Reading the comments on Netflix’s social media pages is hell. It’s absurd how many people miss that the real issue isn’t whether Mike could realistically reciprocate Will’s feelings, but rather the quality of the writing itself. The story clearly exploits and romanticizes Will’s pain. For at least a couple of seasons, it emphasizes his romantic longing and encourages the audience to invest in it. Yet, all that suffering and tension are ultimately dismissed and never properly acknowledged or respected. While Will’s pain remains unresolved, the heterosexual couple is given a serious, tragic moment framed as meaningful, despite being rooted in avoidance and misunderstanding.

So this isn’t a question of realism; rather, it is about writing that appropriates queer pain to enrich the narrative but ultimately discards it without any payoff. I wish it received better acknowledgment in mainstream media.

I feel so insane about ai. I've had face-to-face conversations with people who use it for therapy, who use it to calculate the safety of pill interactions, who use it for all their emails and grant applications and legal documents and academic papers and finance sheets and for every single question they have about the world, and if you tell them about the ecological costs they just laugh and say "I guess I've used a lot of water." and I've been in multiple gatherings of 10+ people where I'm THE ONLY PERSON who doesn't use chatgpt. it's turning me into a ranting raving pariah, because how don't you people see??? why don't you understand??????? this bullshit didn't exist five years ago, you absolutely do not need it, and it is destroying everything

went right from getting rejected by the love of his life to being his relationship counselor once again! awesome writing

every universe except this one, i guess.

the official stranger things squawk radio station was made to serve as a promotional way to foreshadow the events of stranger things' final season, using songs and speaking in code during each broadcast to serve as easter eggs to the audience. and before vol2's release, they constantly played songs with lyrics relating to cheating, affairs, & basements. there were multiple broadcasts mentioning how you should go down to the basement for a "good signal", how you should lock the door to the basement so you "don't get caught" doing something, as well as a broadcast mentioning a man cheating on his wife with another man. these were intentionally pre recorded broadcasts to foreshadow something relating to cheating, affairs, and basements in s5. and there was no conclusion to that. no payoff. nobody cheated on anyone and there was nothing to do with basements at all.

i know the fandom started the rumor of cutgate — the idea that there was an alternative storyline for stranger things s5 vol2 that got changed or cut out — and i initially had thought, like many others on here, that that was people reaching to try and scramble to explain how atrocious the duffer brothers' writing actually was (i mean, we literally saw this same scenario with BBC sherlock and johnlocks thinking there was a secret final episode.)

but now, the more and more i think about the 30+ plot holes in the show, the countless questions people have that never got answered, and more damningly, the amount of small things the cast and writers said would happen in the final season that flat out didn't happen, (such as: maya hawke saying robin mentors another character after will, lover's lake being in promo and never showing up, the basements and cheating references in the squawk, the promise of barb's body showing up again, mike never finding out about the painting lie, the promise that we will know who opened the door in 01x01, & more) i am, honestly, starting to believe that something went very, very wrong during the production of this show's final roar. i am genuinely starting to believe that they were forced to cut out and change a lot of the initial plotlines the show was building up to, whether that was due to netflix censorship for queer storylines, to the WGA strike and writers quitting/or getting fired.

something went very, very wrong here. there's too much proof to support it, and i genuinely hope some people that were behind the show expose what went down after NDAs are up, or that we can pressure them to actually release unseen footage they have. i refuse to believe that this was the ending that they always intended.

the official stranger things squawk radio station was made to serve as a promotional way to foreshadow the events of stranger things' final season, using songs and speaking in code during each broadcast to serve as easter eggs to the audience. and before vol2's release, they constantly played songs with lyrics relating to cheating, affairs, & basements. there were multiple broadcasts mentioning how you should go down to the basement for a "good signal", how you should lock the door to the basement so you "don't get caught" doing something, as well as a broadcast mentioning a man cheating on his wife with another man. these were intentionally pre recorded broadcasts to foreshadow something relating to cheating, affairs, and basements in s5. and there was no conclusion to that. no payoff. nobody cheated on anyone and there was nothing to do with basements at all.

