BYLER × Love, Simon Parallels
We all saw the rambly, messy, insecureness of the coming out scene, so let's talk about it. This was quite literally the biggest piece of proof for me that it's not over yet because Will's whole monologue is so clearly a parallel to Greg Berlanti's 2018 film Love, Simon, based on the book Simon Vs. The Homosapiens Agenda by Becky Albertali, and the parallels don't stop there. And honestly, I'm surprised more of us aren't talking about this because it was literally historic in its influence on centering a gay main character in a coming of age story.
Spoilers ahead for Love, Simon and it's big reveals, so be warned.
The premise of Love, Simon is that our main character Simon Spier is gay, but no one in his life knows. When another kid at his high school reveals he is gay through the school's anonymous website CreekSecrets, Simon begins emailing him, while neither of them know the other's real identity.
The main plotline hinges on blackmail, as a fellow student Martin Addison has a crush on Simon's friend Abby and uses Simon's private emails between himself and Blue (the name of the anonymous gay kid's alias) as a means to manipulate Simon into getting Martin closer to Abby under the threat of leaking his emails and outing Simon.
The love storyline develops through an anonymous perspective. We see Simon and Blue exchanging emails, all the while Simon is attempting to figure out Blue's identity.
So where does this fit into Byler and Will's coming out? There are quite a few narrative parallels to pull from here so let's start with our most obvious: Will's coming out scene
In Love, Simon, Simon's opening monologue follows the same narrative pattern as Will's speech, and that's how I clocked it immediately. The monologue is as follows:
I'm just like you. For the most part my life is totally normal. My dad was the annoyingly handsome quarterback who married the hot valedictorian. And no, they didn't peak in high school. I have a sister I actually like, not that I'd ever tell her that. And last year, and 200 episodes of Chopped ago, she decided she wanted to be a chef, which means we're pretty much all her test subjects now. And then there's my friends. Two of them I've known since pretty much the beginning of time. Or at least kindergarten. One of them I just met a few months ago, but it feels like I've known her forever. We do everything friends do. We drink way too much iced coffee, watch bad '90s movies and hang out at Waffle House dreaming of college and gorging on carbs. So, like I said, I'm just like you. I have a totally perfectly normal life. Except I have one huge-ass secret.
I'm sure you can already see the similarities, but this opening services as a means of storytelling, of introducing us to Simon as the main character of this story, and illustrating that while he's gay, he is still a normal teenager who enjoys normal teenage things.
Will's monologue establishes much of the same, as he says:
I haven't told any of you this because...because I don't want you to see me differently. But the truth is...the truth is I am. I am different. I just...I just pretended like I wasn't because...because I didn't want to be. I wanted to be like everyone else. I wanted to be like my friends and...And I am like you. I'm like you in...in almost every way. We...we like playing D&D late into the night. And we like that old-person smell in Mike's basement. And we...we like biking to Melvald's for malted milkshakes. And we like getting lost in the woods, and getting lost in Family Video and arguing about what to rent and settling on Holy Grail for the millionth time. And...and we lime Milk Duds in our popcorn with extra butter. And we like drinking Coke with Pop Rocks. And we like bike races and trading comics and NASA and Steve Martin and Lucky Charms and...Literally all the same things. I just...I just...I...I...I just...I...I--I...I don't like girls.
When we look at Will's monologue, I think it plays on a similar narrative thread not only so that we can see his queerness as important and integral to who he is and in establishing him as a main character with a main storyline, but also to emphasize during a time period like the 80s where rumors and misinformation about homosexuality were rampant that Will is still the person they all know and love. I think the writers took this monologue as inspiration because of the sentiment that despite what society had to say about queer people at the time, it didn't change who Will was at his core. And so yes, the coming out felt targeted toward straight people, but I think that was very intentional as a choice to not only directly address the general audience, but likely because Will knew that people in the room might not understand with the level of nuance that someone else like him, like Robin, would. It feels very much like all of his own thoughts/fears/projections about how people might see him directed outwards.
