I don't know if there's a term for this, but there should be. It's the condescending straight view of what it must be like to be gay. I liken it a bit to how white people would look down on other races as needing to be saved or civilized. It's a form of pity, but they see it as magnanimity. If only the poor gay people could give up their harmful feelings, they'd be so much better off.
The Duffers clearly share this view. The real hurtful thing is that there's many LGBTs who support it because it "reflects their struggle." It just tells me that many have internalized this idea as being a sort of rite of passage that every gay person has to go through, as if it's the only possible outcome. That any "love" you feel for someone who isn't obviously gay (despite Will getting his advice from someone dating a girl who wasn't obviously gay) is a hinderance, a pain, not something to be celebrated. Nope, you can't be happy, so you better cast it off because it's keeping you from loving yourself. And it results in this being almost exclusively the story we get for LGBT characters in popular media unless it's a side character or an IP targeted at the LGBT audience.
The biggest problem in this case, though, is that it spanned the entire run of the series. Will's love for Mike slowly built up over the course of their friendship rather than being some hallway crush. He always derived strength from having Mike in his life, and that was shown to be a good thing, until suddenly it wasn't. They show him becoming empowered, in part, due to remembering meeting Mike and their developing friendship. This suggests that Will feeling like he had value because of Mike was fine when they were just friends, just as he drew value from the love of his mom and brother, but it became a problem when Will fell for him. They made it a problem Will created for himself because, despite Will's biggest issue being that he feared Mike was leaving their friendship behind, suddenly Will couldn't love himself unless Mike loved him first. At least, that's what the intent seems to be by them having Robin tell him about Tammy.
Will spent 5 seasons going through this slow burn with no payoff. It's not even a slow burn rejection, as Will never even explicitly confesses his feelings to Mike, nor does Mike ever clearly acknowledge them, let alone respond to them. It's left as this unspoken secret, something they silently promised each other they'd never bring up again, as if it were shameful. It's such a harmful thing, too, as it suggests that actually talking about it would hurt their friendship.
In reality, though, I guess they feel that if Will was more clear about it, not only would mouthbreather fans get angry, but it would force a response from Mike. Since Mike feeling the same way was "never in the cards," it means that he'd be made to reject Will on screen, hitting into his intended image as an awesome friend who accepts Will for who he is. Of course, this means we were left with the horrid "friends? no thanks....best friends!" line (a scene which wasn't originally in the script) and telling Will that he should go off and find happiness elsewhere with his own kind as a way of showing he isn't interested.
I tire of this "straight guy unwittingly leads on gay guy but is totally cool and accepting about it" story. It only serves to make the straight people look good, while minimizing the story of the gay character, who can only be "ah, well, that's ok as long as we're still friends." But that's what we get when performative progressives write stories. It's not like they actually believe that LGBT characters and their feelings are equal to their own.
