#the duffer brothers literally went: here's a character trying to overcome her depression and suicidal thoughts! now let's kill her :)

[wiitzend]

it’s just...the utter heartbreak of max mayfield as a character is just too much for me. she’s so young, but has already built up walls thousands of feet high around her because of her father and her brother. she contends herself with her loneliness, forces herself to accept the fact that her life is crap and it’s most likely going to stay that way. 

then she moves to hawkins.

max mayfield moves to hawkins and gains a support system in the form of best friends who she’ll do anything for, (because fighting monsters from another dimension is a surefire way to form life-long bonds, but max clings to her friends with everything she has regardless. no way in hell is something from the upside down going to tear them away from her), which makes the scene of her breaking out of vecna’s curse so emotionally powerful. she’s fighting to go back to her friends, because her love for them is more powerful than her fear, more powerful than her depression. (and at it’s core, stranger things is a show about characters loving each other so intensely that it ultimately conquers the trauma and blood they face, again and again.) and while it’s incredibly important for the show to explore max’s depression, her conflicted feelings about billy and her thoughts of suicide, seeing all of that ultimately culminate with her in a coma with her arms and legs broken just makes me so mad. of course, i’m sure the duffer brothers won’t kill her, but it feels like an endless cycle of max daring to hope again only to have that hope ripped away from her in the cruelest ways possible.