, and with El injured from their last fight, convinces the Party to bring them along as support weapons. The fireworks later become critical in suppressing the Mind Flayer, saving El from getting flayed and buying more time to close the gate.
• Deadpan Snarker: In line with his Action Hero personality and being the Only Sane Man of the group, Lucas has a penchant for sarcastic quips and rejoinders. It's also present in his nonvocal mannerisms.
• Determinator: Lucas never wavers from the boys' search to find Will, and almost ventures into the Upside-Down all by himself in order to rescue him.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: When the boys and a passed-out Eleven are cornered by Brenner in Hawkins Middle School, they all step in front of her prepared to fight, but Lucas takes it a step further and commands the government agents to "eat shit!". Done literally in Season 3 when Lucas yells "Flay this, you ugly piece of shit!" before lobbing a firebomb into the Mind Flayer's mouth.
• Dislikes the New Guy: Of the trio, Lucas is quite vocal over his dislike and suspicions of El early on, mainly because Mike is paying more attention to her.
• Epic Hail: Warns Mike, Dustin, and Eleven through a walkie-talkie that Brenner and company are coming after them in S1 Chapter 7, whilst yelling that "the bad men are coming".
• Establishing Character Moment: When playing Dungeons & Dragons with his friends, Lucas is the first into the fray and urges Will to take the offensive with a risky fireball spell. Later, he tells Will that if Mike didn't see the roll, then it shouldn't count. This displays his logical nature as well as his courage in battle. It also shows that Lucas isn't afraid to bend the rules a little.
• Everyone Has Standards: Whatever friendship Jason and Lucas once shared is gone by the Season 4 finale, with Lucas regretting even trying to be like Jason and calling him a “raging psychopath” before beating him unconscious in self-defense. Yet when Jason is torn apart by the gate opening, Lucas can only look on in horror and even sadness.
• Eye Scream:
  • Brings along his slingshot and several rocks as ammo with the intention of blinding whatever took away Will via a well-placed shot in its eyes. It turns out that the monster is completely blind, rendering this pragmatic aim useless.
  • In the first episode of Season 3, Lucas takes Dustin's hairspray bomb right in the eyes...and screams.
• Fairy Tale Motif:
  • Lucas's single-minded focus on finding Will, combing the woods by himself, and proficiency with a long-range weapon all bear semblance to the Ranger class from Dungeons & Dragons. He's also very good at scouting, tracking, and spying — even owning a pair of binoculars, and this is how Mike describes his dynamic in the Party to Max. However, he plays as a Knight in their D&D campaign.
  • That single-mindedness is also analogous to Rangers, who in some D&D editions can only be Chaotic Good, an alignment that does good deeds with little regard for how their actions or intentions might affect others.
• Fatal Fireworks: He jury-rigs fireworks into firebombs to use in their fight against the Mind Flayer’s avatar.
• First Kiss: Has his with Max in Season 2.
• Friendly Sniper: Lucas has impeccable aim with projectiles and isn't afraid to show it. He is also jocular, reliable, fiercely loyal, and endearingly nerdy to boot.
• Friend Versus Lover: Dustin at least believes this is part of why Lucas is more hostile to Eleven than the rest of the group. He's Mike's best friend, but all Mike wants to do is spend time with Eleven.
• Groin Attack: Gives Billy a well-deserved one in the Season 2 finale.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: To the casual observer, bringing a wrist rocket into battle against monsters from another world would seem ill-advised. However, this never stopped Lucas from trying, and Season 3 finally sees him putting it to good use. He temporarily incapacitates a possessed Billy Hargrove when the latter is trapped in "The Sauna Test". Later, Lucas ensures everyone's escape from Starcourt Mall by distracting the Meat Flayer in "The Battle of Starcourt".
• Hormone-Addled Teenager: In Season 4 Erica threatens to tell Dustin about the gross thing that Lucas keeps under his bed, implying it's of a sexual nature and would be devastating if Dustin knew.
• Hot-Blooded: Lucas is fiercely devoted, passionate and intense in what he sets his mind to. While not physically the biggest and possessing no superpowers, Lucas is strong-willed and possesses a fierceness the other boys lack, often acting as the backbone of the group. When the Demogorgon is closing in on them in Hawkins Middle in Season 1, everyone turns to Lucas to fend it off with his slingshot.
• Hyper-Awareness:
  • His suspicious nature makes him vigilant enough to pick up on things that his friends don't notice, as shown when he realizes that Eleven is using her powers to disrupt the boys' compasses in "The Flea and the Acrobat". In "The Monster", he discovers that the mysterious "Hawkins Power & Light" van parked outside his house is one of the many stationed at Hawkins Lab, the location of The Gate.
  • In the final season, Lucas is the first to realize that Vecna is not just randomly abducting kids. He is targeting specific kids for an unknown goal. And that the dates of the abductions are the same dates when Will was kidnapped. Leading the group to realize that they were quickly heading towards an unknown endgame.
  • When in the Abyss he spots in the distance some high ground as well as a narrow opening. That not only can be used to trap the Mind Flayer but allow Nancy’s group the ability to attack from above, while giving them the manoeuvrability to dodge counterattacks.
• Insult of Endearment: Max calls Lucas "Stalker" angrily after noticing the guys are following her around, but once she decides to join their group, she repurposes "Stalker" as a playful nickname.
• In with the "In" Crowd: For the first couple episodes of Season 4, Lucas prioritizes his new friendship with the basketball team, especially when his game-winning shot makes him the toast of the whole school. However, when things heat up he quickly realizes that the basketball players, and Jason in particular, are not to be trusted and returns to his true friends.
• I Will Find You: Sets out to find Will on his own in Season 1 after El sabotages the boys' search in an effort to keep them safe.
• Jerkass Realization: Initially, he is pretty cruel in his comments to Eleven about her being a traitor or weirdo, but he is just a young kid who understandably sees her behavior, powers, and knowledge of Will as suspicious. When he finds out he was wrong, he apologizes to El for his actions.
• The Lancer: Serves as Mike's primary foil within the main group of kids, providing a healthy dose of skepticism to Mike's claims. He's also most frequently at odds with Mike over the search for Will and in his doubts about Eleven. However, he's nonetheless steadfastly loyal to his friends. Lucas is the Party's Ranger, a warrior class known for long-ranged combat, just as Lucas is devoted to his wrist rocket.
• Light Is Good: "Lucas" is a Latin name that means "light", and Lucas is a heroic individual. When faced with threatening foes while playing Dungeons & Dragons in Season 1, he counsels Will to rely on fireball spells. In Season 3, he hatches a strategy to use fireworks on the Meat Flayer, as this would generate enough heat to weaken it and give everyone more to finish their respective missions.
• Lock-and-Load Montage: Gets one in Season 1 when he sets out to save Will by himself, following a brief fall-out with Dustin and Mike.
• Lovable Jock: In Season 4, he joins Hawkins High School's basketball team. Unlike his teammates (who despise Eddie and Hellfire), he still remains close with his fellow Party members and the Hellfire Club despite their misfit, outsider status in the school's social sphere. Eventually, he rejects them when they begin setting up a Witch Hunt against Eddie and fully throws his lot back in with his friends.
• Made of Iron: Takes a Steve Harrington level of punishment from Jason in Season 4, but is still able to make a comeback and knock him out.
• Military Brat: His father fought in the Vietnam War, and Lucas views him as a hero.
• Mr. Exposition: Acts as one to Max when she gets fed up with the secrets the group is keeping from her. He spills the beans on what's really going on in Hawkins, which acts as a recap for the viewer.
• Nerves of Steel: Being a kid, he's not immune to fear or panic, but Lucas can show stoicism and admirable endurance in the face of adversity — whether it's staring down a Demogorgon or being attacked by Billy Hargrove. He also pulls a Bait-and-Switch on the gang of jocks who aren't just going to "talk to Eddie" in Season 4, leading them to Hopper's cabin and high tailing it out of there, at great risk to himself.
• Nice Guy: Despite taking the longest to warm up to Eleven, he is actually a very kind-hearted person and a true friend. This is ultimately what makes Max fall for him in Season 2.
• Offscreen Breakup: As mentioned in "The Mall Rats," Max has dumped Lucas on five separate occasions between Seasons 2 and 3. She dumps him again prior to Season 4.
• Oh, Crap!: When he sees the small army of Brenner's men drive towards his neighborhood to intercept his friends in Season 1.
• One True Love; Even after Max splits up with him, Lucas never moves on. By the end of Season 4, Max is more dead than alive and Lucas waits by her hospital bed hoping she'll eventually wake up again.
• Only Sane Man: He's the only one of the friends who recognizes just how insane the occurrences happening around Hawkins are, and usually takes the most direct approach to solving a problem. This doesn't always work out.
• Pocket Rocket Launcher: Lucas uses his wrist rocket when faced off against creatures of the unknown. Dustin even makes sure he brings it along in Season 2.
• Puppy Love: He develops a crush on Max in Season 2 and they become an Official Couple by season's end.
• Relationship Revolving Door: He tells Mike that Max has broken up with him on five different occasions, yet they always come back together.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: As shown when Max jumps the Party on Halloween, and with his reaction when she's driving.
• Sibling Team: He and Erica start to work more closely together in the last third of Season 4, even getting a scene where they do a little one-on-one sibling bonding while making spears together.
• The Spock: He is the most logical member of the group, the best example being him bringing along tools and even weapons when the boys go out searching for Will, whereas Dustin exclusively loads up on snacks and food. He is also very skeptical towards the weirdness they encounter during the series.
• Stalker with a Crush: He and Dustin spy on the new girl Max in the Season 2 opener. She finds this rather annoying at first.
• Street Smart: Lucas is a realist who tends to bring a hefty amount of common sense and critical thinking skills to the table. He is not easily deceived and is careful where he puts his trust.
• Sympathy for the Devil: Even after defecting from the basketball team due to their witch hunt for Eddie, Lucas still has some care for them, showing sadness at Patrick and even Jason’s death’s.
• This Means Warpaint: In Season 2, he wears black war paint on his face along with his bandana when he suits up for the action.
• Token Minority: Lucas is the only black main character before his sister Erica joined the main cast in Season 3. He's also quite put out that Mike expected him to be the Winston Zeddemore of their Ghostbusters Halloween costumes, while Mike insists it's not because he's black. However as a positive example, he has his own character development and arc like his friends.
• Took a Level in Kindness: When Lucas first meets Eleven, he doesn't think she can be trusted and singles her out as a "weirdo". After witnessing Eleven defend him, Mike, and Dustin from Brenner's forces in S1 Chapter 7, he realizes that he was wrong and apologizes to her, becoming her friend. After this, Lucas does everything in his power to protect Eleven from the bad men and The Demogorgon. From Season 2 onward, he's a lot less of a caustic jerk, his sarcastic comments are more jokes and actual jabs, and he saves his actual anger and vitriol for actual monsters as opposed to "weirdos".
• Undying Loyalty: Is very protective of his friends, and will brave any force that puts them in danger.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Dustin is one of his best friends, but the two are never short on sarcastic jabs at each other. He also has this relationship with his little sister, constantly arguing but loving and respecting one another deep down.
• Walking Armory: Opts to carry a hammer, a bayonet, and a wrist-mounted slingshot when going on the lookout for the Demogorgon. He also sports surplus ammo pouches when he goes off on his own.
• White Gal on Black Guy Drama: Billy treats Lucas with barely-concealed racial prejudice, and is not happy at all when he and Max begin to explore a romantic relationship. Luckily, nobody besides Billy gives them grief over it.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: When Max reveals that she's scared of being similar to Billy, he tells her that she's much better than that.

Eleven / "El" / Jane Hopper (née Ives)

^{Click here to see her appearance in Season 3} "Bitchin'."

^{Click here to see her last appearance in Season 5} "You became my dad. But I’m not a kid anymore"

Played By: Millie Bobby Brown, Martie Marie Blair (young) ^{Foreign voice actors} Clara Soares (European French), Rie Kugimiya (Japanese)

Voiced By: Brooklyn Davey Norstedt (Tales from '85)

Debut: "Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers" (1x01)

A mysterious young girl with psychokinetic powers found by Mike and his friends the day after Will's disappearance. As the series goes on, Eleven's backstory is gradually brought to light. Her original name was Jane Ives and she was acquired by Hawkins Laboratory as part of their research into superhumans. Through numerous encounters with the Upside Down, Eleven finds herself regaining what was denied to her from the start; family, friends and love.

