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* IncompatibleOrientation: Girls throw themselves at Will but he is uncomfortable every time that happens.
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* IncompatibleOrientation: Girls throw themselves at Will but he is uncomfortable every time that happens. Season 4 cements that Will's feelings for Mike Wheeler go beyong platonic friendship, while Mike is in love with Eleven.
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* MisterSeahorse: After the Demogorgon impregnates him, he "gives birth" to the demodogs. By coughing them up.
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* MisterSeahorse: After the Demogorgon impregnates him, he "gives birth" to one of the demodogs. By coughing them it up.
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* QueerCharacterQueerActor: Both Noah Schnapp and Will byers were confirmed/came out as gay
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* QueerCharacterQueerActor: Both Noah Schnapp and Will byers Byers were confirmed/came out as gay
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Trope was cut/disambiguated due to cleanup
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* MuggingTheMonster: 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''. [[KickTheSonOfABitch And they deserved every agonizing moment of it.]] She also does it to a pair of abusive orderlies before her escape, throwing one into a concrete wall so hard he leaves a ''massive'' dent, and casually snapping the neck of the second like a twig.
to:
* MuggingTheMonster: 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''. [[KickTheSonOfABitch And they deserved every agonizing moment of it.]] it. She also does it to a pair of abusive orderlies before her escape, throwing one into a concrete wall so hard he leaves a ''massive'' dent, and casually snapping the neck of the second like a twig.
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** Eleven's personality has also become much more forceful and proactive. While in Season 1 she was meek, quiet, and submissive, 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.
to:
** Eleven's personality has also become much more forceful and proactive. While in Season 1 she was meek, quiet, and submissive, 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.
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* ShrinkingViolet: He is more soft-spoken and gentle than his friends.
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* ShrinkingViolet: He is more soft-spoken and gentle gentler than his friends.
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** Stranger Things Writers on Twitter claiming that "this also makes Mike crazy" with a photo of Will.
to:
** Stranger Things Writers ''Stranger Things'' writers on Twitter claiming that "this also makes Mike crazy" with a photo of Will.
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Sub-bullets should not be formatted this way, and these examples are excessive and not required to demonstrate the Ship Tease trope. Trimmed.
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--> NetflixUK posting an image of "who they ship" including Steve and the Demogorgon and Mike and Will on Instagram stories
--> NetflixIndia posting El as "the true third wheel" and Mike and Will as "the otp" on Instagram
--> Multiple interviews and Platform/TikTok comments of Noah Schnapp speaking favorably of the pairing, hinting at more of them up coming in season 5
--> Finn Wolfhard and David Harbor giggling over Will's true romance (confirmed as Mike) in season 4
--> Stranger Things Writers on Twitter claiming that "this also makes Mike crazy" with a photo of Will
--> Stranger Things Writers posting an image of Mike and Will labeled "Thinking of our Halloween costumes" on National coming out day
--> Nxonnnetflix posting a Battleship question with Mucas, Mileven, Jancy, and Byler captioning the post with "Byler Rights amirite?"
--> Stranger things writers on the Writer's Strike with signs saying "Byler won't write itself"
--> Season 4 promotion material featuring a poster of Lumax, Jopper, and Byler
--> The last shot of season 4 with Jancy, Jopper, and Byler standing on the hill as the flowers Mike had given El rot
--> Several shots, words, and auditory cues directly comparing Byler to Lumax Jancy and Jopper
--> NetflixIndia posting El as "the true third wheel" and Mike and Will as "the otp" on Instagram
--> Multiple interviews and Platform/TikTok comments of Noah Schnapp speaking favorably of the pairing, hinting at more of them up coming in season 5
--> Finn Wolfhard and David Harbor giggling over Will's true romance (confirmed as Mike) in season 4
--> Stranger Things Writers on Twitter claiming that "this also makes Mike crazy" with a photo of Will
--> Stranger Things Writers posting an image of Mike and Will labeled "Thinking of our Halloween costumes" on National coming out day
--> Nxonnnetflix posting a Battleship question with Mucas, Mileven, Jancy, and Byler captioning the post with "Byler Rights amirite?"
--> Stranger things writers on the Writer's Strike with signs saying "Byler won't write itself"
--> Season 4 promotion material featuring a poster of Lumax, Jopper, and Byler
--> The last shot of season 4 with Jancy, Jopper, and Byler standing on the hill as the flowers Mike had given El rot
--> Several shots, words, and auditory cues directly comparing Byler to Lumax Jancy and Jopper
to:
--> NetflixIndia
** Netflix India posting El as "the true third wheel" and Mike and Will as "the otp" on
-->
** Multiple interviews and Platform/TikTok comments of Noah Schnapp speaking favorably of the pairing, hinting at more of them up coming in
-->
** Finn Wolfhard and David Harbor giggling over Will's true romance (confirmed as Mike) in
-->
** Stranger Things Writers on Twitter claiming that "this also makes Mike crazy" with a photo of
--> Stranger Things Writers
** ''Stranger Things'' writers posting an image of Mike and Will labeled "Thinking of our Halloween costumes" on National
--> Nxonnnetflix posting a Battleship question with Mucas, Mileven, Jancy, and Byler captioning the post with "Byler Rights amirite?"
--> Stranger things
** ''Stranger Things'' writers on the Writer's Strike with signs saying "Byler won't write
--> Season 4 promotion material featuring a poster of Lumax, Jopper, and Byler
--> The last shot of season 4 with Jancy, Jopper, and Byler standing on the hill as the flowers Mike had given El rot
--> Several shots, words, and auditory cues directly comparing Byler to Lumax Jancy and Jopper
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* TheSmurfettePrinciple: Applies to them in Season 1, with El as the sole girl and Season 2, where El and Max are both main characters, but El has left the Party for a chunk of time, and she dislikes Max at first sight. Subverted in Season 3, where Max and El become close friends.
to:
* TheSmurfettePrinciple: Applies to them in Season 1, with El as the sole girl and Season 2, where El and Max are both main characters, but El has left the Party for a chunk of time, and she dislikes Max at first sight. Subverted in Season 3, where Max and El become close friends.time.
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* BoyishShortHair: In Season 1, she has a buzz-cut as a result of her being a laboratory test subject. It is difficult to [[LadyLooksLikeADude 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 it with a wig when the boys have to move her through public. Has some shades of BaldMystic as well, since because of the experimentation she has telekinetic abilities. Later subverted since by season 2, enough time has passed for her hair to grow out and by Seasons 3 and 4 it's shoulder-length. [[spoiler:Brenner and Owens' attempt to restore her powers in Season 4 involves shaving her hair back down to its Season 1 state.]]
to:
* BoyishShortHair: In Season 1, she has a buzz-cut as a result of her being a laboratory test subject. It is difficult to [[LadyLooksLikeADude 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 it with a wig when the boys have to move her through public. Has some shades of BaldMystic as well, since because of the experimentation she has telekinetic abilities. Later subverted since by season By Season 2, enough time has passed for her hair to grow out out, and by Seasons 3 and 4 it's shoulder-length. [[spoiler:Brenner and Owens' attempt to restore her powers in Season 4 involves shaving her hair back down to its Season 1 state.]]
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As per Averted Trope guidelines, instances where a trope does not occur, or is not a relevant fit, should not be added to a work page, unless in certain exceptional circumstances.
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* TheLoad: Zig-zagged and PlayedForDrama. She's normally the ''opposite'' of TheLoad, being the only person who can truly protect the other characters from the various supernatural threats they face. However, near the end of season 3, [[spoiler: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. Averted when she's able to reach out to Billy and convinces him to redeem himself by taking on the Mind Flayer]].
to:
* TheLoad: Zig-zagged and PlayedForDrama. She's normally the ''opposite'' of TheLoad, being the only person who can truly protect the other characters from the various supernatural threats they face. However, near the end of season 3, [[spoiler: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. Averted when she's able to reach out to Billy and convinces him to redeem himself by taking on the Mind Flayer]].own]].
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Main Cast (''The Party''' | [[Characters/StrangerThingsAdults Adults]] | [[Characters/StrangerThingsTeens Teens]]) | [[Characters/StrangerThingsSupportingCast Supporting Cast]] | [[Characters/StrangerThingsHawkins Hawkins]] | [[Characters/StrangerThingsHawkinsNationalLaboratory Hawkins National Laboratory]] | [[Characters/StrangerThingsTheUpsideDown The Upside Down]] | [[Characters/StrangerThingsOutsiders Outsiders]]-]]]]]
to:
Main Cast (''The ('''The Party''' | [[Characters/StrangerThingsAdults Adults]] | [[Characters/StrangerThingsTeens Teens]]) | [[Characters/StrangerThingsSupportingCast Supporting Cast]] | [[Characters/StrangerThingsHawkins Hawkins]] | [[Characters/StrangerThingsHawkinsNationalLaboratory Hawkins National Laboratory]] | [[Characters/StrangerThingsTheUpsideDown The Upside Down]] | [[Characters/StrangerThingsOutsiders Outsiders]]-]]]]]
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[[Characters/StrangerThingsMainCast Main Cast]] ([[Characters/StrangerThingsSteveHarrington Steve Harrington]] | [[Characters/StrangerThingsRobinBuckley Robin Buckley]]) | '''The Party''' ([[Characters/StrangerThingsEleven Eleven]]) | [[Characters/StrangerThingsSupportingCast Supporting Cast]] | [[Characters/StrangerThingsHawkins Hawkins]] | [[Characters/StrangerThingsHawkinsNationalLaboratory Hawkins National Laboratory]] | [[Characters/StrangerThingsTheUpsideDown The Upside Down]] ([[Characters/StrangerThingsTheMindFlayer The Mind Flayer]] | [[Characters/StrangerThingsVecna Vecna]]) | [[Characters/StrangerThingsOutsiders Outsiders]]-]]]]]
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!!CharacterSpecificPages
* '''[[Characters/StrangerThingsEleven Eleven]]'''
* '''[[Characters/StrangerThingsEleven Eleven]]'''
!!Founding Members
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[[folder:Max Mayfield]]
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[[folder:Eleven]]
!!Eleven / "El" / Jane Hopper (née Ives)
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%% Image selected per Image Pickin' thread:
%% Please don't change or remove without starting a new thread.
%% Please don't change or remove without starting a new thread.
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%% Please don't change
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!!Maxine "Max" Mayfield
[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/max_24.png]]
[[caption-width-right:350:''"That's presumptuous of you."'']]
!!!'''Played By:''' Creator/SadieSink, Jacey Sink (young, Season 3), Belle Henry (young, Season 4)
!!!'''Debut:''' "[[Recap/StrangerThingsS2E1ChapterOneMADMAX Chapter One: MADMAX]]" (2x01)
->''"From here on out, you leave me and my friends alone. Understand?"''