i know the fandom started the rumor of cutgate — the idea that there was an alternative storyline for stranger things s5 vol2 that got changed or cut out — and i initially had thought, like many others on here, that that was people reaching to try and scramble to explain how atrocious the duffer brothers' writing actually was (i mean, we literally saw this same scenario with BBC sherlock and johnlocks thinking there was a secret final episode.)

but now, the more and more i think about the 30+ plot holes in the show, the countless questions people have that never got answered, and more damningly, the amount of small things the cast and writers said would happen in the final season that flat out didn't happen, (such as: maya hawke saying robin mentors another character after will, lover's lake being in promo and never showing up, the basements and cheating references in the squawk, the promise of barb's body showing up again, mike never finding out about the painting lie, the promise that we will know who opened the door in 01x01, & more) i am, honestly, starting to believe that something went very, very wrong during the production of this show's final roar. i am genuinely starting to believe that they were forced to cut out and change a lot of the initial plotlines the show was building up to, whether that was due to netflix censorship for queer storylines, to the WGA strike and writers quitting/or getting fired.

something went very, very wrong here. there's too much proof to support it, and i genuinely hope some people that were behind the show expose what went down after NDAs are up, or that we can pressure them to actually release unseen footage they have. i refuse to believe that this was the ending that they always intended.

as someone with a degree in television and a background in cinematography and narrative analysis, i genuinely cannot understand what the duffers were doing with mike and will. the sheer amount of intentional groundwork poured into their dynamic wasn’t accidental, and wasn’t something you can dismiss as audience projection. it was craft. it was design. it was the kind of layered visual storytelling you only build when you’re setting up a payoff.

the costuming alone charted an emotional arc, colour palettes shifting in tandem, mirroring, contrasting, signalling internal states long before the characters verbalised anything. the blocking and framing consistently positioned them in ways that highlighted intimacy, tension, longing, and narrative centrality. the camera lingered on them with a specificity that, in television language, means something. you don’t shoot two characters like that unless you’re building toward a reveal or a culmination.

and then there’s the emotional architecture: years of subtext, coded longing, parallel arcs, mirrored traumas, narrative foreshadowing. every tool in the tv writer’s and cinematographer’s kit was pointing toward byler as a deliberate, slow burn queer storyline. it wasn’t just possible, it was textually supported by the show’s own visual grammar. even the pink sky in the field scene, that gorgeous, deliberate wash of colour, was doing thematic heavy lifting.

which is why the lack of follow through feels so jarring. from a craft perspective, it’s almost nonsensical. you don’t invest that much visual and emotional capital into a relationship you plan to abandon. from a storytelling perspective, it’s a structural rupture, a setup without a payoff, a thematic thread left dangling. and from a queer audience perspective, it’s heartbreaking, because this could have been monumental. byler had the potential to be an epic queer narrative with genuine depth, history, and emotional resonance. it could have been groundbreaking.

instead, it feels like all that potential was discarded at the last minute. years of careful build up rendered pointless. a beautifully constructed arc left unresolved. and i can’t make sense of it, not academically, not narratively, not emotionally. it just feels like such a waste of what could have been one of the most compelling queer storylines in mainstream genre television.

"In a situation like that" you mean... being queer?

Last sightings of Mike wheeler before he died

Why are the duffers acting like queer people need to learn their lesson

"I think it's important to show younger people that not every crush they have will work out" Yeah because queer youth truly struggle with thinking that all their feelings will be requited.

Some of you are going to have to accept that there are trans people who do not hold "passing" as a goal in their transition, like at all. Some people would feel just as much dysphoria "passing" as their gender as getting misgendered. Make space for them in the conversation. They are some of the most vulnerable of us and deserve protection and a voice when discussing trans theory. This does nothing but benefit you too btw

I saw you. Waiting for me, playing my…my song.

ilya 'needy top' rozanov