#EDDIE STRANGER THINGS MOVIE#
#EDDIE STRANGER THINGS SERIES#

Chrissy doesn’t pull the mean girl cheerleader act, and he offers empathy and a potential pharmaceutical solution without judgment.

His kindness (and her acceptance) goes against the way these interactions typically fare. Take his conversation with Chrissy in the woods in “The Hellfire Club” when his goofy antics make her laugh, temporarily breaking Vecna’s grip. Eddie is no lone wolf, and his friendships reveal it is silly to assume that his metal aesthetic is a gateway to devil worship. Yes, he does circle the drug dealer with a heart of gold archetype, but there is more to him than being a misunderstood outcast. Thankfully, Eddie is cut from a different cloth. No one is writing odes to any of those figures.

#EDDIE STRANGER THINGS MOVIE#

Elsewhere, Eleven’s (Millie Bobby Brown) bullies in California or basketball douche Jason (Mason Dye) highlight a tendency to lean hard into ‘80s teen movie clichés. It would be easy for this new character to retrace the same moody steps as Billy or be a Bizarro World Steve.

This mindset makes this character a joy to watch, but it also turns him into an easy scapegoat when cheerleader Chrissy (Grace Van Dien) is found dead in his uncle’s trailer. Eddie wears his “freak” badge proudly, and his cafeteria table walk reinforces how little regard he has for the opinions of the popular cliques. The Duffers have drawn on other 1980s geopolitical and cultural events, so it only makes sense that the Satanic Panic swirling around this game would eventually play a role.

#EDDIE STRANGER THINGS SERIES#

In the premiere, Eddie’s dramatic reading of a Newsweek article that warns of the D&D dangers is not fiction invented for the series - though it should be noted that the article appeared the year before. Long before video games were blamed for instigating real-life violence, Dungeons & Dragons were cited in court as a motive for murder. It hardly seems fair that he won’t be around to fight Vecna in the final season, but Eddie more than made his mark. Throughout all nine episodes, Quinn has captured Eddie’s contradictions, including how his gregarious personality clashes with his newfound belief that he is a coward. In a short time, Eddie went from the Hellfire Club’s Dungeon Master to fighting a swarm of actual demobats in the Upside Down. Killing audience favorites is inevitable in a landscape filled with this much peril, although the Duffer brothers couldn’t have known how much the metalhead misfit would resonate when they shot the finale. It is hardly surprising the death toll continues to rise, considering monsters keep attacking the once sleepy Indiana town. Eddie joins Barb (Shanon Purser), Bob (Sean Astin), and Billy (Dacre Montgomery) on the nearest and dearest departed list - they sure like to off people whose name begins with a B.

Eddie stranger things