Stranger Things 5 Reasons Max Was The Best Addition To The Cast (5 Reasons Billy Was)

Stranger Things: 5 Reasons Max Was The Best Addition To The Cast (5 Reasons Billy Was)

When the third season of popular TV show Stranger Things dropped on Netflix this past summer, Max and Billy were two new characters. We compare them.

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The television series Stranger Things has a lot of incredible strengths, but one of their clearest and most reliable skills is the ability to make pretty much every character that they put on screen someone who the audience wants to keep watching. After an absolutely smashing season one, they kind of had their work cut out for them, but when season two began, they started things off with a bang by introducing step-siblings Billy Hargrove and Max Mayfield.

These two California kids arrived in Hawkins and shook things up literally the first day that they showed up, and they’re undeniably two of the coolest characters that have ever been on Stranger Things. It’s hard enough to make one new character into a fan favorite, but Stranger Things managed to do twice as much. Here are five reasons that Max was the best addition to the show, and five reasons why Billy was.

10 Max: She’s A Bucket Full Of Sass

All of the boys in the party can serve up a whole lot of attitude if they want to, but they really needed someone to give them a taste of their own medicine every once in a while. And luckily when Max showed up she was ready to serve them up a whole pharmacy’s worth.

Max is pretty much the queen of cool, which everyone besides Mike seems to catch on to as soon as she walked in the door of Mr. Clarke’s classroom. Max can not only hold her own, she can also run witty circles around everyone else in the party, and it’s awesome to watch.

9 Billy: He Wasn’t Always Easy To Swallow

Stranger Things is actually exceptional at creating characters that are impossible not to love, and that’s great. But the fact that everyone seems to be so easily lovable made Billy kind of a breath of fresh air.

Stranger Things has a tendency to shy away from any potential complexity or ambiguity in their characters, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But it just doesn’t leave the audience much of an opportunity to really mull over the characters or their actions. Even though Billy was only a supporting character, he got a more detailed and more complex character arc and backstory than almost any other character on the show.

8 Max: She Tries To Be Kind To People Who Aren’t Kind To Her

Given what we know about Max now, it’s borderline miraculous that she’s as nice and well adjusted as she is. When she first arrived in Hawkins she seemed like she was just too cool for school, but as time went on it became readily apparent that she was suffering under the weight of a stepbrother who loved tormenting her and a stepfather who was a terrifying, abusive monster.

It didn’t take much for most of the party to accept her, but Mike and El both flat out rejected her from the moment they met her, and that still didn’t deter her from being kind to them.

7 Billy: He Brought A Lot Of Fire To The Human Side Of The Story

Stranger Things is a show that has one foot in the supernatural realm and the other foot in the normal human realm, and that is a huge part of what makes it so appealing. The characters are experiencing extraordinary things, but they feel ordinary enough to relate to.

However, this division unsurprisingly left the human side of the storyline feeling a bit dull in comparison sometimes. That is, until Billy showed up. Billy showed up in Hawkins to smoke cigarettes and tear things up, and he’s all out of cigarettes. His fiery presence definitely livened up the sometimes boring human storyline.

6 Max: She Doesn’t Let The Boys Paint Her Into A Corner

Up until Eleven showed up the whole party was quite literally a boys club. And once El was gone, it seemed like it might go back to that status quo, except then Max arrived in Hawkins and half of the party was immediately smitten with her.

But one of the more negative sides of that was that Lucas and Dustin pretty clearly idealized her to the point where they lost track of who she really was, and they almost treated her like she was a prize to be won. She obviously wasn’t having any of that though, and she demanded to be treated like a person instead of an object.

5 Billy: He Wasn’t Just Steve Rebooted

Steve certainly kicked off his tenure on Stranger Things as the insufferable, ultra-popular bully. But after his relationship with Nancy as well as his experience with the Demogorgon, he revealed himself to be a genuinely awesome dude. And Billy was clearly meant to fill the role he vacated in some respects. However, they definitely didn’t write Billy as just another iteration of Steve.

Billy exhibits all of Steve’s earlier negative traits times ten, but although he seemed like he was just a raging, testosterone-fueled ruffian the truth behind his demeanor and behavior was much darker and much more complicated than anyone would have initially predicted.

4 Max: She’s Not Just Girl #2

When Max was introduced to Stranger Things it would have been very easy for her to be a one-dimensional character who was essentially designed to be a placeholder for the spot that El had vacated, but thankfully she was never relegated to that role.

Max may have joined the party after El was presumed dead, but she did not fulfill the role of El in the slightest, and she also didn’t feel like some generic female character who was just written into the show to exist as a girl. She was a totally developed and complex character that was unlike anyone else in the series.

3 Billy: He’s Not An Easy Character To Figure Out

Obviously there is nothing wrong with everything being simple and happy and fun… but that’s not particularly thought-provoking. Billy has moments where he is completely monstrous, and at other times he can be incredibly charming and appealing, and you really never know which version of Billy you’re going to get until he shows his cards.

Billy is a lot of things, but boring isn’t one of them. And when it comes to Billy there are really no easy answers, he’s hard to ignore and hard to write off, and in a world largely populated by characters who have relatively simple and happy lives it’s intriguing to see something different.

2 Max: She’s The Biggest Badass In The Party

Considering that the party are a bunch of nerdy middle schoolers it’s actually insane to realize how badass they all are. However, we think that Max really deserves to top the list for a few reasons. She’s not someone who has any special powers or abilities to speak of, but as soon as she’s ingratiated with the party she is always standing shoulder to shoulder with them in any fight.

She single-handedly took down Billy when he was threatening Lucas, and she was ready and willing to go along with a dangerous plan to distract the demodogs and help El, even though she literally met El two seconds ago and El was rude as hell to her.

1 Billy: He’s One Of The Show’s Most Developed Characters

The vast majority of the characters in Stranger Things are relatively straightforward, and most of them don’t even have a lot of backstory or character development. And while that’s just fine, it’s also amazing to get a dose of more complex and multidimensional characters like Billy.

Billy has layers and different facets to his personality, and what has really made him a joy to watch in seasons 2 and 3 of Stranger Things is that he gets more development as time goes on, so much so that you can go back and watch everything he does again and the scenes and his actions can be interpreted completely differently than they were the first time around.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/stranger-things-reasons-max-best-cast-addition-reasons-billy-tv-show-netflix/

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