mike and eleven's relationship in stranger things is weird as hell
Today, for my daily writing task, I decided to ramble about Mike and El's relationship in Stranger Things. I know the show ended a while ago (quite a let down of a final season for multiple reasons) but before season 5 aired, I think I rewatched the entire thing for about 2,5 times in a row, or so? Kind of excessive maybe, but it was a good distraction. Anyhow, during these rewatches, one aspect of the show that truly revealed itself to be totally Weirddddd to me, and something that I should've seen as a red flag, regarding how the writers would eventually choose to handle El's storyline in the finale, was just horribly misogynistic the Mike and El romantic relationship is depicted throughout the show.
For one, the acute case of power imbalance between these two goes repeatedly unaddressed. Five whole seasons and we never get a deep, substantial discovery of how El has no idea who she is, what she wants, what she likes or dislikes; or how she is an emotionally and socially stunted person due to her being brought up inside a lab, never having experienced unconditional love, freedom or friendship. This is exactly why, Mike takes up an almost deity like position in El's life; and can you blame her? He is the first person, a peer, who was actually nice to her. He provided her protection and safety in a time when she needed it the most. El learned about the "normal world" through Mike's eyes. He made up about 90% of El's personality, her sense of self, as she had been fully denied of a personhood prior to her escape and meeting with Mike. Mike on the other hand, has a full established life, a personality, a family, friends, that doesn't have to involve El at all. Mind you, El was never truly free, even after escaping the lab. For the majority of the show, when she wasn't being used as a weapon in one way or another, she lived a life of captivity, Hopper and Mike practically being her only connections to the outside world. Mike, as I've pointed out, wasn't confined, he had a fully functioning life that didn't involve El at all. She was always where he expected her to be, she was obsessed with him, totally worshipped him! Whereas Mike could always hang out with his friends at the mall, go wherever he wanted to go, be with whoever he wanted to be. El was never given that freedom. El, during the limited time she got to have a semblance of normalcy and personhood in her life, was mostly just making out with her boyfriend. As a 13 year old at that. Is this not weird at all? Am I crazy?
In season 3, this major issue within El's character is starting to get addressed by our beloved writers, as shallow as it may be, when Max is introduced to her storyline. At this point, I will have to assume that the writers introduced the Max and El relationship into the show, not in order to give El another meaningful relationship besides that with Mike, and for her to develop as a person, to figure out her needs, likes, hobbies whatever it may be, but to deflate potential misogynistic writing criticisms which were already being thrown in their way, following seasons 1 and 2. Unfortunately, as much as I love El and Max together, the writers never bothered to show us, the audience, just how exactly El changed after making a friend who truly saw her and empathized with her experiences, in many different levels. They weren't ever courageous enough to lay out the truly problematic foundations of her relationship with Mike. How could it be that you, as the writers, establish, textually at that, within the season that El doesn't know what she likes and dislikes, and NOT make her break up with the boy who she had gotten together before even having a full grasp of the concept of friendship, within that same season? I believe that for her relationship with Max, and her epiphanies regarding girlhood and personhood to have any resemblance of payoff, El should've at least been questioning what her relationship with Mike meant, at its core. We should've gotten a proper inner reflection and questioning, regarding El. Instead, the writers chose not to seriously grapple with this issue and played out the Mike and El breakup storyline as a comedic subplot, and made them get back together at the end of the season, as if nothing had happened. We as the audience on the other hand, are expected to be satisfied with how this conflict was handled; because the writers finally decided to address the elephant in the room. Unfortunately, the resolution they came up with, and the handling of the power imbalance was extremely half baked and essentially meaningless.
At the end of the day, in the seasons that followed, the writers never bothered to develop El beyond her past experiences in the lab, beyond her being a weapon, a superhero, an exotic enigmatic figure who was majorly defined by her relationships with the men in her life, and treated her like an object who had to be left out of the picture in order for the rest of the characters, who got to enjoy "fully realized human being" status, to move on with their lives. When the finale aired, many people, myself included, were baffled at how the writers chose to close off El's story. However, maybe the signs were always there; and them romanticizing her relationship with Mike to this degree and deciding to have this romantic subplot constitute a huge bulk of her character arcs in all five of the seasons were the greatest of them all. In the end, at her dying moments, El had to be Mike's superhero girlfriend, his savior, and nothing more.
This is all I've got for my "Forcing myself to write everyday" post of the day. I really struggled with it, it felt like I was forcibly squeezing sentences out of my brain, so apologies if this doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Excited for whatever tomorrow has in store for me!