With a cast this large, some Stranger Things characters are inevitably underutilized.
- Barbara likely gained such a fan following relatively quickly because she's a virginal, not too conventionally attractive girl with a slightly wry but very down-to-earth personality — a type of girl rarely seen on television. Which made it hurt that much more when she was killed off after only two episodes, during which she was given minimal screen time and development, while her conventionally attractive friend Nancy gets to have her own role evolve without her former best friend by her side. The fan-perceived lack of importance that Barb's death ultimately had in the remainder of the first season didn't help matters, hence the "Justice For Barb" meme, though this one ended up getting addressed and rectified in the second season and got a little Call-Back in the third season.
- Despite the storytelling potential that a character like Max has, she isn't really given much in terms of coherent focus. Until Season 4, that is.
- Will tends to suffer from this a bit in Season 2 when it comes to scenes in which he is with the rest of the Party. While in Season 1, he is shown to have plenty of camaraderie with the others despite his lack of screentime, here he tends to be more or less relegated to the background when the group is together. Granted, it could be chalked up to him still not quite recovering from his ordeal. In Season 3, he doesn't do much in the second half of the season, and in Season 4, barely gets to interact with characters other than Mike, Jonathan, and El.
- Mike can feel this way in Season 2, where he spends most of his time either missing El, worried about Will, or rejecting Max. In the first season, he was the closest thing to a protagonist and leader of their group; in the second season, Dustin has picked up his slack with the group, and Lucas is the most proactive of them. This complaint has only gotten louder with each passing season, with many fans feeling his role in the story has been reduced to little more than "El's boyfriend."
- The Russians were clearly meant to fill the void left by the Hawkins Lab, yet they're treated as little more than props to keep the story moving along. Alexei gets some memorable moments, yet he's killed off as soon as he's no longer relevant. The Russian hitman (who killed Alexei) also seems to serve little purpose outside of being The Heavy and a Shout-Out to The Terminator, as if there was a need to get as many 80s references in as possible.
- See above and below about "The Lost Sister"; Kali/8, another psychic who wants vengeance, is an interesting concept (regardless of the writing for the rest of the episode, the scene where she makes a butterfly for Eleven is very pretty, plus a rare instance of Hawkins "graduates" getting to enjoy their powers). But she got bogged down by an episode that was poorly received, and she doesn't appear at all in future seasons despite her implied connection to Dr. Brenner, and the writers saying they'd bring her back at some point. She does appear in the novel Suspicious Mind and the comic Into the Fire thought.
- Jonathan and Nancy fell into this in Season 3, the former especially being marginalized in favor of memeable moments from flashier characters like the Scoops Troop. Jonathan is hit with this even harder in Season 4, where he is heavily Out of Focus and spends much of the season (outside of a few moments with Will) either palling around with Argyle or driving the boys cross-country to find El.
- Angela the Alpha Bitch at Eleven and Will's new school in Season 4 is given a lot of screen time and build up, culminating in El breaking her nose with a roller skate. After that, she disappears from the narrative completely. While it would admittedly be hard to work her in to all the other subplots, we never get a chance to see if the incident changed her or how it affected her at all.
- Chrissy, not unlike Barb, received an enormous amount of fan support after only one episode, despite her Plot-Triggering Death. As a result, "Chrissy lives" AU fics cropped up immediately due to a large number of fans believing that they killed her off way too quickly and that she had a lot of potential as a character. The Duffer Brothers, Chrissy's actress Grace Van Dien, and Eddie's actor Joseph Quinn have all expressed agreement, with the Duffer Brothers admitting they regretted that they'd already filmed her death scene by the time they realised her potential.
- Many fans bemoaned Eddie's death which they felt didn't add anything to the narrative and only happened because the writers couldn't figure out a way to clear his name and thus continue including him in the show's future.
- Jason, who for many was a character with potential, either as a villain posing a real threat to the heroes when turning the town against them or by redeeming himself and finally helping bring all of Hawkins together to fight the Upside Down, since he proved himself capable of swaying the entire town. In the end, he's little more than a nuisance who paves the way for the real villain to succeed and is then unceremoniously killed practically by accident. Ultimately, it seems like the character was only created as a Take That! to other shows, and the Duffer brothers just didn't know when and how to remove him from the story once they had made their "point".
- Terry Ives (El's mom). She has a beyond tragic backstory, and is only temporarily reunited with her long lost daughter (in her catatonic state)- who interprets that her mother wants her to find Kali. But after two episodes, her story is dropped, and we don't see El reunite again with her. She's a character who truly deserves justice, and a decent closure.
