I never talked about this before and probably never will again, but I'm very tired of seeing people say stuff along the lines of "Ronance is just Lesbyler." I feel like that's very reductive, unfair to both ships, and just straight up wrong. Like, please, let's just think about it for a single second.
When you really look just a little deeper than the superficial similarities, and actually pay attention to their actual dynamics, they are just two completely different ships.
To start, Byler are childhood friends, they grew up together and care deeply about each other since ever. Ronance only met later in life after Nancy had already lost her best friend, Barb. A loss that Nancy carries in her back like a cross and makes it harder for Nancy to open up to a friendship with Robin.
If you really think about it, the dynamic and the development of Byler throughout the show is much more similar to Barb's and Nancy's storyline.
In season 1 Nancy was trying to fit in, she was dating Steve Harrington, and Barb was feeling left behind, much like Byler on season 3 and 4, where Mike is trying to focus in his relationship with El, and Will feels left behind.
I think Mike is aware, one way or another, of Will's and his own queerness, and being deeply repressed himself he pushes Will away, which I believe is more or less what was going on with Nancy in season 1. I don't believe Nancy ever really liked Steve, I think she started to go out with him because part of her was aware she was different and that scared her a lot, so when the king of the school started to hit on her, she just jumped at the opportunity to blend in, and in that effort she ended up pushing Barb away.
By the time Nancy meets Robin, though I think her deeply repressed queerness still plays a part on what keeps them apart, that's not the biggest rift between them on Nancy's part. The biggest rift is that Nancy thinks she is to blame for everything that happened with Barb, and she doesn't want to repeat the cycle by letting Robin in. Nancy has a big guilt complex and she feels like if she let's anyone be that close to her again, then she will end up "killing" them the same way she "killed" Barb.
Robin can't be the Will of Nancy's Mike, because Nancy's Will is already dead and she thinks it's all her fault.
Will and Robin are also in different steps of their queer journey, and also, in totally different queer journeys altogether. Though there are overlaps, we can't forget that gays and lesbians face different experiences. Experiences that also intersect with different gender expectations and dynamics. Even if we were to make the comparison using Lesbyler instead of Byler, just the fact that Will and Mike have different personalities than Robin and Nancy would already make things different. But let's not dive too deep into that because I don't wanna turn this into some kind of gender studies essay, I'm not even qualified to do so.
Anyway. Throughout the show we se Will grow up and discover himself, he is still in his baby gay era, falling in love with his best friend, having to deal with his first romantic heartbreak by seeing Mike choosing El over him. In comparison, by the time we meet Robin, and the time she officialy meets Nancy, Robin is already completely aware of her sexuality, she is already in another step of her journey, Nancy is not Robin's first love or crush. The foundation of their relationship is totally different from Byler's foundation. By the time Robin starts to catch feelings for Nancy (In my interpretation of Ronance's timeline, ofc), there's a lot of other stuff happening–that goes beyond the whole guilt over being in love with a "straight" friend and feeling like a creep–that makes Robin fight against that attraction and resist it instead nurturing it. She is best friends with Steve, Nancy's ex, who is clearly still interested in her, and who is also the guy Robin's first crush was obsessed with. Robin also has a second alternative, Vickie, who Steve is already supportive of, so it's a much safer option for her to pour her heart in, especially when you remember that Robin has to watch first hand how self-sacrificing Nancy is, and falling in love with someone who won't think twice about doing some stupid shit–like being bait for a monster a hundred times her height–must be really scary. She just can't afford to let her feelings for Nancy grow.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that in Byler's dynamic they are already close to each other and already have deep feelings for each other for way longer before the romantic feelings start and Will can't help but to keep nuturing his affection because he's a sensitive boy and that's his first experience with romantic love, while Mike is trying to repress it and keep Will at arms length because he just can't deal with it.
While in Ronance both parts are trying to repress it and keep each other at arms length, trying not to catch feelings almost from the start of their relationship, and they are also failing miserably because they can't help but being close to each other because their magnetic fields keep pulling them together.
This is like, just a quick assessment of the differences that quickly come to my mind and there's a lot of others, including personality stuff, different drives, tastes and whatever, that I'm too lazy to really write about it now. The important thing that I wanted to take out of this is that, there's nothing weird about being invested in Ronance and not being in Byler, or vice-versa, because they are two different ships, with different dynamics, and even if they had more similar dynamics and the very same personalities, they would still have different plots and backstories surrounding them which also affects how the ship works, so you can like one and dislike other, or be indifferent to one and love the other. And it's alright to like both, neither or only one of them. I just feel like is not fair to any of the ships to treat them as if they were the same thing when they are not.
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