A transfer student to Hawkins Middle School. She later becomes the group's SixthRanger.
to:
[[caption-width-right:300:[[labelnote:Click here]]https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/elevenseason3_9.jpg[[/labelnote]] Season 3]]
!!!'''Played By:'''
!!!'''Debut:'''
->''"From here on out, you leave me
->''"Friends don't lie."''
A mysterious young girl with psychokinetic powers found by Mike and
A transfer student
Added DiffLines:
* EightiesHair: By Season 3, her hair has grown out to a chin-length curly bob (a la Creator/MollyRingwald) which she wears with either a side parting or held up with colorful scrunchies. In Season 4, sports longer hair with heavy bangs. [[spoiler: Until it is shaved off.]]
* ActionGirl: Thanks to her psychic powers, Eleven [[spoiler:is able to fight off attackers by either moving objects into their path, breaking their bones with telekinesis, or even ''melt their brains'' with her mind. Her personal kill count is well into double figures.]]
* ActuallyPrettyFunny: When she and Max [[spoiler: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 [[ToiletHumor burp-and-fart contest]]]]. El immediately tears her blindfold off, looks at Max with a horrified expression on her face... and breaks down laughing.
* BadassAdorable: 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.
* BadassBoast: Rarely gives these but definitely does when she crosses paths with Vecna years after their last confrontation. "If you touch her, again. I will kill you, again."
* BadLiar: 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 [[spoiler: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.
* BecauseYouWereNiceToMe:
** 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 [[spoiler:avenges Benny Hammond by finally (and graphically) killing Connie Frazier]].
** Ultimately, having experienced real niceness is also what helps her see what [[spoiler: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. [[spoiler: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.]]
* BewareTheNiceOnes: 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 DeathGlare. Also overlaps with BewareTheQuietOnes.
* BigDamnHeroes:
** [[spoiler: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 [[spoiler:arrives at the last minute to kill a Demo-dog that seemingly had the rest of the main cast cornered]].
** In "The Bite", she [[spoiler:saves Steve, Robin, Dustin, and Erica from Russian soldiers by [[CarFu splattering them with the mall's display car]].]]
* TheBigDamnKiss: Two with [[spoiler:Mike. The first is at the end of Season 1, and the second is during the finale of Season 2]].
* BigEater: 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. [[JustifiedTrope Justified]], as this is probably to replenish her energy after using her powers.
* TheBigGuy: While Dustin 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 [[WizardsAndWitches Mage]], reflecting her supernatural powers.
* BigNo: In "Will the Wise", after [[spoiler:Hopper unplugs the TV and takes away her privileges to use it]], followed by a RapidFireNo as she [[spoiler:tries to get it working again]].
* BlessedWithSuck: 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. [[spoiler:After her clash with the Mind Flayer in Starcourt Mall - during which she sustained extensive physical and emotional trauma - Eleven's powers go dormant.]]
* BlindfoldedVision: Often covers her eyes to improve her ability to see visions.
* BlownAcrossTheRoom: Eleven is capable of doing this to anyone with her psychic powers. Lucas, Mike, and the Demogorgon all get their share of it.
* BoyishShortHair: In Season 1, she has a buzz-cut as a result of her being a laboratory test subject. It is difficult to [[LadyLooksLikeADude 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 it with a wig when the boys have to move her through public. Has some shades of BaldMystic as well, since because of the experimentation she has telekinetic abilities. Later subverted since by season 2, enough time has passed for her hair to grow out and by Seasons 3 and 4 it's shoulder-length. [[spoiler:Brenner and Owens' attempt to restore her powers in Season 4 involves shaving her hair back down to its Season 1 state.]]
* BrattyTeenageDaughter: 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.
* BroughtDownToNormal: [[spoiler: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.]]
** [[spoiler: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.]]
* BullyingTheDragon: 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 AlphaBitch 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.
* CallingTheOldManOut:
** Calls out her "Papa" in the first season finale with just one word: ''"Bad."''
** Does it to [[spoiler:Hopper in Season 2 when he won't let her leave. Even going so far as to compare him to Brenner]].
* CastFromHitPoints: Using her PsychicPowers causes fatigue and can eventually knock her out if she overextends herself and causes her PsychicNosebleed. There's also an element of CastFromCalories, 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".
* CharacterDevelopment:
** In the first season, Eleven is submissive, 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 IJustWantToBeNormal 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.
* CharacterTics: 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 [[spoiler:breaks Troy's arm]]. Her KubrickStare when using her telepathy also qualifies. [[spoiler: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/NeckSnap movement]].
* ClingyJealousGirl: Eleven doesn't like Max a lot because she saw Max and Mike hanging out alone during Season 2. She gets angry about [[spoiler: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.]]
* ConditionalPowers: She is extremely powerful, but she seems to be limited by her 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.
* CombatPragmatist: Not usually she always relies on her powers for anything violent 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.
* CreateYourOwnVillain: [[spoiler: Season 4 reveals that she unintentionally did this when she banished murderous telekinetic Henry Creel, aka One, to the Upside Down. Not only did this result in One's transformation into the monstrous HumanoidAbomination Vecna, but he used his powers to reshape his new home [[InTheirOwnImage in his own image]], transforming it from an alien -- but by no means ''evil'' -- environment into the hellish DarkWorld it is now, making her unwittingly responsible for all the paranormal threats that have plagued Hawkins.]]
* CreepyChild: In Season 1, she barely speaks and her entire body language is that of a skittish and scared animal. She also has no idea [[NoSocialSkills how to interact with regular people]]. [[spoiler:Being raised as a subject of study in a laboratory will do that.]] Did we mention she has telekinetic powers?
* CurbStompBattle: Absolutely ''no one'' is able to stand up to her insane psychic powers, man or Demogorgon. In fact, the only opponents she ''hasn't'' dished one of these out to are [[spoiler: a possessed Billy Hargrove, the Mind Flayer's avatar, and Vecna.]]
* DaddysGirl: [[spoiler:She becomes this 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]].
* DaddysLittleVillain: 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.
* DarkAndTroubledPast: [[spoiler:Stolen from her birth mother]], raised as a weapon and put through emotionally grueling training as a start.
* DavidVsGoliath: She's UnskilledButStrong with her powers. This means that whenever she's fighting Vecna in season four who [[spoiler:is really 001 from Hawkins Lab]] is weaker but much more trained with his powers, it becomes a battle of his greater skill and her greater strength. [[spoiler: Her raw power and love, which is incomprehensible to him, overpowers him.]]
* DeathGlare: 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[[spoiler:, because the fact that she takes a very literal approach to this trope makes her glares even more terrifying.]]
** She gives a great one when she [[spoiler: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]].
** An even better one comes when [[spoiler:she, Mike, Dustin, and Lucas are cornered by government agents in Hawkins Middle]]. It's made all the more disturbed by the fact that it's accompanied by her [[spoiler:telekinetically crushing the agents' brains]].
** Out of all of them, though, her face when, [[spoiler: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.
* DeconstructedCharacterArchetype: She is a MagicalGirlfriend to Mike for the most part, but once they become an OfficialCouple, El has no idea how to handle the pitfalls of a normal romantic relationship, along with having a life centered entirely on Hopper and Mike's desires. Fortunately {{Reconstruction}} when she [[spoiler:seeks out Max in Season 3 who shows her "there's more to life than stupid boys", helps El develop her own inner life and independence, while also pushing Mike to treat El like a real partner rather than a WishFulfillment pet]].
* DisproportionateRetribution: 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, sending Max flying from her skateboard just for being in the same breathing space as Mike in an attempt to cause injury also counts, clobbering Angela over the face with a roller blade boot was too far too and she would have done worse if she still had her powers.
* TheDogBitesBack: 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.
* EmotionlessGirl: 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.
* EscapedFromTheLab: She escaped from Hawkins Laboratory where experiments were being performed on her.
* ExpositoryHairstyleChange: She has a shaved buzz-cut for all of Season 1 before it grows out in Season 2. [[spoiler:In the second half of season 4, her hair is shaved off once again during her sensory deprivation "training".]]
* ExtremeMeleeRevenge: How she deals with Angela for antagonising her, clobbering her with a roller skate, drawing a lot of blood, and possibly causing a minor concussion -- all because Angela ruined her date with Mike.
* ExtremelyProtectiveChild:
** She's this to her mother, [[spoiler: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 [[ElectricTorture 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 [[spoiler:destroy One/Henry Creel and cause him to be recreated as Vecna.]]
** She's also this to her adoptive father Hopper; [[spoiler:in Season 4, despite taking multiple insults from Angela, it's only after Angela insults Hopper's name that Eleven grabs a rollerskate and clocks her in the face with it, giving the girl a broken nose and a concussion.]]
* FairyTaleMotif: 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 ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'', and InUniverse Mike has assigned her the role as the mage for their party.
* FeetFirstIntroduction: Her feet are shown in the first shot of her appearance in Season 1.
* FreakOut: Does this in "The Bathtub" when she sees [[spoiler:Barb's body]].
* GirlinessUpgrade: 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 Music/JoanJett 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.
* GlassCannon: Her combat capabilities are formidable but almost purely offensive in nature, and when she pushes her powers to the limit she can exhaust herself, sometimes to the point of falling unconscious.
* GuestFighter: She appears as a skin for [[Myth/ClassicalMythology Scylla]] in ''VideoGame/{{Smite}}''.
* HandicappedBadass: 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. [[spoiler: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 was particularly challenging for Hopper in Season 2 trying to "parent" El when she was both willing and able to throw him across a room whenever she got 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.
* HappilyAdopted: [[spoiler: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.]]
* HeroicBastard: Implied. There's no mention of her mother being married at the time of El's birth, indicating this trope. Finally confirmed in the novel, ''Suspicious Minds'', as her parents were not married when Terry became pregnant with El.
* HeroicBSOD: [[spoiler:Falls into this right after she hits Angela in the face 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.]]
* HeroicRROD: Overuse of El's powers tends to start with a PsychicNosebleed before overflowing into fatigue and eventual fainting spells if she doesn't have the time to rest and recover. [[spoiler: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, tragically leading into the trope below. In Season 3, she overtaxes her powers to the point where she's BroughtDownToNormal.]]
* HeroicSacrifice: [[spoiler: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 NotQuiteDead, though, and returns in Season 2.]]
* HugeGuyTinyGirl: 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.
* HumanoidAbomination: ''The First Shadow'' strongly hints that El, and the rest of the children Brenner experimented on, have a little bit of [[spoiler:Mind Flayer]] in them, by way of [[spoiler: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.]]
* {{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 [[KnightTemplarParent 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.
* IAmAMonster: She says this verbatim when she confesses [[spoiler:that she opened the portal to the Upside-Down]]. [[spoiler:After her bullying incident at the Roll-a-Rink, the mindset comes back in full force.]]
* IfYouThoughtThatWasBad: Her name, Eleven, opens the possibility that there are more [=ESP=] children out there like her doing who knows what. [[spoiler:We eventually meet one in Season 2, and another in Season 4... However, it turns out that the one we met in Season 4 had slaughtered all the rest of them, except the one we met in Season 2.]]
