Also I just wanna make notice that Will was not getting bullied in Cali. In fact he even had people show interest in him. When Angela and co approach their table at rink-o-mania they don’t even take a look at Will, they definitely are aware of who he is but they don’t spare a look.
He is not a target anymore but the problem is that he continues to hang around Eleven who is now the target of the whole school, like he once was. He could have a “chance” at being normal and having friends but he’d rather stay loyal to her because he knows exactly how she feels and because he loves her so much. He’d rather sacrifice his happiness than hurt someone he loves.
So keep his name out of your mouth when you say he hates or even dislikes Eleven. He loves his sister and does everything he can to make her feel like normal and not a mistake. Something he has never felt in his life.
We love an unbothered king. Seriously though how jobless must people be to hate the actors for just shipping the characters ,like the amount of homophobia is just baffling to me. I hope byler becoming canon becomes a pathway for more mainstream representations without worrying about the homophobic audience.
Lumax mostly hang out within the group but are still clearly a couple. Mleven don’t; they isolate and hang out primarily alone. When in the group, Mike tends to drift towards Will for in-pair groups (ex. who you have your reaction shot with/stand next to).
It’s almost as if Mike knows that he can only choose El when he removes Will as an option. Something about the group never coming over to hang with Mike and El even though THEY’RE allowed to go to her house. Something about him ignoring Will to focus on El and the breakup not necessarily being the choice it seems to be (but rather an avoidance of another choice he doesn’t want to be confronted with). Something about them being distanced from him so it can both be argued that he has separate relationships with them and that they coexist very closely - i.e. if he talks to them separately, but he writes letters to them back to back, that same comparison is present even if it isn’t a choice so to speak, so the reason for avoidance would be just as present.
And maybe originally it was hard to have them to choose between in the same space but he could go from El to Will at the movies more easily but then it got a little harder when he went from Will saying he wouldn’t join another party to El telling him she loved him and comparison started to come a little too easily/automatically by the time he was writing to them back to back etc. bc let’s be honest, if you’ve ever written two letters, notes, emails, whatever to two different people back to back - possibly about very similar things - you’re gonna be asking yourself “did I just word that the same? how am I talking differently to them?” and opening the door to comparison of how you talk to them and it can only go from there. And it might be a little too much clearer than even going from El’s to the movies with Will if he’s ever writing seconds apart with different levels even emotional depth to the topics and different levels of his own emotional openness - so he stops, because he doesn’t like that feeling. And he’s a kid, too: don’t like the feeling, avoid. Don’t need to know why. (asking why was the bad feeling in the first place, actually).
It isn’t anything against El any more than it is against Lucas, Dustin, or Max; rather, something for Will. Something about how even without an explicit love triangle presented to him, when presented with them as the two options in lower stakes situations like who he physically drifts towards, he has consistently made his choice already. And part of that is that it’s in a group. He won’t choose if he thinks choosing one will make him lose the other (because it isn’t anything against the rest of them so why push them away when he pulls someone closer if he didn’t want to push them away anyways - it doesn’t have to be an exchange). But if they’re both right there, he’s just standing a little closer to one? That’s fine! Ask him to choose overall and he’ll have trouble. But ask him to choose in little ways every day for a hundred days and he’ll answer the same every time.