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ON LOVING IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE: ZHANG HAO & SUNG HANBIN

heart apnea – sierra demulder. translating myself and others – jhumpa lahiri. call the midwife – jeanette winterson, the passion. what if we had never met – mayday.

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i’m not crying YOU ARE

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i can't wait to change byler analysis to byler foreshadowing

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I’m obsessed with @wheelersboy’s theory that Mike thinks Will is in love with El. It’s one of those takes that’s so simple, yet so perfectly explains every odd little detail you couldn’t quite account for before, that you know you’re on to a winner.

I always thought it was bizarre that the Willel reunion at Nina was framed in blatant love triangle imagery:

If this was supposed to be yet another reminder that the sad widdle gay boy has fee-fees for his best friend, we’d expect him to be gazing at Mike or otherwise looking conflicted at both of them. But he isn’t. His steady, adoring gaze is for El only. Yes, he loves her, but that love is strictly fraternal, so why the romance symbolism?

Is it straight-bait? This scene comes after his thinly-veiled love confession to Mike (in the same episode, no less), and the Duffers and Noah both made a point of confirming that Will was gay in post-vol.2 interviews, so making the audience think that Will is in love with El clearly wasn’t the intention here.

The Willel romance-coding isn’t for the audience – it’s for Mike.

We often joke about Mike being crushed that Will didn’t laugh at his vomit green socks, but follow Will’s gaze – it’s a little hard to see in the still image, but he’s staring at El, checking to see if she’s going to heed his advice. Mike’s discomfort isn’t because he’s upset that Will didn’t like his joke, it’s because he doesn’t understand the weird tension between these two and is frustrated that his attempt to lighten the mood didn’t dispel it.

Mike’s smart enough to correctly connect the dots by the time Will starts sobbing in the van though: Will is destroying himself in his efforts to be supportive of the relationship between his best friend and the person he’s in love with.

But heteronormativity and a severe inferiority complex lead him to draw the wrong conclusion – he thinks he’s the best friend and El is the one Will’s in love with, and that gets confirmed in his mind when he catches them making goo-goo eyes at each other at Nina.

And not once, after figuring it out, does he get jealous about it – he guides El into Will’s arms at Nina, he looks conflicted as hell during the “I love you” monologue as Will hovers over his shoulder – he just wants them to be happy and is prepared to put his own feelings aside to make it happen, even though it would hurt him terribly to do so. Exactly the same fucking thing Will is doing. It’s utterly farcical. I love this theory so much.

I’d like to springboard off this by taking a look at what it implies about S5.

Between Will’s history with Vecna and the Wonder Twins foreshadowing–

–it’s looking pretty likely that Will and El are going to be spending a significant amount of time together next season.

So we can already see that conditions are perfect for Mike to go through a similar arc as Will did in S4: being a third wheel between his best friend and the person he’s in love with and feeling like he can never truly be more than a third wheel, leading him to sacrifice himself in an effort to support what he thinks they have together.

Mike is very much at risk of doing something stupidly self-harming in S5 – this is the same kid who jumped off a cliff to protect Dustin’s baby teeth, after all. He feels like he has no value if he isn’t needed by Superman. And there’s a goddamn mind-reading despair demon stalking his friend group.

Of course, it’ll all work out in the end. He’ll be saved at the last moment, the truth will be tearfully revealed, and we’ll finally get that big, dramatic, affirming kiss for our OTP.

You might have noticed that everything I’ve said in this analysis so far is consistent with either Byler or Milevn being endgame.

Many Milevns and GA members don’t just believe that Milevn will triumph over Byler – they believe there isn’t any conflict between Milevn and Byler in the first place. The lack of evidence that Mike isn’t into boys is meaningless to the heteronormative mindset – he’s the protagonist and dating a girl, therefore he’s straight, therefore Will’s hopes are dead in the water, therefore Mike has no romantic dilemma to solve.

By introducing a misunderstanding in which Mike imagines that his best friend is competing for his girlfriend – couching his dilemma in relatable heterosexual terms – the audience will be forced to accept that Mike is experiencing a distressing internal conflict involving Will and romance that won’t be resolved until the queer truth comes out.

The GA felt bad for Will in S4 because they assumed there was nothing he could do about it, but they’ll be tearing their hair out with frustration at Mike in S5 – “you’re wrongly assuming he’s straight, you idiot! Just talk to him and this will all be cleared up!!”

It would be an absolutely genius way of getting the audience to question heteronormativity without them even realizing they’re questioning heteronormativity.

Once Mike’s queerness is revealed, the parallels between his arc and Will’s will suddenly become clear, and the audience will realize that, despite his straight-passing invisibility, Mike was just the other side of the same gay coin Will was on all along.

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there’s just some fics... they never leave u bro. i’ll be sitting on the toilet four years later thinking about the 94k enemies to lovers fic that captured my soul

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You’re worried if they are gonna make byler canon, I’m worried about how they’re gonna execute it. We’re not the same.

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is there an artist that you like the entirety of their discography

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Byler is 100% endgame & the cast knows about it.

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can’t wait for the edits of mike saying “it’s not my fault you don’t like girls” and then a cut to s5 mike pulling will to a kiss

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did you guys seriously know that will liked mike as more than a friend before season three or are you guys stretching the truth a little..? 🧐

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Pissing all by yourself, comrade?

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Listening to "I love you first" I was thinking about the months after Will left Hawkins, how Mike might feel...how many times did he try to write a letter to Will, A letter that always ended with "love, Mike" because he couldn't do unless to expresses her immense love to him and how much he suffered from his distance

I believe in a mike’s letter to Will full of love and I hope we’ll have it in s5.

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It’s the way Mike at the airport doesn’t even let El finish her sentence, before his head snaps up at Will and voice goes up a few octaves, “oh. Oh!”

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absolutely hilarious that the duffers said tlou probably affected stranger things subconsciously. so i’m like oh okay! you subconsciously gave the biological daughter the same name. you subconsciously gave the adopted daughter the same name. you subconsciously made the father wear on his wrist an item from his dead daughter. you saw “we could lose our minds together” and proceeded to write “let’s go crazy together” without realizing the connection

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found this ss on pinterest and i can’t stop giggling lol