• '80s Hair: By Season 3, her hair has grown out to a chin-length curly bob (a la Molly Ringwald) which she wears with either a side parting or held up with colorful scrunchies. In Season 4, she also sports longer hair with heavy bangs, until it is shaved off.
• Action Girl: Thanks to her psychic powers, Eleven is able to fight off attackers by either moving objects into their path, breaking their bones with telekinesis, or even melting their brains with her mind. Her personal kill count is well into double figures. Season 5 has her running physical gauntlets under Hopper and Joyce's supervision so she can be physically adept as well.
• Actually Pretty Funny: When she and Max use El's abilities to spy on their ex-boyfriends after their temporary breakup, she catches Mike and Lucas right before they engage in a burp-and-fart contest. El immediately tears her blindfold off, looks at Max with a horrified expression on her face... and bursts out laughing.
• Allegorical Character: While she has plenty of character outside of that, she's also a symbol for childhood: emerging in the world as almost a blank slate in season 1 before gaining friendships, having a relationship, and slowly growing up over the seasons until she finally admits she's "not a kid anymore" in season 5. Her loss marks the end of childhood for the Party, and it's left ambiguous if she is truly dead or still out there but permanently beyond their reach.
• All-Loving Hero: El is shown to be a deeply loving and compassionate person who fights to protect her family and friends. Made most prominent in Season 4, where she is literally shown to draw on The Power of Love to gain the upper hand during her fight with Vecna. Notably, as much as El has every reason to hate Angela, she is visibly horrified when she realises that she bashed her face in out of anger (as up to this point she had never seriously harmed another outside of self-defence). Similarly, a flashback shows her looking the most concerned out of all the kids at watching Brenner torturing Two, despite the fact that he beat her to a pulp. Even with people she absolutely hates, El can’t stand to watch them suffer.
• Ambiguous Ending: The series ends with El either having perished in the Upside Down to ensure the government can never obtain her blood for further experiments or having secretly escaped to a far off place where she can finally live in peace. Either way, the rest of the main characters will never know for sure and they know it's likely they'll never see her again.
• Appropriated Appellation: Eleven's legal name is Jane, though she primarily answers to the number she was given at the Hawkins Lab, or by "El" for short. Notably, Kali is the only person to ever call her Jane, due to her disdain for everything relating to their shared past.
• Backported Development: In Season 4, we get to see flashbacks to Eleven's time living in Hawkins Laboratory while under Dr. Brenner's care. In Season 1, Eleven was shown to be very unfamiliar with social cues and had a stilted vocabulary due to her sheltered life, yet she's shown speaking full sentences and understanding things quite well during the flashback sequences. Justified, as after fighting and banishing Henry/One to Dimension X, it's shown she developed amnesia that would render her developmental skills to where they were in Season 1.
• Badass Adorable: A sweet, vulnerable girl who, whilst generally being very even-tempered and timid, nonetheless readily unleashes her deadly psychokinetic powers in defense of her friends.
• Badass Boast: Rarely gives these but definitely does when she crosses paths with Vecna years after their last confrontation.
  Eleven: If you touch her again, I will kill you, again.
• Bad Liar: Played with, as it comes with her complete deprivation from socialization. Due to this shortcoming, she's usually unable to respond effectively to accusations of lying. When she's forced to tamper with the boys' compasses in order to keep them away from the gate, she gives herself away by wiping her nosebleed with her coat.
• Because You Were Nice to Me:
  • Meeting Mike, Lucas, and Dustin and being their friend is unlike anything she had experienced before, so she becomes fiercely protective of them.
  • This is one of the reasons she avenges Benny Hammond by finally (and graphically) killing Connie Frazier.
  • Ultimately, having experienced real niceness is also what helps her see what Kali offers for the flawed, dead-end relationship it is, despite first appearances implying they'd share a similar dynamic. Without the genuine article to compare with and go back to, she might not have. What is rather sad is that Kali probably didn't get any real niceness aimed her way, so she doesn't quite understand the difference, herself.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Her sweet-natured and mellow personality is genuine, but so is the fiery temper she has deep down; push her too far and this girl will not hesitate to melt your brain with a literal Death Glare. Also overlaps with Beware the Quiet Ones.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Levitates Mike when Troy forces him to jump off a cliff, before breaking Troy's arm and driving both him and James off. Later, in "The Upside-Down", she single handedly kills nearly a dozen agents that are about to gun down her friends.
  • In "The Mind Flayer", she arrives at the last minute to kill a Demo-dog that seemingly has the rest of the main cast cornered.
  • In "The Bite", she saves Steve, Robin, Dustin, and Erica from Russian soldiers by splattering them with the mall's display car.
• The Big Damn Kiss: Two with Mike. The first is at the end of Season 1, and the second is during the finale of Season 2.
• Big Eater: To start — El helps herself to a basket of fries, and later a burger and some ice cream at Benny's. She also eats all the snacks Dustin brings over to Mike's house (minus an apple) for their confrontation with the monster. Finally, in Chapter 6, she cleans out several boxes of Eggo waffles, as eating is later noted to be the best way replenish her energy after using her powers.
• The Big Guy: While Lucas may be the physically strongest of the kids, it's Eleven whose mental powers are a force to be reckoned with. They make her the most powerful member of the Party, able to casually snap a bully's arm, or liquefy someone's brain. Mike describes Eleven as the Party's Mage, reflecting her supernatural powers.
• Big Little Sister: Eleven has become taller than Kali by Season 5.
• Big "NO!": In "Will the Wise", after Hopper unplugs the TV and takes away her privileges to use it, followed by a Rapid-Fire "No!" as she tries to get it working again.
• Blessed with Suck: She was born with her psychic powers and was trained to hone them to current strength level...at the cost of her family, early childhood, and innocence. After her clash with the Mind Flayer in Starcourt Mall - during which she sustained extensive physical and emotional trauma - Eleven's powers go dormant.
• Blindfolded Vision: Often covers her eyes to improve her ability to see visions.
• Blown Across the Room: Eleven is capable of doing this to anyone with her psychic powers. Lucas, Mike, and the Demogorgon all get their share of it.
• Boyish Short Hair: In Season 1, she has a buzz-cut as a result of her being a laboratory test subject. It can be difficult to discern a prepubescent girl with short hair from a boy, making her a red herring for the missing Will. It also adds to the perception of her as a weird outsider and they have to hide her buzz-cut with a wig when out in public. Has some shades of Bald Mystic as well, since because of the experimentation she has telekinetic abilities. By Season 2, enough time has passed for her hair to grow out, and by Seasons 3 and 4 it's shoulder-length. Brenner and Owens’ attempt to restore her powers in Season 4 involves shaving her hair back down to its Season 1 state.
• Bratty Teenage Daughter: Downplayed, but her relationship with Hopper resembles this in Season 3 and some of Season 2, where she obsesses over using the television and will often throw tantrums if he tries to stop her, or when he tries to split her up with Mike.
• Brought Down to Normal:
  • Eleven exhausts herself exerting her powers over the course of Season 3, using them even while sporting a leg injury. The epilogue reveals that even 3 months later she's completely burned out, though it may be temporary as Mike believes they'll come back sooner or later. Her nose still bleeds from the effort, so she hasn't exactly lost whatever makes it possible.
  • In Season 4, Vecna reveals that it wasn't her exhausting herself: the physical avatar of the Mind Flayer was constructed for the primary purpose of stealing Eleven's powers in order to enhance his own. She loses them after it absorbs some of her blood from her injury – her last successful use of telekinesis was pulling the piece of Mind Flayer tissue that tried to take her over from the inside out of the wound on her ankle.
• Bullying the Dragon: She's the dragon, in this case, but Eleven is constantly being targeted by people she could easily tear apart with her mind. Season 4 makes this somewhat literal when she's bullied in her new school by resident Alpha Bitch, Angela, and though Eleven doesn't have her powers anymore she's still got a history of using violence. Flashbacks also show she was bullied by the other Brenner kids, particularly Two, despite being the strongest and most powerful of them, never mind Brenner's favourite.
• Calling Parents by Their Name: Jim Hopper is her adoptive father by the end of Season 2 but she keeps calling him "Hopper" or "Hop". Justified in that the only person she called "Papa" is the villain Martin Brenner who experimented on her since she was a child.
• Calling the Old Man Out:
  • Calls out her "Papa" in the first season finale with just one word: "Bad."
  • Does it to Hopper in Season 2 when he won't let her leave. Even going so far as to compare him to Brenner.
• Cast from Hit Points: Using her Psychic Powers causes fatigue and can eventually knock her out if she overextends herself. There's also an element of Cast from Calories, as it's explicitly stated more than once that eating helps her to "recharge".
• Catchphrase:
  • "Friends don't lie", which is a phrase that Mike originally taught to her. She parrots it back at him on several occasions, usually to get him to open up when he's being secretive.
  • "Promise".
• Character Development:
  • In the first season, Eleven is quiet, and easily frightened. By Season 2, she has become more aggressive and open about her feelings. By Season 3 she acts like any ordinary teenage girl.
  • Eleven at first wanted to use her powers to hurt the ones who hurt her, but later chooses to use them to protect the loved ones in her life.
  • Her first big fight with Mike prompts her to reach out to Max, who helps her become more independent and encourages her to express herself more.
  • Season 4 sees El move from an I Just Want to Be Normal position where she's (poorly) repressing her trauma and differences from other kids, to realizing that she needs to accept these parts of herself and deal with her traumatic memories to move forward.
• Character Tics: Whenever Eleven uses her powers to break someone's bones, she sharply jerks her head to one side. The first time we see it is when she snaps an abusive orderly's neck before her escape, and it comes up again later when she breaks Troy's arm. Her Kubrick Stare when using her telepathy also qualifies. Season 4 implies that she picked it up as a repressed memory of witnessing One violently kill several guards once his psychic powers were unleashed, finishing off the last one with a similar head jerk/Neck Snap movement.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Eleven doesn't like Max a lot because she saw Max and Mike hanging out alone during Season 2. She gets angry about Mike's not-quite friendship with Max, and psychically knocks her off her skateboard. Ironically, Mike didn't like Max at the time either. In Season 3 she and Max finally bury the hatchet after Eleven asks her for advice about boys, and they become firm friends.
• Combat Pragmatist: Not usually, as she always relies on her powers for combat, but if she can't use them she won't hesitate to grab a roller skate and whack you across the face with it, or even a defibrillator.
• Conditional Powers: She is extremely powerful mentally, but is hindered by normal bodily limits. This is usually manifested by bruising and ruptures in her mucosal capillaries, causing either nose or ear canal bleeding. She faints whenever she overexerts herself.
• Create Your Own Villain: Season 4 reveals that she did this unintentionally when she banished murderous telekinetic Henry Creel, aka One, to the Upside Down, resulting in One's transformation into the monstrous Humanoid Abomination, Vecna.
• Creepy Child: In Season 1, she barely speaks and her entire body language is that of a skittish and scared animal. She also has no idea how to interact with regular people. Being raised as a subject of study in a laboratory will do that. Did we mention she has telekinetic powers?
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Hardly anyone of any dimension is able to stand up to her insane psychic powers; human opponents typically meet a swift end as her preferred method of dispatch is breaking their necks.
• Daddy's Girl: She becomes one in Season 2 to Hopper after a year living together, some healthy, plentiful bickering, and her going "runaway-train" on him. When he ends up (apparently) dying in Season 3, she is utterly devastated.
• Daddy's Little Villain: Unwillingly to Brenner, whom she calls "Papa". But she breaks out of it and gets better at the end of Season 1 and beginning of Season 2.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Stolen from her birth mother, raised as a weapon by Brenner's group, and put through emotionally grueling training, all before she was 12 years old.
• David vs. Goliath: She's Unskilled, but Strong with her powers. This means that whenever she's fighting Vecna in Season 4 who is really 001 from Hawkins Lab is apparently weaker in raw power but much more trained in using it, it becomes a battle of his greater skill and her greater strength. Her raw power and love, which is incomprehensible to him, overpowers him.
• Death Glare: Even when she isn't angry, she can look pretty intense. When she is angry... well, given the choice between facing the Demogorgon or being on the receiving end of one of El's glares, you'd be entirely justified to take the Demogorgon...
  • She gives a great one when she walks up on Troy and James blackmailing Mike into jumping off a cliff by threatening Dustin with a knife. Troy winds up fleeing the scene with a broken arm.
  • When she, Mike, Dustin, and Lucas are cornered by government agents in Hawkins Middle, her stare-down is made all the more disturbing by the fact that it's accompanied by her telekinetically crushing the agents' brains.
