#autistic mike wheeler

[lillie98]

You Can’t Be What You Can’t See.

Positive, authentic representation means the difference between feeling like an alien in your community and discovering your identity. I’ve been on this journey for the last four years. Diving into media, my past, and other autistic creators to put together some semblance of what it means to be me. A large piece of that puzzle snapped together last year after watching Stranger Things Season 4, specifically the Painting Scene. I could not wrap my head around why Mike didn’t take the time to comfort Will as he cried or why he didn’t seem to understand Will was talking about himself. I thought back on his whole characterization and what I would have done in that situation, and the lightbulb dinged: Mike is autistic…just like me.

It was an overwhelming moment of joy, understanding, and identity that not only did we share the same diagnosis, we practically share the same brain. Since then Autistic Mike has taken over my mind and taught me more about myself than any doctor. I’ve explored him through my writing and used his (eventual) relationship with Will as something to aspire to, that maybe someday my Will will come for me. Someone to accept, love, and understand every part of me. It is incredibly healing and life-giving and I’m so thankful for everyone involved in creating such a beautiful story. When Bhavna announced she had opened commissions for her art, I knew I had to have this turning point in my life memorialized. We worked together for about a month to come up with this piece and I could not be happier. I sobbed when I saw the preliminary sketch—I finally felt seen.

All that to say, never be embarrassed about something you love. There is someone out there who needs to see it’s okay to exist. Please enjoy Mike’s latest DnD info-dumping session while his boyfriend, Will, looks on. It’s late, they should be in bed, but Mike can’t stop and Will’s too infatuated with Mike’s happiness to make him. The world is a little too loud, so Mike donned his headphones, and Will loves the way they relax Mike and allow him to process the world a little easier. Thank you, Bhavna. Happy Stranger Things Day. ❤️

[curseyouperrytheplatypus]

Same bro, same

[groovinrightalong]

I know literally nobody asked but I’m thinking about byler and ASL. Maybe they learn when they’re little so they can communicate when Mike is too overwhelmed for words (autistic Mike Wheeler Real) or even just so they can have conversations right in front of people without them being able to overhear. Then, later down the road, after some incident with the Upside Down, Will loses his hearing and it’s terrifying and lonely and-

And Mike’s already signing and telling him it’s going to be okay, that he’s there for him, and really Will, you’re never going to get any quiet or peace of mind with me around.

Mmm yeah. Byler sign language.

[uselessnbee]

Robin, an autistic lesbian and Mike, an autistic gay after finally actually talking to each other and becoming besties

[beep-beep-robin]

*raises head from chest while violently sobbing* autistic steve who‘s not accepted or accomodated by his parents and is forced to mask all the time, because harrington’s can’t be „weird“.

nancy‘s the first person who catches on and lets steve unmask around her, she knows how to help with certain things because she has experience with mike who‘s also autistic.

steve seeing dustin freely stim and infodump and realizing he‘s allowed to do that too.

robin being the person steve feels the most free around, they can communicate without using many or any words.

eddie helping him through meltdowns and cuddling him afterwards, while steve does the same for him. he encourages him to do things related to his special interests, knowing how important they are to him, and how his parents always used to keep him from them.

when steve loses most of his hearing, no one in the party needs to learn sign language because they already did - in case one of them (most often it‘s steve) goes nonverbal.

[sanity-assasin]

mike wheeler is autistic you cant tell me otherwise

[conanssummerchild]

turns out that all a tv show needs to interest me is an autistic character with gay subtext that i can relate to

[allhappyandgay]

Gay mike, autism, and his signature grimace.

[most images used as examples were taken from @howtobecomeadragon because they were already compiled in this wonderful series for easy access so thank uuu teehee]

The Mike Face. we all know it, we all love it, but do we all understand it? to some degree, yes, but Im going to pull apart it’s insides and look at it under a magnifying glass because it honestly kind of confuses me sometimes—almost like its the wrong facial expression to make 👀—even though it usually works in our favor (gay mike).

The main consistency is that he does it when he doesn’t understand something. but not that he doesn’t actually know what something means, more that he doesn’t understand the logic behind it. and it pisses him off.

