Untitled

I'm disappointed that they didn't get to interact more, even in just a best friends way, but I also definitely don't think anything that happened or didn't happen negates the possibility. Like... yes, the coming out scene was clumsy and awkward with all those people there (and obviously the element of being outed). But volume two continued to focus on Will and specifically on his sexuality with his talk with Robin and said coming out scene. I mean, if they were going to leave it at an unsatisfying place it would have made more sense to skip that additional rooftop chat with Robin or change it so he told her specifically he was going to let Mike go.

Mike really didn't do much this volume, but he was shown worrying about Will a handful of times. It wasn't nearly as cold turkey as I'd been lead to believe, though obviously more time together would've been nice and narratively warranted.

I'll be as pissed as anyone if that's the end of the arc (especially since Mike stands up for the hug after Dustin, who has barely interacted with any of the boys since season two and certainly not with Will; Mike's always been the one closest to Will, however you want to read the relationship and unless they were going to give him something additional with Will they should have at least let him jump up at the same time as Jonathan). It just doesn't FEEL like the end of the arc. Like, even if the writers aren't going ahead with Byler they have to know that Mike+Will is one of the most popular dynamics and that a huge number of fans will feel hurt and betrayed if their relationship is dropped. If it was all about Will getting over "Tammy," why wouldn't they let him talk to Mike almost immediately and then use the rest of 5b reestablishing a new dynamic for them that is fully platonic? They could have worried about El together or supported Lucas or Max or talked about Holly or any number of things, but with fewer shared looks and arm brushing. It would have been disappointing for a lot of us, but if they've decided that Mike is just Will's Best Friend Forever and not the love of his life, why not let them act like it?

In any case, I feel like 5b did a lot of the heavy lifting with the plot which, I'm hoping, will leave more time in the finale for character beats. I've got my fingers crossed that we waste less time with Holly this time. I seem to be in the minority but Holly's bloated screentime is maybe my top complaint about the season. I assumed that her vanishing was going to be used to reflect on Will's, but that very much doesn't seem like the case and it's frustrating to see her (and Mrs. Wheeler and Derek, who I admittedly do like) getting so much screentime when other, established characters (namely Mike, but arguably everyone) aren't getting enough.

And maybe I'm delusional. I was 100% convinced of endgame Destiel and endgame Nandermo. I'm not 100% convinced of endgame Byler (though it still feels the most satisfying to me and certainly I want it very much), but I'm absolutely not at 0% either. I'm going to go into the finale guarded, but I personally think that there's still as decent a chance as there ever has been.

I mean... Bylers seem to be the only ones who actually, actively like Mike. At this point, what do they have to lose?

Honestly, the thing that upsets me the most about 5b right now is that it's been reiterated that Vecna took Will because he was a weak, malleable child which is NOT TRUE. If he just needed any child, why on earth would he have chased Will around the Upside Down for so long instead of bailing and finding someone weaker? They need to clear my boy's name.

This is not anything that people here haven't already done and done better but this is part of a longer Stranger Things powerpoint I made for my parents (pre-5a) with reminders, theories, and jokes since they aren't as obsessive as me. As a still-closeted queer person IRL, I tamped down my enthusiasm as much as possible and gave what I thought was an easy, unemotional primer on why Mike/Will > Mike/El without digging into any of the difficult stuff like heteronormativity or internalized homophobia or how important this kind of mainstream representation would be (both in general and for me personally).

When I was done, my dad said, "I don't know why you keep assuming Will is gay."

The Steve/Nancy/Jonathan love triangle:

Obviously a spinoff book is not going to definitively answer a question that the show has been dancing around for five seasons, but a Nancy book by necessity has to touch on Nancy's relationships. Based on what is in this book, it feels like Steve/Nancy is absolutely dead (which is not news to me), but Nancy/Jonathan and single Nancy both feel like plausible outcomes.

Nancy was absolutely weirded out by Steve’s six little nuggets speech in season four. It strained their friendship to the point that she is avoiding him. He tries to apologize for it, but Nancy isn’t quite ready to let him off the hook. She thinks, and I quote, “you told me you wanted me to pump out six of your kids so we could all travel the country packed into a van like a bunch of sardines.”

