Heteronormativity and its impact on Stranger Things
While taking a walk today, I got to thinking about how romantic relationships are handled on TV and in movies. It generally comes down to the basic formula of the male and female leads getting romantically linked, regardless of any actual romantic building. We just expect a man and a woman who meet to have some degree of romantic attraction to each other. We see it all the time in real life. How many of you have had friends or relatives who see boy and girl toddlers interacting and begin to say things like “He’ll be a real heartbreaker.” or “Oh, I hear wedding bells.” I imagine many of us who oppose the idea of heteronormativity have fallen into this behavior as well.
We simply have been conditioned to expect boys and girls to pair off. Joyce and Hopper had a fan following for their relationship as early as season 1, despite there not being much to go on until season 2. We knew they were familiar with each other, but there wasn’t really much in the way of romantic undertones. Still, fans started to pair them together. Mike and El’s fan base acted like they were the best couple in the history of fiction, even though they were 12 and only knew each other for a week. There were even people who shipped Will with Jennifer Hayes. Why? Because she cried at his funeral. That’s it. That’s all they needed.
Strong relationships between same-sex pairs end up being written off as mere friendship and/or adoration. Even worse, terrible same-sex relationships take off as popular pairings. Look at Steve and Billy. There’s no reason for those two to be romantically linked, but it’s one of the most popular pairs in the fandom. It reeks of a horrible concept of homosexuality, one characterized by animalistic attraction and a lack of genuine affection. This all harkens back to old ideas of gay people: that they are sexual deviants, immoral, primal. There’s still this idea in even progressive culture that sees the heterosexual couple as the ideal, and the homosexual couple as inferior. The better among those who think this way at least understand it is not a good mindset to have, but it still leaks, subconsciously or not, its way into popular culture.
Had Will been a girl, there’s no question as to whether his relationship with Mike would be seen as romantic. There’d be a full-fledged ship war going on. We’d have Team Will vs Team El. I realize that I have my own biases in this, but I didn’t start seeing Mike and Will romantically because I wanted them to get together. I started wanting them to get together because I was reading that there was something going on between them. Just close your eyes and imagine these scenes with a female actor playing Will:
Mike becomes intensely worried after Will disappears and goes searching for her despite the growing danger.
Mike breaks down in tears when Will’s (fake) body is pulled from the quarry. He tries to console himself by looking through the drawings she had given him.
Mike is the only one awake in the hospital waiting room, and the first to rush to Will’s side when she wakes up.
Mike dotes on Will during the entirely of Season 2. He’s constantly in tune with her emotional needs.
Will trusts Mike, and Mike alone, with what is going on with her. Mike tells her that if they’re both going crazy, then they’ll go crazy together. Will smiles and says, “yeah, crazy together.”
Mike becomes Will’s primary source of comfort throughout the season. He stays by her side, making use of a lot of physical contact.
Despite the Mindflayer eating into Will’s memory, she still remembers who Mike is. Mike smiles a bit bashfully in response.
Mike tearfully recollects meeting Will in an attempt to break through to her. Will starts off staring blankly at him, as she did with Joyce and Jonathan, but by the end of Mike’s story her eyes are glassy and her mouth is trembling.
When a boy walks up and asks Zombie Girl if she wants to dance, Will looks over at Mike briefly before going off at his urging. Mike suddenly looks stunned and then upset.
That summer, when Mike meets Will, Max, and Lucas for a movie, Mike sits with Will a row apart from Max and Lucas. He notices when Will sense the Mindflayer, asking her if she’s ok.
When Mike bails on the party to go off and make out with El, Will turns away with a sad look on her face.
In fact, everytime Mike makes a display of his feelings for El, Will looks sad.
When Mike and Will fight, and Mike asks if Will really expected things their relationship to stay the same forever, Will tearfully says she did. Mike looks sad as she bikes away from him. He chases after her in the rain to apologize.
As Will sits in Castle Byers, she looks around at pictures of her and Mike and recollects him telling a campaign. She calls herself stupid and proceeds to destroy everything.
Before she moves away, Will packs up her D&D set to donate to Erica. Mike nervously asks what she’s doing, but Will reassures him that she’ll just use his set when she comes back. She tells Mike it’s not possible for her to find a new party. They smile at each other.
This would be a blatant “Will they or won’t they?” situation if Will were a girl. There would be no shock that Will had feelings for Mike or that Mike had feelings for Will if it were to be revealed explicitly. Everyone would already have been waiting for it, regardless of who they wanted Mike to end up with. There would be no cries of pandering or sexualization of children. Fans wouldn’t be threatening to burn merchandise or boycott the show.
I know there’s no chance that anyone associated with the show will ever read this. I know that I probably shouldn’t get so worked up about the love lives of fictional teenagers. Still, the entire situation, and the fact that most fans insist Mike and Will are just friends, reeks of heteronormativity. It’s nothing more than a low-grade homophobia. It pisses me off. This mindset is one of the last obstacles to same-sex couples being truly accepted. Stranger Things has a real opportunity to strike a blow against it, but I worry that it won’t. The buildup is genuinely all there, we are not delusional, but will they pull the trigger on it? I’ve grown to be pessimistic about such things. I hope I’m proven wrong.
