Chrissy Cunningham and the Anne Boleyn Effect

On the cult following of Stranger Things and its characters

In the first episode of Stranger Things 4, we are launched from the hot and gory summer of 1985 into the rock-and-rolling spring of 1986 as our flock of misfits adjust to the leap from middle school to high school. This brings about all the usual teen struggles – the feeling of isolation, the yearning for popularity, the constant dread of an incoming apocalypse. Just regular teen stuff. This first chapter, The Hellfire Club, introduces us to a handful of their new peers at Hawkins High – there’s metalhead and social outcast Eddie Munson, leader of the boys’ new Dungeons & Dragonscoterie; jock Jason Carver, the captain of the basketball team that Lucas is so eager to impress; cheerleader Chrissy Cunningham, Jason’s girlfriend and It Girl of Hawkins High – and throughout the season we encounter a trio of unsettling characters who come together to form this season’s monster (and, as it is eventually revealed, the kingpin behind the creatures from previous seasons), Vecna.

While none of these new characters meet particularly pleasant ends, it’s Cunningham’s gruesome death that is by far the most memorable, her tiny body propelled onto the ceiling of Munson’s trailer in a trance, eyes bleeding, jaw dislocating, bones breaking one by one. This desecration of the teenage girl’s body acts as the catalyst for the entire season’s Upside Down-based storyline – it is this that alerts our protagonists to the existence of Vecna while adding an extra layer of jeopardy, as the time and location of her death inadvertently frames new addition Eddie Munson for her brutal murder. Paired with the violent and senseless manner in which she meets her demise, she is the perfect victim to incite Hawkins’s very own satanic panic.

On the other side of the screen, Cunningham was met with instant adoration, quickly amassing a cult following on social media despite her brief time on screen. New viewers began forgoing previous series just to see her storyline, having become enthralled by her character through the numerous TikToks or Instagram edits, with many complaining that the size of her role was oversold to them by devotees. A number of viewers, including those who had been watching since the show began back in 2016, found her death so disturbing that they opted not to watch the remaining episodes, citing it as a step too far. Considering Stranger Things has always billed itself as a horror show, it’s true that Cunningham’s Cronenbergian execution is by far one of the most graphic killings in the series, despite her being far from the first innocent victim. It’s this pairing of a virtuous, likeable young girl and a grisly, senseless murder that acts as the martyrdom of Chrissy Cunningham and begins the interlacing of her story with that of a Tudor queen.

Chrissy Cunningham, queen of Hawkins High, and Anne Boleyn, queen of England, both had short-lived reigns, but each were met with an unprecedented level of adoration from the popular culture. Both have an iconic, easy-to-identify image – Anne Boleyn with her French hood, bell sleeves, and bepearled B necklace, Chrissy Cunningham with her blonde ponytail, green and yellow cheerleading uniform, and golden 1986 necklace. Both, while beloved by their respective courts, met gruesome and untimely ends as young women – Anne Boleyn by executioner’s sword aged around 29, Chrissy Cunningham by Vecna’s curse aged only 16 (more on this later). Both were involved with men who, in the court of public opinion, were no good for them (and far too into religion for their own good, or the good of those around them). Both are almost universally agreed upon as being undeserving of their fate, and yet to some degree we all feel a little self-righteous in this belief, as though we are the first to ever feel this way. It's the gruesome, untimely, and unjustifiable ends that these women meet which form the foundations of their places in modern culture.

This is not a rare occurrence throughout history – countless women have found more fame in death than in life. The likes of Princess Diana, Janis Joplin, and Joan of Arc were all highly regarded in life but face new levels of worship having died young and unjustly. Diana killed in a car accident aged 36, Janis dying of a heroin overdose aged 27, Joan burned at the stake by the Catholic church aged 19, all of them beloved as the people’s princess or Pearl or the maid of Orleans but revered as idols and saints (quite literally, in Joan’s case – the very same Catholic church who ordered her execution canonised her as a saint in 1920, nearly 500 years later) following their early, heart-breaking deaths.

So why the Anne Boleyn effect? Why not title this essay The Joan of Arc Effect or The Princess Diana Effect? They all, in one way or another, fall victim to this same effect that eventually befell Chrissy Cunningham, so what is it about Anne Boleyn that sets her apart from the others? Anne Boleyn was not the first woman in history to die young and tragically – Joan of Arc was executed for heresy over 100 years before Anne’s own beheading – and she is not the only woman to lose her agency in death, to be moulded posthumously by rumour and opinion. But there is a component to her story which all the others seem to lack – something that, in my mind, makes her the blueprint for this curiosity.

Anne Boleyn was physically erased from history.

In the days following her execution, all references to Anne Boleyn were chiselled from the stone of Hampton Court Palace. Every physical trace of her existence was stripped and replaced with the badges, name, and belongings of Jane Seymour; the woman Henry VIII would marry a mere nine days after Anne’s death. Despite how familiar we are with her iconography, there are no surviving contemporary portraits of her – the earliest images of Anne Boleyn in existence were commissioned by her daughter Elizabeth years after her death as part of her abrogation of the smear campaign led against her mother by her father, her half-sister Mary, and the Catholic population of Tudor England. Where most other women found themselves slowly erased metaphorically after death, Anne was chiselled away quickly, efficiently, and literally.

Out of sheer nosiness, I decided to ask my friends what they knew about Anne Boleyn and how they felt about her. I got overwhelmingly varied responses from everybody – some of them believed she was guilty of her crimes, others believed she was a victim of a brutish husband and a botched trial. People described her as tragic, promiscuous, and my personal favourite, a “beheaded girly”. There was one particular response, however, that really stood out to me. It read “I also don’t know a lot about her, but I just have an idea of her in my head as a bad bitch,” This is exactly the sort of response I wanted to discuss. I just have an idea of her in my head.

