Joyce Byers personality type: ENFP

Christmas lights. A wall. Twenty-six painted letters. When Joyce decides her missing son is talking to her through the electricity, everybody in Hawkins thinks she has lost it. She is right, and the whole show depends on her being right.

Fear drives her, and that is the enneagram 6. Sixes scan for danger and stay loyal to whatever keeps them steady. Joyce lives on high alert, burning through cigarettes and worst-case scenarios, and like many Sixes she turns fear into reckless courage. The 7 wing is her humor and restless motion, the mom who cannot sit still in a waiting room. She loses Bob, nearly loses Hopper twice, and keeps going. In season five she gets the last word on Vecna with an axe, the most satisfying swing in the series.

The MBTI is ENFP. Extraverted intuition sees connections that other people dismiss, and her whole first season is one long leap that turns out correct: the phone call, the flickering bulb, the shape pushing through the wallpaper. In season three she notices magnets sliding off her fridge and refuses to let it go until she has uncovered a Russian lab under the mall. In season four a porcelain doll arrives in the mail and she decides it means Hopper is alive. She is right again.

Her biggest strength is that she has stopped caring how she looks. A mother who yells at a store manager, a police chief or a government agent is a woman who has already lost the worst thing once.

Beneath the hunches sits a code nobody can bargain with. Her kids come first, full stop. She will scream at a police chief, swing an axe at her own living room wall, and chain-smoke through the whole thing. The price is a mind that gets stuck in past fear, especially in season two, where every odd look on Will’s face throws her back to the night he vanished.

Some fans call her an enneagram 2, because her life revolves around caring for her boys. Fair point. But a Two seeks love by giving, and Joyce does not care whether anyone thanks her. She is driven by threat, and she is braver for being scared.