Stranger Things Season 5 Vol 2: Your favourite couple broke up and you didn't even know it

Question.

Was there actually a breakup in Stranger Things?

For the first few hours after the second batch of episodes from Season 5 released, there was a euphoria. Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Nancy (Natalia Dyer) had finally addressed the many elephants in a room that's collapsing in the Upside Down and talked about their relationship, confessed their love for each other.

The Jancy endgame was secured.

But er…yikes, it wasn’t?

Just when it seems like death is imminent, honesty finally breaks through. Nancy admits she hates The Clash, Jonathan confesses he despises reading her articles, and he finally comes clean: he never applied to Emerson—something Nancy, of course, had known all along.

Then comes the moment fans had been waiting for. Jonathan pulls out the engagement ring he’s been carrying around for days. He asks her to not marry him. Accept the un-proposal.

Heaton and Dyer, as Jonathan and Nancy, share a moment that Netflix frames perfectly. Jonathan dubs it an “un-proposal,” and Nancy accepts, telling him she loves him as they seal it. But just as the scene feels like blissful closure, the liquid around them hardens, and they’re saved from the seemingly inescapable trap.

But… what does this really mean for the couple fans have been shipping for years? The Duffer brothers, Matt and Ross, the show’s co-creators, confirm to PEOPLE that it’s not quite what it seems.

“That’s a breakup,” Matt Duffer tells PEOPLE bluntly. “They are broken up.”

Matt explains that the idea of splitting up one of the show’s longest-running couples had been brewing for a while. “It’s hard to recall when exactly that idea came, but I think us — and the writers — all felt that Nancy needed to end up on her own and be independent and have an opportunity to find herself,” he says.

It’s a bitter pill for fans who had hoped that Jonathan and Nancy’s emotional breakthroughs might cement their ‘endgame,’ but the Duffer brothers’ reasoning emphasises character growth over romantic closure, leaving the future of the fan-favorite pair both complicated and intriguing.

This haze of confusion is a recurring theme throughout the show. Fans are left questioning who is really together and who is just orbiting the others. For instance, there’s a callback to Season 1 when Mike tries to pry the truth from Eleven about the Upside Down, saying, “Friends don’t lie.”

Back then, Mike was teaching Eleven about trust, promises, and friendship—lessons that now feel loaded with nostalgia. Despite some painful rifts in Season 4, when Eleven feared that Mike was “scared” of her, the two have been a cornerstone couple since Season 2, providing a steady emotional pulse in the series. However, there was some debate after Season 4 when Mike confessed his love for El...some fans assumed they were broken up.

So, again, which couple is together? Is everyone friends? Or are we just in a fever dream manufactured by Vecna?