  • Her face when, after years of abuse, she finally snaps and kills two orderlies in Hawkins Lab when they try to force her into solitary confinement is horrifying. The amount of anger and hatred radiating from her in that moment is virtually indescribable.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Breaking the neck of and killing an orderly and sending another orderly into a wall full force and killing them both for trying to take her back to solitary confinement when she could have just incapacitated them. On a smaller scale, sending Max flying from her skateboard just for being in the same breathing space as Mike also counts. Smashing her Season 3 school bully Angela in the face with a roller blade boot is extreme, but she could have done worse if she still had her powers.
• The Dog Bites Back: Treat her (or someone close to her) horribly, and she will eventually get back at you, Brenner, Troy, and Angela are a few prime examples.
• Emotionless Girl: Deconstructed. El doesn't show a great deal of emotion in Season 1, then by Season 2 seems hardened by her experiences, but she becomes much more emotional in Season 3 as she gets re-assimilated into the Party.
• Escaped from the Lab: She escaped from Hawkins Laboratory where experiments were being performed on her.
• Establishing Character Moment: Is first shown in a tattered hospital gown, shaved head, and eats with almost no table manners, making it clear that she's a troubled young girl and something horrible happened or has been happening to her. She subsequently reveals her powers when she turns off a fan with a Kubrick Stare.
• Expository Hairstyle Change: She has a shaved buzz-cut for all of Season 1 before it grows out in Season 2. In the second half of season 4, her hair is shaved off once again during her sensory deprivation "training", and Season 5 sees her keeping her new hair in a low bun.
• Extremely Protective Child:
  • To her mother, Terry Ives. It begins when she tracks Terry down, who shares her memories with Eleven; this reveals to Eleven that Terry never stopped looking and fighting for her until she was forcibly silenced by Brenner. After this, Eleven shows a strong desire to get vengeance on the people who hurt her mother, and the memory of her own birth and then Terry's separation from her gives her the power to destroy One/Henry Creel and cause him to be recreated as Vecna.
  • To her adoptive father Hopper; in Season 4, despite taking multiple insults from Angela, it's only after Angela insults Hopper's name that Eleven grabs a roller skate and clocks her in the face with it, giving the girl a broken nose and a concussion.
• Extreme Melee Revenge: How she deals with Angela for publicly antagonizing and humiliating her at the skating rink: clobbering her in the face with a roller skate, drawing a lot of blood, and possibly causing a minor concussion — all because Angela ruined her date with Mike.
• Fairy Tale Motif: El's powerful and otherworldly abilities, which were a talent she was born with and honed via practice, is similar to the Sorcerer class in Dungeons & Dragons, and In-Universe Mike has assigned her the role as the mage for their party.
• Feet-First Introduction: Her feet are shown in the first shot of her appearance in Season 1.
• Freak Out: Does this in "The Bathtub" when she sees Barb's body, complete with a demo-slug oozing from her mouth.
• Girliness Upgrade: El's shaved head and hospital gown leads to her being mistaken for a boy by several characters in Season 1, which inadvertently helps Hopper reveal the Lab's conspiracy. The boys dress her up in one of Nancy's old dresses and give her a wig, but she eventually ditches the latter, which leaves her with a distinctly androgynous look. In Season 2, she mostly wears her hair in a tomboyish mop once it grows in, paired with jeans or overalls provided by Hopper. "Punk El" from later in the season has more feminine elements with lots of makeup, but is still a rather hard-edged Joan Jett sort of masculine look. However, by Season 3, her hair is even longer, and her style becomes more recognizably feminine after her trip to the mall with Max.
• Glass Cannon: Her combat capabilities are formidable but almost purely offensive in nature, and she's not particularly resistant to physical damage. Maybe a bit more than the other children, but much less than any combat-trained adult. Further, when she pushes her powers to the limit she can exhaust herself, sometimes to the point of falling unconscious.
• Guest Fighter: She appears as a skin for Scylla in Smite, and also came to Dead by Daylight in the second "Stranger Things" chapter.
• Handicapped Badass: Of the mental variety, though not in a literal sense.
  • Eleven has spent her entire life locked away in a laboratory, and therefore suffers from an extreme lack of social skills, as well as a basic understanding of how the world works. As a result, she is quite naïve, timid and has a limited vocabulary. And while she has improved greatly over the years, it's likely that spending her entire early childhood in the lab has left her with a permanent social learning disability of some kind. Don't underestimate her ability to pose a threat however, as she can and will use her psychokinetic powers to epic and often deadly use.
  • A lifetime in the lab where she was trained to be essentially a living weapon hasn't left El with great emotional control. It is particularly challenging for Hopper in Season 2 trying to "parent" El when she is both willing and able to throw him across a room whenever she gets frustrated. As late as Season 4, she struggles to handle negative emotions, spiraling into self-loathing, tears, and anger in response to her school bullies, even when Mike points out that they're nobodies and have no idea who she really is.
• Happily Adopted: By the end of Season 2, Hopper adopts her and their growing bond over the season shows she doesn't mind. At the end of Season 3, Eleven is adopted again by Joyce after Hopper is presumed dead, though this is less happy as Eleven is still mourning Hopper. Season 4 reveals that although she's still missing Hopper, she thinks of Will and Jonathan as her stepbrothers (and vice versa), and Joyce as her stepmother, so her home life is at least nurturing.
• Heroic Bastard: Implied. There's no mention of her mother being married at the time of El's birth, which is confirmed in the novel, Suspicious Minds, as her parents were not married when Terry became pregnant with El.
• Heroic BSoD: Falls into this right after she hits her Season 3 school bully Angela in the face with a roller skate for humiliating her. It gets worse after her ensuing fight with Mike the next day, to the point that she can't sufficiently advocate for herself when she's being interrogated by police for the incident.
• Heroic RRoD: Overuse of El's powers tends to start with a Psychic Nosebleed before overflowing into fatigue and eventual fainting spells if she doesn't have the time to rest and recover. In the final two episodes of Season 1, she repeatedly overtaxes her abilities and eventually finds herself unable to walk — unfortunately, the Demogorgon decides to attack her and her friends. In Season 3, she overtaxes her powers to the point where she's Brought Down to Normal.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • In "The Upside-Down", El, already exhausted from repeated use of her powers to protect Mike, Lucas, and Dustin, finds herself faced with the Demogorgon about to kill her friends. In response, she pins it against a wall before disintegrating it, but seemingly dies herself in the process. She's Not Quite Dead, though, and returns in Season 2.
  • Zig-zagged in the series' finale, "The Rightside Up". She stays behind in the Upside Down as it's destroyed to ensure that the experiments which gave birth to her will never be able to repeat. It's left ambiguous whether this did her in or Mike's theory of her survival is true.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Is the shortest of the main cast in Season 1, her adoptive father is over a foot taller than her, and from Season 3 onwards her boyfriend Mike towers over her.
• Humanoid Abomination: The First Shadow strongly hints that El, and the rest of the children Brenner experimented on, have a little bit of Mind Flayer in them, by way of Henry Creel's blood. Henry himself received his powers directly from the Mind Flayer when he vanished and entered Dimension X while still living in Nevada, not long before the Creels moved to Hawkins. As it was Henry's own blood that was the catalyst in transplanting his powers onto others, the implication is strongly there.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: During the first season, she handily devours loads of food, including a few packs of eggos, as it's implied her psychic powers physically drain her and she needs more caloric intake to fuel her powers.
• Hypocrite: Eleven takes Mike's promise of "Friends don't lie" incredibly seriously, to the point where she temporarily dumps him after discovering that he lied about being unable to see her early in Season 3 (albeit due to Hopper's influence). Fast-forward to Season 4, and Eleven chooses to actively deceive Mike into thinking she's a popular girl in California with lots of friends, even when it's far from the truth. Will openly lampshades this, noting that what El's doing will only serve to hurt Mike more than it will help her.
• I Am a Monster: She says this verbatim in Season 1 when she confesses that she opened the portal to the Upside-Down. In Season 3, after brutalising her school bully Angela via a roller skate to the face, this mindset comes back in full force.
• If You Thought That Was Bad...: Her name, Eleven, hints at the possibility that there are more ESP children out there like her doing who knows what. We eventually meet one in Season 2, Kali, and another in Season 4... However, it turns out that the one we meet in Season 4, Henry/001, had slaughtered all the rest of them, except the one we met in Season 2.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: In the series first episode, she flees the facility in the chaos during the Demogorgon's breach and mostly goes here and there to survive. When she is found by Mike, Lucas, and Dustin, she tasks herself to help them with mixed results, as she is extremely socially withdrawn. She eventually warms up to them and they reciprocate, ultimately choosing to sacrifice herself to protect them. She initially keeps trying to protect them by basically holing up with Hopper and pretending not to exist. It ultimately takes a toll on her, him — and them.
• In-Universe Nickname: The kids call her "El" for short.
• I See Dead People: She's able to channel the presence of other people through electrical devices such as speakers and walkie-talkies. Including from the Upside-Down, such as Will.
• It's All My Fault: She holds a lot of guilt from making contact with the Demogorgon. Subverted in Season 4, during most of which Eleven believes, and the viewers are meant to suspect, that she was responsible for the bloody massacre in the Hawkins National Laboratory, of which she has only a few flashes of incongruent memories. However, it is later revealed that far from being the culprit, she defeated and seemingly killed the actual perpetrator, Henry/001.
• Jealous Romantic Witness: She is visibly jealous of Max when she arrives on the scene in Season 2. Mistaking Max spending time with Mike for Mike forgetting about her, she decides to give Max the cold shoulder later on when Max introduces herself as part of the Party. The two eventually warm up to each other in Season 3.
• Killer Rabbit: Eleven doesn't look all that intimidating in Season 1. Her slight frame and short-cropped hair in the first season make her appear quite delicate and vulnerable, and she's ultimately a quiet, young, scared, and confused girl. Hopper's Clueless Deputies even mock Troy after she deals with him at the quarry. But endanger someone she loves, and she will actually reduce your brain to the consistency of oatmeal with a literal Death Glare.
• Kubrick Stare: Eleven does several of these throughout the series, usually before using her psychic powers.
• Lady Looks Like a Dude: Because of her androgynous appearance (too young to be obviously a girl, and has a buzz cut), one of Benny's acquaintances mistakes her for a boy early in Season 1. This later leads to her case getting mixed up with Will's during Hopper's investigation, though it's easier to tell what her real gender is once she starts wearing a dress.
• Like a Daughter to Me: Hopper adopts this view in Season 2, taking care of Eleven for the good part of a year. It's later shown that she does reciprocate the sentiment, and finally Dr. Owens pulls some strings to make the girl Hopper's daughter on paper as a gesture of appreciation for saving his life.
• Little Miss Badass: Only about 12 years old in Season 1, but she is capable of laying waste to squads of armed orderlies and schoolyard bullies alike.
• Little "No": Her response to One's We Can Rule Together speech.
• The Load: Zig-zagged and Played for Drama, since she's normally the opposite, being the only person who can truly protect the other characters from the various supernatural threats they face.
  • Briefly in Season 1, due to the Glass Cannon nature of her powers; after killing the agents who pointed guns at her and her friends (one of whom had casually murdered Benny Hammond in the first episode just for knowing of El's existence), she collapses, and the boys literally carry her to safety when the dead agents' blood attracts the attention of the Demogorgon.
  • Near the end of season 3, she suffers a severe leg injury and loses her powers right as the Mind Flayer is trying to kill her specifically, forcing the other characters to fight to protect her and stop the threat on their own.
• Long-Distance Relationship: Hopper's apparent death and the Byers having to move out of Hawkins forces her and Mike into one of these at the end of Season 3. It faces some strain after a year, as El is lying to him in her letters to make her life in California sound much better than it actually is, while he seems to have a mental block against using the word "love" to describe his feelings for her.
• Long Hair Is Feminine: Downplayed as her hair is still pretty short, but in Seasons 2-5, her hair growing out corresponds to her growing femininity.
• Magical Defibrillator: This is how she saves Max's life at the end of Season 4; using her powers to restart her friend's heart.
• Meaningful Rename: At the end of Season 2, Eleven takes on the name "Jane Hopper", which is significant for two reasons: One, "Jane" is her birth name given to by her mother; two, "Hopper" signifies her becoming Jim's adopted daughter. However, she continues to Only Be Known By Her Nickname, and it's implied that she likes it because it came from Mike.
