emma_b

and

One of the statements was, "If you can go down the street holding hands with your romantic partner, take a step forward. If you can't, take a step back." My aroace ass had no idea what do to. I knew I couldn't step forward, because there was never gonna be a romantic partner whose hand I could hold. But it didn't feel right to step back, because there wasn't a romantic partner whose hand I couldn't hold either.

and if we’re talking about evidence, let’s start right at the beginning of season three with that kiss, the one that’s so uncomfortable it borders on unwatchable. he physically takes el’s hands off his face. that is not the body language of a boy in love. that is a character recoiling. that is an actor directed to show discomfort. that is a camera lingering on the wrongness of the moment. it’s a visual cue, a narrative cue, and a performance cue all pointing in the same direction: this relationship is not working for him on a romantic level.

mike was queer coded whether people like it or not. the framing, the lighting, the emotional beats, the way his discomfort is emphasised in scenes with el, these are deliberate choices. they’re not accidents. they’re not “reading too much into it.” they were part of the show’s visual language.

and i’m allowed to say, with confidence, that the text supports mike being gay. the emotional dissonance in his relationship with el is baked into the performances. the way he physically stiffens, the way the camera isolates him, the way he can’t articulate romantic feelings for her no matter how many times the narrative gives him the opportunity, that’s not hetero storytelling. that’s a character struggling with compulsory heterosexuality.

and then there’s the dialogue. when he practically shouts “it’s not my fault you don’t like girls” at will, that’s not just a line. that’s classic projection. that’s a character lashing out because he’s terrified of what he sees in himself. it’s queer subtext breaking the surface.

so when people come at me like i’m committing some moral crime for pointing out what the show was doing, it’s exhausting. if you don’t like my interpretation, that’s fine. disagree. scroll past. curate your own space. but don’t attack me for using the education i literally have a degree in. don’t act like i’m making things up because it makes you uncomfortable.

I'm going to be blunt: it's not only poor writing that the lie about the painting was never addressed, but also actively cruel in terms of queer representation. It's a classic Cyrano trope - Mike (a stand-in for Roxanne from Cyrano de Bergerac) falls in love with the emotional truth being expressed by Will (Cyrano) while believing those feelings belong to El (Christian). I've never seen a Cyrano trope go unresolved in media, and it's particularly troubling in Stranger Things because it means that Will's uniquely queer desires are absorbed into a heteronormative framework without consequence.

For queer viewers, this isn't just a narrative shortcut that we can brush off and forget about. It mirrors a cultural pattern that we see over and over again - queer pain is turned into a spectacle for straight people to consume, while the queer person themselves is denied agency. Our longing is treated as moving, even beautiful, but only when it serves to deepen straight relationships, rather than allowed to exist on its own terms.

Will's feelings for Mike are exploited to uplift Mike and El's heterosexual romance. Will performs intense emotional labour - pouring himself into the painting and giving a powerful speech despite it tearing him apart - for the purpose of strengthening their relationship while getting no reciprocity. His own desires are erased and handed to El as narrative fuel, simply there to amp up Mike to confess his love for El. This reinforces the idea that queer love exists only to serve others, rather than to be honoured in itself.

In the Cyrano trope, this just doesn't happen. Roxanne always realises that the feelings she fell in love with were never Christian’s, but Cyrano’s. This gives back autonomy to the person who actually felt and expressed that love - Cyrano (in this case, Will).

By not addressing the painting again, Stranger Things totally refuses the reckoning that employing the Cyrano trope demands. Mike is never allowed to recognise that the feelings he responded to came from Will, not El. Will is left without ownership or recognition of his own queer feelings, and the show endorses Mike and Eleven's relationship being built off a lie despite the power of authenticity being a continual theme of the series. The show betrays its own core values.

To have the painting on Mike's wall in the epilogue further drives home how Will's feelings for Mike were made invisible. Mike obviously has it pinned up because he still believes it to have been commissioned by El. Will painstakingly created that painting out of his own love for Mike, but it becomes folded neatly into a heterosexual narrative that excludes Will entirely. It becomes a prop in Mike and Eleven's romance rather than a testament to the beauty, courage, and sincerity of Will's queer love.

