Friends...Best Friends

I drew like every character in Stranger Things as their animal version💙

I’ll forever stand by the fact he’s socially unintelligent, not emotionally unintelligent

He doesn’t pick on social cues that seem obvious to others, but when someone is openly needing comfort from him, he’s immediately vulnerable and really good at comforting people. He knows how to use a soft tone, he’s not afraid to express that he sometimes feels scared or insecure too if it helps that person feel less alone, he knows how to reassure them. Like his emotional intelligence is above that of your average teen boy.

Even his communication skills are not as bad as he’s bashed for. After he and Els fight in s4 he makes a genuine attempt to talk to her and is actually doing pretty good in this conversation before his insecurities are brought up and he gets defensive and the whole thing crumbles, and he clearly apologised to Will in s4 too and took accountability, and generally if he feels there’s an issue he won’t leave it unspoken

Emotional intelligence isn’t being able to pick up on people being upset when they don’t directly tell you, it isn’t being able to notice if someone has a crush on you, it isn’t being able to read any tone- it’s mostly about having empathy and care for others and knowing how to vulnerable and sensitive !!

so WHY am I still regularly seeing people say "a true mike wheeler fan hates mike wheeler" bc... no... no, i don't think a "true mike wheeler fan" does...

- Will having a crush on him and him not realising it (like when a script mentioned his love for Mike hurt— like no shit it’s queer love in the 80s and it was made very apparent that he’d been hurting from his love, it’s literally a major plot point in s4, for one why were people acting like this was a grand shocking reveal😭 and secondly how tf is that Mikes fault when he didn’t even know, it’s society’s fault for creating shame around those feelings for Will since he was very young. Mike canonically makes Will feel like he’s not a mistake, and was the one who never treated him like he was broken from his trauma when his other friends did)

- The "my life started the day I met you in the woods" (to explain because this has been irritating me since 2022, no it wasn't the day Will went missing it was the day after, and he obviously wasn’t saying that Will being missing made him happy he’s saying meeting El did, at most it was a weird dialogue option for him to say his life started when a bunch of traumatic stuff for everyone including him was starting to go down but you can have happy positive moments in traumatic times, and that’d still just be odd writing not a moral failing of Mike. And also people use that one shot of Will looking sad in this scene, and say he was sad bc of Mike, when he literally made that expression BEFORE Mike said this btw, watch the scene and see 😭😭 it was a reaction to El being in danger, not anything Mike said. The entire thing of Will apparently being hurt by Mike saying this is completely fanon not an actual plot point in the show.)

- The writers forgetting Wills birthday (blaming him for sloppy continuity and writing. They literally made mistakes with Wills birthday between season 1-2 as well, his funeral said it was in August. In-universe, it was not his birthday that day, Mike or any other character forgetting is not an actual plot point. It’s simply a writing mistake. Blaming Mike for this is the same is saying that in-universe Holly just woke up one day like 5 years older out of nowhere and wondering why no characters were confused by this, when her sudden age up is just poor continuity. It’s a fictional universe that has mistakes, blaming fictional characters for writing errors makes no sense)

- Him not saying ‘I love you to El in her sacrifice scene (don’t get me wrong this was a bad writing decision but people mistake why it was bad. It wasn’t bad because it was a moral failing of Mike - it was not. The actual reasoning for him not saying it was because he was distressed, and from the perspective of him being a human with emotions and a 16 year old moreover, it makes sense a teenager in that situation, one of his worst fears and something he has past trauma linked to coming true, would feel too upset or overwhelmed to respond. The reason it was bad was because narratively, from a story perspective, it’s dogshit to make it a big storyline that a character can’t say he loves his partner, and then not properly resolve that storyline at the end, and sometimes writers should set aside realism to make way for narratively sound moments. That’s why that part sucks and is frustrating. Not bc Mike is an awful evil malicious selfish person)

- ‘He didn’t touch Will after he came out” (the reason being is that this is a made up idea and not true. The implication people make with this statement is that because of the AIDs crisis Mike felt Will was too ‘dirty’ to touch, which is the most batshit thing I’ve ever heard, it sounds like something a toxic homophobic Mileven stan would make up for their ass fanfiction. It’s blatantly not true as Mike is never shown to be uncomfortable with his sexuality he is fully supportive and they put in a scene emphasising he is supportive and apologising for not realising sooner, literally shares a water bottle with him which was a huge no no for anyone actually scared of AIDs since people believed it could be transmitted that way back then, and also there are scenes of him putting his hand on Wills shoulder, they’re just awkwardly cropped. They simply didn’t have many scenes together in the finale bc they decided to pair Will with Joyce, which was a poor writing choice, not a moral failure of Mike. Plus the weird direction where he wasn’t putting his hands on Will started before he came out, it’s just bad directing and almost certainly them trying to minimise these twos usual bond, not to make it a plot point that Mike is disgusted by Will, but to try and downplay the queerbait since by now they would’ve knowing they weren’t doing Byler. Again, blaming bad writing choices, and this time bad directing, on Mike the fictional character who has no control over this. And yet again, also just lying because he DOES touch and make contact with Will after he comes out, they literally share saliva with each other omg if I knock on these people’s heads it would echo.)