Karen is skeptical of Jonathan and Nancy’s relationship because, not knowing about the supernatural stuff, she misinterprets Nancy’s anxiety about the future and hesitation about college as a sign she’s going to stay in Hawkins for a boy rather than pursue her dream. She is convinced Jonathan is going to get stuck in Hawkins. She's actively cold to Jonathan for a while because of it. After she and Nancy talk and she better understands where Nancy is coming from, she changes her tune.

Nancy and Jonathan’s struggles in large part stem from the fact that she is continually looking to the future, to what’s next, and he is focused on the minutiae of the here and now.

Nancy is generally quite avoidant with the boys. She ends up solving the mystery with Robin because she just doesn't want to engage with the current awkwardness with Jonathan and Steve. Both boys give her opportunities to talk it out, but she defers.

Nancy and Jonathan have a fraught conversation about the future of their relationship at the very end of the book. She’s still worried about his lies, but decides to just focus on the here and now. For the last conversation, they essentially both concede and take the other's position. He assures her that they’ll find Vecna and she encourages him to live in the present, romantic moment. I like Nancy/Jonathan, so Nancy worrying about their foundation and focusing on their beginning being trauma concerns me a bit, but the overall scene seems basically good for them.

The Will/Mike/El Love Triangle

El does not actually appear in this book, and Mike and Will are only occasional presences, but surprisingly there's still come interesting stuff here. I'm probably definitely biased, but I feel like One Way or Another leans more towards Will/Mike than Mike/El.

There is seemingly no awkwardness between Mike and Will despite everything that happened in season four. They're minor characters and as the book is in Nancy's POV she doesn't dwell on their relationship in any way, but there are several scenes of them just hanging out and one instance apiece of one of them attempting to slip away from someone else's conversation to find the other (Will escapes a Nancy/Jonathan conversation to find Mike, and Mike tries to slip away from Karen reminiscing with a school friend to find Will, but is reprimanded for being rude).

At one point when Mike and Will are hanging out in the basement, Nancy assumes they’re making plans for Mike to sneak out to see El.

At another point Nancy teases Mike by saying "I'll get your girlfriend to explode your brain" and he rolls his eyes. This is the only time Mike acknowledges or references El in One Way or Another.

Mike is the one who offers that the Byers move in with them (without running it by his parents first). He suggests Will share his room but doesn’t consider any of the other arrangements: "I was just saying, why don't they stay with us? [...] Will can share my room, and you guys can— I don't know, Mom'll figure it out." Will is pleased at the prospect of “a sleepover" but everyone else gently rejects the plan, to Mike's annoyance (he mutters "I don't get it"). Later, Karen instructs Nancy to help Mike clear out enough space in the basement for "the Byers boys," having already talked to Joyce about it. There's no indication of why Will has been moved from Mike's room to the basement in the plans.

When Nancy and Jonathan have their fraught conversation about the future of their relationship, they're sitting on the roof of the radio station at sunset. This is the exact setting for Mike and El's conversation about the future of the party in 5x01, both in location and in time of day. In both cases, one could make an argument both that the conversations are pointing to a breakup or that they're potentially paving the way for a future together. I do also think there's a way to make an argument that it points to Nancy/Jonathan making a future together and Mike/El breaking up, but that may or may not stem from my own preferences.

Interestingly, that same scene also has a Mike/Will parallel. When Mike first suggests that the Byers family move in with the Wheelers (and specifically that Will stay in his room), Will says “I don’t mind sharing. It will be like a sleepover." In the final scene, Nancy breaks the news to Jonathan by saying “Sleepover at my house" (my emphasis in both cases).

General Nancy

Nancy calls her mother’s life “a horror show” in a fit of anger but later apologizes; Karen says that while there are things about her life that she wants to change, she doesn’t hate herself and reminds Nancy that “there’s always a way out.”

Nancy delays Emerson but she still ultimately wants to leave Hawkins.

