Spoilers for Buffy, Scream and Stranger Things ahead.
If you're a horror fan, you've probably heard of the "final girl" trope. The term was coined by Carol J. Clover in 1992, and it describes the protagonists of a slew of slasher movies. One teenage girl survives until the end of the movie after watching all of her friends die horribly. She outwits the killer, and manages to temporarily defeat him, if not outright kill him. She's probably brunette, bookish, and repressed, staying away from sex, drugs, and alcohol. If she has a boyfriend, he probably shares few of her interests, pressures her to have sex, and eventually dies along with the rest of the cast.
From the time that Stranger Things premiered in 2016, the show has incorporated – and subverted – 1980s movie tropes, and the final girl is no exception. While Stranger Things features several major female characters, its "final girl" comes in the form of Nancy Wheeler. When we meet Nancy, she seems like the quintessential final girl stereotype: she's brunette, she's book-smart, and her new boyfriend Steve is trying to get her to study a little less and party a little more. She even shares a name with the final girl from A Nightmare On Elm Street.
That being said, Nancy immediately deviates from the typical final girl in one key way: she only has one friend, Barb, who's just as bookish as she is, more anxious, and less traditionally attractive. In a standard slasher film, you might even expect Barb to be the final girl, especially in a sequence of events in episode two: Barb accompanies Nancy to a party at Steve's, and attempts to shotgun a beer so she can fit in, but ends up cutting her hand in the process. Nancy brushes Barb off in favour of having sex with Steve, and Barb ends up sitting by the pool, sad and alone.
Then, something happens that dispels any notion of Barb being the final girl: her blood attracts the monster, who kills her, leaving no trace of a body.
So, within the first two episodes, Nancy has already broken some of the main final girl rules. She doesn't have big group of friends for the monster to pick off one by one, she's not the most bookish and repressed of the friends she does have, and she's no longer a virgin. This isn't so groundbreaking, however; various classic final girls have broken the formula in some way, from Laurie Strode smoking pot in Halloween to Sidney Prescott sleeping with the killer in Scream. Nancy still fits the final girl role in personality – and now her best friend has been killed.
Nancy teams up with Jonathan Byers, a high school outcast whose brother has just disappeared, and who took a photo of Barb before her death, to investigate Barb's disappearance. This leads Steve to believe that Nancy is cheating on him with Jonathan and break up with her. Nancy and Jonathan begin hunting for the monster, and we see that she's resourceful, brave, and handy with a weapon, even without any practice – more classic final girl traits. The pair buys an arsenal of weapons and traps, and sets them up around Jonathan's house before each cutting their hand to attract the monster. Unfortunately, Steve happens to show up just before the monster does, and he freaks out. Eventually, he calms down enough to hit the monster with a spiked bat, helping Nancy and Jonathan to disarm it, and once he realizes what's going on, he apologizes to Nancy, and they get back together.
By the end of season one, Nancy is still recognizable as the final girl – book-smart, resourceful, brave, and eventually playing a part in defeating the monster, although she didn't kill it herself – but with some key differences. Notably, she's not alone; she has supports in Jonathan, Steve, and her brother Mike, who was also hunting the monster with his friends in an attempt to find Jonathan's brother Will. Nancy is also a more fleshed out character than most slasher films allow for. She's studious and polite, but she's also jaded and critical, and she's no longer afraid to break the rules. She's fiery, ambitious, brave, and handy with a weapon, and she's also feminine.
At this point in the series, Nancy is reminiscent of another favourite subverted-horror-trope character of mine: Buffy Summers from Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Buffy was written to be a subversion of the girl who typically gets killed at the beginning of the movie, the blonde, socialite party girl who's not bookish and doesn't follow all the rules. In season three, Buffy starts working harder at school so she can get into university, and she acts as the "good girl" in opposition to the reckless, rebellious, and seductive Faith Lehane. Like Nancy, Buffy is a well-rounded character by this point; she's responsible but she's okay with breaking the rules, she's a skilled fighter, she's confident and unafraid to stand up for herself, and she's feminine, fashionable, and has a boyfriend.