- People believing he’s queer, and then being angry he didn’t come out in the 80s with a conservative family, and acting like that makes him a horrible person (I’m not even gonna put a long explanation here, just what, I hope you have no closeted friends)

There’s probably more but only these come to mind rn. Also crazy that everything listed here are some of the major reasons for him getting so much hate and they are straight up not his fault, and or people making up plot points in their head to get angry at him for 😭

There was no big fight between them. Mike has never hurt Will on purpose and Will knows that. I’m sorry that someone hurt you, but you are NOT Will. Your toxic crush was NOT Mike. That’s some weird, made up agenda that you’re pushing.

Like that is a figment of his imagination that he uses to comfort himself when he’s scared or upset. He doesn’t even think of *being* Mike the Brave, he specifically said he imagines Mike the Brave just being *at his side* and that helps him keep going, like he’s a sort of protector and comforting figure to him, who guides him, similar to the way he usually does that for othesr.

And then in fanon people made Mike the Brave exist to hate him, insult him, degrade him, compete with him, take his boyfriend etc etc

I also don’t like it when people write Will fake dating a person to force Mike to come out or have the party get irritated when Mike doesn’t come out at THEIR pace. it’s not funny, it never will be.

The byler community is really weird and homophobic to closeted people. Ever since the s5 ending dropped, I’ve felt unsafe as a closeted queer teenager in the community because of all the weird jokes and insults people make, and I know so many other closeted people have expressed feeling the same way, not that any have ever been taken seriously or listened to. This was at its worst in January but it’s still an issue now.

People spent ages raving about how numerous queer people outright came out the closet out of fear at Mike’s ending, and yet immediately get cognitive dissonance at the idea of closeted people being affected by things relating to the queer reading of him in any other way. Specifically people who perceive/interpret Mikes character as ending up too scared or depressed to come out the closet in the end, and then use that to make a bunch of weird jokes about closeted people. Like calling them ‘DLs’ in a degrading way, saying how it’s cowardly, saying how it’s embarrassing and shameful, saying how they’re glad he’ll be miserable if he stays in the closet forever. Along with making fanfic situations of the other characters being angry at Mike for not coming out fast enough and doing things to force or pressure him out, and those AUs being very popular.

Especially considering Mike in the show has republican parents and is in a small 1980s Reagan town, so if they are viewing him as queer it’s utterly nonsensical how they’d still act like it’s so shameful to be closeted in that situation. Of course Mikes fictional so he could never be affected by people making these jokes regardless of his circumstances, but the main idea of ‘being closeted is embarrassing and something to ridicule even in situations where it would very likely be unsafe to come out’ is insensitive to the centuries of struggles real queer people have gone through and the reasons they’ve had to hide their identities.

And the issue is that when they say this stuff, it impacts the feelings of real closeted people who should feel safe in the byler community, but have to read that being closeted is embarrassing and laughable and should be ridiculed. People argue that “well Mike’s not canonically queer, so it’s not like we’re making fun of actual queerness, it’s a non-issue” but that feels like a logical fallacy of sorts and just a lack of literacy and comprehension around what people are actually saying. Mike Wheeler’s not a real person so even if his character was confirmed queer Mike himself wouldn’t be affected by it.

The issue was never the feelings of Mikes character, it’s the way these jokes and rhetoric impact real closeted people, because the character you’re saying it about isn’t the issue, the weird and cruel mindset to those who haven’t come out yet is the issue. Hell, him being queer coded doesn’t even really matter. You could literally headcanon Jim Hopper or the Demogorgon as closeted and then make the same jokes about them and it’d still be bad.

The overarching issue of treating being closeted as a moral failure and something to be punished is still there, and that’s the actual problem. It doesn’t matter whether you’re making the joke about a real person or a character because it still affects that group that exists in real life regardless.

I remember my mutual on Twitter (who iirc is closeted themselves and was being extremely vulnerable here and talking about something that personally affected them), made a thread on this where they vented their frustrations and honestly said a lot of valuable things, and they just got clowned and dogpiled and attacked to oblivion to the point they had to private for days. People essentially watered it down to “you’re mad people are being mean to Mike” when that’s not even close to what anyone is saying. (The mutual in question who made this thread wasn’t even a Mike stan btw lol they were a Will-centric account and had alway had him as their fav, it’s really interesting to me how all the Will stans thought the idea of another Will stan calling out homophobia to closeted people was incomprehensible).

The complaint is the fandom framing it as “being in the closet = cowardly, embarrassing, something people can justifiably be angry at”. That is a perfectly valid thing to have issues with, and this being such a common mindset in the Byler community should be questioned.

Or people will just use whataboutism and say “well we should solely focus on the homophobic jokes about Will, the character confirmed as queer, they’re the real issue!”. Of course those are absolutely horrible and every single one of them should be called out and treated seriously, and I agree they’re much more wide spread and a larger issue than the closeted Mike ones, specifically not really within the Byler fandom itself but because of the GA making really awful viral videos mocking Will’s queerness around when the season had just came out — but saying this the ONLY issue that can be focused on is: A) plain stupid because a community is always gonna talk about a wide array of issues or discourses that vary in importance which is perfectly fine and normal for a fandom, and I know damn well the people who say this will then go and make another tweet whining about someone saying they like bottom Mike as if that’s an important issue, and B) just feels like disregarding the feelings of closeted people as being lesser than and unimportant.