Additionally, Will is put in a position where he won't ever be able to tell Mike of the real origins of the painting because it would take away one of the mementos Mike has to remember El by. Will is basically gagged - his feelings have to remain unspoken so the illusion that the painting was from El can be preserved. The queer longing embedded in the painting is totally erased and Will - as well as the LGBT+ fans of the show - have to watch queer love be repurposed and contained within a straight romance.

This is so harmful for queer viewers because it echoes the deep hurt of being made to feel small, unseen, and inferior. It's a cruel reminder that love is beautiful, profound, and transformative, but only when heterosexual. Stranger Things sentimentalises Will's love for Mike, but does not validate and acknowledge Will as the queer person who felt them.

Wdym Will did the whole “he didn’t want me to see there” thing and it wasn’t a trap?

Wdym Vecna showed up, said he was gonna use Will again, WALKED AWAY and let everyone live, and then just…. Didn’t use him for anything.

(He did later but in retaliation for Max escaping and Will invading his mind, not related to the first thing)

Wdym Will only just discovered his powers and could simultaneously control and “Vecna” THREE impossibly strong demogorgons, and even CONTROL VECNA HIMSELF. But Vecna who has been getting continually stronger just… let our heroes get inside the Mind Flayer and kill him like nothing.

Wdym the Mind Flayer has been colonizing entire worlds but was killed in 0.2 seconds by a ragtag group of teens bc they got to one of his puppets and it said oh well, guess I’ll die too.

Wdym Will had to have a full fledged exorcism to get the particles out, and not doing so would mean he would die and even so he was still selectively affected by the hive mind anyways. But Holly and them just had to cough a little and the particles went out?

Wdym Will was being hurt by being connected to Vecna 0.2 seconds before he was killed, but killing him had no effect on Will at all ??

Wdym the only way to effect Vecna/the gate/etc was to use love instead of hate- and that’s even how Will got his powers two minutes ago. But in the final battle we just need to show up and have an ax or something ?

Wdym the particles still being in the world after the exorcism was and existential threat for two seasons, but we let the particles go up the radio tower and didn’t even spare it a glance ??

Wdym Hopper and Joyce knew Henry in high school and were even kind of friends with him, but they never said a word to Vecna when they actually met him ??

Wdym they were involved in a supernatural investigation related to Henry back in the day but then acted like this was all brand new information and Joyce was crazy in S1 ?

Wdym the playwrite had to take out big parts of the script so it wouldn’t spoil S5? What was there to spoil ??

Wdym you used tons of things as inspiration and as actual references in the show that had memory manipulation, unreality, fake endings, alternate timelines, time travel, etc etc and you had a villain ABLE TO DO THESE THINGS but just…. Didn’t.

Wdym one proximity based couple who was pressured to get together by outsiders and who had communication issues and lies and toxic jealousy was unhealthy, but the other was TWU WUV ?

Wdym a hallway crush is the same as a lifelong friendship that was “the best thing they ever did”?

Wdym we should analyze the show, but numbers and patterns and dates mean nothing ??

Wdym the characters had beliefs and plans for the final episode, and they all went exactly how they thought they would?

Wdym you got THEE Sarah Connor and you just had her play a cartoon villain?

Wdym the military just let them go and Max was able to graduate on time and Hopper was able to resume his job as chief?

Wdym the demogorgons and dogs and bats just stopped existing?

Wdym Vecna said the victims were all in his mind, but only Max actually was?

Wdym you gave Will powers and brought Kali back and maybe even hinted at Holly and them having the potential for powers, but then you barely used them in the Final Battle at all ??

Wdym we just let those pregnant women die ??

Wdym there was a traitor ??

Wdym the coming out took 12 hours to write yet had continuity errors and was longer than the final battle?

Wdym you had two setbacks that pushed production back by half a decade but you didn’t have the finale written as you were filming it ?? What were you doing all that time?

Wdym we revealed the tunnels, but the military didn’t bother checking them afterwords?

Wdym all those dick jokes were just random?

Wdym you are your brother and M marks the spot ? But then Mike does literally nothing at all ?

Wdym Papa suddenly became Van Gogh when he couldn’t even doodle a dog?