I just have this idea of Anne Boleyn in my head as a bad bitch. I just have this idea of Anne Boleyn in my head as a victim. I just have this idea of Anne Boleyn in my head as a seductress. I don’t know a lot about her, because nobody really does anymore, but I just have this idea of her in my head regardless, because the idea of Anne Boleyn extends far beyond the realm of who Anne Boleyn ever really was.

Ever since the first volume of Stranger Things 4 was released, I’ve wondered what it was about Chrissy Cunningham that had viewers falling in love with her so quickly and intensely. Perhaps it was a repeat of the reception to Barb from the first season, whose death similarly acted as a catalyst for the show as Nancy began investigating her best friend’s mysterious disappearance. Perhaps it was the likeability, or even relatability to some, of her character - a sweet young girl with an eating disorder and a mother who seems to be actively destroying her. Perhaps it was the devastation of being introduced to a brand new, incredibly sympathetic character just to see her be brutally murdered in the same episode. Or maybe, like Anne Boleyn, it’s because she was a virtually blank piece of paper onto which people could write whatever story they liked without the fear of canon disproving them.

I can’t say for sure what happened to Anne Boleyn’s legacy among the English population in the days immediately following her execution, besides the carving of Jane Seymour’s name where hers used to be, but when it comes to Chrissy Cunningham I saw countless edits, drawings and, most notably for this discussion, headcanons – the term given to any non-canon idea or perception an audience member has for the characters or stories they love. Throughout last summer, posts detailing her survival and assimilation into the core group of teenagers, what she was like prior to her introduction in season four, or the potential for a relationship between Cunningham and Munson, were all inescapable on every social media platform as fans expanded on the universe of Stranger Things together and reimagined a series where their Queen of Hawkins High hadn’t been massacred almost immediately. Cunningham is a fundamentally dead character – she must die for the story to continue, and so every decision she makes, every aspect of her personality, is designed precisely to see her mutilated on the ceiling of Munson’s trailer at the end of the first episode, and in conceptualising a world in which she survives strips her of nearly everything, leaving little more than a cheerleading skirt and a green scrunchie for audiences to rearrange her into the unattainable version of her character they itch for.

But as time moved on and we found ourselves further from the initial climax, we reach the most bizarre phenomenon of all, in which audiences find themselves so adjusted to stretching the truth and projecting their own ideas onto this blank canvas that the very few details that we do know to be true are overlooked in favour of entertainment, or even rewritten altogether.

For Anne Boleyn, a large portion of these falsities are a result of either contemporary character assassination or retroactive sensationalism, but over the nearly 500 years since her death the image of Anne Boleyn has become polluted with baseless claims that merge swiftly from opinion or theory into fact. Averments that she gave birth to deformed babies, had eleven fingers, and learned wild sex acts in the French court are either disfigured interpretations of the truth, or complete fabrications. There are innumerable myths surrounding Anne Boleyn which have become ironclad fact in the court of public opinion, despite most being easily disprovable – or at the very least, wildly improbable for it to have gone undocumented within her lifetime, even by those who stood in staunch opposition to her.

As for Chrissy Cunningham, I’ve seen countless debates online surrounding her age, with people concocting endless theories and ways to prove her age is one thing or another (usually to justify shipping her with Eddie Munson, a canonically 20-or-so-year-old who had to re-sit his senior year twice), arguing that the 1986 on her necklace must be her year of graduation and so she must be at least 17, or that she shared a class with Munson so they must be around the same age, or a myriad of other reasonings to explain how old she is. And yet we are shown in the show exactly how old she is – 16, turning 17 in June. An embarrassing number of TikToks appeared on my For You page as people confessed that they hadn’t realised Cunningham was portrayed as having an eating disorder, despite the fact that it is one of the very few aspects of her character that we knew to be true, and was paramount to her succumbing to Vecna’s curse. And I repeatedly saw fans, once again usually in reference to the potential for a relationship between her and Munson, writing everything from TikTok captions to bullet-pointed Tumblr posts to entire works of fanfiction delineating her secret hatred for her God-fearing boyfriend, with some detailing how she disliked being popular, how she hated being a cheerleader – all of which we are shown only the contrary to. Perhaps, if given more time on our screens, we would see Cunningham dumping her boyfriend, relinquishing her place on the cheerleading squad, and falling in with the main characters – maybe that’s exactly the sort of person the writers envisioned her as when they were creating her. But as viewers we will never know, because we simply never knew her long enough to find out what kind of girl she is when she isn’t being hunted down by an evil being from another dimension. And as these headcanons and AUs seep into canon, we can see the character of Chrissy Cunningham becoming as contorted and disfigured amongst viewers as that of Anne Boleyn.

It feels redundant to say that Chrissy Cunningham is fictional – we’re all well aware that she’s nothing more than a character fabricated in the minds of the Duffer brothers for a television show, her entire existence a concoction of months of writing and hairstyling and acting. But when I say it now, I don’t simply mean that she is a character from a Netflix original series. I mean that she is fictional in the same way that Anne Boleyn in fictional. The Chrissy Cunningham in the minds of many is not the Chrissy Cunningham we saw on screen.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this. Maybe this is just another classic case of people ignoring canon for the sake of their own ideal world. But there was something truly astonishing to me how, in a matter of weeks, I watched as people latched onto Chrissy Cunningham, adored her, and rewrote her completely.