• Messianic Archetype: She has special powers and at the end of Season 1 she seemingly sacrifices herself to save her friends and kill a monster, only to come back alive in Season 2.
• Military Brat: Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds reveals that El's birth father was sent by Brenner to the Vietnam War before she was born, so the former would be killed and not get in the way of "raising" El.
• Mind Over Matter: She has telekinesis, which she uses in various ways, from simply closing doors to flipping vans over her and her friends' heads when confronted on the road by Brenner's goons.
• Morality Pet:
  • To Billy, as she provokes his Heroic Sacrifice by empathizing with him and reminding him of his mother.
  • To Kali, who truly cares for her as her younger sister and wanted them to stay together.
  • To Mike, as while Mike is short and hostile to mostly everyone, he always takes the time to check on El's wellbeing.
• Mugging the Monster: When Eleven finally has enough of her pursuers' shit — especially when they threaten her new friends — the results aren't pretty and uses her powers to puree their brains inside their skulls. When a pair of abusive orderlies try to thwart her initial escape from Hawkins Lab, she telekinetically throws one into a concrete wall so hard he leaves a massive dent, and casually snaps the neck of the second like a twig.
• Muggle–Mage Romance: While they are both technically human, she is an enhanced human while Mike's a regular one.
• Mundane Utility:
  • The first showing of her psychokinetic powers when she's at large is to turn off a squeaky table fan at Benny's diner. She later levitates some of Mike's toys to entertain herself while he's at school and uses her powers to change channels on the TV.
  • In Season 4, when Mike, Will, Jonathan, and Argyle are setting out to find her, Will casually raises the idea of stopping in Vegas with her and getting super rich because she can rig all the games with her powers.
• Mystical Waif: She's a young girl with No Social Skills and psychic powers whom the boys feel the need to protect, and the supernatural happenings in Hawkins are heralded by her appearance in the aftermath of Will's disappearance.
• Never Found the Body: The Heroic Sacrifice she performs at the climax of Season 1 disintegrates her body right alongside the Demogorgon's, with one of the possible implications being she forcefully relocated the both of them to another dimension. It's later confirmed in Season 2 that she was transported into the Upside-Down but manages to escape using the tear at the school the Demogorgon used. This turns out to be a repeat of the first time she opened a portal to the Upside-Down, even if she didn't recall it, whilst trying to kill One.
• Never Say "Die": Several times, she cannot bring herself to warn Mike of the real danger they are all in. When she searches for Barb, but only finds her decaying corpse in the Upside-Down, all she can scream is "Gone! Gone!" She also continues to use the word 'gone' as opposed to words such as died/dead. Possibly justified as her not knowing the correct words, having such a limited vocabulary.
• Nice Girl: She has a strong sense of right and wrong, even when she has been almost completely socially deprived for most of her life. She also lacks malicious intent and does her best to help and protect her friends, though she goes overboard a couple of times.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: She removed the implant that was keeping One under control, allowing him to go on a murder rampage in Hawkins Lab, and once she banished him to the Upside Down, it only made him more powerful overtime.
• No Infantile Amnesia: Her memory of her mother's love when she was born gives her the strength to defeat Henry/One in the Season 4 flashbacks.
• No Social Skills: Growing up isolated from the outside world has left her unaware of known concepts and devices such as television, friendship, and promises, though this doesn't stop her from making friends or falling in love. Finding friends (and parental substitutes) and learning through TVs really helps improve things for her throughout Season 2, even though she still remains rough around the edges. By Season 3 she remains very socially naïve but has still progressed to the point that she is able to pass as a more or less "normal" teenager, albeit one with an unspecified social learning disability. This continues in subtler ways in Season 4 and causes her problems such as getting targeted by bullies. For example, when tasked to give a presentation at school about her "hero", she misses context that she's supposed to choose a historical hero rather than a personal one and gives an emotional presentation about Hopper instead. (While she likely had zero historical education in the lab, after several years in society and having watched TV and movies, she likely would have been able to find someone had she understood the assignment. Also, Hopper played a key role in literally saving the world from the Mind Flayer twice, but the true scope of his heroism is a secret she can't reveal.)
• Not So Stoic: In Season 4. With dormant powers, separated from Mike and most of her friends, and targeted by bullies, the usually composed El is extremely emotional much of the time, and spends much of the first half of the season on the verge of tears or rage. In fact, part of her arc this season seems to be learning to deal with her emotions in healthy ways, rather than repressing and then exploding.
• Numerological Motif: Her full name is "Eleven". She has a corresponding tattoo on her right arm that reads "011".
• Official Couple: With Mike at the end of Season 2. Eleven dumps Mike early in Season 3 after he lies to her for the first time but more because she was unaware of him being confronted by Hopper, and after they save each other from a Flayed Billy, they're on the road to a relatively quick reconciliation. Additionally, encouragement from Max during the breakup allowed Eleven to better discover her own identity, independent of both Mike and Hopper. By the end of the season, they begin a Long-Distance Relationship when the Byers take her when they move out of town after she confesses she loves Mike back. Strained as of Season 4, due to a combination of Long-Distance Relationship, El lying to Mike about making friends in California, and Mike unable to say he loves her. Although Mike isn't upset about her lying to him, and he eventually does manage to say "I love you".
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Her birth name is Jane Ives but only her newfound aunt Becky and her "sister" Kali, refer to her as such. Dr. Owens later forges a birth certificate that lists her as Jim Hopper's daughter, thus making her "Jane Hopper" on paper; this is only on paper however, as no one ever calls her that at any point in Season 3, with everyone continuing to call her "El" or occasionally "Eleven". She herself prefers "El" as well, which is reinforced in Season 4, where she's only called "Jane" at school and by people who don't know her well, while people she's close to call her "El." Will has to correct himself at one point when he calls her "El" in public, quickly switching to "Jane", implying that "Jane" is essentially El's "public" identity, while "El" is her real and preferred identity.
• Parrot Exposition: Given her limited grasp of the English language from being held captive in the Hawkins National Lab for most of her life, Eleven often responds to the boys' statements as such. In Season 2, having spent nearly a year with Hopper, she does this much less, up to having full-on arguments with him over her frustration with being cooped up in the middle of nowhere with no end in sight.
• Person of Mass Destruction: She possesses very strong psychic powers and can snap necks, flip trucks, and even take down a helicopter with just her mind.
• Pink Means Feminine: Invoked. The boys dress her in an old pink dress of Nancy's so she can blend in better as a sweet Girly Girl at Hawkins Middle, but in reality she isn't particularly girly.
• Power Floats:
  • In "The Gate", she rises into the air while using the full extent of her powers to close the gate to the Upside-Down.
  • In "The Massacre at Hawkins Lab", she overpowers the Orderly/001 in their psychic duel by calling on memories of her mother.
• The Power of Hate: Has shades of this in Season 1, since she generally makes use of her powers when threatened or defending her friends, but comes into this trope in full in Season 2 due to Kali's tutelage. When properly wrathful, she can move a grounded train car by herself, and ultimately closes the Gate into the Upside-Down she opened at the Hawkins Lab.
• The Power of Love: While she does draw on her rage against Hawkins Lab to amplify her powers, Eleven's love for her friends has allowed her to channel it rather than be consumed by it. This empathy saves her from the same violent path of empty revenge that Kali has fallen into, when she refuses to kill the man who lobotomized her mother after learning he has daughters of his own. Eleven makes a conscious a choice to fight for the ones she loves, rather than lash out with blind hatred.
• Power-Strain Blackout: Suffers greatly from the use of her powers, sometime resulting in collapse. The boys compare her to a "bad battery" after she flips a van during a bicycling escape from government agents.
• Pre-Sacrifice Final Goodbye:
  • At the climax of the first Season, Eleven uses her powers to destroy the Demogorgon, apparently killing herself in the process. Before this, she turns to Mike, one of the first people to have shown her genuine kindness, and calmly says a final goodbye to him. Thankfully, her Heroic Sacrifice turns out to have simply transported her into the Upside-Down, where she manages to escape in Season 2.
  • The series' finale "The Rightside Up" has her again bid Mike farewell before allowing herself to be destroyed along with the Upside Down, although the method by which she does it causes Mike to theorize she may have escaped death once again.
• Progressively Prettier: On account of being away from the lab and her hair growing back from a buzz-cut.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: In "The Lost Sister", while spending time with Kali, Eleven comes dangerously close to having this happen to her. Kali encourages her to use her anger and hatred to channel her powers. As a result, Eleven uses her powers to harm innocent people, even nearly committing murder as a result. Granted, her target isn't exactly innocent, but he is merely a retired Punch-Clock Villain who is only following orders and is currently a father to two young daughters. When El discovers this, she spares his life and returns to Hawkins when she realizes that Kali is not a positive influence on her.
• Psychic Nosebleed: Gets one every time she uses her telekinesis. Becomes a plot point when it's used to prove that she's been using her powers. The nosebleed also comes with widespread temporary bruising on her skin when she has to put an extra effort.
• Psychic Powers: She has several psychic powers — including telepathy, telekinesis, and the ability to communicate inter-dimensionally. Coming to terms with her abilities is a constant challenge for her and those who care about her.
• Puppy Love: Mike has a thing for her from the get-go. She quite likes him, in return. Especially after being cut off from everybody for about a year — it probably helped clarify a few things. They become an Official Couple by the end of Season 2.
• The Quiet One: Given her upbringing, she's a quiet girl, usually talking only when spoken to and during times of conflict, often preferring hand gestures to get her point across. She's more vocal in Season 2, which in no small part seems to be due to being around Hopper for nearly a year and picking up a lot more vocabulary from him. By the beginning of Season 3, Eleven can talk like a normal girl her age, though she tends toward the terse side, and she sometimes struggles with pronunciation (mispronounces Illinois as "Ill-Annoy", for example). However, she struggles to articulate herself when stressed and nearly becomes mute when interrogated by police in Season 4 which... does not help her case with them.
• Raised in a Lab: She was abducted at birth due to her telekinetic abilities. She was taken into experimentation and trained to use her powers, deprived of all contact with the outside world. As a result, her language is stunted, and her social skills are non-existent. By the start of the series, she Escaped from the Lab and is found by the Party.
• "Reason You Suck" Speech: Dishes this out to Hopper in Season 2 when she feels he's keeping her prisoner, and Mike (for not expressing his love) and Dr. Brenner (for being a horrifically manipulative father figure) in Season 4.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: In the Season 1 finale, her eyes are absolutely bloodshot from the strain of pushing her powers like she has, especially against the Demogorgon.
• Replacement Goldfish: Hopper outright admits that his overprotective attitude to Eleven at least partly stems from the trauma of losing his biological daughter, Sara. At the end of Season 2, Eleven (via forgery of official documents thanks to Dr. Owens) does become legally recognized as Hopper's adoptive daughter.
• Retcon: In Season 1, Eleven is shown speaking few words when she encounters other people outside of Dr. Brenner, due to what is implied to be stunted growth from being Raised in a Lab. However, flashbacks to her time in the Hawkins Lab in Season 4 show her holding fairly extended conversations with The Orderly without much difficulty, despite this being before Eleven would meet people from the outside world — though her trauma-induced amnesia after the massacre and her battle with One may have caused her to regress.
• Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training: Due to being kept in isolation and experimented on her entire life, she not only has very poor social skills, but she can also barely talk when the boys first find her in the woods. Though on the flipside, at least she can pick up vans with her brain.
• Samus Is a Girl: Earlier on Season 1, she is easily mistaken for a boy, thanks to her buzz-cut hairdo.
• Screaming Woman: Eleven screams a lot, especially when she's using her powers in a desperate situation, or when dragged away by orderlies during her time locked up in Hawkins lab prior to the events of Season 1.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: When introduced, one would be forgiven for thinking she were a preteen boy, but when she borrows one of Nancy's cute pink dresses and a light blonde wig to better blend in, she reveals herself to be a very pretty young girl. Happens a lot more naturally at the end of Season 2, where she puts on a fancy dress for the Snow Ball, and has a decent head of styleable hair at that point.
