The bullies of Hawkins: Troy, James, Tommy H., and Carol, the show's bullies

Troy and James, the two middle-school bullies

At middle school, in November 1983, two boys hold the corridor. Troy talks, James follows. Their targets have been chosen for a long time: Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will, the four boys who play Dungeons and Dragons in a basement.

The first chapter gives the detail. The two hand out nicknames that target the color of Lucas's skin, Mike's face, and Dustin's teeth, then joke about which of the three would bring in the most in a fairground booth. Dustin answers by naming his illness: cleidocranial dysplasia, a rare genetic disease that disturbs the growth of the teeth. Gaten Matarazzo, who plays him, has it and explained it to the Duffer brothers from his audition; they wrote it into the dialogue.

On screen, the two have only first names: the surnames Walsh and Dante come from the production sheets, not from the lines. Peyton Wich plays Troy, Cade Jones plays James, and neither of the two has a scene without the other.

The first scene that matters takes place at the assembly organized for Will, in chapter four, "The Body". While the school pays tribute to a child it believes dead, the two snicker. On the way out, Mike calls them to account, Troy makes a joke about the missing boy, and Mike pushes him to the ground. The next answer does not come from him: Eleven, wearing a wig to enter the school, stares at Troy and pins him in place. He wets his pants in front of almost the whole school. No adult appears in the frame.

Two chapters later, at "The Monster," they corner Mike and Dustin at the edge of the quarry. Troy holds a knife against Dustin and orders Mike to jump. Mike jumps. He stops in midair, comes back up, and sets down on the edge: Eleven is at the top of the slope, her nose bleeding. With one gesture, she breaks Troy's arm.

In chapter seven, "The Bathtub", Troy's mother shows up at the station to demand apologies and the deputies' badge numbers. Pushed by her, her son describes the little girl: the shaved skull, the nose that bleeds, and things she knows how to do. The sheriff picks up and knows at once where to look for the children. The only consequence granted to a bully turns back on him.

Neither one nor the other comes back afterward, and the story does not explain it. A comic takes care of it: The Bully, published on February 4, 2021 from a script by Greg Pak and drawings by Valeria Favoccia, takes the two boys as its heroes.

Tommy H. and Carol: the high school bullies of Stranger Things

At high school, bullying changes tools. No more knife at the edge of a water hole: laughs, a can of paint, and an audience. Tommy H. and Carol form a couple and orbit around Steve Harrington, the most visible boy in the school. Chester Rushing plays Tommy H., Chelsea Talmadge plays Carol.

Their function fits in one sentence: they laugh at what Steve does, and they ask for more. They are known to have neither a family, nor a house, nor a wound. Troy acted out of frank cruelty; they invent almost nothing, they keep it going. The harm they do is always a group harm.

The first season takes them from the pool to the last party. Here is their path, in order.

1. Chapter 2 The can at the edge of the pool

   Barbara Holland goes with Nancy Wheeler to Steve's, refuses to drink, then gives in to the group's pressure. She opens the can with the blade and cuts her hand. The others go back in; she stays outside, and disappears that night.

2. Chapter 3 The smashed camera

   The couple flanks Steve when he corners Jonathan Byers. It is suggested out loud that the missing boy's older brother could have something to do with his disappearance. Steve breaks the camera on the ground.

3. Chapter 6 The Hawk marquee

   Convinced he has been cheated on, Steve lets the couple repaint the movie theater's marquee. Above the title on the bill, All the Right Moves, a sexual insult and Nancy Wheeler's full name.

4. Chapter 6 The fight in front of the movie theater

   Nancy runs to see the marquee. Steve piles on out loud, Jonathan hits him, two deputies separate the boys. Jonathan ends up handcuffed at the station; the couple leaves without being troubled.

5. Chapter 7 Steve leaves them there

   With a black eye, Steve hears them still mocking Nancy and Jonathan. He answers them that they love nobody, leaves them there, and goes back to clean the paint himself.

6. Chapter 8 The new camera

   The day before Christmas, Nancy offers Jonathan a new camera. It was paid for by Steve, who does not say so and lets her hold it out in his place.

