hope&despair

We have a lot of rules in our party, but the most important is, ‘Friends don’t lie.’ Never ever. No matter what.

Caleb McLaughin as Lucas Sinclair

♡ ULTIMATE SHIP MEME ♡ 

Will The Wise and Mike The Heart ♥️

+ a little extra sketch ;3

mike loved el, he cared about her, he wanted her safe, he wanted her happy. but he was never in love with her. she was the heteronormative shield, the narrative beard, the convenient “look, he’s normal” distraction because he didn’t know what to do with the feelings he had for will. and the show doesn’t even try to hide it. even when el was dying, literally dying, mike still couldn’t say “i love you.” not in reality. not in his own mind. not even in the fantasy space where characters usually reveal their true feelings. the words simply weren’t there. that’s not romance. that’s not repression. that’s a character whose heart is somewhere else.

and then there’s the van scene, the most blatant confession by proxy ever put on screen. mike only manages to say “i love you” because will hands him the emotional script. will pours out his soul, mike absorbs it, and then he repeats those words to someone else. that’s not subtle. that’s not ambiguous. that’s classic love triangle construction: one character’s longing powering another character’s relationship.

and here’s the part that makes me want to scream: why are all of mike’s emotional beats given to will? why not dustin, lucas, max, literally anyone else? because will and mike’s relationship has always been framed differently. the blocking, the lighting, the shot composition, the way the camera lingers, it’s intimate, charged, deliberate. that’s not an accident. that’s visual storytelling doing the work the script refused to commit to.

and then, at the eleventh hour, the duffers slam the panic button and try to force mike and el into a tragic romance endgame. and it falls apart instantly. there is no chemistry in that final scene. mike doesn’t even touch her. his hands hover awkwardly in the air like he’s physically unsure about making contact. it looks like someone performing the idea of love, not feeling it. because he did love her, but he was never in love with her. the emotional groundwork was never laid with her. it was laid with will.

the text pointed to mike and will. the cinematography pointed to mike and will. the emotional architecture pointed to mike and will. and then they did a last‑minute 180 that snapped the narrative spine, and that’s why mike’s ending feels wrong. because it is wrong. it contradicts everything the story spent years building.

This guy. Axel. From season 2 episode 7, he was apart of Kali's gang. In season 5 episode 5, the episode after the audience learns mike wanted a bright orange mohawk, we see Axel shot in the head by the military, his mohawk clearly in view.

I was trying to see if their was some sort of connection, because I feel like mentioning an orange mohawk, then having a guy with an orange mohawk appearing the next episode, is gonna automatically generate some questions. I rewatched the scenes Axel appears in, and in his introduction scene he threatens Jane (El) with a knife, before Kali makes visions of spiders appear on his arm.

He freaks out and dances around trying to get them off, before realizing they're an illusion from Kali. He yells at her to "stay out of my head!"

This brings me to my next point---the mind flayer looks a lot like a spider.

More than it ever has in previous seasons.

The mind and meat flayer always had spider elements, but the final season mind flayer fully pushed into the spider design, with pincers, thin spider legs, and a large spider body.

Maybe Mike is paralleled to Axel with the orange Mohawk line to also parallel the illusion of spiders? Axel has an orange mohawk and sees illusions of spiders. Mike wanted an orange mohawk and see illusions of a spider-like monster. Both spiders in these instances are not real. An illusion. "Stay out of my head!"

I know this is kind of a reach, and the David Bowie explanation makes more than enough sense, I just wonder why mention an orange mohawk---which is an entirely new piece of information regarding Mikes character, they did not have to use the orange mohawk line---then include a character with said mohawk the very next episode? Was it just coincidence?