• Sickening Sweethearts: At the beginning of Season 3, her puppy love with Mike has evolved into this, bordering on being Make-Out Kids. They tone it down a little after their first big fight.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: When she joins Kali's gang, she gets a punk makeover, which she describes as "bitchin'" and keeps through the season finale. In the third season, when she's trying to figure out who she is and develop as a person independently of other people, Max encourages her to try on different clothes at the mall until she finds an outfit that feels like her, which influences her appearance for the rest of the series.
• Silent Snarker: El is endearingly sweet, but some of her body language when communicating confusion or displeasure can come across as this. The best example is when Dustin asks her to make a toy spaceship fly, akin to an owner asking a dog to perform tricks, and she just glares at him.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: Eleven falls in love with the friendly, loyal, and selfless Mike who was the main one of their group to consistently be nice to her as well as not treat her like a freak.
• Someone to Remember Him By: In the novel Suspicious Minds, Terry finds out she's pregnant with El after her boyfriend, (and El's biological father), Andrew got killed in the Vietnam War.
• Spock Speak: Eleven's way of speaking is stilted at best, but she seems to be getting better by Season 3. Justified in that she was raised in a lab and has No Social Skills prior to meeting Mike and the group.
• Squishy Wizard: She wields formidable Psychic Powers but physically she's still a young girl and is frail against Flayed Bill's physical strength during their fight in Season 3.
• Stealth Pun: Eleven's actual birth name is Jane Ives, and she was kidnapped by the Department of Energy as an infant. The Department of Energy's acronym is DOE, and since Eleven doesn't officially exist, this makes her a literal Jane Doe.
• Strong Girl, Smart Guy: Strong Girl to Mike's Smart Guy. Eleven is a powerful Little Miss Badass with psychic powers but, due to her isolated upbringing, she can barely speak. Mike is a smart, nerdy boy who teaches her some vocabulary.
• Sue Donym: Mike blurts out "Eleanor!" when Mr. Clarke asks El what her name is when he accidentally meets her at Hawkins Middle School.
• Sympathy for the Devil: To Billy and Brenner before their deaths; she cradles and comforts both of them, crying.
• Technopath: She can channel the voices of other people through radios and other electronic devices.
• Teen Superspy: A Darker and Edgier (and more literal) example than most. Before she broke out, the government was training her from birth to use her Psychic Powers to spy on the Soviets.
• Telepathy: Of a sort. She can't talk in people's heads, but can hear and detect others from long distances, even across entire continents (or dimensions, in the case of the Upside-Down), and being placed in the sensory deprivation tank at the lab (which the main characters recreate in "The Bathtub") grants her a sort of Astral Projection.
• Territorial Smurfette: Zigzagged. She's cold towards Max and shrugs off her friendly introduction when they meet — not because Eleven isn't the only girl in the Party anymore, but rather because she was jealous of the moment Max and Mike shared in the gym. She overcomes this entirely in Season 3 as she and Max become best friends.
• Terse Talker: Early on, El only says a few words when she speaks. Justified as her social skills are clearly undeveloped. After Season 1 she more or less sheds this trope as she becomes more social and less awkward.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: In Season 1, when Lucas accuses her of being a monster and gets into a scuffle with Mike, she telekinetically attacks him and runs away. She then takes her disguising blonde wig off and uses her powers more aggressively to steal food, going on something of a rampage in the local supermarket, before snapping out of this mindset thanks to Mike and Dustin later in the same episode.
• Three-Point Landing: She performs a particularly badass "Superhero Landing" in "The Massacre At Hawkins Lab" that evokes Iron Man in the MCU.
• Token Super: Of the entire main cast, El is the only one of them with abilities that can be described as superpowers.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Subverted, as she and Max are the two main girls of their group but neither of them are girly. The main difference is that Max is a traditional tomboy by choice (like her love for skateboard and videogames), while Eleven is mostly unfeminine because of her unconventional background (except in season 3, she almost always has short hair, an androgynous look, and masculine-leaning clothes). Both show a feminine side in season 3 after Max introduces Eleven to shopping, so they both can qualify as Tomboy with a Girly Streak.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • In Season 2, not only are her Psychic Powers stronger, but she can also use them more frequently/for longer periods of time before weakening. What's more, she no longer needs a sensory deprivation tank to perform Astral Projection; she just needs a blindfold and some form of white noise, removing two senses instead of all five.
  • Eleven's personality also becomes much more forceful and proactive. While in Season 1 she is reserved, by the time Season 2 rolls around, she demonstrates much more agency, confidence, and self-determination. This is best demonstrated during her squabble with Hopper after he grounds her for sneaking out; it's hard to imagine Season 1 El snapping at him the way she does in Season 2.
  • Season 4 does it again. After losing her powers destroying the Avatar in Season 3 and spending half a year Brought Down to Normal, Owens and Brenner (mostly Brenner) put her through Training from Hell to regain them so she can fight Vecna. It works and then some - she not only brings down a military helicopter onto a squad of their vehicles, but she shows some powers of resurrection, keeping Max barely alive after Vecna should have, by all measures, killed her.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Not for lack of trying – El undoubtedly has had a hard life and has had much chance to deal with her emotional damage, adjusting to societal norms, and growing into a teenager, but the later seasons see her display a more selfish, pettier side, specially to Mike.
  • In Season 3, she dumps him over a single lie which wasn't entirely his fault in the first place, is somewhat catty towards him when he actually told the truth by stating, "I make my own rules", and even laughs at Max's jokes about him in the bathroom after he'd literally just saved her life. Though she's not seen apologizing for her part, she is able to move on from her anger at him by the time they confront the Mind Flayer. It's not clear that she ever thought of "dumping" Mike as final, or even potentially so – she's modeling her behavior on Max, who in less than a year of dating has "dumped" Lucas and quickly gotten back together with him five times (with a sixth happening concurrently with El's declaration that she's dumping Mike). Within an hour of that declaration she and Max are plotting to get Mike and Lucas to take them back after extracting suitably groveling apologies.
  • In Season 4, she lashes out at Mike again, but with more understandably low self-esteem in "The Monster and the Superhero". Though he tries to encourage her in spite of his shock about her lying, and identify with her own bullying, she has none of it. She also shows No Sympathy towards Mike's inability to say that he loves her, even putting "from" on a note she leaves for him when she decides to go with Dr. Owens. All in all, the whole episode implies that at least most of El's anger and misery at Mike comes from her imploding under her unresolved and repressed negative emotions, but doesn't deny that she brought some responsibility for that on herself.
• Trademark Favorite Food: El loves Eggo(tm) waffles. She steals several boxes' worth of waffles while robbing a supermarket, and her thoughts zero in on them when Mike talks about his mom making her whatever food she wants. Hopper leaving an Eggo(tm) in a box in the woods in the last episode is the main hint that she's still alive after her Heroic Sacrifice.
• Trauma Button: In Season 1, events trigger a Troubled Backstory Flashback to her dark past at the lab at least Once per Episode.
• Trauma Conga Line: Eleven's life has been far from easy, to say the least.
  • She spent much of her life being tortured and experimented on, after she was kidnapped from her mother at birth. Until, that is, she meets Mike, where her life becomes much more complicated but undeniably much, much, much better.
  • Season 2 continues it. She has to hide away for her own safety, and her powers let her here Mike calling to her each night on his walkie-talkie, but she's unable to let him know she's okay. When she blows up at Hopper things get worse, then she finds out her mother is alive, but permanently broken. When trying to find help for her, she falls in with a crowd of troubled youths who try to use her for revenge, and she ultimately has to flee them to save Hopper and Mike and the others, and then has to go back into hiding. Fortunately, they have a friendly agent in Dr. Owens, who is helping bury the secret so she can have a normal life within the next year.
  • It gets even worse in the Season 3. She first discovers the Mind Flayer's plot during a perfectly innocent game of spin-the-bottle with Max, where she discovers Billy communicating with it. Later, she delves into Billy's memories, and in the process she accidentally reveals her location to the Flayer, which causes its flesh avatar to arrive at the cabin and try and take her. Eventually, Billy catches up to her in the mall and tries to kill her; she's able to break him free of the Flayer's control by reminding him of the memory she saw of his mother, only to see him bloodily murdered by the Flayer for trying to protect her and the Party. The cherry on top? Hopper dies. (Or does he?) Not to mention the nasty leg injury she sustains, requiring Jonathan to perform emergency field surgery with a chef's knife to remove a piece of the Mind Flayer avatar from under her skin, followed by the loss of her powers...
  • Season 4 keeps the tradition. She's still without her powers and is relentlessly bullied in her new high school in California by the local Alpha Bitch and her cronies until she snaps and attacks her. She's soon arrested, and as she's being transported to jail, she's "rescued" by Dr. Owens, who takes her to another laboratory so she can regain her powers... by being forced to confront her Papa again and to relive a memory so traumatic she repressed it most of her life: One's massacre of the rest of the test subjects in Hawkins Lab.
• Traumatic Haircut: Hard not to view her previously shaved head as this, as she clearly enjoys having longer hair in Season 2 and Season 3. She's absolutely horrified to find it's been shaved again during her re-training in Season 4.
• Tsurime Eyes: She sports these when she gets extremely angry.
• Tyke-Bomb: From the day of her birth. Being the daughter of an MKULTRA test subject, she inherited supernatural abilities from her mother and, among other things, is being used by Brenner to spy on and assassinate Russians, this being the Cold War era.
• Undying Loyalty: To Mike in particular, Dustin, and even Lucas; she even sabotages their search for Will in order to keep them from harm and later sacrifices her own life to keep them safe from the Demogorgon.
• The Un-Favorite: It turns out that some of Dr Brenner's attitude towards El stems from her having been tricked into removing One's Power Limiter, then apparently destroying him after he massacred the other test subjects – Brenner would still have wanted to keep control of One rather than kill him.
• Unskilled, but Strong: For all El's power, she doesn't show precise control beyond whether she chooses to kill someone, break their bones, or knock the wind out of them. This is particularly apparent in her confrontations against Vecna. If she is able to surprise him, Eleven's sheer power is able to immobilize and defeat him. However, in a direct fight, Vecna's greater skill and mastery of his psychic abilities allows him to deal Eleven a Curb-Stomp Battle. That is, until she channels The Power of Love, which is far more powerful than Vecna's hate, and she curbstomps him while he's completely helpless to fight back.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • Her accidental contact with the Demogorgon during a test opens the gate, which kickstarts the events in Season 1.
  • Season 4 delves into Eleven's backstory at the lab. A few years before the events of Season 1 she was manipulated by One into removing his Restraining Bolt, who then went on to massacre the other gifted children at Hawkins Lab and was banished by Eleven into the Upside Down, becoming the monster known as Vecna. It goes even further: One eventually took over the Upside Down itself by forming a symbiotic bond with the Mind Flayer, who has been terrorizing Hawkins from Season 1 and beyond.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Even comes into play when Mike and Eleven aren't dating; in Season 1 before she even knew about romance as a concept she breaks Troy's arm for forcing Mike to jump off a cliff (and threatening to cut out Dustin's teeth with a knife), in Season 3 during a temporary break up she sends a flayed Billy through a brick wall when he decides to go after Mike who just moments prior fit this trope himself.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • She flees from the boys after she knocks Lucas out with psychokinetic push that sends him flying after he berates her for tampering with their compasses when searching for Will in Season 1.
  • She gets into a huge fight with Hopper, who's understandably furious after she sneaks out of the cabin to see Mike.
• When She Smiles: She starts the series as an extremely socially inept Tyke-Bomb and understandably doesn't smile often, but shows signs of this as early as the first episode — when Benny is trying to communicate with her, he mentions that she has a nice smile.
• Worf Had the Flu: Several times, but most notably in Season 3, when she gets a tentacle in her leg which prevents her from using her powers when the party are being hunted by Billy and the Mind Flayer.
• You Are Number Six: The number 011, her identity given by Hawkins Lab, is tattooed on her arm. It is also the basis of her nickname.
• You Monster!: In Season 4's "Papa", she gives Dr. Brenner a "The Reason You Suck" Speech that concludes with her declaring "I'm not the monster...it's YOU. YOU are the monster!"

