Hi! Do you think there are some proofes that makes you think that Byler was supposed to be endgame but they scrapped it in the last season? Maybe for political reasons,like some people sre thinking. Or do you think we just didn’t interpret well the real intentions of the Duffers?
I don't think there's any reason to think that, no.
We were just plain wrong in our interpretations.
That said, I think we had every right to come to the conclusions that we came to. The clues were all there, and the Duffers sat back and watched as we pieced things together incorrectly. They were more than happy to let us be wrong and get a ton of no-effort engagement.
But, like most things, it wasn't a problem until it suddenly was a problem.
Season 4 changed everything. Noah changed everything. The Byler community exploded.
With Noah coming out, Will's sexuality and feelings for Mike becoming canon, and Noah subsequently championing Byler, things grew out of control at a rapid pace.
The Byler community was no longer an innocuous portion of the fanbase that could just be ignored. We started to control the conversation. Hell, I dare say we became the conversation, especially as the between-season hiatuses grew to 2-3 years each. We became noise that the Duffers couldn't block out anymore.
There were always little hints that Byler wouldn't happen, but they were always so vague that, when combined with the fact that even Will's feelings were just subtext at the time, could be taken as protecting a future reveal. One of the biggest "hints" we thought we had was the way Mike treated Will in season 2. He was tender, protective, devoted in a way that he wasn't with anyone else. I'd argue he was never any of those things with El, at least not to the same extent. However, even after season 2, it was said that Mike's devotion to Will was a manifestation of his trauma at El's "death." There was really little to nothing said about his and Will's bond beyond it bringing light back into Mike's life after losing El.
So, we probably should've realized at the time that, even way back in season 2, the Duffers only saw Mike as El's love interest. They were just extremely shitty at writing it, constantly making Mike treat both El and Will poorly, but only ever really making things right with Will. We saw that as him actually being in love with Will. I personally saw it as him redirecting his feelings to El as a social acceptable alternative, with his romantic failings being the result of him not really seeing her that way. But I suppose I was foolish to think the Duffers had enough of an understanding of psychology to ever write something like that. And we were all a bit foolish to ignore the signs and think it was leading to Byler, but the Duffers willingly brought us along for the ride.
By writing Will's story the way they did, it was only natural to think something would happen. I don't know when exactly Will fell for Mike, but I'd guess it was the Snow Ball. After everything that happened in season 2, it would make sense. It was Mike's story that ultimately broke through to Will in the shed, and he looks to Mike when the girls asks him to dance. The script also says his eyes are on Mike while they were all dancing.
They knew as far back as season 2 that Will would be in love with Mike (fuck all that "crush" shit). They made that decision and then wrote three more seasons to follow up on it. Three more seasons, mind you, where Will pursues Mike, only to realize Mike doesn't see him like that and ostensibly moves on, only to come back the next season in the same situation. Three more seasons where Mike treats Will with a unique tenderness while completely failing to connect emotionally with El.
Cue season 5, where the Duffers went all in. Mike doting on Will again. They've been living together for 18 months. Will sees Robin and Vickie kissing. Mike gushes on Will possibly having powers while seeming unconcerned about El being gone. Will actively flirts. Will saves Mike's life after remembering the history of their relationship. Mike looks to be in total awe.
How could anyone blame us for thinking it served a narrative purpose?
How could anyone blame us for coming to the conclusion that Mike truly loved Will, but was trying to repress it?
But their grand plan for all this was for Mike to just be bad at feelings, El to never find out who she is outside of her powers or relationship with Mike, and Will to move on in a day's time after the only other gay person he knows tells him her feelings were holding her back from being happy.
Despite Mike being all about Will a day ago, it's all quickly forgotten after he is put in a trance. A still-confusing scene of Mike looking at Will on the couch, only to walk away, probably should've been a huge hint to us. As soon as El returns, Mike basically forgets about Will, just as he always has. And, at this point, there's little time to go with the whole "he uses her for feelings he's not allowed to show Will" thing. It truly is a case of him just using Will as a substitute for when El is gone or for things he's not confident enough to talk to her about.
The hints were all there, I guess. We just chose to interpret them in a way that benefited our preferred endgame. But the hints were there, especially in season 5, because the Duffers wanted to keep us watching. So, even while they were telling the actors to stop talking about Byler, they still wanted us to talk about it. Who was driving fandom engagement between seasons for the most part? Byler fans. They just didn't wanted to be able to say they weren't encouraging it.
Let's not even get into the greater train wreck of the Robin and Will dynamic, where Will, after a conversation with Robin, suddenly feels empowered to flirt with Mike because she told him about the signs she picked up from Vickie. No, despite Mike's flirty behavior, Will tries exactly once to flirt, and then gives up because Mike doesn't immediately respond.
It was such an impossible task to believably get Will to move on after all of this that they had to get him to take what was honestly terrible advice. Robin presumed her experiences would be the same as his and she legit discouraged him from loving Mike or he'd be miserable forever. Meanwhile, Robin treats Vickie increasingly poorly, and isn't even together with her or is on the way to it in the epilogue between the "overbearing" comment and asking Nancy about the women at college.
Meanwhile, Mike tells Will his ending involves leaving and going to a big city to be with his own kind if he wants to be happy. Personally, I have to wonder if Mike and Will ever see or talk to each other again after that final summer. Mike only seems to care about pining away for El for the rest of his life, and Will seems to be about cruising gay bars, which, in the early 90s at the height of HIV, was not an especially safe thing to do.
I feel like the Duffers let their true feelings on gay people shine by the end.
But we had every reason to see what we saw. It wasn't until season 5, perhaps, that the Duffers weaponized it, but it was always there. They made the conscious choice to make Will's series-long arc be about him having feelings for Mike. They can go on all they want about it being a self-acceptance story where he has to be ok with being gay, but that wouldn't require him to have feelings for Mike for 3+ years. That wouldn't require that he have the same season arc of "I love MIke, but he loves El, so I have to move on" only to come back the next season and do it again. There were a lot of other ways they could've done this, but they did it this way, and I honestly think it is partially due to them knowing there was a sizeable Byler fandom. This is why it's queerbaiting.
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