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Twilight Adagio, oil on linen by Brent Cotton

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Hey, thanks so much for your response!

I agree on the first point, that Mike would have told El he loves her anyway, but your answer - "so why did the writers feel the need to weave Will into Mike's love confession?" - relates exactly to the 2nd take, about Will's love not being portrayed as sad enough to ruin the Mike/El storyline in s4. I've seen mileven fans use the exact phrase you did to justify why Will won't end up with Mike:

Mike isn't a prize to be awarded to whichever Vecna victim would be made the happiest by him.

They say that Will doesn't get to have Mike just because he wants him, and that Mike and El have chosen each other time and again, every season, and so why would they change that going into s5? (Obviously the last part is silly, because stories do change and progress, but I'm more interested in the first part: that people do genuinely seem to read this storyline as purely romantic for Mike/El, and purely sad and unrequited for Will). The ambiguity that you mentioned is missed by many people.

And ok, on your last point ("Who cares why some people still ship Milevn?") - that's a sensible outlook. But for me, being in this fandom has become a sort of sociological experiment where I've learned a lot about human nature as well as just enjoying the show. I genuinely expected to come to fandom to share in byler and celebrate it with other fans, not be told I was insane - and as an artist and writer myself, it has made me question my own original works outside of this fandom, wondering how they will be understood or received in the wider world, because things that appear so clear and understandable to me within Stranger Things - like the ambiguity of this love triangle as we end s4 - are apparently hard for some viewers to grasp.

So this is what I meant by a fundamental difference in how people perceive the visual storytelling of the show, because milevens will say that Will was included in the scene of Mike's love confession (and woven into the Mike/El story as a whole) to show how sad Will's unrequited love is and make the audience root for him to move on.

At what point does this stop being a valid interpretation? I can never tell if mileven fans genuinely can't feel the chemistry and energy between Mike and Will, or if they are denying it, because for me, seeing the way Will's pain was portrayed made my pity for Will stronger than my need to see Mike and El reconcile. This combined with how flirtatious I perceived Mike to act around Will as the season progressed made me start rooting for byler despite the odds. But milevens will say that byler fans are biased towards Will, and are inventing that Mike flirted with Will at all.

I've studied art at college and worked in storytelling fields. I'm not a teenager who is easily swayed, and neither am I part of the queer community, so my investment is different to that of people who would like to see themselves represented in byler's sexuality storyline. And yet being in this fandom has been the first time I have ever started to doubt my own instincts regarding my understanding of a story.

In the end, perhaps it speaks more of the phenomenon of fandom itself than it does about the actual show, but it's just interesting for me as a writer and a human, from a sociological standpoint. I think it's important for writers to be interested in people and what makes them tick, and milevens sure do make me (morbidly) curious.

I can understand if you don't want to discuss this further but I thought I'd try, as I do love your theories and the way you think about the show. I haven't been able to find many people who want to talk about this aspect of fandom, and yet for me, it's the thing that makes me most intrigued.

Thanks for everything and keep up the great posts :)

[Hey, thanks for this follow-up. I misread the context of your previous ask, sorry; I assumed you were queer since your pinned post mentions queer theory. My bad.]

I'm sure you probably suspected this already, but the sociological phenomenon you're encountering is homophobia.

And I would say you're experiencing it first-hand: doubting your instincts because you keep being told you're insane for predicting a queer outcome you know is real, but can't prove is real.

This is how comphet operates: making people feel like they need to conjure up concrete, objective, undeniable proof of queerness before they're allowed to consider it a valid option, even though straightness and cisness aren't held to the same standard. (There's a reason "born this way" is a more popular saying than "who cares why we choose this lifestyle?") It's about gaslighting queers into staying closeted and straights out of becoming allies; not much more to it than that, I'm afraid.

The way some folks in this fandom treat Byler fans reminds me so much of the way I was treated as a queer teenager.

So I'm just not interested in engaging with their refusal to acknowledge the ambiguity in Mike and Will's story. As far as I'm concerned, taking their arguments too seriously is tantamount to ceding ground in the fight to live my life on my terms instead of theirs.