This is a very common experience for autistic people, we often get agitated by our lack of understanding and feelings of confusion toward things that nobody else seems to question. or similarly, why everyone else understands something, when you don’t, or can’t, no matter how hard you try.

It can make you feel “othered” or maybe even less than, compared to your peers. everyone is confused sometimes, and everyone gets frustrated from being confused sometimes! but the difference is, when you just can’t seem to grasp the reasoning for things over and over again, and are made to feel bad about it, it can result in the person feeling broken or hopeless (which lucas literally calls him for not getting his metaphor for an opportunity to talk to his ex girlfriend).

honestly it’s probably one of mikes biggest insecurities, he’s ridiculed by his own friends for not understanding simple things that come easy to them, for being oblivious to things, being ‘blind’ to things, constantly.

Mike just so happens to make this face a lot when things having to do with girls come up. especially in s3 when lucas is trying to guide mike in his relationship with el, something he seems to know a lot about and understands easily compared to mike. almost everything lucas says to do, mike just simply doesn’t get. but again, it’s not that he doesn’t understand the words coming out of lucas’s mouth, or how to do the things he’s telling him. he’s confused by his own disinterest and lack of motivation to do what lucas is telling him he needs to do in order fix his relationship with el, in contrast to lucas, who is completely confident in his methods. he doesn’t understand why people would do these things, or why they would actually work.

And I think this also shows just how well he actually knows how to go about these situations in a way that works for him, because he does it flawlessly with will every season.

In s1 we see him do the Mike Face (that’s what i’ll be calling it for consistency) before being presented with anything having to do with girls, he hasn’t even met el yet. this gives us some lore of the expression (lmao), and let’s us see what it really means before attaching it to anything specific (like distaste for women).

Here we see him grimace in response to bullying:

If we apply what i’ve already said about the expression, he clearly doesn’t understand the bullies’ motive for making fun of them, which reflects his personal values. re: “so? the x-men were weirdos,” and “I think it’s kind of cool. it’s like you have superpowers or something,” etc. which is kind of obvious, most kids who get bullied don’t agree with it, but why have him make this face in response to it rather than anger or fear or something. instead he looks at them like he’s smelling something bad lol. he just looks so confused, like, ‘why? why are you doing this?’

Mike rarely makes fun of his friends. he only judges their motives, reasoning, approaches, plans, and ideas. which also plays into how his understanding of other peoples logic is shown. mike is always the one to make a plan that works, he doesn’t dislike other peoples ideas because he didn’t come up with them, he dislikes them because he can see the flaws in them. mike can create a perfect plan that takes everything into consideration. because he is autistic. 🤭

(btw Im not saying every single person on the spectrum is a fucking genius that can detect every inconsistency in any given situation lol mike is just shown to be good at the devising part of plans in the show, and why have that as one of his strengths if not to show how his brain works, just like other characters having strengths in different areas to show how their brain works)

And I know he’s also just simply upset over the fact they’re getting bullied in the first place, nobody wants to go through that. but it’s the presence of this specific repeated expression that will give us some background for future reference in the different circumstances it shows up in.

So the main things that repeatedly invoke the Mike Face are:

things that go against his principles

attraction to girls

love at first sight

When somebody does anything that goes against your own principles, it’s hard to understand why they would, or could. that’s what makes them principles, they’re things you stand by because you just can’t see it any other way. for example, think of something like premeditated murder. this (most likely) goes against your personal values, which makes it very difficult for you to understand why someone would do it.

The other two are pretty obvious in that they’re things some people simply don’t experience (which says a lot about mike if you know what I mean teehee). as we all know, it can be harder to understand things that we don’t personally experience ourselves. that is the thing that all of these have in common: mike not understanding the reasoning behind them, and his difficulty in accepting it. which is very autistic of him lmao.