Nancy is still working at the Hawkins Post. She keeps the job in large part because it’s a hub of information.

Despite mentally checking out for the last few months because of everything that happened, Nancy graduates top of the class (possibly because everyone else also mentally checked out for the last few months).

Barb and Eddie both weigh heavily on Nancy’s mind.

Robin and Nancy hang out on Robin's roof. It's a safe space for Nancy, who considers climbing out windows as a way to escape where she is rather than being a place to stay.

At one point Nancy gets annoyed at herself for wearing impractical shoes and wonders how she hasn't been more careful about footwear considering how often she has to unexpectedly run for her life.

Life in Hawkins

The reason the Byerses are staying with the Wheelers is because there’s almost no available housing in Hawkins. Despite the mass exodus, the opening rifts destroyed enough properties that lots of people are displaced and homeless. The Byers stayed in a temporary military shelter along with many other families before moving in with the Wheelers.

There is a new editor at the Hawkins Post who was working there before but who was not part of the boys’ club. Work there is frustrating because there is constant, direct military oversight and every single story they put out has to be approved.

Powell is still chief of police, but Hawkins PD is also under direct military supervision and can’t really make any of their own decisions. 

Misc.

Jonathan immediately clocks Robin and Vickie; Nancy can tell she’s missing something, but has no idea what it is.

Robin listens to a police scanner every night because she’s afraid she’ll hear the name of someone she loves on there.

Mike was ready to square up against a military officer for Nancy but immediately stood down when she told him to.

Robin's parents are over-invested in her love life, but cluelessly. They tease her and wiggle their eyebrows when a boy calls her.

Robin and Vickie don't seem to be officially dating yet, but there's an unmistakably flirtatious vibe between them. Nancy is confused about why Robin can persuade Vickie to do things when she, Nancy, failed.

It is a great time to be a Will Byers fan. It’s occasionally rough going in the Stranger Things general audience when Will is your favorite character. Or… it was before 5a released. He’s a chronically underappreciated and misunderstood character. Because he’s soft and gentle and—in the past couple seasons, not quite in the center of the action—a lot of people have stopped thinking much about him beyond ‘cries a lot’ and ‘has a bad haircut.’ But Will has been one of my favorites, if not my outright favorite, since season two (his standout season, and not coincidentally my favorite season). It takes immense strength to remain gentle and emotionally vulnerable after trauma and abuse. Will is a boy who was hunted and stalked by creatures from the Upside Down but who, when face to face with a small one, reassures it that he won’t hurt it, who immediately asks after his brother’s bandaged hand after waking up in the hospital after having been kidnapped and kept in an alternate dimension for a week. He’s a boy who lost his childhood and his innocence and his sense of safety at an extremely young age but who never complains about it or bothers anyone else with his discomfort. He’s a boy who tries to play relationship counselor to the love of his life because he wants him to be happy even if it’s with someone else. Will is amongst the sweetest fictional characters I’ve ever come across… and people hate him because he cried like three times? In emotionally traumatizing moments? Because he’s a closeted child with PTSD perpetually stuck in world-ending situations? He’s also subtly hilarious. It’s easy to miss how snarky Will is with the people he feels comfortable with because in the grand scheme of things he’s largely conflict-avoidant, but he shades particularly Jonathan and Mike regularly. It’s just very endearing to me, particularly as a person who insults exclusively the people I’m closest to.

So much of Will gets missed and disregarded I guess because people decided he was an incidental character and dismissed him? I don’t know. All I know is that when I was discussing my various predictions for the final season and took Will’s being gay as an established fact—because, you know, it is an established fact—my dad pushed back on me and acted like I’d just fully made that up. Like, what did you think that pizza van scene was about? Or the one with Jonathan in the freezer? If we’re missing massive parts of the character like that, perhaps it’s not a surprise that some of the more subtle elements aren’t being fully appreciated. If you weren’t paying attention to Will, sure, maybe his glow up was a surprise. If you were… well, this is just Will turned up to Eleven.