Wdym Papa created exotic matter and knew all about the upside down and Henry and everything, when they couldn’t even set foot inside the gate in S1 and the rest of the military thought everything was all El’s fault ?

Wdym the spores might be toxic or not?

Wdym we just left the one ring rock out in the desert for whoever else to find ?

Wdym Holly and them fuckass kids had more screen time than our already established characters?

Wdym Dr Owens and Argyle and Susie and Vickie just poofed into thin air?

Wdym this is a coming of age story and each season has gotten progressively darker and more mature, but the final season is 90% references to children’s books and fairy tales ? But also the “personification of childhood” has to die at the end.

Wdym this show is for outcasts and freaks but lol wouldn’t it be sooo cringe if a character got a mohawk ? Or *gasp* dyed their hair ?? Also we can suddenly become bffs with the jocks who hated us, BUT to be accepted and happy we have to move away or die or both(?) ?

Wdym you queerbaited in the year 2026 ?? In a show for outcasts ??

I see where you're coming from, but I disagree. It's 2026, not the 2010s anymore, and I feel like nowadays that ‘inequity in patterns’ that you mentioned should absolutely be taken into account when discussing queerbaiting. It's not really about the lack of representation anymore (we made a lot of progress in the last decade, there's queer characters everywhere) but mostly about the quality of (and the intention behind) said representation.

Let's not kid ourselves, queer audiences have seen their fair share of stories about self acceptance and whatnot, what we wanna see now in mainstream media is what straight audiences have gotten for decades, so queer ships like Byler are always gonna bring much engagement and money. So that's why I think that you can definitely queerbait your audience with a ship even if there are gay characters in canon – not always! Sometimes it's just shipbaiting. It depends on other factors.

When it comes to Byler, I do believe it to be queerbaiting, even though Will is canonically a gay character, because of the way S5 was structured AND because of the way Will's suffering was exploited in a frankly disgusting manner.

Byler only went mainstream after Vol. 1 of season 4. In season 4, Will sacrificed his feelings to push forward a failing straight relationship, which sucks on so many levels, but the point is that at the end of the season he had already accepted that his love was unrequited. Flash forward to the beginning of season 5, and what do they show us? Will has hope again. Not only that, but Mike and El don't act romantically at all with each other, unlike the other couples. The whole thing is kept ambiguous.

We reach the end of Vol. 1 and another big slice of the audience starts believing that Byler might actually be in the cards. After Sorcerer, the jokes about Mike “having a type” were everywhere.

Now, I'm aromantic. I can appreciate a story that decenters romantic love in a meaningful way. I adored the way Sorcerer showed Will's queerness as something pure and magical, and, above all, powerful. It was awesome.

BUT MIKE WAS STILL THERE.

And then what happens? Will gets basically sidelined. He gets his coming out in episode 7 and it's a massive step back from Sorcerer on so many levels. And it's then and only then that he says he had (implying he got over Mike) a crush (a ‘crush’ is not what the show's been depicting for 3 seasons and a half) on someone (he never gets the chance to confess) but he was just his Tammy (all queer experiences are the same!).

So what, Mike and El who had a terrible relationship throughout the show and got together at like 12 when she didn't even know what the word friend meant are true love because they're straight, while Will who's been so selfless with his own feelings gets to get over them in a day because he's gay so it's not that serious...?

Will's suffering has been exploited throughout all seasons of this show. He's been abused by the narrative a thousand times over. The shame and sense of wrongness around his sexuality have been used in season 3 and 4 to add depth to a story that had no intention to actually make it mean something. We don't get real power, we don't get pride and joy, we only get acceptance in the most heartbreaking connotation of the word.

It's not just about Byler, it's about promising something that they had no intention of delivering. “Will is the heart and soul of season 5”? We didn't get that at all. “The painting lie in season 4 will pay off”? We don't get a resolution and Mike might as well have no idea.

The scene in the finale “Friends? No, thanks... Best friends!” is a fuck you to the shippers if I've ever seen one. But I bet they loved the shippers' money when they bought all the painting merch released after season 4.

They were aware of Byler. They knew we were a big (and growing) portion of the fan base. And still they structured Vol. 1 of S5 like that and treated the topic like it was a huge secret in cons and interviews instead of just taking Will's story in a different direction and stating that, or even just writing season 5 differently.

