We were the backbone of their success during the pandemic and writers' strikes. We were the few still engaged while the GA was off watching other shows. Don't gift them continued engagement now. Don't create fanwork. Let's leave.
I know you all want comfort. I know you all want to keep your favorite ships and characters in your fanwork. But consider the importance of showing these heartless people that they cannot do this to fans and continue to benefit from our engagement with their content. Share other stories you've loved with your mutuals, and find new worlds to enjoy.
Otherwise you're telling them that queerbaiting is a great way to create success in a show.
That betraying fan expectations and ruining character arcs is a way to spur even more engagement and "noise" about their work.
Literally.
You don't Need this. You don't. Please be brave and leave and go support fiction made by people that actually care about you. That actually care about us.
if the love triangle with dustin happened in s3 but with henderhop we could have had everything.
not only cause of byler, but dustin would LOVE el. and imagine instead of getting the never ending story dustin declared his love for el in the walkie using cerebro cause he thought she was about to die, and accidentally told everyone BUT el. and like the ending scene of s3 could have been them getting together. basically something like the mike and el scene at the end of s3 but dustin actually fucking cheers. el saying she found out what dustin said, him getting flustered, she kisses him, and he does stay put kinda like mike but with the BIGGEST smile in his face.
and their conflict in s4 could have been something about el being scared dustin only likes her cause of her powers and to study her brain and stuff for scientific purposes. and she is like “you only are with me cause you think im some sort of superhero, just like everyone else” and dustin says “i couldn’t care less about if you had powers or not, even less if you were a superhero. i’m with you cause you are jane hopper and that’s better than what any superhero could ever aspire to be”
give it to me rn
Joyce would be the biggest henderhop and byler supporter ever trust. she’s very happy that her twins have people who genuinely love them and she practically watched Dustin and Mike grow up she knows that they’re both good kids with kind hearts.
-not rielle
oh em gee, who could it be?
i agree with you soo much anon!
How the Duffers treated Will over the course of the show
- Had him be bullied for being gay before he was even old enough to know what it meant, even by his own father
- Had him kidnapped by an interdimensional monster
- Had him run and hide, terrified, hungry, and cold, for a full week
- Had him ultimately get captured and effectively sexually assaulted to the point he was clinically dead when he was found
- Had him suffer from PTSD symptoms that were actually quite real
- Had him become possessed to the point that he completely lost his sense of self
- Had him almost kill his mother while possessed
- Had him be coerced to dance with a girl against his will by the boy he wished he could dance with
- Had him feel abandoned by his friends when they all got girlfriends
- Had him feel betrayed when his best friend, who he was in love with, said it wasn't his fault Will didn't like girls
- Had him tear down his cherished childhood fort in a fit of anguish
- Had him relive his trauma when he started to feel the presence of the being that possessed him
- Had him move away from everything and everyone he cared about
- Had his best friend give him false hope when his friend was worried Will would find another party
- Had him feel ignored by his best friend after he moved
- Had his best friend give him a chilly greeting when they met up for the first time
- Had his birthday be completely erased (because the Duffers just didn't give a damn) as he watched his best friend blame him for his girlfriend lying
- Had him be an emotional crutch for his best friend after he fought with his girlfriend
- Was given false hope that maybe his relationship with his best friend was better than he feared
- Had him listen to his best friend worry about his girlfriend and their relationship even though it was his own fault the relationship was failing
- Had him reassure his best friend that he could fix things with his girlfriend and used his own feelings to sympathize
- Gave his best friend a painting he made for him, but gave all credit to the girlfriend because he thought that's what his friend wanted to hear.
- Explained how much his girlfriend loved and needed him, even though those were actually his own feelings
- Had him watch his best friend put his advice and feelings to work, but still requiring further encouragement from him
- Had him hear his best friend tell his girlfriend that his life started the day he met her, which was while he was in the Upside Down
- Had him reassure his best friend yet again after they get home because his girlfriend isn't talking to them
- Had him watch through a monster's eyes as it attacks his best friend's family
- Had him finally get hope as he sees two women kiss
- Had him inexplicably regain hope by talking to one of the women about how she knew the other woman was interested
- Had his best friend fawn over an apparent superpower, likening him to a sorcerer from their favorite tabletop game
- Had him flirt with his best friend despite the fact that he was still dating his sister and feel embarrassed when it isn't returned
- Had him be told by the woman he saw kissing that what he essentially had was akin to her own hallway crush and that he had to get over it and remember a time when he was truly happy
- Had him remember that time and have it heavily feature said best friend
- Had his best friend gush over his power awakening and insist on it to everyone he sees for the next hour or so
- Had him be talked into trying to intentionally use his powers again, only to end up psychically kidnapped and tortured, being shown a future where he ends up pushing everyone away until he's alone because he's gay
- Had him break under the torture and be unable to prevent a monster from finding a friend in order to kill her
- Had his best friend suddenly stop showing the same level of concern for him that he had been
- Had him be forced to come out to everyone he knows in order to prevent it from being used against him and putting everyone at risk
- Had him have to admit his feelings were "a crush" and that he knew "he's not like me," tacitly admitted to his friend about his feelings.
