superstition

i love you forever will byers

mike saying “but there is a story he can never tell” and then later on running his thumb down the middle of his and will’s binders.

i SAW mike wheeler's lingering stare at will's d&d binder, and i SAW as he gently ran his finger down the spine of BOTH his and will's binders. I SAW THAT. don't you dare tell me he didn't love him

i genuinely need to know what the intended narrative function was here. why build an entire arc around will falling in love with mike if there was never going to be a payoff. why give them some of the most emotionally intimate conversations in the series. why the deliberate colour coding, the blocking that places them in mirrored positions, the framing that isolates them together, the cinematography that treats their scenes like romantic beats. why the shared looks, the lip glancing, the repeated visual language of longing.

All of that to just completely destroy byler in vol 2. And if it wasn’t for noah schnapp, we wouldn’t even have that small conversation between them in the final episode. The duffers were just going to kill byler in the coming out scene.