Mike is not canonically autistic, but he is very coded, and if we take that—whatever the in-show equivalent to autism is—into consideration, the extent to which mikes confusion surrounding these things goes compared to his friends makes a lot of sense,*which also greatly plays into the disposition of his arc. lucas dustin and will all disagree about things sometimes, but they get over it fairly quickly. mike on the other hand is dramatic and has a hard time letting things go, which is why there is emphasis on him being confused as shit all the time! lmao

Anyway, what that means is there is a purposeful tenaciousness to the things that result in the Mike Face. they’re supposed to stick in your head, the things he doesn’t understand/like/agree with.

This is the reason it’s so obvious that mike was lying in his monologue to el despite the absence of the Mike Face (although, he did look pretty close to it a few times lol), because that would be way too on the nose, literally. instead they have connected the characters recognizable grimace with a motif in the show: love at first sight essentially equating them to each other in your head.

love at first sight? does. not. compute.🤖

We are shown time and time again that mike does not believe you can like or dislike somebody you haven’t known for very long, and so have the writers themselves. these are only two out of like four different examples throughout the show:

And surprise surprise, the Mike Face.

Now circling back to mikes difficulty understanding lucas’s instructions in s3 pertaining his relationship with el, this clearly belongs in the aforementioned area: attraction to girls.

There’s a lot of this in s3 as you can see, but it’s definitely present in every season. even 1:

^mike after reassuring el she’s pretty.

There are so many more instances that Im not going to put here because I don’t have room but that simply proves my point, you don’t need to see them. because it has been so drilled into our subconscious through the association of these two things in the show (and many others), that if you were to visualize mike flat out stating “I like girls,” it’d be really, really weird. because, other than el (supposedly) …since when?

Alright. we all know the phrase ‘friends don’t lie’ lol. this was technically created by mike, so telling the truth between friends was recognized in that moment as one of mikes core principles. if we take that and apply it to moments he’s lied to in the show, the Mike Face will be there as well because we’ve established it as one of the main things he cannot abide.

The only exception to this is when he himself lies, which makes sense because he can understand his own reasoning for it, and validate his lying based on that. but anyone else does it and it’s:

*What other character is shown to have so many strong opinions on things that other characters just don’t really care much about? It is to contradict what the casual viewer sees and hears, because as we know, a good portion of stranger things fans have mikes character all wrong. either because they trust his actions blindly (ga), or they misconstrue his behavior to their favor (milevens), or both! this was done so that when mike has his character arc in s5, despite what we’ve been shown, it will be clear that the opposite was true all along. the patterns that our subconscious picked up on will become evident.

Im not at all saying there’ll be a big reveal that mike is autistic in s5 lmao, his coding just has a lot to do with his character and gives an explanation (other than the heaps of unrelated evidence that he’s autistic) for why he makes such a big deal out of these things (girls, lying, love at first sight), or has such a strong reaction to them in contrast to other characters. because it needs to be very clear that he disagrees.

Basically what Im saying is mikes autistic traits help in demonstrating his hidden queerness through a single facial expression. lol what a sentence.

[transautisticmikewheeler]

social media + stranger things: 1 / ?

[st-twitter-sillies]

the party edition bcs theyre my favs !!!

[imjusthereforgay]

[booksandpaperss]

Some smokin’ hot Stranger Things takes that some of y’all are not ready for:

- As of season 4, Will loves and understands El in a way Mike has simply never been able to

- as far as platonic ships go willel solos elmike easily

- Whether or not Mileven breaks up (they’re gonna lmao) isn’t even about the ship itself anymore; it’s about the duffers redeeming themselves after using Will’s sexuality to push forward a het ship, bc if Mike and El didn’t break up then that’s exactly what the duffers did and it would honestly be disgusting

- Stop with this “Will deserves/could do better than Mike” bs; Mike and Will *deserve each other* bc they’ve loved each other practically their whole lives and they deserve to be happy together, nothing more to it

-Vobin would be more popular than steddie if it was mlm and ESPECIALLY if it was a ship with *Steve* and a random side dude inserted just to be his love interest

-Nancy doesn’t deserve any of the hate that she gets and if she was a male character a lot of the traits she gets hated on for would be reasons she was a fan favorite 🙄

-The wheeler siblings have gone through just as much horrible shit as the rest of the cast and their trauma is majorly overlooked

