animbilla

I believe wholeheartedly that the entirety of season 5 is off. That they're already in a loop of wrong, illusion and/or warped memories are at play, and there is a lot of evidence to back it up.

But the hardest part of this for me has always been that none of the characters ever seemed to catch the glitches. Lucas does wonder momentarily if they're being messed with, but he's quickly distracted from that with news that Max might be returning to her body.

What I'm talking about is Neo and the cat in the Matrix. The Truman Show with a falling spotlight. Dark City where the hero watches the buildings change shape. The Freddy/Inception signs that you're in a dream of it all.

You see where I'm going with this? No member of the party is the mythological Cassandra telling them something is wrong and not being believed.

Joyce, who notices magnets and follows up on unusual hunches, never seems to figure it out. Hopper the investigator and Murray and Nancy the journalists never figure it out. Jonathon the observant photographer never figures it out. Dustin the genius gets it all wrong. Mr. Clarke doesn't even flinch at the UD trip or the bad wormhole explanation and beanstalk plan. We've got a lot of smart people there who don't seem to notice that anything is wrong with their story at all--even when it is staring them right in the face.

The audience can see the subtle signs. The character changes. The color changes. The fake monster battle and disturbing ending. There is absolutely something going on. But when the basement door closes at the end of episode 8, no other shoe has dropped, and we're left with ambiguity and confusion. For months. A confusion that wasn't cleared up with Tales at all. Only emphasized.

We do have at least 5 of them saying something doesn't make any sense multiple times, but they never follow up on that, and choose to believe the easiest conclusions they are given. (Holly does scream none of this is real, but that is in Henry's mind, so...)

Nancy in particular surprises me by not thinking for herself. She agrees and follows up on something Mike or Dustin says. On something Steve says. She remembers the UD lab for El and dresses like a candy striper to talk to her mom, but that and shooting things are all we get of her old intelligent and curious character. She and Joyce were the main go-tos for discovering the truth, but they are both pretty distracted and emotionally compromised, so we got nothing from them.

We have a few subtle signs that are never followed through on. El looks momentarily confused when she hops from her mindscape to the middle of the road while looking for Holly. She looks down at Kali's reflection in the mindscape and makes a subtle face that could be some sort of realization. She almost has a real moment with Hopper but then a roaring sound that is never explained draws them back into the action.

Mike seems distracted and makes a lot of his famous figuring something out faces, but other than some seriously odd behavior, particularly after shock jock, we don't have any idea what he's actually thinking or feeling.

Robin, the solver of the most puzzles through this series, is put directly in the visual path of the dial color change and the tower color change, both objects she should be extremely familiar with due to her job, and she doesn't react to either.

Murray's entire character is literally brilliant, paranoid, overly suspicious conspiracy theorist and he spends the entire season just smiling goofily and delivering things to the party. He barely reacts to Joyce's insane plan that makes no sense, except to mention they need some snacks. It's very out of character for him to be that oblivious.

Will's mysterious experience with Vecna changed him, but we have no idea what he saw so we can't establish the true reasons for his reactions. Was he shown the truth and warned of the outcome if he didn't follow the script? We don't know.

And that is the most frustrating part of this. I know it's true, I even believe there will be more content, BUT I can see why it might be difficult for others.

Because no character had a deja vu cat moment. No one noticed that the people behind him were on a loop. No one noticed the fifty million exit signs that kept appearing everywhere, or all The Wall references. No one even wondered why the military had a lab in the UD that kept needing to be restocked when they didn't seem to know about Vecna. It was just there because?

Nancy should have wondered about the military during all those crawls, that's all I'm saying. But they were all wearing blinders.

No one questioned the absence of characters--and not just the physical absence but the absence of mention, because no one ever said their names even though it would have fit the story for them to at least get a passing reference. Particularly Owens, Argyle, Suzi, the deputies in every season until 5, and Max's mother.

Don't get me started on the wormhole and those journals.

So yes, the people, the objects, the relationships and the physics of the entire season was completely off and wrong. But no one noticed except the audience. And you only saw it if you were really paying attention or watched it more than once.

And even if you have a 50 page list of things you saw that were wrong on the show (and we do) none of it is conclusive enough to explain what's happening.

Which has left the show open to accusations of queerbaiting, cash-grabbing, bad AI writing, just another big show with a bad ending etc.

omens and cycles

But when she saw Will flirting with Mike, for like half a second, she went for a Tammy speech.