* IJustWantToHaveFriends: At first, 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, [[spoiler: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.]]
* InUniverseNickname: The kids call her "El" for short.
* ISeeDeadPeople: She's able to channel the presence of other people through electrical devices such as speakers and walkie-talkies. [[spoiler:Including from the Upside-Down, such as Will.]]
* ItsAllMyFault: [[spoiler:She holds a lot of guilt from making contact with the Demogorgon.]][[spoiler: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.]]
* JealousRomanticWitness: [[spoiler:She is visibly jealous of Max. While mistaking Max spending time with Mike for Mike forgetting about Eleven is understandable, that doesn't justify her later decision to give Max the cold shoulder much later when she introduces herself as part of the party. The two eventually warm up to each other in Season 3.]]
* KillerRabbit: 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 [[CluelessDeputy 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 DeathGlare.
* KubrickStare: Eleven does several of these throughout the series, usually before using her psychic powers.
* LadyLooksLikeADude: 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.
* LikeADaughterToMe: [[spoiler: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]].
* LittleMissBadass: Only about 12 years old in Season 1, but she is capable of laying waste to squads of armed orderlies and schoolyard bullies alike.
* LittleNo: Her response to [[spoiler:One's WeCanRuleTogether speech.]]
* TheLoad: Zig-zagged and PlayedForDrama. She's normally the ''opposite'' of TheLoad, being the only person who can truly protect the other characters from the various supernatural threats they face. However, near the end of season 3, [[spoiler: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. Averted when she's able to reach out to Billy and convinces him to redeem himself by taking on the Mind Flayer]].
** She also briefly falls into this role in Season 1, due to [[spoiler:the GlassCannon nature of her powers; after killing the agents who pointed guns at her and her friends (one of whom had [[PsychoForHire 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.]]
* LongDistanceRelationship: [[spoiler:Hopper's [[UncertainDoom 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.
* LongHairIsFeminine: Downplayed as her hair is still pretty short, but in Season 2 and 3, her hair growing out corresponds to her growing femininity.
* MagicalDefibrillator: This is how she saves [[spoiler:Max]]'s life at the end of Season 4; using her powers to restart her friend's heart.
* MeaningfulRename: [[spoiler: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 [[OnlyKnownByTheirNickname Only Be Known By Her Nickname]].
** Mike giving her that nickname at the beginning of the second episode of Season 1 is significant as well, as it's implied that she likes it because it came from him.
* MessianicArchetype: She has special powers and at the end of Season 1 [[spoiler:she sacrifices herself to save her friends and kill a monster, only to come back alive in Season 2]]. Also, Mike pretty much prays to her daily for almost a year.
* MilitaryBrat: ''Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds'' reveals that [[spoiler: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]].
* MindOverMatter: She has telekinesis, which she uses in various ways, from closing doors to [[spoiler:flipping vans over her and her friends' heads]].
* MoralityPet: [[spoiler:To Billy, as she provokes his HeroicSacrifice by empathizing with him and reminding him of his mother.]]
* MuggleMageRomance: While they are both technically human, she is an enhanced human while Mike's a regular one.
* MuggingTheMonster: 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''. [[KickTheSonOfABitch And they deserved every agonizing moment of it.]] She also does it to a pair of abusive orderlies before her escape, throwing one into a concrete wall so hard he leaves a ''massive'' dent, and casually snapping the neck of the second like a twig.
* MundaneUtility:
** 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 [[spoiler: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.
* MysticalWaif: She's a young girl with NoSocialSkills 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.
* NeverFoundTheBody: [[spoiler:The HeroicSacrifice 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 [[HistoryRepeats a repeat]] of the first time she opened a portal to the Upside-Down, even if [[TraumaInducedAmnesia she didn't recall it]], whilst trying to kill One.]]
* NeverSayDie: Several times, she cannot bring herself [[PoorCommunicationKills to warn Mike of the real danger they are all in]]. [[spoiler: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.
* NiceGirl: 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.
* NiceJobBreakingItHero: [[spoiler: 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 [[EldritchLocation Upside Down]], it only made him more powerful overtime.]]
* NoInfantileAmnesia: [[spoiler:Her memory of her mother's love when she was born gave her the strength to defeat One in the backstory.]]
* NoNudityTaboo: Twice in Season 1 she shows no compunctions about getting changed in front of strangers:
** Benny gives her one of his shirts so that she can change out of her hospital gown, and after she changes, he knows that she's a girl.
** When Mike gives her some of Nancy's old clothes to wear instead of the sweater Benny had given her, she immediately starts getting undressed in front of the boys, much to their horror, and they have to explain to her that she should change privately. Which further suggests that Benny had not given her any such explanation.
* NoSocialSkills: 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. [[spoiler: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 [[HandicappedBadass 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.)
* NotSoStoic: 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.
* NumerologicalMotif: Her full name is "Eleven". She has a corresponding tattoo on her right arm that reads "011".
* OfficialCouple: 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 LongDistanceRelationship 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 LongDistanceRelationship, El lying to Mike about making friends in California, and Mike [[CannotSpitItOut 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".
* OnlyKnownByTheirNickname: 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.
* ParrotExposition: Given her limited grasp of the English language from [[spoiler:being held captive in the Hawkins National Lab for most of her life]], Eleven often responds to the boys' statements with this. [[spoiler:In Season 2, having spent near 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.]]
* PersonOfMassDestruction: She possesses very strong psychic powers.
* PineappleRuinsPizza: {{Defied|Trope}}. When she tries pineapple pizza in Season 4, she likes it, in contrast to Mike.
* PinkMeansFeminine: Invoked. The boys dress her in an old pink dress of Nancy's so she can blend in better as a sweet GirlyGirl at Hawkins Middle, but in reality she isn't particularly girly. She does care more about her appearance than [[{{Tomboy}} Max]], though.
* PowerFloats:
** In "The Gate", she rises into the air while [[spoiler: using the full extent of her powers to close the gate to the Upside-Down.]]
** Happens again in "The Massacre at Hawkins Lab", when [[spoiler: she overpowers the Orderly/001 in their psychic duel by [[ThePowerOfLove calling on memories of her mother]].]]
* ThePowerOfHate: 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 [[spoiler:due to Kali's tutelage]]. When properly wrathful, she can move a grounded train car by herself, [[spoiler:and ultimately closes the Gate into the Upside-Down she opened at the Hawkins Lab]].
* ThePowerOfLove: 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 [[spoiler:lobotomized her mother]] after learning [[EvenEvilHasLovedOnes 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.
* PowerStrainBlackout: 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.
* PreSacrificeFinalGoodbye: At the climax of the first Season, [[spoiler: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 HeroicSacrifice turns out to have simply transported her into the Upside-Down, where she manages to escape in Season 2.]]
* ProgressivelyPrettier: On account of being away from the lab and her hair growing back.
* ProtagonistJourneyToVillain: In "The Lost Sister", [[spoiler: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 wasn't exactly innocent, but he was merely a retired PunchClockVillain who was only following orders, and is currently a father to two young daughters. When she discovers this, she spares his life and returns to Hawkins when she realizes that Kali is not a positive influence on her.]]
* PsychicNosebleed: Gets these 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.
* PsychicPowers: She has several psychic powers -- including telepathy, telekinesis, and the ability to communicate inter-dimensionally. Coming to terms with them and her situation is a little... well... "bringing up Carrie". [[spoiler:Thankfully, El has a much better parent in Hopper, so the destruction is minimal.]]
* PuppyLove: Mike has a thing for her from the get-go. [[spoiler: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 OfficialCouple by the end of Season 2.
* TheQuietOne: Given her [[TrainingFromHell 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.
* RaisedInALab: 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 EscapedFromTheLab and is found by the Party.
* ReasonYouSuckSpeech: 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.
* RedEyesTakeWarning: It's subtle, but in the Season 1 finale, [[spoiler:her eyes are absolutely bloodshot from the strain of pushing her powers like she has, especially against the Demogorgon]].
* ReplacementGoldfish: [[ParentalSubstitute Hopper]] outright admits that his [[KnightTemplarParent overprotective]] [[PapaWolf 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 RaisedInALab. 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.
** Justified by [[spoiler:her trauma-induced amnesia after the massacre and her battle with One]].
* SamusIsAGirl: Earlier on Season 1, she was easily mistaken for a boy, thanks to her buzz-cut hairdo.
* SacrificedBasicSkillForAwesomeTraining: 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. At least she can pick up vans with her brain, though.
* ScreamingWoman: Well, technically Screaming Girl as she's a minor, but Eleven screams a lot, especially when she's using her powers in a desperate situation.
* SheCleansUpNicely: 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 blond 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.
* SickeningSweethearts: At the beginning of Season 3, her puppy love with Mike has evolved into this, bordering on being MakeOutKids. They tone it down a little after their first big fight.
* SignificantWardrobeShift: [[spoiler: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.
* SilentSnarker: 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 [[InnocentlyInsensitive 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.
* SingleWomanSeeksGoodMan: 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.
* SirSwearsALot: [[InvertedTrope Inverted]]: she's one of the only characters in the show who doesn't swear, unless you count "bitchin'."
* SomeoneToRememberHimBy: 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.
* SpockSpeak: 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 NoSocialSkills prior to meeting Mike and the group.
* SquishyWizard: She haves useful PsychicPowers but she's still a young girl frail against [[spoiler:Flayed Bill's physical strength during their fight in Season 3]].
* StealthPun: Eleven's actual birth name is [[spoiler:Jane Ives]], and she was kidnapped by the Department of Energy as an infant. [[spoiler:The Department of Energy's acronym is DOE, and since Eleven doesn't officially exist, this makes her a literal Jane Doe.]]
* StrongGirlSmartGuy: Strong Girl to Mike's Smart Guy. Eleven is a powerful LittleMissBadass with psychic powers but, due to her isolated upbringing, she can barely speak. Mike is a smart, nerdy boy who teaches her some vocabulary.
* SueDonym: Mike blurts out "Eleanor!" when Mr. Clarke asks El what her name is when he accidentally meets her at Hawkins Middle School.
* {{Technopath}}: She can channel the voices of other people through radios and other electronic devices.
* TeenSuperspy: A DarkerAndEdgier (and more literal) example than most. Before she broke out, the government was training her from birth to use her PsychicPowers 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 AstralProjection.
* TerritorialSmurfette: {{Zigzagged|Trope}}. 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 [[spoiler: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.
* TerseTalker: 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.
* ThenLetMeBeEvil: When Lucas accuses her of being a monster, she attacks him and runs away. She then takes her wig off and uses her powers more aggressively to steal food, before snapping out of this mindset thanks to Mike and Dustin later in the same episode.
* ThreePointLanding: She performs a particularly badass "Superhero Landing" in "The Massacre At Hawkins Lab" that evokes Iron Man in the MCU.