I guess the best I can do to answer your question is point you towards an older essay of mine which illustrates how giving in to homophobic patterns of thought just straight-up erased my ability to see the obvious queer truth that was right in front of me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Going to bed, but wanted to share this dumb doodle first. (A remake of an old ass doodle I did a long time ago)

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I miss them

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I'm trying to focus on drawing my Max piece and an OC art piece but I'm having trouble so I'm gonna pause and play the sims for a while.

Also have a little Older Byler doodle...They're off to the farmers market

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"it was the best thing I've ever done."

Will Byers & Mike Wheeler in Stranger Things @emblazons gifset remake (x)

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After reading your latest Mike analysis, I’m interested in what you think of people who say that 1. Mike would still have given the love confession to El on his own regardless of whether Will prompted him or not, and 2. that Will’s unhappiness is not portrayed as being sad enough to override how joyful Mike’s love confession is. These are takes I see often, and they’re hardest to argue with because they have to do with technical filmmaking aspects like editing and cinematography, which people disregard as being subjective and therefore up to interpretation, as well as each individual viewer’s empathy and ability to read facial expressions and non-verbal cues. Rather than create genuine discussion that holds water, I find that these takes just expose mileven fans as being cruel people who are either wilfully or unwillfully denying Will’s importance in this story for their own personal reasons, but of course that gets into psychological territory rather than discussing the show itself, which can be controversial (although I do believe it to be the explanation for why milevens still exist). Interested to hear your thoughts on the 2 takes.

Hi, thanks for the ask!

1. I agree with this, actually. El was dying in front of him and Mike is a man of action -- of course he was going to do the only thing he could possibly do in that moment, regardless of whether Will prompted him. So why did the writers feel the need to weave Will into Mike's decision anyway?

2. Mike isn't a prize to be awarded to whichever Vecna victim would be made the happiest by him. He's his own character with his own character arc, and being entwined with the character arcs of his love interests doesn't negate the fact that whatever he chooses in the end is an expression of his coming-of-age journey, not theirs. The real question is the one I addressed in my last analysis: Why couldn't his confession empower El well enough to stop Vecna?

I feel like a lot of Milevn-vs-Byler discourse boils down to endless bickering over details that are ambiguous on purpose; there comes a point where you just have to accept the ambiguity for what it is and start looking at the bigger picture.

And I'm not just referring to the show when I say that. I think this applies to the fandom, too.

Who cares why some people still ship Milevn? Ships don't have to be canonically endgame or understandable/tasteful to the majority of the audience to attract an enthusiastic fanbase; us queers should know that better than anyone. And does it really matter if some rando on the internet doesn't get a fictional gay boy's importance in a story that's been deliberately downplaying his importance?

I have zero tolerance for bullies who call us delusional or degenerate over something as petty as a TV show -- but equally, it's not worth getting worked up over people disagreeing with us about how that TV show is going to end. Bylerposting can get folks to question their heteronormative assumptions, as it did with me -- but they need to have decided they want to question it first, and that's not something you can force by arguing about which tortured kid deserves to date Mike more. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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I didn't start shipping Byler because I picked up on a few moments of chemistry and decided they'd make a cute couple -- I started off by absolutely refusing to entertain said moments as reciprocally queer until I ran into the ridiculous homophobia on the ST subreddit and decided to review Mike's character arc out of sheer gay spite.

Let me clarify: Spite isn't what made me change my mind about Mike. Spite just made me read a few Byler analyses and rewatch the show with an open mind because I didn't want to be like those pricks who would insult and censor queer fans for... [checks notes]... thinking something gay might happen in a TV show with gay people in it. I truly wasn't expecting a queer interpretation to fit Mike's arc anywhere near as well as the default interpretation -- but by the time I'd finished my rewatch, I was reeling from how much better it fit.

Cause that's the thing: Mike's queerness is pretty obvious once you look for it. The difficulty is in giving yourself permission to look.

-------------------

A question Bylers are often asked is "why would the show spend four seasons building up Milevn just to tear it down at the last minute for some unrealistic woke ship? Mike literally said he loves El!" And yeah, Mike's grand love confession at the end of S4 certainly seems like a triumphant pay-off to all that build-up... but I have a few questions of my own.