They centered Will's entire arc around his love for Mike for no reason and then didn't even treat Will and Mike's friendship with the respect it deserved. They had him say "I'm not gonna fall in love” just to give us the epilogue maybe boyfriend/maybe a friend at a gay bar and we didn't even get to keep the lesbians because they just brok up off screen (they also got together off screen! Yay consistency!).

Now, I can see your point, and I get why someone wouldn't call it queerbait, but still I find it absurd how so many people online (many queer people too) keep focusing on how dumb the shippers were or whatever instead of focusing on the real pieces of shit here. Bait or not, the writing was cruel and homophobic AND EXPLOITATIVE and MALICIOUS, but all I see are ex destiel shippers or whatever saying that "shippers were seeing things that were not there and it's not queerbait actually because there were no signs of Byler at all!"? Like not to be a dick but I feel like other people must've said the same things about their fandoms at some point.

Honestly, no. It's a part of it, yes, but not the sole reason, by any means.

In fact, if volume 1 made it clear that Will had already moved on or portrayed Mike and El as being genuinely in love, I would've been able to swallow the bitter pill, even if I would've hated it.

I have plenty of complaints beyond that. And Byler getting together wouldn't have fixed them, even if it would've made it easier to tolerate.

How they handled El's story, and the horrible message it sends to victims of abuse.

Same with Kali. Honestly, what did they even need to bring her back for?

How Mike had no real arc, no real personality, especially in volume 2.

How they handled Will's story, and the horrible message that sent to queer people and how their romantic feelings compare to those of straight peers (crush vs love).

How Will ended up not being special in any way, just a "weak" kid who Vecna thought he could mold.

How Will's coming out was forced by Vecna using it to torture him, forcing him to do it to avoid being a liability to his loved ones. Seriously, Max almost died because Will was in the closet.

How Will's powers being "innate" suddenly stopped being important, instead he was just siphoning Vecna's powers somehow.

How they handled Rovickie, having them get together off-screen, make it seem like it was so we'd essentially get to see it play out with Will, only to have that not happen, and then the implication they break up off-screen. Seriously, it was like they did it for diversity brownie points.

How pathetic Vecna and the Mindflayer were after volume 1. Will overpowering him, while cool, made no sense. The Mindflayer getting killed by untrained people with small arms was just plain dumb, especially considering we now know Will was meant to confront it himself.

How Will only had a couple good moments in what was supposed to be his season. He had to go through his traditional sad, helpless gay boy shtick yet again to support the story.

How little we really learned about Henry or the nature of the Mindflayer. Henry just found a rock with shadow particles and willingly chose to support the Mindflayer. Or maybe he just is made to think he does it willingly. Who the hell knows?

The Upside Down just being a wormhole opened by Brenner instead of it having anything to do with Will or El. The Upside Down being frozen on November 6, 1983 had no real significance, and it makes no sense considering it would've had to be opened in 1979 in order for El to send Henry there.

No demo creatures in the Abyss, even though the demogorgons were the scariest part of the entire season. The Abyss was just a barren wasteland.

How utterly ridiculous the final battle was, with characters doing things off-screen because there's no way they could show it without it being laughable (getting on top of the cliffs, El jumping up the rocks, etc.)

El managing to either get to the tunnels or the gates while under the effects of the kryptonite when it previously was shown to completely debilitate her to the point she can't even move. It makes no sense.

The military just up and leaving with no comeuppance for Dr. Kay.

El saying Mike is the only one who ever understood her, when people like Max and Will are there.

Mike being utterly depressed in the ending, still stuck on El after 18 months, with hints that it continues into his future.

So, I don't know what they were trying to accomplish with this season, but it fell flat very quickly. Volume 1 was good, but volume 2 started to go downhill fast. I was forgiving of it, though, at the time, because I thought the finale would help it make sense.

This can’t be real because like… Eleven had to die for them to let their childhoods go?

Mind you, the “final” battle was happening mid junior year, they’re still kids… and will still be kids in senior year.. and will still be kids starting college… like that’s okay…

The lab rat (said affectionately, She’s so much more than that.) is who you’re saying represents childhood…

A CHILD who barely had a childhood to begin with… any fun things that did happen to/with Jane happened off screen or in the books because each season is literally a fucked up week in the life. (Except this season was 3 days…. Right…)

You don’t have to let your childhood go to grow up, those things are not mutually exclusive. The things that happen in your childhood literally make you who you are.