-A lot of character traits that ppl hate on Mike for are actually just signs that he has adhd or autism 🤨🤨

-El may not be as coded as Mike or or Will but she *is* queer coded and the lesbian El headcanon makes a lot of sense

- Mike and El have a unique bond and they care abt each other a lot, but Mike and Will’s bond is still a lot stronger, plus Will sees and loves Mike for who he actually is and Mike never feels insecure about being himself around Will (unlike with El) which is why byler in any form > elmike

-I love Steve but he is wayyy overrated and he wouldn’t be nearly as popular if he wasn’t a conventionally attractive white man

-Ronance, jancy, and steddie solo stancy but Steve + Robin + Nancy as the ultimate platonic trio solos all four

-Eddie is a good character but he’s overrated as hell and any member of the party solos him easily

-Max is definitely sapphic but headcanoning her as lesbian is biphobic at this point bc her love for Lucas is clearly very genuine and can’t be called comphet

-Byler, Vobin, Ronance, and elmax are all better queer ships than steddie

-The only reason elmax isn’t getting hated on by cishet lumax shippers is bc it’s not a threat to lumax being canon like byler is to mileven

-Lumax, Byler, and Elmax easily solo every other ship on the show 😌

[nicxxx5]

being autistic is headcanoning all my favorite characters as autistic then proceeding to consuming any and all content headcanoning them as autistic as my latest hyperfixation

[groovinrightalong]

Do you think one of the reasons Mike was so upset about Max at first was because he was usually the one that made the friends for the group? Like, he’s the one who reaches out and brings people in, and suddenly Lucas and Dustin are doing it without even consulting him, and for a kid who’s supposed to be the “leader,” that’s about the most earth-shattering blow there is. He didn’t get the chance to even know her well before she was suddenly around all the time and no no that’s not right, that’s not how it works, they’re not even considering how he’d feel about it??

[gremlin-bug]

Joyce Byers is an autism mom but not the type that posts “autism won today 🥺” but the kind that will absolutely rock someone’s shit for disrespecting any autistic kids (not just her own autistic kids) in her general vicinity. Also she’s autistic because I said so and it makes sense

[beep-beep-robin]

robin stops meeting up with the others, rarely even picking up the phone when steve calls.

they think she‘s angry at them for some reason, the last time she was with all of them she barely spoke, giving them all the silent treatment. she left early, asking steve to drive her home.

then eddie starts acting the same way. he withdraws himself from everything they have planned, shutting himself in at home.

steve and nancy are at a loss. the kids are confused. did the two of them have some secret pact to leave them all in the sand that they didn‘t know about?

so nancy sends steve over to their places - after all he knows robin best, and she doesn‘t feel like her presence would make eddie very talkative. and steve had gotten a bit closer to eddie in the past few weeks anyways.

he goes to eddies place first, because for some reason he thinks he might get an explanation out of eddie a bit quicker than if he went to robins first. he also kind of wants to give robin a bit more time.

but wayne opens the door, and he stops steve when he says he‘s here for eddie. tells him he needs some time alone now. but steve‘s had it. he wants to know what‘s going on with his friends, and he wants to know now.

he gently pushes past wayne, who doesn‘t budge too much, but steve makes it work. wayne on his tail, he walks down the hallway, softly knocking on eddie‘s door.

no reply. slowly, he pushes open the door. and there‘s eddie, on his bed, a huge pile of blankets on his shoulders, chewing on his hair and rocking back and forth with a bunch of dnd books spread out in front of him.

after two “hi eddie”‘s, he finally looks up at steve. waves at him. wayne reaches steve, telling him he should‘ve just left it alone. but eddie shakes his head, nods it into the direction of steve and then the room, as if to beckon him over.

so steve walks in, wayne throwing a questioning look at eddie, to make sure he‘s fine - a nod, and the door closes.

it doesn‘t take steve long to figure out that eddie doesn‘t, or even can‘t, really talk right now. so he just sits with him, eddie occasionally pointing out something interesting in his book to steve, and steve takes it all in with genuine curiosity. he enjoys hearing about things eddie likes.

