Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The internet has a new folk hero and her name is Barb.
You remember Barb, right? From Stranger Things. Come on! You remember Nancy’s barely-there goody two-shoes best friend who gets dragged away into another dimension where a monster kills her. Well, google “Barb Stranger Things,” and you’ll see an avalanche of excited posts arguing why she’s the best. You’ll see a number of glowing interviews with the actress behind her, newbie Shannon Purser. HelloGiggles even compares her eye-rolls to those of Liz Lemon! Oh, and then there’s this from Difficult People‘s Cole Escola:
It’s easy to understand why Barb is so beloved. With her super-sized glasses and terribly unflattering clothes, she represents the misfit, the nerdy outcast, the unpopular kid. She’s Daria without the well-formed zingers. Her whole storyline hinges on how much she hates how popular Nancy is becoming. Does Barb get humiliated in front of the whole school? Nope, but she does feel the sting of being ostracized. She just doesn’t fit in with the cool kids and she doesn’t want Nancy to become one. She doesn’t want to lose her best friend. It’s completely relatable! And then — a monster comes to suck her into a netherworld where she dies. It’s all very unfair.
Here’s the thing: Barb is actually boring. She isn’t really all that important to Stranger Things. In fact, she’s a thinly-written character who only exists to advance the character development of her flashier best friend, Nancy. Barb’s death is purely the catalyst for Nancy’s growth. The town — and the show — is far more interested in what happened to cute little Will Byers than dull old Barb. Worse than that, the Duffer Brothers admitted using her as a sort of sacrificial lamb to help establish tone. Matt Duffer told Variety:
Got that? Barb isn’t that big of a deal. She’s “poor Barb.” She was just there to add flavor to the series. So why is everyone making such a big deal about her? I think we feel empathy for her. We relate to her because most of us know what it’s like to be the outcast and Barb isn’t just an outcast in the world of Stranger Things, but in the show’s structure. She’s been discarded by the writers in much the same way the town writes her off.
I can’t help but feel that a lot of people are projecting their own emotional scars from high school onto her character. She’s defined enough as an outcast to be a symbol of that experience, and yet she is vague enough to be a cipher upon which we can project our own personal stories of feeling left behind. In celebrating Barb, we are in fact celebrating our younger, sadder, more awkward selves. We are arguing that sidekicks and misfits are heroes, too.
So maybe it’s not that we love Barb. Maybe it’s that we love ourselves. Through the lens of adulthood, we can look back at the times where we felt unloved and realize that we did deserve love. We deserved respect. We were cool enough in our own skins — we didn’t have to waste all that time feeling lesser than our more confident peers. We didn’t have to settle upon being the sidekick or the first kill. We were good enough to be the fierce heroine, the final girl, the one who makes it out alive. We can be heroes, too.