Maxine "Max" Mayfield

Played By: Sadie Sink, Jacey Sink (young, Season 3), Belle Henry (young, Season 4)

Voiced By: Jolie Hoang-Rappaport (Tales from '85)

Debut: "Chapter One: MADMAX" (2x01)

A transfer student to Hawkins Middle School. She later becomes the group's Sixth Ranger and proves herself to be a key member to the Party in their struggles against the Upside Down.

• Action Survivor: She's not nearly as good in a fight as Eleven, Nancy, or Robin, but she's notably the first non-superpowered individual to harm Vecna and is also the first to escape his murder attempt (with some outside help from Dustin, Lucas, and Steve).
• Adventures in Comaland: Her mind has been trapped in Vecna's mental prison after the ending of Season 4. When she next appears to Holly in “Sorcerer”, she tells her she was wandering through all of Vecna's memories looking for a way out before settling in the canyon bordering his old neighborhood.
• Affirmative Action Girl: The second girl member of the Party, introduced in Season 2. She also serves to fill the role of token girl while Eleven is off on her own story arc in Chicago.
• Agent Scully: When she and Eleven investigate Billy in Season 3, she's quick to offer a rational explanation for the things they find, while El is more rattled by Billy and his possible connection to the Upside-Down.
• Alcoholic Parent: While Max's mother seems a decent enough parent in the second season, by Season 4 the divorce and Billy's death have taken a toll on her, leading to some Parental Neglect of Max.
• Alliterative Name: Her first and last name start with the letters 'Ma', as does her nickname Mad Max.
• Always Someone Better: She starts feeling this way about Eleven when she's continuously Locked Out of the Loop by the guys, but Eleven isn't.
• AM/FM Characterization: Season 4 establishes that "Running Up That Hill" by Kate Bush is her favorite song, with the added significance of the song playing an active role in helping her escape Vecna. The score of the show even begins to use the main melody of "Running Up That Hill" as Max's Leitmotif. The lyrics of the song itself are about switching places with a person to better understand them, which mirrors her grief over Billy's death and her wish that she had known him better in life.
• And I Must Scream: Season 5 reveals that Max has been trapped inside Vecna's mind ever since the ending of Season 4 and has been trying to find an escape.
• Animal Motifs: While chasing her in his mindscape, Henry derisively refers to Max as a "fox", due to her tendency to evade him and disrupt his plans even within his own mind. It helps that she's a Fiery Redhead, much like a fox's fur color is.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Despite everything that happened in the previous season, Max is still skeptical at the strange things that occur in Season 3, even coming up with plausible excuses to Billy's odd behavior. Although this could be because she was in denial.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Zig-Zagged with her and Billy. In Season 2, they openly despise each other. Season 3 shows that Max doesn't want to believe he's been possessed by the Mind Flayer and is absolutely heartbroken when he sacrifices himself to hold back the Mind Flayer and save Eleven and her friends. In Season 4, she visits his grave and talks about how she wishes that he was still alive so they could have had a chance at a better relationship; however, she later admits that she used to pray for Billy's death and was secretly relieved when he died. She also tries to protect him from Neil's abuse in Runaway Max. Ultimately, Max's feelings towards Billy are so clouded by guilt and trauma that it's impossible to be certain how much she really cared for him, if at all.
• Back from the Dead: Vecna was able to injure Max badly enough to cause her to bleed to death, but was stopped before he could destroy her skull. This meant Max was just stable enough to be resurrected by Eleven in a comatose state. Unfortunately, she was physically dead for a full minute and her arms and legs were shattered, so when she does wake up again towards the end of Season 5, she's racked with physical and mental issues.
• Badass Driver: For a 13-year-old, she's an incredible driver, considering everyone is still in one piece after driving. She even names herself the "zoomer" of the group, despite that not being a real D&D class. This also makes the nickname "Mad Max" even more adequate.
• Batter Up!: After drugging Billy, she grabs Steve's nailed bat and used it to threaten him into never bothering her or her friends again.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: She prayed for Billy to die due to despising him for his abuse towards her. When she finally gets her wish, she’s not happy about it. Not completely anyways.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: Mike initially irrationally dislikes her because he fears she will replace El, Dustin becomes distant due to her growing relationship with Lucas, Will is too wrapped up in visions of (and later full on Demonic Possession by) a Demonic Abomination, and El coldly shrugs off her greeting when they first met. Lucas, however, is the only one of the Party to be consistently nice to her, and as such, she is the closest to him.
• Big Sister Instinct: In Season 5, whilst trapped in Vecna's mind, Max reunites with Holly after she’s kidnapped by a Demogorgon and pulled into the same psychic prison. Here, she takes on the responsibility of guiding Holly through this surreal, dangerous environment and manages to convince her that Henry, her supposed imaginary friend, is dangerous. Holly, in turn, looks to Max for comfort and direction.
• The Blind Leading the Blind: Downplayed. Max is Eleven's love adviser in Season 3 and encourages immature emotional manipulation to torment Mike into behaving better, which also explains why her relationship with Lucas is so rocky. But she also helps Eleven assert her own identity, then takes a less toxic approach to reuniting Mike and Eleven after the former proclaims his love for the latter in front of everyone.
• Broken Bird: Billy's death in such a gruesome manner turns Max from a happy-go-lucky tomboy to a loner girl struggling with PTSD. She secludes herself from everyone for weeks, and starts to see a counselor, which doesn't help her very much because she can't be honest about what she truly witnessed.
• Bruiser with a Soft Center: While Max can be pretty aggressive and ready to fight due to her rough upbringing with Billy, she loves her friends and is particularly a very good friend to El.
• Brutal Honesty: Max doesn't mince words and generally says what's on her mind.
  Max: People say I'm too negative. I just think I'm honest.
• Celeb Crush: As Season 3 reveals, she has one on '80s teen heartthrob, Ralph Macchio.
• Cheated Death, Died Anyway: Max is able to get past Vecna the first time he tries to kill her, and thanks to the tunes of Kate Bush she is able to hold him off indefinitely. Then Max uses herself as bait, a plan which experiences several setbacks that ultimately leads to Max dying a painful death. Eleven is able to restart Max's heart, but by that point the damage has been done and she's left comatose until the second half of Season 5.
• Cool Board: Max is pretty handy on her skateboard. Dustin points out that just owning one proves she's awesome.
• Covert Pervert: When Dustin and Lucas comment on Steve's Carpet of Virility in Season 4, she grabs their binoculars to get a closer look, much to their surprise.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Is freed from Vecna's trance halfway through his murder process and suffers far longer than his other victims did.
• Daddy's Girl: In "Runaway Max", she notes that she's closer to her father than to her mother.
• Damsel out of Distress: The first time Vecna gets her she manages to free herself, outrun him, and escape.
• The Darkness Before Death: Vecna's curse damages Max's eyes. They're completely white and bleeding profusely.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • "Runaway Max" details both the events of Season 2 from her perspective, as well as providing her backstory.
  • Season 4 gives her a hearty amount of focus, particularly episodes "Dear Billy" and "The Piggyback".
• Dead Man Writing: When Max figures out that she ultimately can't avoid being killed by Vecna, she makes sure to write a series of letters to her family and friends.
• Deadpan Snarker: Her sense of humor and personality tends towards the sarcastic. Initially, she's rather more caustic and cutting than she needs to be, but the longer she and the boys spend in each other's company and the more comfortable they all get with each other, the more playful she becomes. Crowning example has to be her reaction to Dustin asking her to play D&D.
  Dustin: [realizing] You're being sarcastic?
• Death by Transceiver: Eleven telepathically witnesses Max dying. She later uses this same power to try and reconnect with Max when she's brought back in a comatose state, but finds only darkness. In Season 5, Eleven wonders whether Max is simply somewhere beyond her reach, and she's right: Max's consciousness has been trapped in a realm of Vecna's memories for 18 months.
• Death Equals Emotion: After three seasons of acting tough and aloof, Max finally expresses fear and agony in her final moments, crying to Lucas that she doesn't want to die in her final moments.
• Death Glare: She gives a good one to Billy in the second season finale. The glare and memory of her threat was enough to scare him away.
• Death Is Dramatic: Max's gradual demise is given far more attention than Jason's instant destruction.
• Death Seeker: Zigzagged. Admits that after Billy's death, she started praying something awful would happen to her thanks to her Survivors Guilt and her shame over secretly being relieved that he died. When she finds out she's cursed by Vecna, she accepts it and puts her affairs in order, which is less Face Death with Dignity as it is grim hopelessness. However, when Vecna actually puts her in his mindscape, she tries to, and succeeds in, escaping, realising she has things Worth Living For. When she's actually dying in agony the second time she goes up against Vecna, she's absolutely terrified, desperately whispering that she's not ready to go yet.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: In season 2, Max starts off guarded, sarcastic, and emotionally walled-off due to trauma and instability, then gradually thawing as she builds trust with Lucas, forms a warm and empowering friendship with Eleven and the rest of the party.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: Max is the only one of Vecna's targets to break out of his prison, which she does by blocking out his taunts and focusing on her positive thoughts.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Max is able to slash off one of Vecna's tendrils to escape.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: Lucas and El couldn't save her from Vecna in time, leaving her so badly mangled that she dies even without his final killing stroke, with Lucas holding her close and panicking as the girl he loves fades away.
• Disappeared Dad: As of Season 4, Max comments to her mother "If you can find him" when asking her to send a letter to her dad, meaning they are no longer in contact.
• Disney Death: A realistic example; Eleven telepathically restarts Max's heart, but due to the amount of time she was clinically dead, it doesn't immediately bring her back to life and it's later grimly hinted that Max might be braindead.
• The Dog Bites Back: After being bullied by Billy throughout Season 2, she's the one that takes him down and threatens him to leave her and her friends alone or face Crippling Castration.
• Do Not Call Me "Paul": "No one calls me Maxine. It's Max."
• Downtime Downgrade: Max and Lucas break up in-between Seasons 3 and 4. They get back together and even arrange a date... before Max gets killed. Even revived, she is initially in no position for dating.
• Dude Magnet: Dustin and Lucas get crushes the second they see her.
• Eating the Eye Candy: In "The Dive", when Steve goes shirtless to look for the "water gate," Max takes a good, long stare with the binoculars. Dustin and Lucas are bewildered.
• Establishing Character Moment: Even before she appears, the group discovers she's beaten Dustin's long-standing high score at Dig Dug.
• Everyone Has Standards: After Lucas gives Max an abridged version of the incident that happened in the first season and the reason the school call Will "Zombie Boy," she admits that she doesn't find the nickname funny anymore.
• Eye Scream: At the end of Season 4, Vecna burns out her eyes to the point of bleeding, making them milky white in the process. As she lays dying in Lucas's arms, Max openly begins freaking out about how she can no longer see, indicating Vecna may have permanently blinded her.
• Face Death with Despair: After having all her limbs broken and her eyes burned out by Vecna the Season 4 finale, Max completely breaks down in Lucas's arms, sobbing that she's utterly terrified of dying as her life slowly slips away in his arms.
• Fairy Tale Motif: While she is never officially given a D&D class like the others (despite dubbing herself the "Zoomer"), a lot of her characteristics bring to mind a Rogue/Thief (which, prior to her introduction, was a very conspicuous omission from The Party's lineup). Her subversive attitude, skill with a lockpick, being associated with speed (her skateboard and the scene where she drives Billy's car), and stabbing her brother in the back with a "poison" needle are all characteristics and behaviors you'd expect from a Rogue. Further, her fiery personality, acerbic wisecracking, and Tomboy appearance are all classic Rogue staples; she's pretty much as close as you can get to Woodchuck or Han Solo as a teenage suburban girl. The Han Solo comparison gets taken further at the end of Season 4 due to the effectively "frozen" state she ends up in, akin to The Empire Strikes Back.
• Feminine Mother, Tomboyish Daughter: The dynamic between Max and her mother Susan, which is confirmed and expanded on in the tie-in novel Runaway Max. Max (which is short for Maxine) is a tomboy who skateboards, drives, plays video games, and hangs out with a group of guys. Susan is dainty, frustrated with Max's tomboyishness, and is a Useless Bystander Parent to her new husband's abuse of her new stepson.
• Fictional Fan, Real Celebrity: It becomes a plot point that Max is a big fan of Kate Bush, especially her song "Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)". The song saw a resurgence in popularity as a result of the show, reaching Number 1 on the UK pop charts a full 37 years after its original release.
