THERE IS NO WAY TO DESCRIBE THIS MESS

Every day when I think about the ending, I remember the story of the pilot with severe depression whose condition, by mistake, wasn't diagnosed. He got behind the controls of a plane, locked the cockpit door during the flight, and deliberately crashed a plane full of passengers into a mountain, taking a huge number of lives with him simply because he himself saw no point in living.

This book talking about how Finn wanted Mike to know what Will was talking about in this scene and not be so clueless. While the Duffer Brothers said that they were making sure the actors were satisfied with their characters’ endings since they had been ‘living’ as them for a decade. 🤣 and know them better than anyone

(b) wtf does finn know about life in the 80s? This repeated claim from cishets that no one was out then, that no one talked about it, that queer people just had to suffer in silence or move to NYC or SF is absolutely ignorant and offensive. WE TALKED ABOUT IT. FFS. (And then Will's coming out scene is a town hall meeting where everyone is cool with it? Kind of contradicts the argument, bub.)

wheezingwheeler deleted their ENTIRE ao3 account 😭😭😭

I went to look them up to see if super soaker was still up and this was all that came up IM DYING

basically long ramble short is that i searched for evidence if it was really confirmed that wheezy used ai and i found nothing..it seems to be misinformation.

obviously it’s heartbreaking when authors use ai and we don’t know if she did or not…but it’s best to assume she didn’t use ai, unless there is ACTUAL proof (“ai detection software” is scientifically proven to be useless lol)

Claude is literally baked into the html of their work. It was detected with a non-ai siteskin. It’s unclear what they used the ai for (generation, spell check, editing, etc) but it is 100% proven that they copied and pasted prompts directly from claude into ao3

I think what people sometimes forget is that you have to see byler in the context of Will being canonically gay and in love with Mike. To me that is why I personally am so set on them being canon and Mike being queer.

Because with a whole lot of other very popular gay ships they're still both canonically straight or at least never actually confirmed to be gay or queer. So with those ships it's like: yes, all of these scenes that have tension could mean something but they might also mean nothing because nothing is confirmed, nothing is there to outright tell you that this ship might be realistically possible.

But byler is different. Because byler is already halfway confirmed. Byler is as close to canon as you can get a ship before actually making it fully canon. Will is not only canonically confirmed to be gay but he is also canonically confirmed to be in love with Mike. It's not implied, it's not secretly hinted at, it is confirmed as total fact!! No plausible deniability or anything, no, just full fact!!!

And that is something people have to consider when discussing whether byler was supposed to happen and intended or not. Because why would they do this? Why would they make Will gay and in love with Mike? There are of course also stories about queer rejection. A lot of them. We all know the gay best friend character who is in love with the straight main character and eventually gets rejected. But the thing about byler is that that is not how they're being shown.

Byler has romantic scenes, they have parallels to other romantic couples, queercoding of Mike and incredible amounts of scenes that show Mike in awe with Will, looking at his lips, making heart eyes, flirting with him, behaving differently/softer around Will than he does with other people, Mike doing everything he can to make Will feel better when he hurt him and Mike feeling bad and guilty only when Will confronts him about his bad behavior and Mike not actually being in love with his girlfriend and always prioritising Will over his girlfriend. We have all of that.

And yes, you could say that this is platonic. There are shows out there where there are two best friends and they do all of this and it's intended to be platonic and it stays platonic even when people ship them.

But Will is canonically gay and in love with Mike. Like even if Will was only gay you could say that this could all be platonic and never intended. But Will is ALSO in love with Mike. And why would they do that? Why do you set up a character to be in love with his best friend if you don't actually make them canon? And why do you make the person that your character is in love with show all these signs of reciprocating that love? Why do you do that and then not make it happen?

That is what doesn't make sense. A character being in love with another but the other being shown to not reciprocate their feelings so the character gets rejected is one thing. Two characters having chemistry but never being confirmed to be actually interested in each other is also one thing. One character being in love with another and them having actual chemistry and the other character being shown to have interest in the first character as well. That is something else. That is usually the setup of a romance.

Queer shipping exists everywhere, characters often will have chemistry and they'll be shipped with each other. And to some degree a ship like that not actually happening is reasonable and understandable and something fans should have known was likely to happen even though they have the chemistry for a romance.

But byler does not fall into that category. Because Will is in love with Mike. And they have chemistry. And Mike is shown in uncountable amounts to be interested in Will too. And Will's story is not actually about rejection. It's not set up that way. Will's story should reasonably be about getting the love he craves and deserves.

That's why byler not being canon is so upsetting, that's why fans keep complaining about it. That's why byler is Not like a lot of other gay ships that never happened where fans them got mad about it not happening, even though it was never likely to happen.

I don't think calling byler fans unreasonable, for being upset that byler didn't happen, is fair. Because the show was set up to have them get together. Canonically. Will being confirmed queer and in love with Mike is part of setting that up. Mike being queer coded and shown to be interested in Will romantically is another part of setting that up. But people for some reason view byler as one of those ships where both of them are straight but have a lot of chemistry. Byler is not that. Byler is literally as close to canon as you could possibly be before simply becoming fully canon.

He's told this by Robin, who was put into the position of gay mentor, who specifically mentions things like touches and shared looks, things that Bylers have been pointing out Mike has been doing for years with Will. And he continues to do this after this conversation, particularly in the field scene where we see Mike walk in such a way that he brushes up against Will, prompting Will to glance over at him.

That they would do all this simply to trick Will, who had already supposedly given up on Mike a year and a half prior, into thinking he has a chance is disgusting. Even more vile is that there's no way they didn't know how Byler fans would see this development, especially when it culminated in a volume 1 finale where Mike is staring over at Will in awe after Will's powers unlock in part due to memories of Mike.

So, the Duffers made Mike Will's source of strength while showing Mike demonstrating the signals Robin talks about, but then turn it around in volume 2 and turn it all into a weakness Will has that Vecna is able to exploit, a weakness he can only overcome by disregarding his feelings as a mere crush.

Also, ST wasn't a documentary. Realism was hardly a concern in 99% of the rest of the show.