* TokenSuper: Of the entire main cast, El is the only one of them with abilities that can be described as superpowers.
* TookALevelInBadass:
** In Season 2, not only are her PsychicPowers stronger, she can also use them more frequently/for longer periods of time before weakening. What's more, she no longer needs [[spoiler:a sensory deprivation tank to perform AstralProjection; she just needs a blindfold and some form of white noise, removing two senses instead of all five]].
** Eleven's personality has also become much more forceful and proactive. While in Season 1 she was meek, quiet, and submissive, 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 [[spoiler:does it again. After losing her powers destroying the Avatar in Season 3 and spending half a year BroughtDownToNormal, Owens and Brenner (mostly Brenner) put her through TrainingFromHell 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.]]
* TookALevelInJerkass: Not for lack of trying – El undoubtedly had a hard life and has barely gotten many breaks 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 of herself, specially to poor Mike.
** In Season 3, she dumped him over a single lie which wasn't entirely his fault in the first place, was somewhat catty towards him when he actually told the truth by stating, "I make my own rules", and even laughed 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 find 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 NoSympathy 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 came from her imploding under her unresolved and repressed negative emotions, but doesn't deny that she brought some responsibility for that on herself.
* TrademarkFavoriteFood: 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. [[spoiler: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 HeroicSacrifice.]]
* TraumaButton: Events trigger a TroubledBackstoryFlashback to her dark past at the lab at least OncePerEpisode.
* TraumaCongaLine: Eleven's life has been ''far'' from easy, to say the least.
** [[spoiler: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 [[PuppyLove 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, [[spoiler: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. [[spoiler: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 [[DarkAndTroubledPast 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? [[spoiler:Hopper dies. ([[UncertainDoom Or does he?]])]] Not to mention [[spoiler:the ''nasty'' leg injury she sustained, 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 [[spoiler: without her powers]] and is relentlessly bullied in her new high school in California by the local AlphaBitch 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, [[spoiler: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]].
* TraumaticHaircut: Hard not to view her previously shaved head as this, as she clearly enjoys having longer hair in Season 2 and Season 3. [[spoiler: She's absolutely ''horrified'' to find it's been shaved again during her re-training in Season 4.]]
* TsurimeEyes: She sports these when she gets [[LetsGetDangerous extremely]] [[TranquilFury angry]].
* TykeBomb: From the day of her birth. [[spoiler: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 UsefulNotes/ColdWar era.]]
* UndyingLoyalty: To Mike in particular, Dustin, and even Lucas; she even [[spoiler: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]].
* TheUnfavorite: [[spoiler:It turns out that some of Dr Brenner's attitude towards El stems from her having been tricked into removing One's PowerLimiter, 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.]]
* UnskilledButStrong: 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.
** It's entirely possible she didn't intend to kill anyone but the agent who kills Benny, and killed the other guards by mistake.
** [[spoiler: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 a CurbstompBattle to Eleven. That is, until she channels ThePowerOfLove, which is ''far'' more powerful than Vecna's hate, and she curbstomps him while he's completely helpless to fight back.]]
* UnwittingInstigatorOfDoom
** Her [[spoiler: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 [[spoiler:manipulated by One into removing his RestrainingBolt, 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: [[spoiler:One eventually took over the Upside Down itself and created the Mind Flayer, who has been terrorizing Hawkins from Season 1 and beyond.]]
* ViolentlyProtectiveGirlfriend: Ironically this trope tends to come into play when Mike and Eleven ''aren't'' dating, [[spoiler: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]].
* WhatTheHellHero:
** She flees from the boys after she knocks Lucas out by giving him a psychokinetic push that sends him flying; this, after he berates her for tampering with their compasses.
** She gets in a fight with Hopper sneaking out of the cabin to see Mike.
* WhenSheSmiles: She starts the series as an extremely socially inept TykeBomb 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.
* WorfHadTheFlu: Several times, but most notably in Season 3, when [[spoiler: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.
* YouAreNumberSix: The number 011, her identity given by Hawkins Lab, is tattooed on her arm. It is also the basis of her nickname.
* YouMonster: [[spoiler: In Season 4's "Papa", she gives Dr. Brenner a TheReasonYouSuckSpeech that concludes with her declaring "I'm not the monster...it's YOU. YOU are the monster!"]]
[[/folder]]
[[folder:Max Mayfield]]
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!!Maxine "Max" Mayfield
[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/max_24.png]]
[[caption-width-right:350:''"That's presumptuous of you."'']]
!!!'''Played By:''' Creator/SadieSink, Jacey Sink (young, Season 3), Belle Henry (young, Season 4)
!!!'''Debut:''' "[[Recap/StrangerThingsS2E1ChapterOneMADMAX Chapter One: MADMAX]]" (2x01)
->''"From here on out, you leave me and my friends alone. Understand?"''
A transfer student to Hawkins Middle School. She later becomes the group's SixthRanger.
----
* ActionGirl: Thanks to her psychic powers, Eleven [[spoiler:is able to fight off attackers by either moving objects into their path, breaking their bones with telekinesis, or even ''melt their brains'' with her mind. Her personal kill count is well into double figures.]]
* ActuallyPrettyFunny: When she and Max [[spoiler: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 [[ToiletHumor burp-and-fart contest]]]]. El immediately tears her blindfold off, looks at Max with a horrified expression on her face... and breaks down laughing.
* BadassAdorable: 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.
* BadassBoast: Rarely gives these but definitely does when she crosses paths with Vecna years after their last confrontation. "If you touch her, again. I will kill you, again."
* BadLiar: 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 [[spoiler: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.
* BecauseYouWereNiceToMe:
** 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 [[spoiler:avenges Benny Hammond by finally (and graphically) killing Connie Frazier]].
** Ultimately, having experienced real niceness is also what helps her see what [[spoiler: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. [[spoiler: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.]]
* BewareTheNiceOnes: 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 DeathGlare. Also overlaps with BewareTheQuietOnes.
* BigDamnHeroes:
** [[spoiler: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 [[spoiler:arrives at the last minute to kill a Demo-dog that seemingly had the rest of the main cast cornered]].
** In "The Bite", she [[spoiler:saves Steve, Robin, Dustin, and Erica from Russian soldiers by [[CarFu splattering them with the mall's display car]].]]
* TheBigDamnKiss: Two with [[spoiler:Mike. The first is at the end of Season 1, and the second is during the finale of Season 2]].
* BigEater: 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. [[JustifiedTrope Justified]], as this is probably to replenish her energy after using her powers.
* TheBigGuy: While Dustin 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 [[WizardsAndWitches Mage]], reflecting her supernatural powers.
* BigNo: In "Will the Wise", after [[spoiler:Hopper unplugs the TV and takes away her privileges to use it]], followed by a RapidFireNo as she [[spoiler:tries to get it working again]].
* BlessedWithSuck: 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. [[spoiler:After her clash with the Mind Flayer in Starcourt Mall - during which she sustained extensive physical and emotional trauma - Eleven's powers go dormant.]]
* BlindfoldedVision: Often covers her eyes to improve her ability to see visions.
* BlownAcrossTheRoom: Eleven is capable of doing this to anyone with her psychic powers. Lucas, Mike, and the Demogorgon all get their share of it.
* BoyishShortHair: In Season 1, she has a buzz-cut as a result of her being a laboratory test subject. It is difficult to [[LadyLooksLikeADude 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 it with a wig when the boys have to move her through public. Has some shades of BaldMystic as well, since because of the experimentation she has telekinetic abilities. Later subverted since by season 2, enough time has passed for her hair to grow out and by Seasons 3 and 4 it's shoulder-length. [[spoiler:Brenner and Owens' attempt to restore her powers in Season 4 involves shaving her hair back down to its Season 1 state.]]
* BrattyTeenageDaughter: 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.
* BroughtDownToNormal: [[spoiler: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.]]
** [[spoiler: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.]]
* BullyingTheDragon: 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 AlphaBitch 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.
* CallingTheOldManOut:
** Calls out her "Papa" in the first season finale with just one word: ''"Bad."''
** Does it to [[spoiler:Hopper in Season 2 when he won't let her leave. Even going so far as to compare him to Brenner]].
* CastFromHitPoints: Using her PsychicPowers causes fatigue and can eventually knock her out if she overextends herself and causes her PsychicNosebleed. There's also an element of CastFromCalories, 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".
* CharacterDevelopment:
** In the first season, Eleven is submissive, 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 IJustWantToBeNormal 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.
* CharacterTics: 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 [[spoiler:breaks Troy's arm]]. Her KubrickStare when using her telepathy also qualifies. [[spoiler: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/NeckSnap movement]].
* ClingyJealousGirl: Eleven doesn't like Max a lot because she saw Max and Mike hanging out alone during Season 2. She gets angry about [[spoiler: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.]]
* ConditionalPowers: She is extremely powerful, but she seems to be limited by her 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.
* CombatPragmatist: Not usually she always relies on her powers for anything violent 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.
* CreateYourOwnVillain: [[spoiler: Season 4 reveals that she unintentionally did this when she banished murderous telekinetic Henry Creel, aka One, to the Upside Down. Not only did this result in One's transformation into the monstrous HumanoidAbomination Vecna, but he used his powers to reshape his new home [[InTheirOwnImage in his own image]], transforming it from an alien -- but by no means ''evil'' -- environment into the hellish DarkWorld it is now, making her unwittingly responsible for all the paranormal threats that have plagued Hawkins.]]
* CreepyChild: In Season 1, she barely speaks and her entire body language is that of a skittish and scared animal. She also has no idea [[NoSocialSkills how to interact with regular people]]. [[spoiler:Being raised as a subject of study in a laboratory will do that.]] Did we mention she has telekinetic powers?
* CurbStompBattle: Absolutely ''no one'' is able to stand up to her insane psychic powers, man or Demogorgon. In fact, the only opponents she ''hasn't'' dished one of these out to are [[spoiler: a possessed Billy Hargrove, the Mind Flayer's avatar, and Vecna.]]
* DaddysGirl: [[spoiler:She becomes this 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]].
* DaddysLittleVillain: 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.
* DarkAndTroubledPast: [[spoiler:Stolen from her birth mother]], raised as a weapon and put through emotionally grueling training as a start.
* DavidVsGoliath: She's UnskilledButStrong with her powers. This means that whenever she's fighting Vecna in season four who [[spoiler:is really 001 from Hawkins Lab]] is weaker but much more trained with his powers, it becomes a battle of his greater skill and her greater strength. [[spoiler: Her raw power and love, which is incomprehensible to him, overpowers him.]]
* DeathGlare: 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[[spoiler:, because the fact that she takes a very literal approach to this trope makes her glares even more terrifying.]]
** She gives a great one when she [[spoiler: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]].
** An even better one comes when [[spoiler:she, Mike, Dustin, and Lucas are cornered by government agents in Hawkins Middle]]. It's made all the more disturbed by the fact that it's accompanied by her [[spoiler:telekinetically crushing the agents' brains]].
