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My Writings
The Duffer Brothers are once again wrong about their own show if they think El’s fate is at all ambiguous….cuz it’s really not. This is like the ending of “Dogtooth” and the car trunk. If we are visually seeing El hiking to a waterfall and going though all this exposition in the epilogue, she’s alive. To quote November Kelly from the Kill James Bond podcast, “Do you believe in movies or not?” I guess the Duffers don’t but I sure as shit still do!
Still a fucked up ending cuz the government restarting the program is haphazardly set up and we’re just using Kali, one of the few POC characters in the show, as a plot device for the other white character…but she’s still alive, of course she is!
Stranger things was truly doomed the moment they brought Hopper back to life… in a goddamn teaser no less.
It was a dead show walking from there…
And don’t even get me started on Dr Brenner!
Duffer brothers honestly proving a real-life Chinese room thought experiment with questioning how well they actually understand storytelling or film language by just imitating other films…
I know there’s a lot of complex emotions going on as we process that trainwreck of a finale but I refuse to buy into the idea the Byler subtext was being ‘masterfully’ done and it was all smooth sailing until the final hour when it started to suck. I always thought the way subtext was used with Will in S4 was clunky and lacked appropriate follow-through. Would the show be better if it took Byler seriously? Almost certainly.
But the problem was, if Byler being taken seriously, I wouldn’t expect a story to rely that much on subtext so late into the show. In this context, subtext should compliment a story, not be the primary way it’s delivered. If Byler was actually being taken seriously, Mike and Eleven would have been broken up by the end of S4 at the least, instead of pushing it that hard into S5 (Vol. 2). That stops being a slow burn and just becomes a bottleneck. They would actually bother to actively deconstruct Mike’s relationship with Eleven. Instead what we get are a bunch of heteronormative tropes of cheap conflict I’ve seen plenty of times before. And queer subtext doesn’t always depend on authorial intent (of which there are many examples)… It’s like we’ve forgotten about death of the author until we want to justify materially supporting shitty artists.
Not even just Will (and Mike), Vickie is hardly even a character. She’s just there with hardly any notable personality traits. And hearing Robin wasn’t even originally supposed to be a lesbian but instead Steve’s love interest, and the seeing her character change in S4.
And then there’s the fact I noticed virtually zero societal homophobia. All I remember is Will’s father and the bullies and they disappear in later seasons. Homophobia doesn’t actually feel like a real, felt threat or experience. It’s the 1980s and there not a single goddamn reference to the AIDS crisis, a HUGE part of modern queer history??? Fuck that! This makes it feel like shame for being gay isn’t because of socially enforced homophobia but just internal feelings.
It is so obvious to me that the Duffer brothers didn’t actually think though what writing a queer character (in 1980s Indiana suburbs) means. They didn’t do their due diligence in learning how to write marginalized characters (cuz they haven’t written POC characters well either and I’ve seen very few people talking about that—how Kali is a plot device, Lucas is chronically underdeveloped, Erica can feel stereotypical at times, how racism is once again contained in a handful of individuals like Billy but the explicitly Republican family doesn’t say any microaggressions to Erica. No instead we stay focused on the white boys who aren’t kissing… [I’m being overly glib but it’s to enforce the point]).
So when the S5 finale happened, it felt like the obvious result of everything that came before. And so it always drove me crazy when ever I saw people talking about how clever or skilled the representation was, which is frankly insulting to queer media history and actually queer creatives (and straight allies who actually bothered to learn) who managed to use subtext way more effectively or just straight up tell better, bolder stories. Please seek out more queer media, get more indie with it. The Duffers never deserved that much credit as I’ve occasionally seen people give them. Heated Rivalry alone has been running circles around ST. Or The Owl House. Or I Saw The TV Glow. Go watch The People’s Joker, please I’m begging! Watch James Sweeney’s two movies: Straight Up and Twinless. Check out Julio Torres. Josh Thomas. Watch Bottoms, It’s A Sin. Nimona. Feel Good. Halt And Catch Fire. Read The Celluloid Closet or The Rainbow Age of Television. Hell, Luca is better queer media.
And to people who are creatives and not just consumers: make it! Make the Byler story that wasn’t and should have been, but make it actually good! We deserve that story! I absolutely want a slow burn story about two childhood best friends who are in love and they have bad internalized homophobia (and need to actually deal with the homophobic atmosphere of the 80s!) and learn to love each other.
One final note. Even as a PLATONIC love story, which are important and my aspec ass wants more!—this sucks cuz there is barely any felt emotional that’s consistently embodied by the story. But sometimes the hurt felt around Byler can leave a sour taste in my mouth of amatonormativity and ‘he can’t be happy without romantic love’…not all or even most but some.
Also see these videos back in S4 days, which are pretty good and less irritation-fueled than I am:
So I have a question: I keep seeing the word “queerbait” being used to describe what happened with the final season of Stranger Things and Byler, and I think it should be pointed out that traditionally queer baiting is when queer subtext is used to attract a queer audience while not making it explicit so homophobic audiences still watch. But that was a media strategy that relied on specific material conditions of mass audiences still being mostly homophobic, which is not the case anymore at least in an anglophone context. These days, media companies are pretty tolerant of being perceived of as “woke” and will include queer representation more often that isn’t just subtext but explicit. The problem is, this representation is very tokenistic and shallow.
