a small elaboration on my previous hot take:
will is constantly infantilized and treated like he can do no wrong, when he very clearly does mess up. multiple times. he’s avoidant, he bottles things up, and then he blows up. and that’s fine. it’s realistic. what’s annoying is how fandom keeps trying to wash that away like it never happened, because will has to be morally spotless at all times. let him be flawed. let him be difficult. pretending he isn’t actually makes him less likable, not more.
on top of that, they give will qualities he explicitly does not have — emotional omniscience, perfect communication, moral superiority — and a lot of the time those traits are just lifted from other characters. at that point why even have the rest of the cast. he isn’t god. he’s a traumatized teenage boy who struggles to say what he wants out loud. that’s the whole point.
mike, meanwhile, gets treated like a faceless ragdoll in the ship. he stops being a person and starts being a prize. his autonomy is completely gone. canon mike has always chosen el. this is the same kid who was basically ready to run away and elope at sixteen. that is not ted wheeler behavior and it definitely is not repressed internalized homophobia. on top of that, he is consistently accepting of will, so the idea that he’d secretly hate himself over it just doesn’t make sense.
if you ship byler, that’s fine. genuinely. headcanon it, au it, have fun. but it is not canon, and trying to push it as if it is by flattening every character around it is exhausting. not everything in this show exists for byler. mike is allowed to have flaws. he’s allowed to fuck up. he’s allowed to grow. he is not there to make will feel better, and he does not owe anyone his feelings. will liking him does not mean mike has to like him back. that’s not how attraction works. (i have way more posts on mike here)
and then there’s el. people say they love her, but they really just love the idea of her. they strip her autonomy constantly and belittle her at every turn. you’re telling me she’d just step aside from a multi-year relationship because her pseudo brother likes her boyfriend? a boyfriend who doesn’t even like him back? no. she’s not a mary sue whose job is to lie down and accept emotional erasure.
having a boyfriend does not make el dependent. she’s had three separate, independent arcs. she’s self-sufficient. wanting love and choosing love does not undermine any of that. she is not a toddler and people need to stop treating her like one.
and the “jane” thing drives me insane. el is the name she chose. it’s the life she built. it’s the identity that first gave her autonomy. insisting on calling her jane while ignoring that context feels like erasing her selfhood. she is capable of processing emotions. she understands the different kinds of love she experiences, even if she wasn’t always great at verbalizing it.
this is all off the top of my head, but yeah. that’s my main problem.