** Out of all of them, though, her face when, [[spoiler: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.
* DeconstructedCharacterArchetype: She is a MagicalGirlfriend to Mike for the most part, but once they become an OfficialCouple, El has no idea how to handle the pitfalls of a normal romantic relationship, along with having a life centered entirely on Hopper and Mike's desires. Fortunately {{Reconstruction}} when she [[spoiler:seeks out Max in Season 3 who shows her "there's more to life than stupid boys", helps El develop her own inner life and independence, while also pushing Mike to treat El like a real partner rather than a WishFulfillment pet]].
* DisproportionateRetribution: 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, sending Max flying from her skateboard just for being in the same breathing space as Mike in an attempt to cause injury also counts, clobbering Angela over the face with a roller blade boot was too far too and she would have done worse if she still had her powers.
* TheDogBitesBack: 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.
* EmotionlessGirl: 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.
* EscapedFromTheLab: She escaped from Hawkins Laboratory where experiments were being performed on her.
* ExpositoryHairstyleChange: She has a shaved buzz-cut for all of Season 1 before it grows out in Season 2. [[spoiler:In the second half of season 4, her hair is shaved off once again during her sensory deprivation "training".]]
* ExtremeMeleeRevenge: How she deals with Angela for antagonising her, clobbering her with a roller skate, drawing a lot of blood, and possibly causing a minor concussion -- all because Angela ruined her date with Mike.
* ExtremelyProtectiveChild:
** She's this to her mother, [[spoiler: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 [[ElectricTorture 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 [[spoiler:destroy One/Henry Creel and cause him to be recreated as Vecna.]]
** She's also this to her adoptive father Hopper; [[spoiler:in Season 4, despite taking multiple insults from Angela, it's only after Angela insults Hopper's name that Eleven grabs a rollerskate and clocks her in the face with it, giving the girl a broken nose and a concussion.]]
* FairyTaleMotif: 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 ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'', and InUniverse Mike has assigned her the role as the mage for their party.
* FeetFirstIntroduction: Her feet are shown in the first shot of her appearance in Season 1.
* FreakOut: Does this in "The Bathtub" when she sees [[spoiler:Barb's body]].
* GirlinessUpgrade: 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 Music/JoanJett 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.
* GlassCannon: Her combat capabilities are formidable but almost purely offensive in nature, and when she pushes her powers to the limit she can exhaust herself, sometimes to the point of falling unconscious.
* GuestFighter: She appears as a skin for [[Myth/ClassicalMythology Scylla]] in ''VideoGame/{{Smite}}''.
* HandicappedBadass: 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. [[spoiler: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 was particularly challenging for Hopper in Season 2 trying to "parent" El when she was both willing and able to throw him across a room whenever she got 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.
* HappilyAdopted: [[spoiler: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.]]
* HeroicBastard: Implied. There's no mention of her mother being married at the time of El's birth, indicating this trope. Finally confirmed in the novel, ''Suspicious Minds'', as her parents were not married when Terry became pregnant with El.
* HeroicBSOD: [[spoiler:Falls into this right after she hits Angela in the face 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.]]
* HeroicRROD: Overuse of El's powers tends to start with a PsychicNosebleed before overflowing into fatigue and eventual fainting spells if she doesn't have the time to rest and recover. [[spoiler: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, tragically leading into the trope below. In Season 3, she overtaxes her powers to the point where she's BroughtDownToNormal.]]
* HeroicSacrifice: [[spoiler: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 NotQuiteDead, though, and returns in Season 2.]]
* HugeGuyTinyGirl: 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.
* HumanoidAbomination: ''The First Shadow'' strongly hints that El, and the rest of the children Brenner experimented on, have a little bit of [[spoiler:Mind Flayer]] in them, by way of [[spoiler: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.]]
* {{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 [[KnightTemplarParent 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.
* IAmAMonster: She says this verbatim when she confesses [[spoiler:that she opened the portal to the Upside-Down]]. [[spoiler:After her bullying incident at the Roll-a-Rink, the mindset comes back in full force.]]
* IfYouThoughtThatWasBad: Her name, Eleven, opens the possibility that there are more [=ESP=] children out there like her doing who knows what. [[spoiler:We eventually meet one in Season 2, and another in Season 4... However, it turns out that the one we met in Season 4 had slaughtered all the rest of them, except the one we met in Season 2.]]
* IJustWantToHaveFriends: At first, 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, [[spoiler: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.]]
* InUniverseNickname: The kids call her "El" for short.
* ISeeDeadPeople: She's able to channel the presence of other people through electrical devices such as speakers and walkie-talkies. [[spoiler:Including from the Upside-Down, such as Will.]]
* ItsAllMyFault: [[spoiler:She holds a lot of guilt from making contact with the Demogorgon.]][[spoiler: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.]]
* JealousRomanticWitness: [[spoiler:She is visibly jealous of Max. While mistaking Max spending time with Mike for Mike forgetting about Eleven is understandable, that doesn't justify her later decision to give Max the cold shoulder much later when she introduces herself as part of the party. The two eventually warm up to each other in Season 3.]]
* KillerRabbit: 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 [[CluelessDeputy 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 DeathGlare.
* KubrickStare: Eleven does several of these throughout the series, usually before using her psychic powers.
* LadyLooksLikeADude: 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.
* LikeADaughterToMe: [[spoiler: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]].
* LittleMissBadass: Only about 12 years old in Season 1, but she is capable of laying waste to squads of armed orderlies and schoolyard bullies alike.
* LittleNo: Her response to [[spoiler:One's WeCanRuleTogether speech.]]
* TheLoad: Zig-zagged and PlayedForDrama. She's normally the ''opposite'' of TheLoad, being the only person who can truly protect the other characters from the various supernatural threats they face. However, near the end of season 3, [[spoiler: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. Averted when she's able to reach out to Billy and convinces him to redeem himself by taking on the Mind Flayer]].
** She also briefly falls into this role in Season 1, due to [[spoiler:the GlassCannon nature of her powers; after killing the agents who pointed guns at her and her friends (one of whom had [[PsychoForHire 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.]]
* LongDistanceRelationship: [[spoiler:Hopper's [[UncertainDoom 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.
* LongHairIsFeminine: Downplayed as her hair is still pretty short, but in Season 2 and 3, her hair growing out corresponds to her growing femininity.
* MagicalDefibrillator: This is how she saves [[spoiler:Max]]'s life at the end of Season 4; using her powers to restart her friend's heart.
* MeaningfulRename: [[spoiler: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 [[OnlyKnownByTheirNickname Only Be Known By Her Nickname]].
** Mike giving her that nickname at the beginning of the second episode of Season 1 is significant as well, as it's implied that she likes it because it came from him.
* MessianicArchetype: She has special powers and at the end of Season 1 [[spoiler:she sacrifices herself to save her friends and kill a monster, only to come back alive in Season 2]]. Also, Mike pretty much prays to her daily for almost a year.
* MilitaryBrat: ''Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds'' reveals that [[spoiler: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]].
* MindOverMatter: She has telekinesis, which she uses in various ways, from closing doors to [[spoiler:flipping vans over her and her friends' heads]].
* MoralityPet: [[spoiler:To Billy, as she provokes his HeroicSacrifice by empathizing with him and reminding him of his mother.]]
* MuggleMageRomance: While they are both technically human, she is an enhanced human while Mike's a regular one.
* MuggingTheMonster: 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''. [[KickTheSonOfABitch And they deserved every agonizing moment of it.]] She also does it to a pair of abusive orderlies before her escape, throwing one into a concrete wall so hard he leaves a ''massive'' dent, and casually snapping the neck of the second like a twig.
* MundaneUtility:
** 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 [[spoiler: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.
* MysticalWaif: She's a young girl with NoSocialSkills 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.
* NeverFoundTheBody: [[spoiler:The HeroicSacrifice 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 [[HistoryRepeats a repeat]] of the first time she opened a portal to the Upside-Down, even if [[TraumaInducedAmnesia she didn't recall it]], whilst trying to kill One.]]
* NeverSayDie: Several times, she cannot bring herself [[PoorCommunicationKills to warn Mike of the real danger they are all in]]. [[spoiler: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.
* NiceGirl: 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.
* NiceJobBreakingItHero: [[spoiler: 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 [[EldritchLocation Upside Down]], it only made him more powerful overtime.]]
* NoInfantileAmnesia: [[spoiler:Her memory of her mother's love when she was born gave her the strength to defeat One in the backstory.]]
* NoNudityTaboo: Twice in Season 1 she shows no compunctions about getting changed in front of strangers:
** Benny gives her one of his shirts so that she can change out of her hospital gown, and after she changes, he knows that she's a girl.
** When Mike gives her some of Nancy's old clothes to wear instead of the sweater Benny had given her, she immediately starts getting undressed in front of the boys, much to their horror, and they have to explain to her that she should change privately. Which further suggests that Benny had not given her any such explanation.
* NoSocialSkills: 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. [[spoiler: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 [[HandicappedBadass 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.)
* NotSoStoic: 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.
* NumerologicalMotif: Her full name is "Eleven". She has a corresponding tattoo on her right arm that reads "011".
* OfficialCouple: 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 LongDistanceRelationship 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 LongDistanceRelationship, El lying to Mike about making friends in California, and Mike [[CannotSpitItOut 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".
* OnlyKnownByTheirNickname: 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.
* ParrotExposition: Given her limited grasp of the English language from [[spoiler:being held captive in the Hawkins National Lab for most of her life]], Eleven often responds to the boys' statements with this. [[spoiler:In Season 2, having spent near 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.]]
* PersonOfMassDestruction: She possesses very strong psychic powers.
* PineappleRuinsPizza: {{Defied|Trope}}. When she tries pineapple pizza in Season 4, she likes it, in contrast to Mike.
* PinkMeansFeminine: Invoked. The boys dress her in an old pink dress of Nancy's so she can blend in better as a sweet GirlyGirl at Hawkins Middle, but in reality she isn't particularly girly. She does care more about her appearance than [[{{Tomboy}} Max]], though.
* PowerFloats:
** In "The Gate", she rises into the air while [[spoiler: using the full extent of her powers to close the gate to the Upside-Down.]]
** Happens again in "The Massacre at Hawkins Lab", when [[spoiler: she overpowers the Orderly/001 in their psychic duel by [[ThePowerOfLove calling on memories of her mother]].]]
* ThePowerOfHate: 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 [[spoiler:due to Kali's tutelage]]. When properly wrathful, she can move a grounded train car by herself, [[spoiler:and ultimately closes the Gate into the Upside-Down she opened at the Hawkins Lab]].
* ThePowerOfLove: 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 [[spoiler:lobotomized her mother]] after learning [[EvenEvilHasLovedOnes 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.
* PowerStrainBlackout: 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.
* PreSacrificeFinalGoodbye: At the climax of the first Season, [[spoiler: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 HeroicSacrifice turns out to have simply transported her into the Upside-Down, where she manages to escape in Season 2.]]