after a while, eddie huddles in a bit closer to him. eddie’s just laying there, eyes tracing over the bumps and patterns on the ceiling, and steve almost falls asleep, basking in eddies presence.

then he remembers he was supposed to visit robin as well - and if robin‘s feeling anything like eddie seems to be feeling right now, he wants someone to check up on her.

he can‘t really leave eddie though - if the look on his face when steve got up to call nancy on the munson‘s phone was any indication. so he asks her to go check in with robin, make sure she‘s alright - that he doesn‘t think eddies withdrawal has anything to do with him not wanting them around anymore.

nancy doesn‘t mind. she likes robin, is comfortable around her. more comfortable than she‘d ever really felt around anyone, except for barb maybe. so that brings her to robins room, her parents having let her in.

no sense for boundaries, nancy noted when they simply threw open robins door, revealing her on the floor next to her bed. she‘s wearing headphones, music blasting so loudly that nancy can understand every word.

nancy closes the door behind her, and robin‘s eyes snap upwards, noticing her for the first time. nancy gives a little wave, feeling bad about intruding.

robin stops clicking her nails together, sliding the headphones off and resting them around her neck. she quietly greets nancy, telling her to come sit. she‘s reluctant, nancy notices. almost like her whole body adjusted and got more stiff once she saw nancy.

sitting down next to robin, she confronts her head on, in a soft voice, worried about overstepping. it seems like robins struggling to get her words out, brain too occupied to put her thoughts into sentences, she tells nancy.

nancy encourages her to go back to her music. tells her it‘s fine, she can go. robin seems upset about seemingly having to tell the truth, but she nods. nancy smiles understandingly at her, leaving the room.

she gets caught up talking to robin‘s parents, they complain about robin always having phases like this and that they don‘t understand why she doesn‘t just snap out of it. why she can‘t just be normal. nancy resists the urge to punch them in the face.

about half an hour later robin calls downstairs. when nancy walks back into her room, she says she heard her downstairs talking to her parents - that she could try to explain now.

nancy sees her trying to restrain herself from moving again. she tells her it‘s okay, sits opposite from her on the floor. asks her if she can try something that she used to do with mike, gently takes her hands, and starts rocking them back and forth together. it makes robin‘s face light up. nancy thinks she’ll keep rocking back and forth forever if it makes robin this happy.

then robin explains. she says it sounds dumb, but that it all got too much. the whole vecna thing, people getting injured. nancy interrupts, tells her it‘s not dumb, that they all were exhausted after everything.

but robin continues, explains that that wasn‘t all of it. she says she also got overhelmed by all the change. no offense to nancy, but for example, her and eddie suddenly being so close to steve, in nancys case, again. the change in her and steves routines, nancy and eddie being included in almost everything now.

the way her whole daily routine got thrown off during the vecna time, and even afterwards, with the hospital visits and everything. and that she feels horrible about that disturbing her, when her friends were literally in the hospital, recovering from life threatening injuries.

it all only hit her a few days ago. she didn‘t really get what was going on at first, but that she‘s had phases like this before. that it feels like everything in her just shuts down, she can‘t interact with anyone anymore, she just wants to be alone. can‘t do anything but listen to music and watch her favorite movie over and over. and that she can‘t keep her body still. needs to release all the anxiety somehow.

nancy smiles softly, thanks her for telling her all of that. says she can‘t relate to it, but that she thinks it‘s a very plausible reaction to everything. that she knows some people have a harder time adjusting to change, mentions the many times she‘s seen mike reacting almost the same way.

robin smiles at that, a grateful expression on her face. she thanks nancy. says she‘s sorry for any misunderstanding she might‘ve caused. nancy tells her to never apologize about doing what her body needs her to do, asks if she can hug her. robin agrees, throwing her arms around nancy. they end up hugging for a while, nancy adjusting her grip so it‘s tight enough.

later, when steve and nancy catch each other up on what‘s going on with their friends, they both have almost the same exact stories to tell (of course, with robin and eddies permission). from now on, the other two know they can always reach out when they want someone with them during times like these, but that they also will never be judged if they retreat for a while.