7. October 1984 The last appearance

   The couple is seen again at high school, then at Tina's Halloween party. They have not changed, and the story has nothing left to do with them.

Steve Harrington, the bully who changes sides

That is the subject's real line of force. In November 1983, Steve Harrington is not the spectator of what Tommy H. and Carol do: he sets the tone. He breaks the camera, he lets the marquee be repainted, he humiliates Nancy in the middle of the street. The story films him at first exactly as it films Troy.

What sets him apart is what is done with it afterward. No revelation, no speech, no punishment. Three gestures: he ditches his friends, he cleans the paint, he pays for a new camera and lets Nancy offer it in his place. None of them redeems him, and none is commented on screen.

The fourth arrives in chapter eight. Steve comes to apologize at the Byers', runs into traps and a weapon pointed at him, goes back out, gets back in the car, and turns around when the lights go wild. He picks up the nailed bat and holds the door while the others set the fire.

The writing choice is clear. A bully is not a species but a position, and you can change it, on condition of losing the people who made it comfortable. Tommy H. and Carol do not change: that is why they leave the story, and he does not.

March 1986: when bullying becomes a manhunt

Three years later, the same high school produces something else. Jason Carver, captain of the basketball team, loses his girlfriend Chrissy Cunningham in March 1986. Convinced that Eddie Munson killed her and that the Hellfire club is a cult, he gathers his team and sets off to hunt him. He has his own article on this blog; here we stick to what he brings to the subject.

What he changes is the scale. Troy held a corridor, Tommy H. held a group. Jason holds a public meeting: in front of the town council, he accuses a role-playing club of satanic rituals, and the town believes him. School bullying becomes an adult search.

Continuity matters more than the break. Jason believes what he says, as Troy believed his mockery; the difference is the microphone handed to him. And his adversary is not a creature: it is Lucas Sinclair, his own teammate, one of the four boys Troy was pushing in the corridors three years earlier.

What the show says about school bullying in the 1980s

One constant runs through the four seasons concerned: no adult ever intervenes. Not one teacher at the assembly, not one monitor at the edge of the quarry, not one manager in front of the repainted marquee. The only adult who shows up for a bully is Troy's mother, and she comes to demand apologies for her son.

The word "bullying" is in fact never spoken, and that is accurate for the time: the school policies that name it arrived much later. The matter was settled between students, or it was not settled. The story does not fill that void with a speech: it leaves it open and films what rushes into it.

He also links school cruelty to a real panic. In that decade, parents, pastors, and journalists accused Dungeons and Dragons of pushing teenagers toward the occult; young people in metal T-shirts were treated as suspects. Jason's speech in front of the town council takes up those arguments almost as they are.

What the story does with the targets remains. The four boys mocked in a corridor in November 1983 are the ones who, chapter after chapter, find the entrance and set up the plan. Nothing is redeemed for all that, and nobody offers them an apology; but the story refuses to leave them in the role where two thirteen-year-old boys had put them.

What the four have in common

None of the four has a power, a creature, or a laboratory behind him, and that is precisely why they mark. Three traits gather them, and one same absence.

They always operate as a pair: Troy with James, Tommy H. with Carol. They always have an audience, a corridor, an assembly, a yard, or a shopping street. And they choose someone who has nobody at that precise moment: a boy whose brother has just disappeared, a girl left alone outside.

None is stopped by an adult. Troy is stopped by a twelve-year-old child. Tommy H. and Carol are stopped by the boy who served as their leader. Jason is stopped by nobody: he dies in the Creel house, during his fight with Lucas. The targets defend themselves alone, or with their friends.

Two other figures complete the list. Billy Hargrove, in the fall of 1984, moves the bullying inside a family: he terrorizes Max Mayfield, his stepsister, and beats Steve at the Byers'. He needs neither a corridor nor an audience.

The last one is outside the town. Angela, at Lenora Hills High School, in California, humiliates Eleven in front of a whole skating rink in March 1986, a milkshake in hand. She takes a roller skate full in the face. She is the only bully to go after an Eleven stripped of her powers, and the only one to end up on the ground.

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