• Fiery Redhead: She has bright red hair and a bit of a temper.
• First Kiss: Has hers with Lucas in the second season finale.
• First Love: She is Lucas' first girlfriend.
• Freudian Excuse: Her rough attitude can be explained by her mother divorcing her father and then moving to Hawkins to get away from him. And having Billy as a stepbrother. To say nothing of probably seeing how Neil treats Billy and her mother sticking her in this whole situation for unclear reasons.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Zigzagged. While she feels this way for sure, she isn't for three-fifths of the group. While Mike and Eleven are cold to her for various reasons at first, Lucas and Dustin have crushes on her but have individually come off as mocking her. Will likes her just fine, but has so much shit to deal with on his own that he doesn't really interact with her much.
• The Friends Who Never Hang: She and Will never really interact despite being part of the same friend group. When Max flashes back to her happiest memories at the end of "Dear Billy", Will is the only Party member who doesn't make an appearance in the montage. Season 5 shows more of their friendship, with them bonding over their similar experiences with Vecna and sharing a couple of hugs during emotional moments.
• Game-Breaking Injury: Taken up to eleven at the very end of Season 4. At the hands of Vecna, Max ends up blinded, having all her limbs broken, and due to Eleven's attempt to bring her back to life, is in a comatose, brain-dead like state in the hospital. When she finally does wake up in Season 5, her limbs and eyes have healed, but she's still weak from eighteen months in a coma, and indeed, her only contribution to the final battle is telling everyone what she discovered in Vecna's mind and guiding Eleven and Kali through it.
• Gamer Chick: Arcade games specifically. The boys first grow interested in her when they discover that she has beaten Dustin's top score for the game Dig Dug. She adds tabletop roleplaying when she joins the D&D group between the final battle and the epilogue.
• Genre Savvy: Knows horror tropes well enough to find Lucas' story about the true nature of Hawkins "derivative." And what will happen in the woods.
  Guys, why are you running towards the sound?
• Girliness Upgrade: She's somewhat more feminine in Season 3. While she's still her feisty, snarky, skateboarding self, she does show a girlier side when she introduces Eleven to shopping at the mall and has a blast helping her pick out clothes.
• Girlish Pigtails: Sports braided pigtails in Seasons 3-5.
• Grief-Induced Split: Following the events of the Season 3 finale, she broke up with Lucas, physically and emotionally withdrawing from him (and to a lesser extent their mutual friends), due to her grief and trauma over Billy's death. Lucas isn't completely oblivious that there's something wrong with Max but did a poor job of supporting and understanding her; in his defence, he's a teenage boy going through his own issues, while Max tends to be standoffish or outright hostile to him. Max later apologises for shoving him away, while Lucas apologises for not trying harder to reach out to her.
• Hesitant Sacrifice: Before temporarily dying in Lucas' arms, Max breaks down quick once she returns into the real world. She realizes she cannot feel or see anything, panics and cries feeling the approach of her own death. Despite her Heroic Sacrifice, she tells Lucas between her tears that she is not ready to die.
• Iconic Outfit: The blue outfit worn in "Dear Billy" is her most famous outfit and very popular for cosplay.
• Iconic Sequel Character: She made her debut in Season 2 and is now just as important as the other main characters.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: She just moved schools from California and the Party are the first schoolmates that approach her to be their friend. Considering that she needs a refuge from her abusive step-brother Billy, she feels an increasing need to feel included in the group.
• In-Series Nickname: Her video game handle is "Mad Max". Once she warms up to the group, she assigns herself another nickname, "the Zoomer," to act as her D&D class.
• Intergenerational Friendship: She forms one with Holly over the course of Season 5 while the two are trapped in Vecna's mind and forced to wander through his memories.
• I Wished You Were Dead: She used to pray for Billy's death so that he would stop abusing her. Then he actually does die, horrifically, right in front of her, while saving her and her friends' lives. As a result, she feels so guilty and disgusted with herself that she becomes suicidally depressed.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: She can be rude and rough around the edges, but her heart is in the right place.
• Like Brother and Sister: With Mike. Even once Mike warms up to her, they are shown to be frequently bickering with each other. However, both will make every effort to protect the other, and it is clear they consider each other genuine friends. Their banter after Max wakes from her coma is a perfect indicator:
  Mike: Took your sweet time, didn't you?
  Max: (laughing weakly) Screw you, Wheeler.
• Little Miss Snarker: Her default mode is sarcastic and defensive when the boys first encounter her, and whilst she still retains this trait following the ordeal they share in Season 2, she warms up quite a bit by the close of the season and her snarkiness becomes more playful and less catty.
• Locked Out of the Loop: To her annoyance, the boys keep her out of the loop when it comes to the Upside-Down till she leaves the group. Lucas finally reveals the truth so she'll rejoin.
• Logical Latecomer: She and her stepbrother are new in town, and thus, she is the least accustomed to all the supernatural goings-on in Hawkins. She is skeptical at first to the existence of the Demogorgon and Demodogs, and thinks they just might be a bear and actual large dogs. She also questions why the others run toward a mysterious noise in forest in "The Mind Flayer".
• The Medic: Serves as Closest Thing We Got in Season 3, correcting the others on how to treat an injury due to her skateboarding.
  Max: I skateboard, trust me.
• Meta Guy: After hearing about the events of Season 1, she assumes it's just a story Lucas made up and repeats a lot of the real-world reactions to the season.
• Mirror Character: To Eleven. Both are the sole female member of the Party for most of a season — the entire first season for El, and most of Season 2 for Max. One of the boys had an irrational dislike of said girl during the season (Lucas disliked El mainly because Mike wanted to spend all of his time with her and Mike disliked Max because he feared she would replace El). They both have a dysfunctional family life to some extent and are newcomers to Hawkins, Indiana (El because she ran away from Hawkins Lab and Max because she moved there from California). The Party included El in most other adventures but hesitated with Max because of Mike's insistence and the fact that what they went through had to be kept secret. Both of them have some sort of physical skill the others don't (El's psychic abilities and Max's skateboarding, and later, driving skills). El has No Social Skills while Max is relatively adjusted for her age. They both also mainly go by shorter variations of their names and form a close, romantic bond with another Party member (El for Mike and Max for Lucas) because said boy was the one to initially treat them with the most kindness and respect of the group, and are very protective of respective boyfriends.
• My God, You Are Serious!: When Lucas tells her of the events that happened prior to her arrival in Hawkins, she at first laughs it off... until the moment that Lucas slaps his hands over her mouth and says that he could die for telling her.
• New Transfer Student: She joins Hawkins Middle School at the start of Season 2.
• Not Afraid of You Anymore: The Season 2 finale has her finally standing up to Billy by injecting him with a tranquilizer and telling him to leave her and her friends alone.
• The Not-Love Interest: Max is shown to be the character El is closest to outside of Mike, and the big emotional climax of Season 4 involves El taking a Journey to the Center of the Mind for Max, violently battling with Vecna in order to protect her, and using The Power of Love to bring her back to life after her death, but both girls are shown to be in love with their respective boyfriends, and are never presented as anything other than best friends.
• Offscreen Breakup: She dumps Lucas five separate times between Seasons 2 and 3, and again between Seasons 3 and 4.
• One of the Boys: She decides to join the four boys who make up the Party, rather than any girl cliques.
• Only Mostly Dead: While her physical state at the end of Season 4 looks incredibly bleak, Season 5 reveals Max is still very much alive, at least mentally, but trapped in Vecna's mind and unable to escape once he was made aware of Max's presence. She's able to find temporary sanctuary in a secluded cave where Vecna, out of fear from past trauma involving said cave, chooses not to chase Max into. In her words, she's currently in a "prison" and had no way to escape until Holly came along.
• Otaku Surrogate: She owns and enjoys comic books, especially Wonder Woman.
• Puppy Love: Lucas is quite infatuated with her, and she eventually returns his feelings. They become an Official Couple by the end of Season 2.
• Red-Headed Hero: The only redhead of the Party and is the sole Fiery Redhead.
• Redheads Are Uncool: Played with. Something of a loner in school but viewed as being very cool by the (also fairly uncool) main heroes.
• Relationship Revolving Door: Between Seasons 2 and Season 3, Max dumps Lucas on five different occasions.
• The Runaway: She attempts this twice in her book, hence the title "Runaway Max". The first time is at the beginning of the book, trying to catch a bus to Los Angeles to live with her dad and avoid moving to Hawkins. She was actually going to try this a second time, but then Lucas shows up to her house. After both her experiences with the Party and Steve and standing up to Billy, she decides to stay in Hawkins.
• Samus Is a Girl: Her video game handle is Mad Max, which initially fools the Party into thinking she's a guy.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: She eventually falls for Lucas; the only person of the group that consistently makes her feel welcome.
• Sixth Ranger: Max joins the Party in Season 2. She's eagerly accepted by Dustin and Lucas, who enter into a rivalry over her affections, but her inclusion is resisted by Mike. Max offers to be the Party's "Zoomer," (which Mike rejects on account of there being no such thing) but also fits the archetype of the Rogue. She's also the only character so far to have been killed off or at least taken out of commission.
• Skeptic No Longer: She reasonably doesn't believe Lucas when he recounts the events of Season 1, but when she sees Dart fully grown, she fully believes.
• Soulless Shell: The Party believe this to be her fate, following the Season 4 finale. While Eleven successfully revives her physical body after Vecna claims her as his final victim, she remains comatose in the hospital, and Eleven's attempt to establish a psychic link with Max's mind results in the former appearing alone in a black void with the latter nowhere to be found. Her revival in the latter half of Season 5 reveals that this state was impermanent.
• Tears of Blood: Vecna's attack leaves Max badly injured. He was interrupted before he could shatter her skull, but the streams of blood coming out of her eyes shows he got very close.
• Tomboy: She uses Max instead of Maxine, plays video games, skateboards, and happily hangs out with a group of boys.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl:
  • Subverted in her duo with Eleven. They are the two main girls of their group but neither of them are girly. The main difference is that Max is a traditional tomboy by choice (like her love for skateboard and videogames), while Eleven is mostly unfeminine because of her unconventional background (except in season 3, she almost always has short hair, an androgynous look, and masculine-leaning clothes). Both show a feminine side in season 3 after Max introduces Eleven to shopping, so they both can qualify as Tomboy with a Girly Streak.
  • Played straight with her duo with Holly in season 5. During their escape from the Upside Down, there is a big contrast between them: Max is a tough and sarcastic girl who wears practical clothes, while Holly is an innocent girl who wears a 1950s blue dress and has long pigtails.
• Tomboyish Name: Her full name is "Maxine" but she'd rather go by the usually masculine-only nickname, "Max".
• Tomboyish Ponytail: In Season 4, she wears a low ponytail and dresses in more masculine clothing (albeit much darker than previous palettes).
• Tomboy with a Girly Streak: Very much a Tomboy full of piss and vinegar, but during Season 3, she's shown doing things like enjoying shopping, dancing to pop music, reading teen magazines, and fawning over Ralph Macchio.
• Trashy Trailer Home: By Season 4 she has moved into a trailer park with her mother after her step-father left them.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: While she isn't quite Lucas's girlfriend at the time, she uses a syringe of sedative to subdue her abusive step-brother Billy and threatens to smash his groin with a nail-embedded bat after he forcibly shoves Lucas against Joyce's shelf of knick-knacks and beats Steve to a pulp.
• "Well Done, Daughter!" Gal: Max's mother really wants her to be a meek, sweet, feminine Proper Lady like some other girls. Runaway Max explains it:
  I wanted to make her happy, but none of the things that would make her happy were things I could be without lying. When my mom looked at me, she saw a problem that needed to be solved. She saw someone too prickly and rude to feel good around, and too much like my dad to really understand.
• What the Hell, Hero?: She berates Lucas for giving her mixed messages about being her friend and keeping her out of the loop. Lucas is shown to be reluctant to tell her everything, as it's an outlandish tale by all measures (and there's the small matter of the Government Conspiracy, its confidentiality agreements, and its presumed assassins to enforce them).
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Played with. Max can be immature in a relationship (as her advice to Eleven shows), but the rest of the Party tend to defer to her as being more experienced; she skateboards, she is The Medic, and she can drive.
• Youthful Freckles: A freckled young teen who skateboards.