- Had him have a conversation with his friend during a life or death situation that ended up being more about his friend feeling absolved of his shitty behavior than anything else
- Had him go through emotional whiplash when his best friend pulls a "Friends? No thanks....best friends" line
- Had him continue to reassure his best friend about his girlfriend in what has become pretty much a pattern by now
- Had him feel agony, both emotional, as he sees his abusers past and fails to convince him that he was once a victim too and to fight it, and physical, as he feels the pain of the hive mind he's still connected to
- Had him watch his sister apparently sacrifice herself
- Had him have to wait another five years before he can get the date he so badly wanted to have (assuming his epilogue story was a true look into the future and not just a story)
I'm sure I probably missed a few things, but this is the Duffers' gay representation, everyone, and it was always planned this way from the start. Will existed to suffer so that the villain had a vulnerable child to exploit, and they decided gay angst and unrequited love was the perfect vehicle for it.
Fuck the Duffers
honestly if you think about it, we kind of baited the GA at the end of the day so. a win is a win!
jane hopper was 16 when she sacrificed her entire life because she believed she couldn’t be free otherwise. the duffers wrote that horrific ending for a scared 16 year old who only ever wanted to be loved, who didn’t want to be a monster.
me talking to the duffer brothers after watching the finale 💕
All in all, if you have so many plot holes that a Truman ending seemed plausible enough to crash Netflix, you're a bad writer.
romantic byler or not, the fact that Mikes worst memory from when they were killing Vecna was El disappearing and not seeing Wills dead body being pulled out of the water is insane
so anyways. i really hope no one gives the duffer brothers the time of day after this.
no one watch that documentary.
no one watch any of their upcoming projects.
unfollow their socials.
give them no attention whatsoever.
they don’t deserve us. they don’t deserve our love, our time, our loyalty. not after all the bullshit they put us and their cast through.
not after sidelining their queer characters.
not after disrespecting all their female characters, especially their female poc characters.
not after writing the sloppiest slopfest the world has ever seen.
fuck you duffers. rot in hell.
at the end of the day though if there is one thing you can be absolutely sure of it's that you will never see conformitygate mockery on this account. this is entirely on whoever's responsible for stranger things ending this way and them only
Byler Analysts Were Part Of The Duffers Plan & We've Played Our Part Beautifully
Subtitle: We Are The Key To Byler Endgame
We are the part of the fandom that is consistently analysing this show, looking deeper, and figuring out where the story's going.
We were right about Will being gay. We were right about him being in love with Mike. We predicted Will having powers (early analysis I've seen was back in 2019). We even predicted Kali being back (well, I certainly did).
We've always looked deeper and more often than not we're on the money.
The finale was bad, and the first think they deemed important to talk about was Byler. They baited us with their comments, so we looked again at the finale to try to prove them fools.
And we saw the weirdness. The things that didn't make sense. The watching eyes and the inconsistencies.
So we did what we always do. We talked about what we noticed. And then we looked again and over here and over there.
And we figure it out: this isn't the end. There's more to come.
And then the theory breached containment and everyone, even major news sites, started talking about it. The GA woke up and started paying attention.
We're the witness. The people they can point to once this is over, and when certain groups claim that the Duffers "went woke" and say "Well, if you paid attention you would have noticed it was there from the beginning, like all these people did."
Episode 8 is the finale the conservative audience wanted. Every female character's ending is used to serve a male's story, Will gets sent off to a gay bar so sanitised that it only reads as a gay bar because he isn't getting harassed for touching another man, El is killed off and reduced to being Mike superhero gf and he seemingly is going to pine forher forever, hell there's even some uncomfortable implications that Steve & Robin are together.
The Duffers gave them it and proceeded to go out and tell the world just how bad it is.
There's the hidden messages of "That was bad, and you should feel bad for thinking it's good"
But they gave themselves an out. A way to go that ending wasn't real without retconing it. In universe mechanics that mess with a character's head.
Vecna's Curse and Camazotz. "It felt real"
Next, they're going to give us episode 9, and they're going to show us how the story is really supposed to end.
We're going to take a walk down memory lane with Mike, and find out everything he's been hiding.
And it is going to be magnificent.
For Eddie! Stranger Things