No one was there for Will to talk him through his doubts. No one was like "dude, he looks at your lips every time you talk" or "he is obviously like dick, have you seen his ROOM?" or "please, he is listening to Butthole Surfers, Will, this boy is gay af"

Basically, what Steve did for her.

So Will was just drowning in his doubts and insecurities until Robin said "you know what, this is hopeless, so just...learn to love yourself instead"

Because out of everything in the show, the scenes I really struggle to rewatch, the ones that give me a visceral, gut twisting reaction, are almost always Will’s. Watching his character is exhausting.

He went through hell in the Upside Down. He was hunted, violated, strung up like something inhuman, declared dead. He came back only to be called a freak and be more bullied. Then he got possessed and wasn’t even allowed to reclaim himself before being turned into a vessel. And when Jane came back, he lost his place in Mike’s life (that’s true no matter people try to soften or twist it). He felt abandoned, ignored and replaced. He clung to D&D because it was a piece of stability, a fragment of the childhood that had been ripped away from him, and he was ridiculed for that. Mind you, he wasn’t even fully his own person for most of season two, and at one point he was literally burned alive.

And what makes it worse is that the same friend who mocked him and hurt him for wanting to play that game later did every stupid thing possible to play Eddie’s campaign, the same kind of emotional attachment Will had been shamed for expressing. Then in S4 he gets ignored and hurt again by the boy he loves with his whole heart. And he has to sit there and watch Mike be act lovey dovey with his sister, a girl he can’t even resent because she’s precious and good. So he swallows it and has no one to talk to. Even Jonathan, who used to be his safe place, is drowning in his own issues and can’t really hold him the way he used to.

He spends an entire trip listening to the boy he can’t move on from complain about his hetslop relationship, issues that had a simple solution if Mike had actually wanted to fix it. And then Will takes his own feelings, his own art (the main thing that defines him) and uses them to repair what’s broken between Mike and Jane. He reassures him and comforts him and builds him back up, all while tearing himself apart. He is constantly asked to be the emotional support, the fixer, the understanding friend. He’s the only character who’s never even been given a fleeting romantic distraction. No fling or messy crush, no canon ups and downs. Not even something temporary to help him try to distract himself or attempt to move on.

As a conformity gater I consider S5 fake but fine, let’s add that too, shit just piles on. He lets himself hope and thought for a moment that maybe he has a chance with Mike. But that hope was crushed completely. He experienced pain through the hive mind, got burned, slammed by a car, hurt in every possible way they could kill demos. He has a few seconds of happiness when he got powers and seeing Mike proud of him, but then Vecna takes that too, destroys the hope and tortures him all over again. He never has any lasting joy or reprieve.

He’s forced to come out in front of a room full of people who didn’t need to be there, essentially begging them not to hate him or see him differently. His agency is stripped again because if he doesn’t expose himself, they lose. He reduces the love of his life to “a hallway crush,” minimizing his own feelings to make them smaller and something to overcome. Then comes the tower scene with the “friends? No, best friends” line, the summum of rage bait like a deliberate twist of the knife. And after all that, what does he get? An epilogue boyfriend who doesn’t exist and is only a figment of Mike’s schizophrenic imagination. A future reduced to two bullet points: find a boyfriend, go on a date in a bar. That’s it.

I GENUINELY don’t know how they can compensate for everything they’ve put Will Byers through. I really don’t. And this might be a hot take, but him getting the boy he wants at the end is NOT enough for me. Because It doesn’t fix the imbalance, It doesn’t explain why Will was consistently denied the narrative space and milestones his friends were given. It doesn’t justify why he was used over and over as a tool to fix Mileven. A last-minute romantic resolution doesn’t undo seasons of sidelining and humiliation rituals.

Also and this might be a hot take, I don’t see Mike, as we left him in S4-S5, as someone I root for in this ship. Not yet. That Mike existed in S2 and stayed there. I get he has his own issues but both things can be true. Just waiting for Mike to be ready and making them endgame in some neat epilogue isn’t satisfying for me. How it’s done matters more than the fact that it happens. I really wish bylers saw that being given crumbs for seasons doesn’t mean we should settle for whatever is handed to us at the end, for the sake of a queer victory. Right now, there’s no meaningful justification for the way Will’s character has been treated and I need more than a relationship to make that feel okay.

See this beautiful boy? He deserves more

And the ending also paralleled Brokeback Mountain:

That second parallel