Both Buffy and the final girl trope have been lauded as feminist – and dismissed as neutral at best and misogynistic at worst. The final girl trope – or at least certain aspects of it – has been criticized for demonizing women who drink, do drugs, have sex, party, or care too much about their looks, portraying them as stupid and eventually punishing them by having them killed. While Buffy is meant to subvert this, it doesn't always work, as things go awry when Buffy loses her virginity (her boyfriend turns evil), gets drunk for the first time (the beer mentally transforms her into a cro-magnon person), and often when she parties (she's inevitably attacked by some sort of demon). This is in part due to the nature of the show – things are always going wrong for Buffy, no matter what she's doing – but it still undercuts the show's feminist message when its main character is seemingly punished for the same things as her horror movie counterparts.
In season two of Stranger Things, we see Nancy and Steve attend another party. She gets drunk, and ends up confessing that she feels that she was responsible for Barb's death – and that she no longer loves Steve. They break up again, and while Steve goes to Nancy's house to attempt to make up with her, it never actually happens – she's not there, and he gets sidetracked into helping Dustin Henderson, a friend of Mike and Will's, who has found a baby Demogorgon (the monster from season one).
Meanwhile, Nancy enlists Jonathan to help her avenge Barb's death. They cut school and visit a private investigator, Murray, who has been hired to look into Barb's disappearance. The three of them put together a convincing story about how Barb was killed by toxins from Hawkins Laboratory – the laboratory that was responsible for the Demogorgon. Murray tells Nancy and Jonathan that the pair obviously in love, and after attempting to deny it, they end up admitting their feelings and sleeping together, entering a relationship that lasts for the remainder of the show (so far).
Unlike Buffy and the women of classic slasher films, Nancy is never morally condemned for drinking, partying, cutting school, or having sex. There are consequences to her actions, but only when she's being rude – like when she abandons Barb in season one, or rather unceremoniously tells Steve their relationship is "bullshit" while drunk in season two. Even in these moments, she isn't portrayed as unsympathetic, but rather as a regular teenager who has never navigated a relationship before, and sometimes makes mistakes. Nancy is also shown acknowledging these mistakes, internalizing a massive amount of guilt over Barb's death that drives her actions in season two.
In season three, Nancy and Jonathan work summer jobs at a newspaper. Nancy becomes frustrated when she has to face frequent misogynistic remarks from her all-male coworkers, and she tries to investigate what she thinks is a big story, only to get herself and Jonathan fired. This leads to the two of them fighting, with Nancy arguing that Jonathan doesn't understand her experiences fighting daily sexism, and Jonathan arguing that Nancy doesn't understand his experiences being poor and having to help support his family. Nancy talks to her mother about what she's been going through and how bad she feels about the fight, and they have a heart to heart about the difficulties of being a woman. Nancy's mother tells her that she has the tenacity to survive, saying "most people just give up ... but you're a fighter". She then urges Nancy to finish writing her story and try and sell it to a different paper.
Nancy then continues to pursue the story, leading her to find out that people in the town are being controlled by supernatural forces, or having their minds "flayed", and that Mike, Will, and their friends might be in danger. She calls Jonathan, and they reconcile, and the two of them help to fight the flayed.
Nancy has all the components of a typical final girl – she's a brainy brunette, she's endlessly resourceful and resilient, and she continues to fight a monster that keeps coming back. However, her character grows well beyond the confines of the normal final girl trope, and she is allowed to make mistakes, have layers, explore her sexuality, and eventually become a more mature person. Unlike the reductive and moralistic final girl trope of the past, Nancy is a fleshed out, realistic portrayal of a teenage girl going through trauma, while also coming of age.
Who are your favourite final girls? What do you think of Nancy Wheeler? Let me know in the comments below!