It was impossible that Stranger Things wasn’t going to loop back around to Will because so much of the plot and lore is directly tied to him. Most of the show’s biggest lingering questions tie directly to him. It was inevitable that Will was going to be a major driving force of the plot in this final go-around, but the show brought him back onto center stage not just for the supernatural goings-on but for some truly beautiful and empowering personal storylines as well. Right off the bat, Will is given a little more narrative space to just be. Yes, he’s immensely plot-relevant, but he also gets to… make a new friend. Stand up for himself. Rebel a little bit. Joke around with his mom. All the things he’s done kind of in the background or alongside overshadowing dramatic things. Like, you’re likely to overlook Will sassing Mike about being dumped when the bigger conversation is about whether or not overreliance on powers has given El brain damage or to laugh at Will shading Jonathan about not having any friends in the conversation that’s more about being “Zombie Boy.” Season five, despite ramping up, lets him have some of these moments more highlighted. In a scene with Will and Joyce, when Will apologizes for talking back but still teases her a little, my mom said, “Oh, Will’s cute this season.” Will is actually not any different in this season than he has been in previous ones… he’s just in focus and has gotten to be himself—not kidnapped, not possessed, not in the middle of an emotional breakdown—for the first time in a long time.

And that’s before you get to the really important stuff. I distinctly remember my reaction in the immediate aftermath of season four. I absolutely loved that a huge, blockbuster fantasy show had a gay lead character... but I was also disappointed and concerned that it was so easily overlooked. It’s obvious, but it’s obvious in the way that if you get it, you get it and if you don’t want to see it, you won’t. I wanted the show to bring it into the forefront, but I also didn't expect it. And then Stranger Things 5 really said, “if you think that Will is weak or that his being gay is unimportant or ignorable, you are wrong.” 

To be honest, my expectations were low. I hoped that it would come up more in the final season. I expected Will and Robin to have a couple of talks and for Will to come out to someone important beyond Jonathan, probably Joyce or Mike. I hoped Will would end up with Mike but actively tried to keep said hopes low because when has a mainstream show ever done anything like that? I'm used to mainstream queerness being blink-and-you-miss-it, especially in fantasy.

What we actually got was so much better than one or two little conversations that would let the writers cross Will being gay off their to-do list. One of the things I love most about Robin is that being a lesbian is a major part of her identity that encompasses her love interests but is not defined by them. That’s a part of the experience that straight people don’t really get. Like, yes. Robin liked Tammy and loves Vickie and Will loves Mike… but the experience doesn’t end there. When Robin and Will start bonding, there’s instant understanding between them. They share a core part of their identities and it lets them truly come out of their shells together in a way that perhaps they couldn’t even with their other closest friends. When they talk about their relationships, it’s not just a surface level ‘I am gay it is hard.’ It’s about expressing themselves through coded signals. It’s about self-acceptance. It’s about finding yourself again after forcing yourself to hide it for years. It’s about how being queer is first and foremost about your relationship with yourself. It's a really difficult experience to explain to people who don't intrinsically get it. It's a difficult experience to explain even internally. I first suspected I was queer when I was like fifteen, and I repressed it so aggressively that I didn't really consider it again for another decade. Now, at 32, I"m STILL trying to figure it out and untangle it all. So even in subtext, Will was deeply, deeply important to me. That friendship between Will and Robin is so incredibly important to me.

And then that midseason finale. It’s apparently now the highest rated Stranger Things episode overall, which, yeah. It’s fantastic. But more to the point, for Will, it’s powerful. It takes the sidelined gentle abused self-loathing gay character and lets him regain the internal sense of love and pride that was ripped from him so long ago. A lot of the conversations—including, admittedly, mine—around Will’s sexuality have been about Mike. And that’s fair, and I’m certain we’ll get a lot more of that in the second half of the season. But by jumping right to Mike, we’ve looked past what is ultimately, intrinsically, the most important part of it. It’s easy for Will to love Mike. It’s hard for Will to love Will. So when Robin shares her story and tells Will that everything he needs is already within himself? And Will listens to her? That’s amazing. The midseason finale and massive twist of the final season of the biggest show in the world depicts a repressed, depressed gay man rejecting his shame and accepting the entirety of himself to heroic effect, saving the lives of his loved ones in the process. Already great, right? It gets better. 

