Stranger Things’ Joyce Byers and Jim Hopper’s Unrequited Love Story: A Complete Timeline

usmagazine.com:

Holding out hope in Hawkins. Stranger Things characters Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) and Jim Hopper (David Harbour) aren’t actually dating, but fans have long pleaded with writers to put them together.The duo’s onscreen chemistry has added an element of romance to the sci-fi show over the years, even as they have to fight off Demogorgons, evil scientists and Mind Flayers.“Ever since I read the pilot, I loved the relationship with Hopper and Joyce,” Harbour told Variety in November 2017. “I consider it a little bit like Chinatown, with Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson.

These are two lost, broken people who need each other but are so prideful and messed up that they’ll never admit it.”The pair are also close outside of work, going so far as to invent backstories for Joyce and Hopper before the events of the Netflix series. “I have this whole thing with Joyce that maybe she went to Chicago after graduating and got into the hippie thing,” the Beetlejuice actress told the Los Angeles Times in May 2018.Harbour, for his part, thinks that Joyce and Hopper dated in high school but never got full closure on their romance. “I think there’s some unfinished business,” the Hellboy actor said in the same interview. “Both of us toyed around in the beginning about who left who.”The Black Widow star has repeatedly teased fans about the fervor for a Joyce and Hopper pairing, going so far as to say he thinks Hopper would be better in bed than Joyce’s former boyfriend Bob Newby (Sean Astin).“The fans, they call it, like, Jopper or something,” Harbour explained during an episode of Beyond Stranger Things. “They all ship this relationship with Hopper and Joyce, and I do too because I feel like they’re two really lonely, lost people that really