* ProgressivelyPrettier: On account of being away from the lab and her hair growing back.
* ProtagonistJourneyToVillain: In "The Lost Sister", [[spoiler: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 wasn't exactly innocent, but he was merely a retired PunchClockVillain who was only following orders, and is currently a father to two young daughters. When she discovers this, she spares his life and returns to Hawkins when she realizes that Kali is not a positive influence on her.]]
* PsychicNosebleed: Gets these 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.
* PsychicPowers: She has several psychic powers -- including telepathy, telekinesis, and the ability to communicate inter-dimensionally. Coming to terms with them and her situation is a little... well... "bringing up Carrie". [[spoiler:Thankfully, El has a much better parent in Hopper, so the destruction is minimal.]]
* PuppyLove: Mike has a thing for her from the get-go. [[spoiler: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 OfficialCouple by the end of Season 2.
* TheQuietOne: Given her [[TrainingFromHell 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.
* RaisedInALab: 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 EscapedFromTheLab and is found by the Party.
* ReasonYouSuckSpeech: 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.
* RedEyesTakeWarning: It's subtle, but in the Season 1 finale, [[spoiler:her eyes are absolutely bloodshot from the strain of pushing her powers like she has, especially against the Demogorgon]].
* ReplacementGoldfish: [[ParentalSubstitute Hopper]] outright admits that his [[KnightTemplarParent overprotective]] [[PapaWolf 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 RaisedInALab. 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.
** Justified by [[spoiler:her trauma-induced amnesia after the massacre and her battle with One]].
* SamusIsAGirl: Earlier on Season 1, she was easily mistaken for a boy, thanks to her buzz-cut hairdo.
* SacrificedBasicSkillForAwesomeTraining: 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. At least she can pick up vans with her brain, though.
* ScreamingWoman: Well, technically Screaming Girl as she's a minor, but Eleven screams a lot, especially when she's using her powers in a desperate situation.
* SheCleansUpNicely: 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 blond 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.
* SickeningSweethearts: At the beginning of Season 3, her puppy love with Mike has evolved into this, bordering on being MakeOutKids. They tone it down a little after their first big fight.
* SignificantWardrobeShift: [[spoiler: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.
* SilentSnarker: 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 [[InnocentlyInsensitive 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.
* SingleWomanSeeksGoodMan: 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.
* SirSwearsALot: [[InvertedTrope Inverted]]: she's one of the only characters in the show who doesn't swear, unless you count "bitchin'."
* SomeoneToRememberHimBy: 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.
* SpockSpeak: 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 NoSocialSkills prior to meeting Mike and the group.
* SquishyWizard: She haves useful PsychicPowers but she's still a young girl frail against [[spoiler:Flayed Bill's physical strength during their fight in Season 3]].
* StealthPun: Eleven's actual birth name is [[spoiler:Jane Ives]], and she was kidnapped by the Department of Energy as an infant. [[spoiler:The Department of Energy's acronym is DOE, and since Eleven doesn't officially exist, this makes her a literal Jane Doe.]]
* StrongGirlSmartGuy: Strong Girl to Mike's Smart Guy. Eleven is a powerful LittleMissBadass with psychic powers but, due to her isolated upbringing, she can barely speak. Mike is a smart, nerdy boy who teaches her some vocabulary.
* SueDonym: Mike blurts out "Eleanor!" when Mr. Clarke asks El what her name is when he accidentally meets her at Hawkins Middle School.
* {{Technopath}}: She can channel the voices of other people through radios and other electronic devices.
* TeenSuperspy: A DarkerAndEdgier (and more literal) example than most. Before she broke out, the government was training her from birth to use her PsychicPowers 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 AstralProjection.
* TerritorialSmurfette: {{Zigzagged|Trope}}. 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 [[spoiler: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.
* TerseTalker: 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.
* ThenLetMeBeEvil: When Lucas accuses her of being a monster, she attacks him and runs away. She then takes her wig off and uses her powers more aggressively to steal food, before snapping out of this mindset thanks to Mike and Dustin later in the same episode.
* ThreePointLanding: She performs a particularly badass "Superhero Landing" in "The Massacre At Hawkins Lab" that evokes Iron Man in the MCU.
* TokenSuper: Of the entire main cast, El is the only one of them with abilities that can be described as superpowers.
* TookALevelInBadass:
** In Season 2, not only are her PsychicPowers stronger, she can also use them more frequently/for longer periods of time before weakening. What's more, she no longer needs [[spoiler:a sensory deprivation tank to perform AstralProjection; she just needs a blindfold and some form of white noise, removing two senses instead of all five]].
** Eleven's personality has also become much more forceful and proactive. While in Season 1 she was meek, quiet, and submissive, 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 [[spoiler:does it again. After losing her powers destroying the Avatar in Season 3 and spending half a year BroughtDownToNormal, Owens and Brenner (mostly Brenner) put her through TrainingFromHell 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.]]
* TookALevelInJerkass: Not for lack of trying – El undoubtedly had a hard life and has barely gotten many breaks 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 of herself, specially to poor Mike.
** In Season 3, she dumped him over a single lie which wasn't entirely his fault in the first place, was somewhat catty towards him when he actually told the truth by stating, "I make my own rules", and even laughed 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 find 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 NoSympathy 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 came from her imploding under her unresolved and repressed negative emotions, but doesn't deny that she brought some responsibility for that on herself.
* TrademarkFavoriteFood: 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. [[spoiler: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 HeroicSacrifice.]]
* TraumaButton: Events trigger a TroubledBackstoryFlashback to her dark past at the lab at least OncePerEpisode.
* TraumaCongaLine: Eleven's life has been ''far'' from easy, to say the least.
** [[spoiler: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 [[PuppyLove 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, [[spoiler: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. [[spoiler: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 [[DarkAndTroubledPast 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? [[spoiler:Hopper dies. ([[UncertainDoom Or does he?]])]] Not to mention [[spoiler:the ''nasty'' leg injury she sustained, 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 [[spoiler: without her powers]] and is relentlessly bullied in her new high school in California by the local AlphaBitch 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, [[spoiler: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]].
* TraumaticHaircut: Hard not to view her previously shaved head as this, as she clearly enjoys having longer hair in Season 2 and Season 3. [[spoiler: She's absolutely ''horrified'' to find it's been shaved again during her re-training in Season 4.]]
* TsurimeEyes: She sports these when she gets [[LetsGetDangerous extremely]] [[TranquilFury angry]].
* TykeBomb: From the day of her birth. [[spoiler: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 UsefulNotes/ColdWar era.]]
* UndyingLoyalty: To Mike in particular, Dustin, and even Lucas; she even [[spoiler: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]].
* TheUnfavorite: [[spoiler:It turns out that some of Dr Brenner's attitude towards El stems from her having been tricked into removing One's PowerLimiter, 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.]]
* UnskilledButStrong: 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.
** It's entirely possible she didn't intend to kill anyone but the agent who kills Benny, and killed the other guards by mistake.
** [[spoiler: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 a CurbstompBattle to Eleven. That is, until she channels ThePowerOfLove, which is ''far'' more powerful than Vecna's hate, and she curbstomps him while he's completely helpless to fight back.]]
* UnwittingInstigatorOfDoom
** Her [[spoiler: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 [[spoiler:manipulated by One into removing his RestrainingBolt, 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: [[spoiler:One eventually took over the Upside Down itself and created the Mind Flayer, who has been terrorizing Hawkins from Season 1 and beyond.]]
* ViolentlyProtectiveGirlfriend: Ironically this trope tends to come into play when Mike and Eleven ''aren't'' dating, [[spoiler: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]].
* WhatTheHellHero:
** She flees from the boys after she knocks Lucas out by giving him a psychokinetic push that sends him flying; this, after he berates her for tampering with their compasses.
** She gets in a fight with Hopper sneaking out of the cabin to see Mike.
* WhenSheSmiles: She starts the series as an extremely socially inept TykeBomb 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.
* WorfHadTheFlu: Several times, but most notably in Season 3, when [[spoiler: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.
* YouAreNumberSix: The number 011, her identity given by Hawkins Lab, is tattooed on her arm. It is also the basis of her nickname.
* YouMonster: [[spoiler: In Season 4's "Papa", she gives Dr. Brenner a TheReasonYouSuckSpeech that concludes with her declaring "I'm not the monster...it's YOU. YOU are the monster!"]]
[[/folder]]
[[folder:Max Mayfield]]
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!!Maxine "Max" Mayfield
[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/max_24.png]]
[[caption-width-right:350:''"That's presumptuous of you."'']]
!!!'''Played By:''' Creator/SadieSink, Jacey Sink (young, Season 3), Belle Henry (young, Season 4)
!!!'''Debut:''' "[[Recap/StrangerThingsS2E1ChapterOneMADMAX Chapter One: MADMAX]]" (2x01)
->''"From here on out, you leave me and my friends alone. Understand?"''
A transfer student to Hawkins Middle School. She later becomes the group's SixthRanger.
----
Added DiffLines:
[[folder:Erica Sinclair]]
!!Erica Sinclair
[[quoteright:220:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/erica_sinclair_001.png]]
[[caption-width-right:220:''"You can't spell America without Erica."'']]
!!!'''Played By:''' Creator/PriahFerguson
!!!'''Debut:''' "[[Recap/StrangerThingsS2E2ChapterTwoTrickOrTreatFreak Chapter Two: Trick or Treat, Freak]]" (2x02)
Lucas' younger sister. Initially a minor character, she joins the main cast starting in Season 3.
----
* EightiesHair: 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.
* ActionSurvivor: 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. [[spoiler:Later graduates to something near an ActionGirl 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.]]
* AdvertisedExtra: 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.
* AllGirlsLikePonies: She's a fan of ''Franchise/MyLittlePony''. Dustin uses this trait as evidence for her "nerd" status, pointing out that many of the staples of the franchise (magic, dragons, ThePowerOfFriendship) are also prominent fantasy tropes of geek culture.
* AnnoyingYoungerSibling: Making fun of Lucas for being a nerd seems to be her mission in life. Played more seriously when she [[LockedOutOfTheLoop unknowingly]] seriously undermines Dustin's "Code Red" call because to her, it's just more of her brother's nerdy stuff.
* ArbitrarySkepticism: PlayedForLaughs. 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.
* AscendedExtra: She goes from being a bit comic relief character to being one of the main heroes in Season 3.
* AwLookTheyReallyDoLoveEachOther: Erica goes to Lucas' basketball games whenever she can to support him because even though he's "a bench riding loser", he's [[ThickerThanWater still her brother]].
* BitchInSheepsClothing: Implied, from what little we see of her; 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 [[TookALevelInKindness taking a level in kindness]].
* BlackAndNerdy: She's African-American and a ChildProdigy. It takes Dustin to convince her to embrace the latter, though.
