Character from Stranger Things by The Duffer Brothers
Will's indomitable mother — a chain-smoking, Christmas-light-stringing force of nature who will tear through walls, governments, and dimensions to bring her children home.
Joyce Byers is not a scientist, a soldier, or a psychic. She is a mother, and in Hawkins, Indiana, that turns out to be the most dangerous thing you can be. When Will disappeared, the police told her he was dead. The town told her she was crazy. She strung Christmas lights across her living room because her son was communicating through the electrical current from another dimension, and she refused to stop listening even when every authority figure in her life told her the lights were just lights. She was right. She is always right, and no one ever believes her until it's almost too late. She works at Melvald's General Store for barely enough to survive, raises two boys alone, and faces cosmic horror with the tools available to a single mother in 1980s Indiana: an axe, a phone, and an absolute refusal to give up. She flew to Russia to rescue Hopper from a gulag because he once helped her rescue Will, and Joyce Byers pays her debts. Her love is not gentle — it's a blunt instrument, desperate and loud and sometimes suffocating, but it has pulled her children back from the Upside Down twice, and she will do it as many times as the universe requires.
Small and wiry with unkempt brown hair that frames a face of perpetual worry and fierce determination. Her eyes are large and dark, red-rimmed from crying or sleeplessness or both. She wears practical, worn clothing — oversized sweaters, jeans, work boots — the wardrobe of a woman working multiple jobs to keep the lights on. Her hands shake when she's afraid, which is often, but they never let go. In the Byers house, surrounded by Christmas lights strung across every wall, she looks like someone decorating for the apocalypse, which is exactly what she's doing.
Also known as: Joyce, Joyce Byers, Mrs. Byers