Even though I was never convinced Byler was going to become canon, there is plenty of subtextual elements in season 4 that support a queer reading of Mike specifically. But we still get explicit (but still shallow) queer representation with not just one but multiple characters, so it’s not queer baiting in the way things like Sherlock or Teen Wolf or even Winter soldier and Captain America in marvel was queer baiting.
So if we are going to use the term queerbating for Stranger Things it’s not in the ‘traditional’ sense. Do you think this means we should rethink what queerbating is and say it’s evolved or changed as queer representation and its context has changed? Or do you think it would be better to find a different term to describe what is happening in cases like this? Like I have been pretty strictly using the term ‘tokenism’ or sometimes ‘straight voyeurism’. Am I just being too rigid in my definition of queer baiting? What do you think?
So I know a lot of you are grieving byler right now, but just quick little PSA: what happened here was not queerbaiting. One of the fundamental characteristics of queerbaiting is that you’re trying not to alienate the homophobes in your audience. The homophobes have already been alienated because of all the gay shit that is already there.
What has happened here (besides bad writing) is something I saw someone else say on the comments of a YouTube video, and that is “straight voyeurism.”
At some point in development, they knew they wanted to make Will gay And then just fell back on whatever default cushy liberal allyship assumptions they had for writing a queer character. They just didn’t think about it that hard.
This was always, always, painfully obvious to me for a plethora of reasons that basically boil down to the continued reliance on heteronormative tropes of relationship conflicts instead of actually deconstructing Mike and El’s relationship.
And while it was frustrating to see what looked to me like, not media illiteracy, but a failure of media literacy nonetheless, I want to say to you, byler nation, that the fact you were able to create a much richer queer story from something where there was none is fucking badass!
Like yeah, you were wrong and you fumbled the media literacy bag but the way you failed was so awesome in so many ways! You should never feel stupid or dumb for being able to do that, and anyone that tries to make you feel that way just because you were wrong has a shallow understanding of what media is good for in life. You should never ever forget that the most important thing when it comes to media isn’t being correct, it is about sincerely caring about something and wanting it to be the best thing it can be! That is, and will always be, the point!
rewatching s1 has made me very aware of how much the widened scope across the seasons has damaged the core feeling of the show. Because how did we go from "this is Hawkins... the worst thing to happen here was when an owl attacked Eleanor Gillespie's head because it thought that her hair was a nest" to "actually crazy shit has been going on here since we were in high school, and an entire family was murdered, and a girl fell from the stage during the school musical and was critically injured, and the principal's eyes were gauged out, also from ~falling,~ and all the lights were flickering as our pets all got mysteriously murdered with all their bones broken in a short span of time. but damn that Joyce Byers sure is crazy for seeing things in the lights!"
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again but it is absolutely an example of civilizational inadequacy that only deaf people know ASL
“oh we shouldn’t teach children this language, it will only come in handy if they [checks notes] ever have to talk in a situation where it’s noisy or they need to be quiet”
My mom learned it because she figured she’ll go deaf when she gets old
My family went holiday SCUBA diving once, and a couple of Deaf guys were in the group. I was really little and I spent most of the briefing overcome with the realization that while the rest of us were going to have regulators in our mouths and be underwater fairly soon, they were going to be able to do all the same stuff and keep talking.
The only reason some form of sign language is not a standard skill is ableism, as far as I can tell.
For anyone interested in learning, Bill Vicars has full lessons of ASL on youtube that were used in my college level classes.
https://www.youtube.com/user/billvicars
and here’s the link to the website he puts in his videos:
Update: you guys this is an amazing resource for learning asl. Bill Vicars is an incredible teacher. His videos are of him teaching a student in a classroom, using the learned vocabulary to have conversations.
Not only is the conversation format immersive and helpful for learning the grammar, but the students make common mistakes which he corrects, mistakes I wouldn’t have otherwise know I was making.
He also emphasizes learning ASL in the way it’s actually used by the Deaf community and not the rigid structure that some ASL teachers impose in their classrooms
His lesson plans include learning about the Deaf community, which is an important aspect of learning ASL. Knowing how to communicate in ASL without the knowledge of the culture behind it leaves out a lot of nuances and explanations for the way ASL is.
Lastly, his lessons are just a lot of fun to watch. He is patient, entertaining, and funny. This good natured enthusiasm is contagious and learning feels like a privilege and not a chore
And it’s all FREE. Seriously. If you’ve ever wanted to learn ASL
Every time I’m watching a show or movie related to spy craft and there’s a bug or listening device and they whisper or write things down or turn on the shower/radio loudly, I just think to myself: YOU WOULDN’T BE HAVING THIS MUCH OF A HASSLE IF YOU KNEW A SIGN LANGUAGE!!!!!!
I like the idea of calling a QPR-date a "quip"
Alternatively, would it be better to call a queerplatonic partner a quip??
I like the idea of calling a QPR-date a “quip”