I also want to point out Simon and Will's costuming here. I don't think we've ever seen Will in a hoodie before this scene, and yet, this is canonically a staple of Simon's wardrobe in the movie, further linking these characters together. Even Will's hair is swept similarly for this scene.
While we're still talking about the coming out scene, let's talk about another very overt parallel, and that is Martin Addison and Vecna.
In Love, Simon, Martin acts as the looming threat of the story, threatening to use Simon's secret against him to further his own agenda, and who else uses emotional blackmail to get what he wants? Vecna. That's right, Vecna is...this guy
And if we're going to draw a stronger parallel, we can do so by observing the ways in which this blackmail plays out in the stories of both Simon and Will.
Vecna tells Will that he is going to use him as his spy one last time as a means of getting at Will's friends and family to thwart their plans. Similarly, Martin convinces Simon to meddle in the lives of his friends, affecting their relationships with him and each other in order to preserve his own secret. Both Vecna and Martin are capitalizing on Will and Simon's greatest insecurity: being ostracized and rejected by the people they love for being gay.
However, we do see these forms of emotional blackmail play out somewhat differently in Love, Simon and Stranger Things.
In Love, Simon, Martin ends up being humiliated when he decides to prematurely confess his feelings for Simon's friend Abby publicly at a school football game. This blows up on CreekSecrets, and due to the backlash and embarrassment, and the fact that he was angry at Simon for giving him bad advice and refusing to manipulate his friends anymore, he leaks Simon and Blue's emails to CreekSecrets to divert the attention away from himself. Simon is now forced to confront the lies he has told his friends as well as the backlash of being outed. Simon is forced out of the closet because of an enacting force, not getting to decide on his own terms. It also reveals his identity to Blue, and due to the pressure of the scandal, prompts Blue to delete his email account and stop talking to Simon
We also know that prior to Will's coming out scene, Will reveals to Joyce that Vecna showed him things, things that came from himself, to torture Will and threaten his friends. Will may have wanted to follow Robin's advice to gain the confidence to tell someone about his identity, but instead of coming out to his mom or Jonathan or even just the party, he feels a pressure to speed up the process, ripping the band-aid off in one clean go so that it's not a part of him that can be weaponized against him to hurt his friends. While Will's choice is a more proactive one than Simon's, he's still being enacted on by and outside force and ultimately forced out of the closet to everyone all at once, just like Simon.
Now that we have drawn these more overt parallels, I want to get into some of the other key players that draw this narrative and the narrative of Love, Simon together.
First, let's talk about Simon's friend group. His three best friends are Nick, Leah, and Abby. While he's known Nick and Leah forever, Abby is a newer friend who recently transferred to Creekwood. We also see her become the first one that Simon actually comes out to, by choice, before his information is blasted online for everyone to see. Abby, whilst seemingly straight (in the movie although not canonically in Becky Albertali's books; she is bisexual), acts as a guide and confidant for Simon as he becomes more confident in his own sexuality, even pointing hot guys that they can now talk about together.
Who does this remind us of in Stranger Things? Robin. Robin and Will are newly friends and Will knows he is able to trust Robin because she is gay, just like he is. Will views Robin as a mentor to help guide him towards his own comfort within his sexuality: looking for signals, following the steps of self-acceptance and confiding in someone, and eventually attempting to move on from a love he believes is unrequited in order to eventually find someone else like him to be his "Vickie."
But aside from the mentor parallels, let's talk about how Mike fits into all of this. I actually want to compare Mike to two of the core characters in Love, Simon.
The first, and most obvious of these comparisons is Blue, Simon's love interest. Throughout the movie, much like Will, Simon is searching for signals, clues about Blue's identity. Using references from his email exchanges with Blue, he begins assigning identities to the anonymous alias, each new clue pointing him toward a different potential love interest.