Erica Sinclair

Played By: Priah Ferguson

Debut: "Chapter Two: Trick or Treat, Freak" (2x02)

Lucas' snarky and sharp-witted younger sister. Initially a minor character, she joins the main cast starting in Season 3.

• '80s Hair: From hair buns, to multi braids with colorful hair decorations, to a high ponytail, and afro puffs, her hairstyles run the gamut of young Black preteen girls in the 1980s.
• Action Survivor: An average preteen girl who is introduced to the world of Cold War espionage, mooks out to kill her and her friends, and supernatural monsters, yet uses knowledge accumulated before those incidents and her powers of observation to survive. Later graduates to something near an Action Girl when she's able to take down one of Jason's basketball teammates with those same powers of observation. The moment he lets his guard down, she clocks him with a Maglite.
• Advertised Extra: In Season 4. While in Season 3 she joins the adventure in episode 3 out of 8, in Season 4 she joins in episode 7 out of 9, with either extremely minor appearances or none at all in the prior episodes that season.
• All Girls Like Ponies: She's a fan of My Little Pony. Dustin uses this trait as evidence for her "nerd" status, pointing out that many of the staples of the franchise (magic, dragons, The Power of Friendship) are also prominent fantasy tropes of geek culture.
• Annoying Younger Sibling: Making fun of Lucas for being a nerd seems to be her mission in life. Played more seriously when she unknowingly seriously undermines Dustin's "Code Red" call because to her, it's just more of her brother's nerdy stuff.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Played for Laughs. She has no problem believing Dustin when he tells her the events of Season 1 and Season 2, but she simply doesn't believe her brother had any involvement in it.
• Ascended Extra: She goes from being a sassy comic relief character to being one of the main heroes in Season 3.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Erica goes to Lucas' basketball games whenever she can to support him because even though he's "a bench riding loser", he's still her brother.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Contrast how sugary-sweet she is with her parents at breakfast with her mean treatment of Lucas. This starts to go away by Season 4 due to taking a level in kindness.
• Black and Nerdy: She's African-American and a Child Prodigy. It takes Dustin to convince her to embrace the latter, though.
• Boomerang Bigot: Constantly insults Lucas and his friends by calling them "nerds." As Dustin thoroughly points out, she's a nerd herself. By Season 4, she's fully embraced it, happily playing Dungeons and Dragons with her brother and friends.
• Bratty Half-Pint: A snarky pre-teen who often makes insulting remarks to her brother and his friends. Plus, she's an implied Bitch in Sheep's Clothing.
• Calling Your Attacks: She gets a "crit hit!" against a basketball player by clocking him across the head with her maglite.
• Catchphrase: "Just the facts!"
• Character Development:
  • In Season 2, she's little more than a bratty younger sister who snarks constantly at Lucas, and makes disdainful remarks about how he and his friends are a bunch of nerds. In Season 3, she starts out the same way, and her only reason for agreeing to help Steve, Robin, and Dustin with their plan is the promise of free ice cream for life. However, as things start to go bad and she's filled in on what's going on, she comes to realize the danger everyone is in, and works with Dustin to help Steve and Robin when they're captured by the Russians. She also begins to embrace her inner nerd when Dustin points out that she's no different from him, and the end of the season has her happily accepting D&D books to use.
  • By Season 4, she's taken a level in kindness due to her experiences, and goes out of her way to help The Party without having to be bribed. She assists Mike and Dustin in their D&D game, her snark becomes reserved for people who are either dismissive of her (like Eddie initially was) or who are spewing bullshit (like Jason), she aids the Party in their fight against Vecna in Season 4, and it's even revealed that she chose to come to Lucas's basketball games (except the championship because she was assisting Mike and Dustin with their D&D campaign) to support her brother.
  • By Season 5, she's fully embraced her nerdiness and become a proud Teacher's Pet in Mr. Clarke's science class.
• Child Prodigy: She can do advanced calculations in her head, has strong opinions about the dichotomy between capitalism and communism, and is smart enough to keep up with Robin, who's no slouch on intelligence. She's also a ten-year-old who drops words like "equation" and "ideology" into her sentences... while refuting the fact that she's a nerd.
• Children Forced to Kill: Erica quickly figures out to use an instrument as a weapon, which Dustin then uses against a mook that was torturing Steve and Robin. Granted, it was the situation of having to fight for their lives and country that brought them to the point of even considering murder.
• Closet Geek: She's a ten year old genius, which Dustin playfully needles her for in Season 3. She initially takes offense to this, but later embraces it.
• Converted Fangirl: She spends the earlier seasons making fun of her brother and his friends for their nerdy hobbies, but between the third and fourth seasons, she gives Dungeons & Dragons a try, and by the time we see her again, she enjoys playing the game with the boys.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Of the Annoying Younger Sibling. At first, she acts like a typical one to Lucas, but since she has no idea what's going on, she assumes that anything the boys get up to is just one of their nerdy games. When Dustin tries to send Lucas a Code Red, she rudely cuts him off, not knowing about the real danger they're dealing with. After she joins the Masquerade, she begins to change her outlook, but she's so set in her ways that she finds psychic powers and other dimensions easier to accept than her brother being a part of it. It takes a long time and a lot of Character Development before the siblings can connect. At the same time, Dustin discovers that there's a lot more to her than just being a Bratty Half-Pint.
• The Drag-Along: Initially reluctant to join Dustin, Steve, and Robin. She only agrees when they cut a deal with her and promise her free ice cream for life, and even then, she's hesitant because what they're making her do could be dangerous. After she learns the truth about everything, she gradually changes her mind and stands with the heroes because it's the right thing to do.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • She may make snarky remarks about how Lucas and his friends are a bunch of nerds, but when Jason attempts to rally the Hawkin's residents against the Hellfire Club and paint them as a satanic cult responsible for all the bad things happening, Erica doesn't hesitate to call bullshit on this, and stands up to Jason in defense of her brother and the other Hellfire Club members.
  • In Season 5, she initially refuses to help Lucas and Mike with their plan to kidnap Derek Turnbow, since it would involve interacting with her former friend Tina. But once Mike explains that the reason for the plan is that Holly went missing, she agrees to help.
• Fire-Forged Friends: With the rest of "Scoops Troop", but mostly with Dustin. Uncovering and foiling a secret plot by a foreign country, barely avoiding getting caught or killed along the way, will do that to a person.
  Jason: Do you know Dustin Henderson?
  Erica: Know him? I've bled with him!
• The Friend Nobody Likes: At first. Most of the main characters know her because she's Lucas' sister but see her as a nuisance. After she's let into the Masquerade and helps the heroes, they're on better terms with her.
• The Gadfly: She's shown to love pushing people's buttons, particularly her older brother's, to get reactions out of them.
• Gamer Chick: Not at first, but by the start of Season 4, she has become an avid Dungeons & Dragons player. She's the only girl known to take part in the Hellfire Club.
• Gender-Equal Ensemble: She becomes a part of one in Season 3, the group investigating the Russians' secret base, which includes two boys (Steve and Dustin) and two girls (Robin and Erica).
• Girly Girl with a Tomboy Streak: Erica wears a lot of adorable tween girl outfits with bright, feminine colors, likes trying different hairstyles, and is a fan of My Little Pony, but she's also gutsy and snarky, not afraid to get into the heat of things, and by the fourth season, she's gotten into Dungeons & Dragons.
• Good with Numbers: Capable of performing complex math calculations on the fly all in her head, which surprises (and impresses) Dustin. As she puts it, "math is easy".
• Guest-Star Party Member: In Season 3, she becomes the late coming fourth member of the Scoops Troop, being the only person they know small enough to fit in Starcourt's vent system. At the end of the season, Will leaves her his Dungeons & Dragons books, implying she might become a more regular part of the Party's adventures in future. In Season 4, she seems to start as a semi-outsider still, but then appears to be a full party member by the end.
• Hidden Depths: Erica appears to be the typical Annoying Younger Sibling who loves girly things, but Season 3 shows that she's a math prodigy and is politically savvy.
• Honorary True Companion: Becomes one to the Party by Season 4. Formerly The Friend Nobody Likes, she's now a genuine friend to the boys and helps them when they need it, but she's absent from their adventures for much of the season and doesn't have quite the same bond with them as they do with each other.
• How They Treat the Help: The negative side of the trope. She's incredibly demanding and rude to Steve and Robin when they're working at Scoops Ahoy!, constantly ringing the bell despite having their attention, being sarcastic to their faces, demanding free samples, and so on.
• Hypocritical Humor: She often calls out her brother and his friends for being nerds, but as Dustin points out, she's just as nerdy as they are.
• Irony: If she knew half of the stuff Lucas has gone through, he'd still be a nerd, but she probably wouldn't make fun of him as much. As it turns out, Lucas is way cooler than she thinks.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Erica might have acted mean to Dustin, Steve and Robin, but she really has a valid point that they are endangering her, as the Russians might have equipment to harm them several times over, not to mention the booby traps that might get activated in the room. And of course, she is proven right (in a way she didn't expect though), as the room is actually an elevator.
  • Assuming her account of the events is accurate, she's right that she really didn't do anything to deserve Tina Turnbow breaking off her friendship. Erica giving Josh a black eye during gym class dodgeball was a genuine accident and it's not her fault that Josh reacted to it by crying and deciding to shun Tina, who has a major crush on him, just for being Erica's friend.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: She's snarky, annoying, and originally only joins the group to get free ice cream. But she's still one of the good guys who helps save the day, and manages to strike up rapport with the rest of "Scoops Troop". In Season 4, when they take Holly's Lite Brite to communicate with the older teens on the other side, she thanks Holly and gives her a full size bag of Skittles. She also goes to Lucas' basketball games just to support him because he's still her brother.
• Like Father, Like Son: She seems to have inherited the snark from her parents, or at least more than Lucas did.
• Little Miss Badass: Takes to her first adventure infiltrating the Russian base like she were a seasoned commando and she orders the adults around her like she's the boss of everybody. In Season 4, she even tells off Jason and his anti-D&D Mob a couple of times, and she wins a fight against one of them in the finale by faking him out when he's distracted.
• Little Miss Snarker: Her default tone is exaggerated, withering sarcasm directed at her older brother.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Like with Robin, after she joins Dustin and Steve to deal with the Russians, she's still kept in the dark for a time about all the supernatural stuff that been happening in Hawkins for a while until Dustin outright tells her. After the groups meet up, Lucas is shocked to learn that his own sister has gotten involved in everything.
• Military Brat: Her father fought in the Vietnam War.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: "Free ice cream FOR LIFE!"
• Odd Friendship: She forms one of these with Dustin, of all people, in Season 3.
• Out of Focus: After the first episode of Season 4 she fades into the background for the next several before eventually joining the adventure in episode 7 out of 9.
• Passing the Torch: Is on the receiving end of this (though it's admittedly a rather mild example). The group pass D&D books on to her, implying that she'll take over the hobby now that the guys have more or less stopped playing.
• Patriotic Fervor: Despite being only 10 she has a firm enough understanding of both Communism and the tensions between America and Soviet Russia to proudly stand with her home team. In Season 4, she wears a cape patterned after the American flag to Eddie's final D&D game, and debuts to an electric guitar cover of "The Star-Spangled Banner".
  "You can't spell 'America' without 'Erica.'"
• Promotion to Opening Titles: As of Season 3.
• Sassy Black Girl: Her most prominent trait is her obnoxious sarcasm.
• Shipper on Deck: In Season 4, she makes a sassy comment to Jason wanting to take Lucas out, noting that he really started dating down in standards after breaking up with Max, implying that she got along with Max and approved of their relationship.
• Sibling Team: She and Lucas start to work more closely together in the last third of season 4, even getting a scene where they do a little one-on-one sibling bonding while making spears together.
• Sixth Ranger: She becomes part of the main cast in Season 3, and is the fourth and last member to join what's eventually nicknamed "Scoops Troop". Occurs in Season 4 as well, with her joining the Party (or at least, the half that's in Hawkins) in the climax of the season to help stop Vecna.
• The Smart Guy: Despite being the youngest member of the main cast, Erica is also one of the smartest. She's a natural math whiz and has an excellent grasp of geopolitics in general. This eventually helps her connect with fellow smart guy Dustin.
• Sweet Tooth: One scene has her drowning her pancakes in maple syrup while her parents are distracted, much to Mrs. Sinclair's annoyance. Season 3 makes a Running Gag of her abusing Scoops Ahoy's sample policy to eat tons of ice cream for free, and Dustin and Steve manage to buy her loyalty to the team by promising her free ice cream for life.
• Tagalong Kid: The youngest of the main cast by virtue of being Lucas's younger sister, and is roped into the "Scoops Troop"'s mission. She's helpful despite mocking them at every opportunity.
• Teen Genius: Well, a preteen genius. She's not even in high school but she's got a brilliant grasp of geopolitics and math.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: In Season 3, she's the Girly Girl (favors cutesy tween girl outfits with bright colors) to Robin's Tomboy (an "alternative" girl, more unkempt and casual).
• Took a Level in Badass: After spending much of the series being a Tagalong Kid, Erica does some pretty badass things in Season 4, which includes fighting off one of Jason Carver's friends who was intending to kill her for her association with Lucas. In Season 5, she serves a drugged pie to Tina's family as part of a plan to save her brother Derek, then stabs her terrified former friend in the neck with a syringe while coldly telling her she should've eaten the pie.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Once she realizes that the Party is into some really serious and badass stuff, she eases up on picking on them (and especially her brother) significantly. This is helped along by her Odd Friendship with Dustin.
• Troll: She's excellent at pushing her brother's buttons.
• Weak, but Skilled: She's a pre-teen girl without any powers, but she's got a genius-level sense of observation, which she's used to get out of danger before.

Nikki Baxter

Voiced By: Odessa A'zion

Debut: "Stranger Things: Tales from '85"

A new student in Hawkins Middle School in early 1985, whose mother is filling in for Mr. Clarke as science teacher while he's taking a sabbatical.

• Bully Hunter: Her introduction has her savings Will from getting beat up by a mean girl's boyfriend.
• Delinquent Hair: She's recognizable by her purple mohawk.
• Friendless Background: Due to the Baxters traveling and relocating frequently, Nikki never gets the chance to make any close friends and has resigned herself to all her friendships being flash-in-the-pan experiences which won't last.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Nikki enjoys taking random objects ans kitbashing them into something new. Two of her projects include a rocket launcher made from a microwave and climbing gloves made from ski gloves with chewing gum. The peak of her skills comes in the final two episodes of the first season, when she manages to build a homemade energy cannon to fight the mutant Queen with, all in the span of a single day.
• Stepford Smiler: Nikki puts on a confident front, but she's hiding some deep-seated angst over her inability to fit in. When Will says he wants to stay in touch once she leaves Hawkins, all Nikki can say is that nobody wants to be pen pals with a freak.
• Younger Than They Look: With her height and more mature, punk style, she could easily be mistaken as being around Nancy or Steve's age, rather than the 13-14 years she actually is.