Stranger Things season 2 introduced the brilliant, beautiful, too precious for this world Bob, played by Sean Astin. This article contains spoilers.

Let’s call a spade a spade: Bob Newby, superhero, was designed to break our hearts.

Inspired by Stephen King’s It as it is, Stranger Things mashes up a heartwarming coming-of-age story with genuinely terrifying, soul-crushing horror — and considering that literally every single person on planet Earth is obsessed with this show, this is clearly a golden combo.

Stranger Things without the horror elements would just be a show about some kids in a town where nothing happened, and nobody would watch it.

We love Stranger Things because it chills and warms our hearts in equal measure (“he likes it cold,” brrr). Without the pain, the sweetness wouldn’t seem so sweet. Genre television is so evocative exactly because it amplifies the highs and lows of our regular, boring lives and allows us to experience extreme emotions from the safe distance of reality.

Demogorgons, nightmare worlds, inner monsters and superpowers are all just metaphors — sorry, allegories — for the human experience.

Related: This Stranger Things ‘B’ conspiracy theory will blow your mind

Someone had to die in Stranger Things season 2, because death is part of life, and this show wouldn’t be half as effective if we didn’t genuinely fear for these characters’ safety. And honestly, Bob was the most merciful choice.

Rather than forcing shock value down our throats with a core character death (e.g. Hopper, Will, Steve, or Nancy) they invented an entirely new character and marked him for death at the outset. Bob is the new Barb — they even practically have the same name.

And boy did they make sure his death would destroy us. In large part, this was a result of casting Sean Astin: walking Goonies reference, an actual hobbit, and the most likable man alive.

Bob Newby wasn’t originally intended to be as likable or prevalent as he was, but through Astin’s performance he became the sweetest, softest, cleverest, most excitable and innocent person in the show — literally too good for that world — and pretty much the antithesis of The White Straight Man™ as contemporary narrative is constructing him (aka a monster).

And not only was Bob a nice guy, but the narrative never used it against him. Yes, he was goofy and corny and clearly not the ‘right man’ for Joyce in the context of the over-arching narrative (it’s overtly signposted that Joyce/Hopper is endgame, and has always been endgame).

But we were never encouraged to hate Bob, or pity him, or laugh at him. We were supposed to like him and root for him because of his goofiness and awkwardness, not in spite of it. We were supposed to love him so that his death would break our hearts. Stranger Things was gunning for the #deservedbetter tweets, and they got ’em.

And let’s be clear about one thing: Stranger Things does not, and has never claimed to, reflect a ‘better world.’ It is not comfort television. It is not ‘nice.’ It is, as mentioned, reflecting the worst and best parts of life back at us in exaggerated, figurative ways. Killing Bob served a very important narrative function, and I think we need to be careful about crying foul over every single ‘bad thing’ that happens in television shows.

If we want to watch romantic comedies with happy endings and aspirational feel-good messages, we can. Stranger Things is not that, and it’s unfair to force expectations on it that it has never given any indication of trying to live up to.

And, unlike Barb, there was nothing fundamentally ‘wrong’ with the way they constructed Bob’s life and death. We actually got to know and love him, and while his ultimate purpose was to break our hearts, it wasn’t his only function.

Bob served as an anchor for Joyce in a way nobody else could, including Hopper, because he was real; he lived in a world where there were no monsters and no supernatural threats to her children. Through Bob, Joyce built a bubble around her and her family in which they could pretend like moving to Maine was an option and that Will’s problems amounted to bullies and bad dreams. That they were a “normal family.”

Ironically (and brilliantly), the circumstances that led to Bob’s death were also a direct result of his original role in the story. Because he was an outsider and didn’t/couldn’t know the truth, he had no reason to think Will’s nightmares were anything other than nightmares.

The genuine and heart-warming moment of Bob trying to connect with Will in the car by giving him what would have been good advice under any other circumstances — stop running away and face his nightmares — led to Will trying to shout down the demogorgon, which led to Will becoming a spy for the monster, which led to the demodogs finding them in the hospital.

At the end of the day, Bob was a safety blanket, for the audience as well as for Joyce. They needed to take it away — or violently rip it away, I guess, very literally tearing him to pieces right in front of our eyes.

Was it gory and gratuitous and cruel? Yes. Was it necessary for it to be so grotesque and drawn-out? I personally don’t think so, but that’s more a reflection of my own taste than anything else. I’m also not a fan of slasher films. That doesn’t make them wrong or bad. Bob’s death, as his life, served to remind us that Stranger Things is a mashup of many different genres, and horror is one of them.

Without his death — without the brutality and without our emotional attachment to him — we would have ended the season feeling happy and relieved that everything worked out, and that’s not what Stranger Things is all about. The intense trauma of Bob’s death balanced out the sugary-sweet ending to the season. Without it, it would have felt like Stranger Things had lost its edge.

But Bob’s role in Stranger Things season 2 and the outcry following his death has made me think about what we ask of our stories these days, and why. And it has made me realize that Stranger Things did make a mistake with Bob — not in making us love him, or by killing him in such an overtly violent way, but by constructing him as the normal, everyday man. Because Bob did, in fact, represent a kind of maleness that we hardly ever see in contemporary media. There was nothing normal about Bob, because there are no other men like Bob.

We talk a lot about the media’s responsibility in terms of breaking stereotypes and telling more diverse stories, and while Bob is literally one white straight male in a cast full of white straight males, he does represent something that society is currently in severe shortage of: nice guys. Not “nice guys,” but actual nice guys.

Characters like Bob — like Jacob in Fantastic Beasts, Chidi in The Good Place or Neville in Harry Potter (tl;dr the Samwise Gamgee of their respective stories) — that have no trace of an edge, but are heroic and loveable all the same, are exceedingly hard to come by in pop culture these days, when all the superheroes have to have a dark side, and where ‘kind’ is synonymous with ‘boring.’

Just as we’re requesting more nuanced, realistic female characters, it seems to me like we need more male characters like Bob — to celebrate the kind of maleness that they embody, to include them in stories and allow them to flourish rather than positioning them as dispensable because they’re ‘only’ good, or kind, or gentle, or safe.

Stranger Things not only managed (half by accident, since the pre-Astin version of the character was meant to have a much smaller role) to create a character we loved, but that society seems increasingly starved for. If he wasn’t so unique, the outcry following his death might not have been so intense.

While there is nothing unusual about fan outcry following a popular character death — and again, I’m not saying they shouldn’t have killed him — I think one thing the Duffer brothers might not have accounted for is that viewers are identifying in Bob something that is hard to come by: pure, unadulterated goodness that made him neither pathetic nor weak.

Killing off the one good man to remind us that this is a gritty narrative that only has room for gritty people feels a little too real-world relevant right now. It’s not on Stranger Things to fix the world’s problems (especially not because this season was written a year ago; they couldn’t have known the show would premiere in this hellish social and political climate), and I’m the last person to condemn a morally ambiguous narrative.

But maybe the collective gut-punch of Bob’s death should be an indicator for storytellers that, right now, we need more men like Bob on our screens. Brutal death or not, Bob was a rare ray of sunshine in an increasingly dark world.