Firstly: why establish in no uncertain terms that feeling loved is the key to unlocking El's fullest potential against Vecna--

--only to undermine the power of Mike's longed-for confession by having it only be good enough to delay Vecna instead of defeat him? Yes, it's the penultimate season -- so why did Milevn's pay-off happen here instead of S5 where it could properly shine?

Secondly: why couldn't Milevn fix their relationship by themselves? Even if you believe that El commissioned the painting (she didn't) and that the feelings Will describes are truly hers (they aren't), it was still Will who had to perform this romantic gesture on her behalf, and it broke his heart to do so. Why hand this important work off to a third party? Why weave queer tragedy into the build-up towards a heterosexual pay-off that's supposed to feel triumphantly romantic?

Speaking of which: why undermine the intimacy of this scene by having Will hover behind Mike's shoulder the whole time? Couldn't they have asked Noah to take a few steps to the left for the sake of a better shot? Couldn't they have waited until after Milevn's big romantic moment to remind us for the millionth fucking time how sad Will is about it?

In my opinion, this scene and its four seasons of build-up make much more sense if you read them as three entwined character arcs about the trials of growing up in a suffocatingly heteronormative era: the gay kid who doesn't think he's entitled to a happy ending; the abused girl who thinks shallow romance with the first boy who's nice to her will make her feel normal; and the confused hero who hasn't figured out the solution yet.

For all the insistence that this show has to stick to "realistic" depictions of 80s queerness... it's hardly a realistic depiction of 80s straightness for Mike to score an awesome magical girlfriend, either. That's just nerdy wish-fulfillment, and common only as a trope in fiction.

So it's not unreasonable to suppose that Mike's true role in the Subverting 80s Tropes Show might be to represent the actually very realistic 80s experience of getting swept up in compulsory heterosexuality.

Think about it: Will's vulnerability to the horrors functions as a metaphor for being visibly gay in a world that despises gay people--

--whereas Mike's girlfriend quite literally has the power to protect him from monsters and homophobic bullies alike.

This doesn't mean Mike is callously using El, though. He learned the hard way in S1 that treating an innocent girl like a means to an end would only end up destroying her, and the guilt and fear of hurting her again has been weighing heavy on him ever since.

Comphet isn't about taking advantage of other people's feelings so you can pretend to be straight -- it's about deluding yourself into believing you're straight because queerness isn't an option you're allowed to consider.

Mike genuinely does love El and he genuinely does want to be an important part of her life -- so surely that means he wants to be her boyfriend, right? Twelve is perhaps a little young to know that yet... but surely there's gotta be something here that sets his feelings apart from how a friend or brother would feel?

Surely the reason he later finds himself struggling to say to her face that he loves her is because he's just an immature loser who needs to try harder to grow up and be the man this girl he adores deserves to have...?

...and certainly not because the guilt and fear of losing her just keeps piling up as the romantic instincts he thinks he's been waiting to grow into turn out to be developing at exactly the pace they're supposed to -- in the wrong direction.

That would be ridiculous. Will's his best friend. Yes, he loves him and can't bear to be without him, but that doesn't mean anything. Why can't a guy display a little unhinged devotion to his special friend without it having to mean something romantic?

Why can't he, indeed.

At his core, Mike is someone who desperately wants to be as special as the straight heroes in the nerdy media he loves. But there isn't anything inherently heroic about being some lame middle-class white nerd who's bad with girls, so he believes that the best he can do is to be a dutiful sidekick who would sacrifice himself in a heartbeat for people he perceives as more special than himself.

For all the "build-up" Mike's romance with El has enjoyed across four seasons, it's done absolutely nothing to help him grow as a character and overcome this self-worth problem.

So is it really any surprise that even after realizing El would be fine and still want to be friends with him if he told her the truth, and even after realizing just how good Will is at understanding his insecurities and reassuring him of his inherent worth--

--Mike would still sacrifice his chance at happiness for the sake of the greater good?

El was literally dying in his arms. How could queer desire possibly be as important as this girl who needed him to be a man and do his damn job so she could do hers?

I'm interpreting Mike as gay here, but I think it's important to note that this principle applies even if he's bi or straight -- Mike can be attracted to girls and still be forcing himself to stay in a relationship with a girl he's not a good romantic match for because that's just what he thinks he's supposed to do.