I’m supposed to believe they all drifted apart and what? Never played dnd again?

You built narrative expectations you never intended to honor, and you went so far as to end the show on an anti-conformity speech while delivering one of the most conformist resolutions imaginable. I hope you understand that people are not criticising your show because they are “haters” or because it failed to match some imagined personal headcanon, but because it systematically violated the narrative and emotional logic it itself established. What makes this especially damaging is that you leaned on your most engaged audience (particularly queer viewers) only to then treat that investment as something to be mocked or brushed aside. That is a breach of trust. And that means you failed.

You claim that “the message is that you don’t need romantic love” yet Lucas and Max are reduced almost exclusively to their relationship, and Mike and Eleven are pushed back into a dynamic that has already been framed as unhealthy and damaging.

You claim that “Will should not be reduced to his sexuality because what's important is that he accepts himself” yet his epilogue is structured entirely around his queerness. You chose to place him in a gay bar with a second-choice love interest while leaving the painting (aka the central emotional and narrative symbol of his arc) completely unresolved. He's the only kid (hell, character) who didn't get to experience being in a relationship.

What else? Mike (ONE OF YOUR MAIN CHARACTERS IN CASE YOU FORGOT) is folded back into the role of his father, unable to say “I love you” even when the supposed love of his life is ACTIVELY TRYING TO KILL HERSELF, reproducing the very affectively stunted masculinity you once seemed to critique and the trauma-bonded relationship you made a point of PROBLEMATISING through the Jancy storyline.

I’m not happy about the ending El got (to put it mildly,) but she could have potentially been the only straight woman to relate to good luck babe. Mike saw her as a super hero, as what she can do, as what was enforced on her. She got to develop a sense of fashion in s3 then was destroyed by a trauma hit in s4. She was a living weapon.

She could have grown up in a loveless marriage with Mike who could never muster up those three little words. She could have never developed personhood. Never realized who she was, what she liked.

She could have been nothing more than his wife.

There's a logical fallacy called 'argument from ignorance'. It basically involves saying that something is true because you can't prove it's false. I'm not saying this is an example of this, but I'm bringing it up so I can use a common example (this is actually a combination of several fallacies, but argument from ignorance is the main one).

If people see strange moving lights in the sky, they call it a UFO, and some people take it as evidence that aliens have visited us. But... by calling it a UFO, we've just said that it's UNIDENTIFIED. Therefore, we can't draw ANY definite conclusions about what it actually is. It could be aliens and there's no way to prove that it isn't. But it could just as easily be a drone or a weather balloon, or a dozen other things. See the problem?

I don't think believing in conformitygate is wrong or even baseless, but I think accepting it as the only possible explanation for the show's conclusion isn't logical.

Here's how I've been thinking about it:

There's a lot that's weird about vol 2 and the finale. That much is a fact. And conformitygate attempts to explain it all away by using some of the most UNexplainable things (the dial changing colors for example) as definitive proof. But there's no way to prove that conformitygate ISN'T true. By assuming that the Duffers and other people working on the show are IN on it, we're even able to dismiss them explicitly stating that there's no extra episode. This is how conspiracy theories work. There's always a way to say "well that's what they WOULD say if they were in on it".

Am I saying that conformitygate holds no water? No.

But I AM saying that there are other possible explanations.

Maybe Ross Duffer had a mental breakdown when his wife left and he dragged the plot of the show down with him.

Maybe Leigh Janiak WAS the mastermind behind Byler and took her good writing with her.

Maybe it really was the most elaborate queerbait in history and Byler really wasn't ever in the cards.

Maybe Netflix stepped in to stop the Duffers from following through on Byler.

Maybe the Duffers chickened out at the last minute.

Maybe the Duffers are greedy and chose to appeal to the general audience rather than risk alienating them.

Maybe the goal all along was for Byler to be ambiguous in the end

Or maybe this is all an elaborate plan involving a fakeout ending and a secret real finale.