* BoomerangBigot: Constantly insults Lucas and his friends by calling them "nerds." As Dustin thoroughly points out, she herself is a nerd. By season 4, she's fully embraced it, happily playing Dungeons and Dragons with her brother and friends.
* BrattyHalfPint: A 10-year-old who often makes insulting remarks to her brother and his friends. Plus, she's an implied BitchInSheepsClothing.
* {{Catchphrase}}: "Just the facts!"
* CallingYourAttacks: She gets a "crit hit!" against a basketball player by clocking the bastard across the head with her maglite.
* CharacterDevelopment: Very subtly done. 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 [[NotSoDifferentRemark 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 [[TookALevelInKindness taken a level in kindness]] due to her experiences, and goes out of her way to help The Party without having to be bribed to. 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.
* ChildProdigy: 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. . . [[NotHelpingYourCase while refuting the fact that she's a nerd.]]
* ChildrenForcedToKill: Erica quickly figures out to use an instrument as a weapon, which Dustin 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 to the point of even considering murder.
* ClosetGeek: She's a ten year old genius, which Dustin playfully needles her for.
* ConvertedFangirl: 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.
* DeconstructedCharacterArchetype: Of the AnnoyingYoungerSibling. 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 CharacterDevelopment before the siblings can connect. At the same time, Dustin discovers that [[HiddenDepths there's a lot more to her than just being a]] BrattyHalfPint.
* TheDragAlong: 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.
* EveryoneHasStandards: She may make snarky remarks about how Lucas and his friends are a bunch of nerds, but when [[spoiler: 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.]]
* FireForgedFriends: 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.
* TheFriendNobodyLikes: 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.
* TheGadfly: She's shown to love pushing people's buttons, particularly her older brother's, to get reactions out of them.
* GamerChick: Not at first, but by the start of season four, she has become an avid ''Dungeons & Dragons'' player. She's the only girl known to take part in the Hellfire Club.
* GenderEqualEnsemble: 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).
* GirlyGirlWithATomboyStreak: Erica wears a lot of adorable tween girl outfits with bright, feminine colors, likes trying different hairstyles, and is a fan of ''Franchise/MyLittlePony'', 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''.
* GoodWithNumbers: 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".
* GuestStarPartyMember: In Season 3, she becomes the late coming fourth member of the [[spoiler:Scoops Troop, being the only person they know small enough to fit in Starcourt's [[AirVentPassageway vent system]].]] At the end of the season, [[spoiler:Will leaves her his ''Dungeons & Dragons'' books, implying she might become a more regular part of the Party's adventures in future.]]
* HiddenDepths: Erica appears to be the typical AnnoyingYoungerSibling who loves girly things, but Season 3 shows that she's a math prodigy and is politically savvy.
* HonoraryTrueCompanion: Becomes this to the Party by Season 4. Formerly TheFriendNobodyLikes, 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.
* HypocriticalHumor: 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.
* JerkassHasAPoint: 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.
* JerkWithAHeartOfGold: 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 she does manage to strike up a bit of a friendship 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.
* LikeFatherLikeSon: She seems to have inherited the snark from her parents, or at least more than Lucas did.
* LittleMissBadass: Takes to her first adventure [[spoiler: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, [[spoiler:and she wins a fight against one of them in the finale by faking him out when he's distracted.]]
* LittleMissSnarker: Her default tone is exaggerated sarcasm directed at her older brother.
* LockedOutOfTheLoop: 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.
* MilitaryBrat: Her father fought in the Vietnam War.
* NiceToTheWaiter: The negative side of the trope. She's incredibly demanding and rude to Steve and Robin when they're working at the ice cream place. Constantly ringing the bell despite having their attention, being sarcastic to their face, demanding free samples, and so on.
* NotInThisForYourRevolution: "Free ice cream FOR LIFE!"
* OddFriendship: She forms one of these with Dustin, of all people, in Season 3.
* OutOfFocus: 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.
* PassingTheTorch: Is on the receiving end of this (though it's admittedly a rather mild example): The group [[spoiler: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]].
* PatrioticFervor: 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.
->"You can't spell 'America' without 'Erica.'"
* PromotionToOpeningTitles: As of Season 3.
* SassyBlackGirl: Her most prominent trait is her obnoxious snarkiness.
* ShipperOnDeck: In Season 4, a sassy comment to one of the basketball goons wanting to take Lucas out is that Lucas really started dating down in standards after breaking up with Max, implying that she got along with Max and approved of their relationship.
* SiblingTeam: 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.
* SixthRanger: 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.
* TheSmartGuy: 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.
* SweetTooth: 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 RunningGag 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.
* TagalongKid: 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.
* TeenGenius: Well, a ''preteen'' genius. She's not even in high school but she's got a brilliant grasp of geopolitics and math.
* TomboyAndGirlyGirl: 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).
* TookALevelInBadass: After spending much of the series being a TagalongKid, 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.
* TookALevelInKindness: 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 OddFriendship with Dustin.
* {{Troll}}: She's ''excellent'' at pushing her brother's buttons.
* {{Tsundere}}: Type A.
* WeakButSkilled: 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.
[[/folder]]
!!Erica Sinclair
[[quoteright:220:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/erica_sinclair_001.png]]
[[caption-width-right:220:''"You can't spell America without Erica."'']]
!!!'''Played By:''' Creator/PriahFerguson
!!!'''Debut:''' "[[Recap/StrangerThingsS2E2ChapterTwoTrickOrTreatFreak Chapter Two: Trick or Treat, Freak]]" (2x02)
Lucas' younger sister. Initially a minor character, she joins the main cast starting in Season 3.
----
* EightiesHair: 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.
* ActionSurvivor: 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. [[spoiler:Later graduates to something near an ActionGirl 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.]]
* AdvertisedExtra: 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.
* AllGirlsLikePonies: She's a fan of ''Franchise/MyLittlePony''. Dustin uses this trait as evidence for her "nerd" status, pointing out that many of the staples of the franchise (magic, dragons, ThePowerOfFriendship) are also prominent fantasy tropes of geek culture.
* AnnoyingYoungerSibling: Making fun of Lucas for being a nerd seems to be her mission in life. Played more seriously when she [[LockedOutOfTheLoop unknowingly]] seriously undermines Dustin's "Code Red" call because to her, it's just more of her brother's nerdy stuff.
* ArbitrarySkepticism: PlayedForLaughs. 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.
* AscendedExtra: She goes from being a bit comic relief character to being one of the main heroes in Season 3.
* AwLookTheyReallyDoLoveEachOther: Erica goes to Lucas' basketball games whenever she can to support him because even though he's "a bench riding loser", he's [[ThickerThanWater still her brother]].
* BitchInSheepsClothing: Implied, from what little we see of her; 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 [[TookALevelInKindness taking a level in kindness]].
* BlackAndNerdy: She's African-American and a ChildProdigy. It takes Dustin to convince her to embrace the latter, though.
* BoomerangBigot: Constantly insults Lucas and his friends by calling them "nerds." As Dustin thoroughly points out, she herself is a nerd. By season 4, she's fully embraced it, happily playing Dungeons and Dragons with her brother and friends.
* BrattyHalfPint: A 10-year-old who often makes insulting remarks to her brother and his friends. Plus, she's an implied BitchInSheepsClothing.
* {{Catchphrase}}: "Just the facts!"
* CallingYourAttacks: She gets a "crit hit!" against a basketball player by clocking the bastard across the head with her maglite.
* CharacterDevelopment: Very subtly done. 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 [[NotSoDifferentRemark 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 [[TookALevelInKindness taken a level in kindness]] due to her experiences, and goes out of her way to help The Party without having to be bribed to. 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.
* ChildProdigy: 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. . . [[NotHelpingYourCase while refuting the fact that she's a nerd.]]
* ChildrenForcedToKill: Erica quickly figures out to use an instrument as a weapon, which Dustin 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 to the point of even considering murder.
* ClosetGeek: She's a ten year old genius, which Dustin playfully needles her for.
* ConvertedFangirl: 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.
* DeconstructedCharacterArchetype: Of the AnnoyingYoungerSibling. 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 CharacterDevelopment before the siblings can connect. At the same time, Dustin discovers that [[HiddenDepths there's a lot more to her than just being a]] BrattyHalfPint.
* TheDragAlong: 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.
* EveryoneHasStandards: She may make snarky remarks about how Lucas and his friends are a bunch of nerds, but when [[spoiler: 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.]]
* FireForgedFriends: 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.
* TheFriendNobodyLikes: 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.
* TheGadfly: She's shown to love pushing people's buttons, particularly her older brother's, to get reactions out of them.
* GamerChick: Not at first, but by the start of season four, she has become an avid ''Dungeons & Dragons'' player. She's the only girl known to take part in the Hellfire Club.
* GenderEqualEnsemble: 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).
* GirlyGirlWithATomboyStreak: Erica wears a lot of adorable tween girl outfits with bright, feminine colors, likes trying different hairstyles, and is a fan of ''Franchise/MyLittlePony'', 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''.
* GoodWithNumbers: 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".
* GuestStarPartyMember: In Season 3, she becomes the late coming fourth member of the [[spoiler:Scoops Troop, being the only person they know small enough to fit in Starcourt's [[AirVentPassageway vent system]].]] At the end of the season, [[spoiler:Will leaves her his ''Dungeons & Dragons'' books, implying she might become a more regular part of the Party's adventures in future.]]
* HiddenDepths: Erica appears to be the typical AnnoyingYoungerSibling who loves girly things, but Season 3 shows that she's a math prodigy and is politically savvy.
* HonoraryTrueCompanion: Becomes this to the Party by Season 4. Formerly TheFriendNobodyLikes, 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.
* HypocriticalHumor: 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.
* JerkassHasAPoint: 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.
* JerkWithAHeartOfGold: 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 she does manage to strike up a bit of a friendship 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.
* LikeFatherLikeSon: She seems to have inherited the snark from her parents, or at least more than Lucas did.
* LittleMissBadass: Takes to her first adventure [[spoiler: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, [[spoiler:and she wins a fight against one of them in the finale by faking him out when he's distracted.]]
* LittleMissSnarker: Her default tone is exaggerated sarcasm directed at her older brother.
* LockedOutOfTheLoop: 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.
* MilitaryBrat: Her father fought in the Vietnam War.
* NiceToTheWaiter: The negative side of the trope. She's incredibly demanding and rude to Steve and Robin when they're working at the ice cream place. Constantly ringing the bell despite having their attention, being sarcastic to their face, demanding free samples, and so on.
* NotInThisForYourRevolution: "Free ice cream FOR LIFE!"
* OddFriendship: She forms one of these with Dustin, of all people, in Season 3.
* OutOfFocus: 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.
* PassingTheTorch: Is on the receiving end of this (though it's admittedly a rather mild example): The group [[spoiler: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]].
* PatrioticFervor: 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.
->"You can't spell 'America' without 'Erica.'"
* PromotionToOpeningTitles: As of Season 3.