His sister had a similar problem: Nancy was legitimately attracted to Steve, but her infatuation with him was more about doing what cool teen girls are supposed do than about authentic connection. And because this is a horror story as much a coming-of-age story, Wheeler's conformity had horrendous consequences -- her critical-of-comphet bestie was killed by the horrors.

Which sounds familiar, doesn't it?

(Sure, Max technically didn't die -- but she still died enough for Vecna's plan to come to fruition. Which just brings us back to my first question: why couldn't the Power of Heterosexual Love prevent this? In the same season that said "forced conforming is what's killing the kids", no less?)

Will describes Vecna as an inevitability that won't stop until he's taken everyone -- which in my opinion is the same defeatist attitude demanded by comphet.

It's not that Mr. Refuses-To-Participate-In-Society's-Silly-Play symbolizes comphet itself, per se; rather, he represents the despair of feeling like you can't truly escape it. But either way, this means that the solution to defeating Vecna is the same solution to defeating comphet:

Giving yourself permission to look and see that your true self is far more valuable than whatever you think you're supposed to be.

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I'm not usually one to post my knee-jerk reactions, but screw it, let's have some fun and geek out over the ST5 teaser:

The Scream King has returned 😱🤴

I'm LOVING the emphasis on Joyce and Will in this teaser. I don't think I'd realized until I saw them together just how much I've missed them as a pair. Like, I knew Will was going to be a big focus in S5, but Will and Joyce fighting side-by-side as mother and son and having heart-to-hearts again? Fuck YESSS

Just look at how they're paralleling S1. The iconic axe, yes--

--but also the iconic shed kidnapping.

Will's not alone this time 😭😭😭

On that note, I'm also loving this shot:

Will weak/unconscious in his mother's arms, presumably exhausted by The Horrors, as Mike protects them and a bunch of kids from some unseen danger? This is EXACTLY what I've been hoping to see from Mike in S5: a return to form as a leader who fights for kids who need someone to stand up for them instead of forcing himself to be the Lois Lane to El's Superman.

Does this count as Byler crumbs? Maybe. But only because Byler is so deeply woven into the supernatural plot; the teaser overall avoids addressing the shipping war in favour of hinting about the nature of the upcoming supernatural battle, and I'm certainly not complaining about that. I'm fascinated by this giant wall of flesh:

What are those red blobs in it? They look person-sized. They look occupied. There are lots of things this could mean, but with Will being such an emphasis I can't help but think of Matrix parallels again.

Looks like it could be El and Hop investigating though, which is interesting. ST's standard approach is to have different groups of characters separately uncover different parts of the puzzle before coming together at the end to compare notes -- so what do they want El to uncover that it's best to keep Will away from until the end, I wonder? 🤔

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I would argue that this has already happened -- but Murray's just too damn good at what he does to give the game away to 80% of the audience.

He clocks Byler:

He recognizes their need to stay hidden and redirects attention away from them:

He waits until they're ready to embark on their Gay Road Trip of Self-Discovery before surreptitiously showing his hand to Joyce:

Random Thought

Just yesterday I thought to myself that Murray giving Mike and Will THE LOOK and then keeping it to himself would get 80% of the audience connecting a BUNCH OF DOTS IMMEDIATELY

-teambyler

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Gonna be a bit of a buzzkill here, but: I think what annoys me about Ted's been casually assuming that Mike was dating Will this whole time theories is that they always tend to treat it as a fun outcome.

Like, I get it: Ted's the useless one-dimensional suburban dad who makes bland observations he thinks are insightful quips, and he hasn't had much of a character arc beyond getting dragged along for the ride his more three-dimensional wife is on -- so what is there for him to do, really, other than to delight us with one final, genuinely insightful joke that subverts our expectations but makes perfect sense in hindsight?

But I feel like this would essentially make him one of those "allies" whose egos are more important to them than actually being supportive, and so they make smug jokes about how accepting they are at the expense of their kids' fear of rejection:

"I hate my gay son! Oh, not because he's gay, he's just an asshole." 🤭 "Why are you telling me you're gay? I figured that out years ago. Stop crying and go help your mother with the dishes." 🙄 etc.