Out of all these options, conformitygate is definitely the most compelling, but that doesn't make it the most plausible. The simple fact is that we don't know, and we may never know.

Am I telling you to stop believing conformitygate is possible? No. Am I telling you to stop speculating? Hell no! I love speculating and theorizing. It's what this community is built off of.

Think of it this way:

Each of the options I listed above are hypotheses. Any of them could be true, and maybe by gathering enough evidence we could prove or disprove some of them. But some can't be disproven. So... let's keep gathering evidence! Maybe conformitygate will hold up as a conspiracy involving a secret episode (and will be definitively proven when the episode releases), or maybe it won't and it'll just become an incredibly fascinating headcanon (which is how I personally view it). Either way, that process of gathering evidence is what this community thrives off of.

And a lot of people won't like this, but Byler as a concept started out the same way. It was conjecture. Over time, we gathered evidence, but there was never a point where it was 100% proven, despite how confident we were.

I guess, scientifically, you could almost classify Byler as a theory rather than a hypothesis. I'm gonna become Bill Nye for a minute here, but a theory differs from a hypothesis because it's verifyable and holds up under scrutiny. Theories are based on evidence that can be reproduced. You can make predictions using theories. That last part is why I'm hesitant to consider Byler a theory. We tried to predict where the show was going, but that obviously didn't work out (meaning there were variables we didn't account for - probably the Duffers' lack of balls).

The reason Byler was so strong was that no matter which way you approached it from, it held up. Common storytelling tropes, the characters' arcs, the cinematography, colors, blocking, music, actor statements, etc, ALL pointed toward Byler. Even now, when you scrutinize the show, even knowing the ending, all roads still lead to Byler.

Anyway, my point is that we shouldn't be treating conformitygate like the one true explanation for what happened with season 5. At least not the version of conformitygate that suggests that episode 9 is coming. Consider it an extremely entertaining possibility. Most importantly, don't get upset with people for not believing in it.

And even if conformitygate were to be definitively shut down, that shouldn't stop us from holding on to the concept.

It's not possible to travel faster than light, but we can still pretend it is. And by doing so, we can create amazing works of art in the form of media.

This is something fandom culture is built off of. Just because a ship isn't canon or even if it's explicitly shut down, we can still ship it. Because it's fun. The same is true for ideas like conformitygate.

I encourage people to continue to run with the idea of conformitygate, but to keep in mind that, like Byler, it may never be 100% confirmed to be true. Whether it's true or not isn't as important to me as the fanfic and fan art and the process of theorizing that will come from it.

the situation we found ourselves in rn is weird, to say the least, so the response is going to be weird too. people are complex beings with complex emotions, after all

i don't want to jump to any conclusions, i simply want to look at things as objectively as possible. i'm trying not to side with "duffers are really just that dumb and their writing is inexcusably terrible" OR with "they are clearly fucking with us and we're falling for it". both are not facts, they're opinions (valid), and we might never know which one is true

i myself do NOT believe that it's possible to make that many mistakes and leave that many plotholes when you have a whole team of people working on the show. i also cannot fathom why would they act like complete dumbasses in all those interviews, that's some crazy work if that's supposed to be actual pr and not a con. i didn't watch the documentary but from what i've seen on my dash, it also seems crazy considering all the context

i am going to stay on the bus even after it crashes and burns and explodes a hundred times, because that's the only plausible explanation for all of this. otherwise it's a statistic anomaly, as someone said, and a marketing disaster. both are possible, but highly improbable. however, in the end of the day we truly do not know what is happening

that being said, the way they behave is unforgivable. i don't care if it's a con or what, if they're just trying to throw us off to pull the biggest plot twist of a century, or if they really are cartoon villains, they shouldn't have said many things they said, and they really shouldn't have written the finale the way they did

the ones who suffered the most are the marginalized communities, those whom they once swore to protect. whatever the reason may be, they threw us under a bus after we trusted them, and they know it damn well. possible plot twist doesn't excuse it. finale just being a bad ending where the villain won doesn't excuse it. conformitygate doesn't excuse it. they just shouldn't have done it, period. certainly not in today's political climate. stories don't exist in some kind of vacuum, they affect the real world, and that for sure was one hell of an influential finale