#wirepost

Mike Wheeler would have to stop the world just to stop the feeling while Will Byers keeps asking himself if it was casual

The month between volume 1 and volume 2 was the best and most hopeful month of my life and then the week between volume 2 and volume 3 was like 15 9/11s

Every time I remember that the painting lie went fully unaddressed and that they used an abused and traumatized gay child's feelings to prop up a failing heterosexual couple and that Stranger Things might be the only piece of media in existence to go to great lengths to painstakingly set up the Cyrano trope but to not end up paying it off and give Cyrano his destined happy ending I start seeing red and have to gnaw on the hem of my shirt to calm down again

I cannot fucking believe Mike intentionally chose a record from Gay: The Band With A Gay Name featuring Gay Man and Gay Songs and then Robin's suggestion for a "replacement" record was Another Gay Band. And I still have the audacity to have Byler doubt

Sorry but unless Mike had broken the fourth wall and said to the camera "I am a heterosexual" I would never have believed that he's straight. And even then I think I still would've read it as him being a closet case and overcompensating like crazy

I cannot believe the wasted potential of having a villain whose entire MO is going into your mind and uncovering your deepest and most shameful secrets and throwing them in front of you as a way to psychologically torture you and NOT using it to torment a character who has been set up to have internalized homophobia and for the one character you do actually do something kind of like this with to never have it shown on camera. What a waste of a villain

And if I said that half of the narrative problems with the finale could have been solved if they'd grown some balls and made Byler canon.....