A lot of general homophobia, but also homophobia directly levied at Will, rests on the idea that queerness is something taboo and adult that children need to be protected from. When people, particularly queer people who relate to Will, suggested that he was deliberately written to be a gay character the response was largely: ‘actually he is a child and children are too young to know if they are gay but also it’s totally fine that El and Mike are making out in season one because children are allowed to know about being straight.’ It’s always ‘oh no how will we explain the dirty gays to the pure, innocent children’ and never ‘maybe telling children about queerness is something that will protect them.’ Will—and Robin (and Mike and Lucas)—are explicitly positioned as the protectors of children in season five. Will actively chooses to put himself in danger for the opportunity to save Holly, and specifically to save her from the same pain he went through. The children don’t need to be protected from gay people like Will. He is himself a child who was not protected and who in direct response is not able to protect them because he had not yet healed and accepted himself. Look at Will before and after he saw queer joy as a possibility! Look at Stranger Things, through Robin, reframing queer joy and pride not as something as antithetical to childhood innocence but as something that brings you closer to it. Robin doesn’t know anything about Will’s relationship to Mike. But she knows that if Will doesn’t love and accept himself, whether or not Mike does ultimately won’t matter. 

Because the thing is, being accepted by his family and friends is not and cannot be Will’s Stranger Things arc. A lot of the fanbase, inexplicably, hates Will. Will hates Will. But in-universe? Will is the most beloved character in Stranger Things. The show only exists because of how completely and deeply his friends and family love him. If they hadn’t, Will would have been just like Barb or Benny or any of the other people who died in season one because of Hawkins Lab and the Upside Down. Saving Will has always been the plot of Stranger Things. No, his friends and family are not going to reject him. The only one who might have is Will himself, so to give him a moment to reject all the horrible things he’s heard about himself from Lonnie or from James and Troy or any of the other countless unnamed bullies is incredible. He had to let go of all the shame and guilt and internalized homophobia and fear before he could think of doing anything else. And it had to come from inside, because everyone else has already told him how loved he is. Jonathan told him he loves him and nothing could ever change that. Joyce told him she trusts him and loves him and will always watch out for him. Mike told him that he’s magic and that there’s no one else like him and that everything is better when they’re a team. And Will heard all those things, but until Robin prompted him, he didn’t believe them because it did not fit with his internal worldview that he will never be loved and doesn’t deserve to.

And do you know how we know that he can believe those things now? Because Vecna told him the opposite. Vecna told Will to his face all the things that the world (and the fanbase) have been telling him: you’re weak, you’re broken, and people like you don’t belong in this world. And if you don’t believe that that last bit was related to Will’s sexuality, both the flashbacks were to Will crying over Mike. Not long previously, Will would have believed that. He would have believed that the fact that he was taken and cried about it made him weak. He would have believed that all the pain he felt watching Mike with El meant he didn’t deserve love. But now? 

Will has never been weak or whiny. And, unlike what Vecna said, he did not break easily or even at all. If Vecna just needed someone weak, why’d he chase Will for a week in the Upside Down instead of just grabbing someone else? If Will broke, why is he out here cracking demogorgons in half? Why does Vecna need so many more kids now? Also… you know what happened to the other William who was bullied by his father and who was possessed by the Mind Flayer? He bullied other kids, did the Mind Flayer’s bidding immediately, and immediately died the one time he stood up to it. Breaking abusive patterns is way harder than maintaining them! Will was always one of the most emotionally strong characters. He just finally realized it and through becoming empowered became, well, literally empowered. 

And that’s why Mike was smiling at him like that. It’s not just that he’s glad he didn’t die (Joyce is presumably also glad she did not die, and her expression is very different). It’s not even that he’s attracted to people with powers (although, to be fair, it sort of seems like he is). It’s because, when he told Will a few scenes previously, Will didn’t believe in his own power. But now he does. That’s Mike seeing Will see himself the way Mike sees him: a sorcerer.