The first person Simon suspects is Bram Greenfeld, a fellow player on Nick's soccer team and an acquaintance/friend whom sits with them at their lunch table often. Simon is clued in by one of the hints from their emails, Blue's love for Halloween oreos, when Bram makes a similar comment about the Halloween ones being the best.
While Simon is at first convinced Bram is Blue, given the clue and their shared banter at Bram's Halloween party, he ends up catching Bram making out with a girl, and so he thinks he has completely misread things and dismisses Bram as an option, then later ascribing Blue's identity to two other boys from his school.
At the end of the movie, it is revealed that Blue was actually Bram the whole time, but because of the misdirection with Bram's drunken makeout session with a girl, Simon doesn't clock it.
Just like Simon, Will believes that he's misreading signals from Mike after having playfully shoved him and not getting a touch in return. Will also knows that Mike has been dating El, and therefore is thrown off the scent of Mike being interested in boys. Just like Simon, Will mislabels Mike as his "Tammy," and continues to search for "Vickie" in other people, not knowing that the real Vickie has been in front of him the whole time.
But Mike does not just represent Blue in Love, Simon. He also represents Leah, Simon's closest childhood best friend who is secretly in love with him.
Simon and Leah are shown to have a closer bond than the rest of the friend group, as Leah sleeps over the night of the Halloween party and we are clued into the fact that she has been sleeping over for years. They have a conversation where Leah identifies how she feels different from other people, and Simon says that he sometimes feels that way too. She then calls herself unlucky because she wishes she were the type of person who could get drunk and just make out with someone.
Leah: I guess I'm just unlucky
Leah: Because I'm not a casual person
Simon: What kind of person are you?
Leah: I think I'm the kind of person who is destined to care so much about one person it nearly kills me
Leah leaves this conversation believing that Simon might be in love with her, too, but Simon actually has no idea that Leah has had feelings for him this whole time.
Instead, Simon tries to push Leah towards their other friend, Nick. Nick and Abby are clearly interested in one another, but because Simon is helping Martin try to get together with Abby so that he is not outed, he attempts to set Nick up with Leah. During this conversation, Simon believes that Leah is talking about Nick and that she is in love with him, so he sets the stage for them to go on a date.
Though Leah had believed because Simon was so picky with girls that he might have been in love with her back, this idea is shattered once he attempts to set her up with Nick.
This should start sounding familiar, right? While Leah and Simon are obviously unrequited because Simon is gay, in Stranger Things, they tweak this parallel of comparing Leah and Mike by also paralleling his storyline to Blue. Mike is the childhood best friend secretly in love with Will, but Will misinterprets a heart-to-heart he has with Mike in Lenora to be about Mike wanting to fix his relationship with El, not to be about the fact that he is not actually in love with her. So, Will uses his own feelings to repair Mike's relationship with El, but Mike views this as a rejection of his own feelings for Will since Will is trying to set him back up with El.
The last parallel I want to draw here is between Simon's emails and Mike's letters. When Simon is first messaging Blue, he signs his emails as "Jacques" for "Jacques a dit" or "Simon Says" in French as his own alias. He is careful not to reveal the intensity of his feelings until the night of Halloween when Simon gets home drunk and responds to Blue's email by sending it "Love, Jacques." He panics, realizing what he said, but Blue reassures him in the next message by returning with the signoff, "Love, Blue."
This draws a pretty seamless parallel to Mike's letters to El in which he signs all of them "From Mike," letting us know that he can't even write "Love" to his girlfriend of years. Now, this is getting into speculative territory as we have never seen proof of Mike having written anything to Will; however, this parallel would be the perfect setup for lettergate, in which it is revealed that Mike has written unsent letters to Will in which he signs them Love, Mike.
While Will's coming out scene was not everyone's favorite, I think the narrative paralleling here is intentional to give us clues as to how the rest of the story might play out.
And that concludes my analysis