* SassyBlackGirl: Her most prominent trait is her obnoxious snarkiness.
* ShipperOnDeck: In Season 4, a sassy comment to one of the basketball goons wanting to take Lucas out is that Lucas really started dating down in standards after breaking up with Max, implying that she got along with Max and approved of their relationship.
* SiblingTeam: 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.
* SixthRanger: 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.
* TheSmartGuy: 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.
* SweetTooth: 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 RunningGag 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.
* TagalongKid: 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.
* TeenGenius: Well, a ''preteen'' genius. She's not even in high school but she's got a brilliant grasp of geopolitics and math.
* TomboyAndGirlyGirl: 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).
* TookALevelInBadass: After spending much of the series being a TagalongKid, 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.
* TookALevelInKindness: 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 OddFriendship with Dustin.
* {{Troll}}: She's ''excellent'' at pushing her brother's buttons.
* {{Tsundere}}: Type A.
* WeakButSkilled: 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.
[[/folder]]
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Changed line(s) 275 (click to see context) from:
* ShipTease: Both the actors and advertisement team has been seen teasing his dynamic with Will.
to:
* ShipTease: Both the actors and advertisement team has been seen teasing his dynamic with Will.Mike.
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Trope was cut/disambiguated due to cleanup
Deleted line(s) 425 (click to see context) :
* ArcherArchetype: He is the analytical, [[BratsWithSlingshots ranged combatant]] of the party, and can keep a cool head when he gets down to business.
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Changed line(s) 278 (click to see context) from:
--> Multiple interviews and TikTok comments of Noah Schnapp speaking favorably of the pairing, hinting at more of them up coming in season 5
to:
--> Multiple interviews and TikTok Platform/TikTok comments of Noah Schnapp speaking favorably of the pairing, hinting at more of them up coming in season 5
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Changed line(s) 148 (click to see context) from:
--> Multiple interviews and TikTok comments of Noah Schnapp speaking favorably of the pairing, hinting at more of them up coming in season 5
to:
--> Multiple interviews and TikTok Platform/TikTok comments of Noah Schnapp speaking favorably of the pairing, hinting at more of them up coming in season 5
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Added example(s)
* TheCaretaker: In season 1 Mike is the lead boy to take her 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.
* MasterOfTheMixedMessage: In season 4 Mike claims to love El yet refuses to say or write it out until necessary, he even requires reassurance from Will. He also ignores Will for the majority of his first day back with El at the roller rink yet somehow is angry that Will was silently pouting and rolling his eyes.
* ShipTease: Both the actors and advertisement team has been seen teasing his dynamic with Will.
--> NetflixUK posting an image of "who they ship" including Steve and the Demogorgon and Mike and Will on Instagram stories
--> NetflixIndia posting El as "the true third wheel" and Mike and Will as "the otp" on Instagram
--> Multiple interviews and TikTok comments of Noah Schnapp speaking favorably of the pairing, hinting at more of them up coming in season 5
--> Finn Wolfhard and David Harbor giggling over Will's true romance (confirmed as Mike) in season 4
--> Stranger Things Writers on Twitter claiming that "this also makes Mike crazy" with a photo of Will
--> Stranger Things Writers posting an image of Mike and Will labeled "Thinking of our Halloween costumes" on National coming out day
--> Nxonnnetflix posting a Battleship question with Mucas, Mileven, Jancy, and Byler captioning the post with "Byler Rights amirite?"
--> Stranger things writers on the Writer's Strike with signs saying "Byler won't write itself"
--> Season 4 promotion material featuring a poster of Lumax, Jopper, and Byler
--> The last shot of season 4 with Jancy, Jopper, and Byler standing on the hill as the flowers Mike had given El rot
--> Several shots, words, and auditory cues directly comparing Byler to Lumax Jancy and Jopper
--> NetflixUK posting an image of "who they ship" including Steve and the Demogorgon and Mike and Will on Instagram stories
--> NetflixIndia posting El as "the true third wheel" and Mike and Will as "the otp" on Instagram
--> Multiple interviews and TikTok comments of Noah Schnapp speaking favorably of the pairing, hinting at more of them up coming in season 5
--> Finn Wolfhard and David Harbor giggling over Will's true romance (confirmed as Mike) in season 4
--> Stranger Things Writers on Twitter claiming that "this also makes Mike crazy" with a photo of Will
--> Stranger Things Writers posting an image of Mike and Will labeled "Thinking of our Halloween costumes" on National coming out day
--> Nxonnnetflix posting a Battleship question with Mucas, Mileven, Jancy, and Byler captioning the post with "Byler Rights amirite?"
--> Stranger things writers on the Writer's Strike with signs saying "Byler won't write itself"
--> Season 4 promotion material featuring a poster of Lumax, Jopper, and Byler
--> The last shot of season 4 with Jancy, Jopper, and Byler standing on the hill as the flowers Mike had given El rot
--> Several shots, words, and auditory cues directly comparing Byler to Lumax Jancy and Jopper
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* ViolentlyProtectiveGirlfriend: Gender-inverted. It doesn't matter if El has powers or if there's a [[spoiler:Flayed!Billy or powerful servant of the Mind Flayer]], Mike will ''not'' tolerate anyone harming his girlfriend.
to:
* ViolentlyProtectiveGirlfriend: Gender-inverted. It doesn't matter if El has powers or if there's a [[spoiler:Flayed!Billy or powerful servant of the Mind Flayer]], Mike will ''not'' tolerate anyone harming his girlfriend. Not explicitly romantic but in season 2 Mike is seen yelling at the other boys when trying to help Will, and pushing over Will's bully in season 1 upon homophobic remarks.
Added DiffLines:
* ShipTease: Both the actors and advertisement team has been seen teasing his dynamic with Will.
--> NetflixUK posting an image of "who they ship" including Steve and the Demogorgon and Mike and Will on Instagram stories
--> NetflixIndia posting El as "the true third wheel" and Mike and Will as "the otp" on Instagram
--> Multiple interviews and TikTok comments of Noah Schnapp speaking favorably of the pairing, hinting at more of them up coming in season 5
--> Finn Wolfhard and David Harbor giggling over Will's true romance (confirmed as Mike) in season 4
--> Stranger Things Writers on Twitter claiming that "this also makes Mike crazy" with a photo of Will
--> Stranger Things Writers posting an image of Mike and Will labeled "Thinking of our Halloween costumes" on National coming out day
--> Nxonnnetflix posting a Battleship question with Mucas, Mileven, Jancy, and Byler captioning the post with "Byler Rights amirite?"
--> Stranger things writers on the Writer's Strike with signs saying "Byler won't write itself"
--> Season 4 promotion material featuring a poster of Lumax, Jopper, and Byler
--> The last shot of season 4 with Jancy, Jopper, and Byler standing on the hill as the flowers Mike had given El rot
--> Several shots, words, and auditory cues directly comparing Byler to Lumax Jancy and Jopper
--> NetflixUK posting an image of "who they ship" including Steve and the Demogorgon and Mike and Will on Instagram stories
--> NetflixIndia posting El as "the true third wheel" and Mike and Will as "the otp" on Instagram
--> Multiple interviews and TikTok comments of Noah Schnapp speaking favorably of the pairing, hinting at more of them up coming in season 5
--> Finn Wolfhard and David Harbor giggling over Will's true romance (confirmed as Mike) in season 4
--> Stranger Things Writers on Twitter claiming that "this also makes Mike crazy" with a photo of Will
--> Stranger Things Writers posting an image of Mike and Will labeled "Thinking of our Halloween costumes" on National coming out day
--> Nxonnnetflix posting a Battleship question with Mucas, Mileven, Jancy, and Byler captioning the post with "Byler Rights amirite?"
--> Stranger things writers on the Writer's Strike with signs saying "Byler won't write itself"
--> Season 4 promotion material featuring a poster of Lumax, Jopper, and Byler
--> The last shot of season 4 with Jancy, Jopper, and Byler standing on the hill as the flowers Mike had given El rot
--> Several shots, words, and auditory cues directly comparing Byler to Lumax Jancy and Jopper
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Added example(s), General clarification on works content
Changed line(s) 76 (click to see context) from:
** When Eleven is trying to locate [[spoiler:Flayed!Billy]], Mike is incredibly worried for her safety. Everyone present tries to reassure him but to no avail. In the heat of the moment, he admits that he loves her and is afraid of losing her.
to:
** When Eleven is trying to locate [[spoiler:Flayed!Billy]], Mike is incredibly worried for her safety. Everyone present tries to reassure him but to no avail. In the heat of the moment, Will urges him to say that he loves her calling him "the Heart" , he admits that he loves her and is afraid of losing her.her. However in a timeskip of several days El seems to be visibly angry at him, slamming the door on her way out.
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* TheBigDamnKiss: In Season 1, Mike and El kiss for the first time and the music swells as they do. This marks more development for their relationship to come.
* JustFriends: Upon Will asking Mike why in season 4 El has much more communication upon them moving than him and El, Mike claims she's his girlfriend. After Will asks "and us?" Mike repeats "We're friends" twice instead of addressing Will's actual issue.
Changed line(s) 126 (click to see context) from:
* LoveAtFirstSight: Invoked by Mike when he says as much in his [[AnguishedDeclarationOfLove speech to Eleven]] in the Season Four finale.
to:
* LoveAtFirstSight: Invoked by Mike when he says as much in his [[AnguishedDeclarationOfLove speech to Eleven]] in the Season Four finale. However in season 1 he reminds the boys that he wishes to send her back to an asylum in order to find Will.
Changed line(s) 138 (click to see context) from:
* PuppyLove: 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.
to:
* PuppyLove: 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. El however seems to still be upset with him.
-->"In "The Mind Flayer":"' And you said yes. You said yes
-->"In "The Hellfire Club":"' We're friends. We're friends.
-->"In "The Hellfire Club":"' We're friends. We're friends.
Deleted line(s) 268 (click to see context) :
* StraightGay: Has all the same interests as Mike, Lucas, and Dustin, with the notable exception of girls. His soft manners and artistic interests provide only the slimmest hint of camp.
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* QueerCharacterQueerActor: Both Noah Schnapp and Will byers were confirmed/came out as gay
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Added example(s)
Changed line(s) 243 (click to see context) from:
* MinorInsultMeltdown: 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.
to:
* MinorInsultMeltdown: 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, [[JustifiedTrope one can understand why he reacts this way.]]
Added DiffLines:
* PeoplePuppet: He’s one of these to the Mind Flayer in season 2.
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None
Added DiffLines:
* TookALevelInJerkass: Downplayed. While still a well-meaning kid overall, he's quite a bit more sharp-tongued and irritable in Season 4 compared to the outright NiceGuy he was previously.
-->'''Steve:''' This kid's gotta get his ego in check.
-->'''Eddie:''' It's his tone, right?
-->'''Steve:''' This kid's gotta get his ego in check.
-->'''Eddie:''' It's his tone, right?