It wouldn't be out of character for Ted to do this. I can totally see him doing it! But it's out of character for the show to make light of queer struggles, so I'd expect it to be critical of Ted for doing this.

Often, parents like the ones described above really do mean well, but they just don't know what they're supposed to do other than try to keep treating their kid the same as if they were straight. Lots of parents struggle with that; I'd argue even Joyce does in S3:

Will's clearly experiencing a specifically queer difficulty here -- boys like him aren't allowed to fall in love and he's upset about having to watch straight people openly enjoy things he thinks he'll never have -- and that apparently sails over Joyce's head. She just smiles at her Silly Immature Boy Who Doesn't Get The Appeal Of Sex Yet and drops the topic.

[Edit: To be clear, Joyce knows he's gay and is explicitly showing support for gay love here. She just has a blind spot when it comes to the gay teen experience.]

It's a disappointing change in her approach from the first two seasons, in which she fought her ass off to understand and advocate for his needs, even when communication seemed nigh impossible.

But then, maybe S3 is about granting Will his S2 wish to not be coddled by his mom anymore.

The Jonwill heart-to-heart at the end of S4 is my favourite scene in the whole show, because it's a pitch-perfect demonstration of how to balance closeted queer kids' need for support against their need to handle things on their own terms, all without embarrassing them by showing your hand of Already Knowing.

Maybe you're thinking: didn't Karen do exactly this with Mike all the way back in S1?

[Literally hiding his future beard in his closet during this convo lol 10/10 queer-coding]

Well, no. The point I made in my previous Wheeler analysis still applies: Karen, as of S1, is too prone to trusting dangerous authorities over her own kids -- and so her words ring hollow. She means well, but deep down she's prioritizing her need to feel like a good mother over putting any real effort into figuring out what Mike needs: reassurance that he and his flock of outcast friends will be safe if he's open with her.

The key thing Jonathan gets right is to understand his brother well enough to directly address the underlying fear that's been preventing Will from opening up:

So if Ted's sole contribution to Mike's queer arc ends up being a reveal that he's always known and been too cool to blab to anyone, but also that he did nothing about it other than to smugly wait for Mike to come out...?

...I just think that would feel more tragic than funny.

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Eu Sem Você ✨

[Strangerthings/Byler]

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okay

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[Mentions of ST5 leaks below.]

I've been thinking about Linda Hamilton's mysterious role in S5. Leaks tend to agree that she plays a military character of some sort, but I dunno how difficult a guess that is to make given how much of a gun-toting badass her Terminator character is.

Most of ST's guest stars tend to be cast in roles that reflect the classic 80s movies they were in -- Paul Reiser plays a representative of an exploitative institution like in Aliens; Sean Astin solves a puzzle map that leads to underground tunnels like in The Goonies; Robert Englund plays (the father of) a heavily-scarred, mind-walking child murderer like in A Nightmare on Elm Street, etc -- but is that true for all of them?

What does Larry Kline (the slimy Mayor who screws over small businesses to protect the interests of a large corporation) have in common with Cary Elwes's most famous role (the dashing, swashbuckling farmhand-turned-pirate from Princess Bride)? The similarities may not be immediately obvious, but I think they're clearer when you remember that Elwes also played Robin Hood -- Larry Kline is an ironic reversal of the working-class hero Elwes is known for.

What if Linda Hamilton has been cast as an ironic reversal of Sarah Connor?

Sarah Connor is the mother of humanity's future savior, and by Terminator 2, the burden of ensuring that he survives being the target of a genocidal time-travelling AI has turned her into a hardened solider plagued by nightmares of children dying in an apocalypse she's helpless to prevent.

You can hardly blame her for feeling helpless. Even without the time-travelling robots, she's just one woman trying to make a stand against powerful institutions: the military-funded lab that's ignorantly creating the AI her son is destined to oppose; the asylum doctors who think she's a raving lunatic unfit to raise a child.

It's very reflective of 80s anxieties -- not just the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation, but the conservative threat of social annihilation in the name of silencing misunderstood minorities.

A reversal of Sarah Connor would, therefore, be someone who is still obsessed with protecting children from a rogue (time-travelling? 🤞) hivemind -- but from the conservative, institutionalized power side of things.

In other words: exactly the sort of antagonistic force that was foreshadowed in the S4 epilogue.

(Should the leaks be true, then this would be the real reason for casting Hamilton in a military role.)

Following this train of thought: if we're getting a villain who's focused on "protecting" children, then what does that suggest about the fact that Holly Wheeler -- 7 year-old sister of a gay Hellfire member and frequent innocent witness to The Horrors that surround him -- is shaping up to be one of Henry's targets in S5?

Let's talk about Ted and Karen.

I feel like these two tend to be misunderstood by the fandom. Either they're frothing bigots who would kick Mike out of the house the instant they found out he was queer, or they're chill allies who have been assuming that Mike was dating Will this whole time.

But that's what Will's parents are like. As a visible gay kid who's playing the stereotypical Sad Gay Boy archetype, it makes sense for Will to have parents that represent the obvious extremes of queer acceptance: Lonnie is never going to be convinced that it's anything other than shameful for his son to be queer, and Joyce is never going to be convinced that there's anything wrong with the way her son loves.

But Mike is the invisible, ambiguously straight-passing kid deep in the throes of comphet -- his role is to surprise the audience by subverting their expectations. And so it's important, I think, that his parents represent the subtler attitude that best reflects his story: the ignorant conformists.

They're the sort of people who get offended when they're accused of bigotry -- they're not hateful, heaven forbid! -- but who still passively support bigoted systems because they refuse to stand up like Sarah Connor or Joyce Byers and challenge the status quo.

While I do believe that "our son with a girl?" is a queer-coded line, I don't think the point was necessarily to suggest that Ted knows about Mike's queerness.

Consider the full context of that scene: Brenner was pressuring the Wheelers to rat Mike out so that this weird kid he was hiding (literally in his closet at one point!) could be apprehended, and he easily won them over with a little "protect the children" fearmongering:

The Wheelers want to support Mike -- but they can only understand his behaviour within the heteronormative white suburban context they're used to, and they'll readily trust authorities they absolutely should not be trusting to explain what help he needs.

Unlike Lonnie, though, the Wheelers have the capacity to change in this regard. They immediately clocked the ridiculousness of the town's Satanic Panic in S4, and the last time we saw them, they demonstrated a promising willingness to question authority and roll their eyes at conservative fearmongering.

But they haven't completed their redemption arc just yet. Holly's disappearance will be an important test of their commitment to this change in attitude.

Picture a redux of that S1 scene, with Hamilton's character in Brenner's role: "I understand your skepticism. It seems ridiculous that there are people in our town who are so committed to hurting children. But cultists are a different breed. Do you remember what happened to Will Byers four years ago? You don't really believe that he randomly got lost in the woods for a week, do you? The same week another child was found dead in the quarry? We can help your daughter, but only if you act now. Tell us where your misguided son and that deeply unwell boy he's a little too close to have gone."

Do they give in to the fearmongering and throw Mike under the bus for Holly's sake?

Or do they clock this bullshit for what it is and decide to peek behind the curtain -- and finally become the sort of parents Mike needs them to be?

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I agree, except for the idea that Vecna isn't the main villain.

(Or main antagonist if you prefer, since that doesn't carry the same evil connotations as "villain".)

This is a story about outcasts and survivors struggling to come of age in a world that hates them and isn't going to stop hating them any time soon; the greater problem of being stuck in a world like this is not going to be solved, imo. Which means that Vecna -- a manifestation of their inability to healthily cope with that bleak reality -- is the primary force that needs to be defeated because he's the only thing that can be defeated.

Bear in mind that defeat doesn't necessarily have to mean kill. It just means that the conflict between antagonist and protagonist gets resolved in a way that benefits the protagonist.

Vecna is not just some villain with a sad backstory. He is not Voldemort or some equivalent villain.

Vecna represents an aspect of the mind that taunts, and persecutes us. He does this by reminding us of our greatest fears, anxieties, and past trauma. Although it actually does cause more harm than good, our minds do this as a way to cope and protect us.

That's why I believe Vecna is not the main villain of the story, but a manifestation or symptom of the greater problem here.

The solution is not to antagonize Vecna (or our own minds), but to understand why our minds behave like this.