all roads lead to conformitygate (no, really)
this one is for everyone still here, regardless of whether you’ve squeezed yourself onto the bus yet or not. because as genuinely fun as looking for hidden clues and analyzing various details is, one of the most convincing points towards conformitygate being exactly what we’re headed towards for me is simply that, when you step back and look at the general picture of all of this, it’s really the only explanation that makes sense.
let’s look at our options.
let’s say you’re in the camp of people that don’t believe in conformitygate, and believe that byler was queerbait. sure. i understand where you’re coming from.
if you think this, though, then that doc HAS to set off alarm bells for you. you cannot both take the doc (or the interviews) where the duffers make themselves out to be incompetent fools who don’t understand a single thing about their story completely at face value WHILE continuing to point at every little detail that forms the coherent, subtextual arc of mike coming to terms with his queerness. these things cannot coexist. you cannot accidentally write linear character progression that is quite literally all explained by a single reading of him. you cannot unintentionally have costuming and lighting and set design that all directly supports and actively adds to said reading, because all of those decisions are made at the discretion of the directors.
the duffers themselves wrote the van scene, and then proceeded to stare at it over the TWELVE HOURS it took to film. every detail we’ve seen, they would’ve been watching ten times over. i’m not sure how the whole ‘secret underground homosexual subtext rebellion enacted by the entire cast and crew without the duffers’ knowledge for ten years’ thing became such a wildly popular theory here, because. guys. this is the show whose entire first season is a very tightly executed and incredibly detailed metaphor for the experience of what it’s like being in the closet. come on.
(and don’t even get me started on divorcegate. you are a supposed homophobe who wants to write a show except you don’t so you tell your wife to do it and she, an established writer in her own right, agrees to do it for absolutely zero credit for some reason and makes it gay and you, the homophobe, are fine with that? why would you pitch a show you had no intention of writing with themes you hated if you had no way of knowing it would be as successful as it was? this makes the entire cast and crew either look like idiots for not noticing ten years of ghostwriting or incredibly cruel for all being complicit in it? a lot of the issues people have with s5’s writing are apparent continuity errors. the person responsible for checking for those (the story editor) was a woman. how did we get here.)
i cannot stress enough that if the writing was written by people who did not care about what they were doing nor understand the character they were writing, None Of Us Would Be Here. this community, with its hundreds of thousands of words of analysis dedicated to analyzing even just the SCRIPT ALONE, would not have grown to what it currently is, because there would be nothing to look at. here, i’ll even give some examples:
- p 5r is one of my favorite games, and overly-eager, goofy golden retriever boy ryuji is my favorite character. the writers, however, really like making him the butt of the joke. so much so, that there’s a scene in which— after literally saving all of their lives— his entire group of friends is made to genuinely beat the shit out of him and then leave him alone on the street, despite four of them (one of which being ryuji himself) being established victims of abuse. this scene comes out of nowhere, is never addressed, and is almost universally hated by the entire community with how unnecessarily cruel and ooc it makes everyone involved act. it’s almost always skipped over in analysis of the characters, because you can see that this was the writers’ bizarre way of prioritizing “comedy” over anything else, and does not fit in with any characterization that comes before or after it since everyone goes right back to acting perfectly normal.
- dipper from GF is commonly hced to be a trans man. this wasn’t the original intention of the character, so not every single detail of the show lines up exactly with this interpretation, but it fits perfectly fine as a reading of him. his canonical relationship to his masculinity is explained, and fully makes sense regardless of whether you’re viewing him through a lens of being trans OR cis!
- and a certain character from p 4 (i truly don’t even dare to utter the name) has an arc related to gender so thematically confused on what it wants to say that there are about 3 main different ways to interpret it, none of them line up perfectly and actively contradict/undermine themselves multiple times, and nearly twenty years of ruthless, unending discourse have been born as a result.
none of the above can be applied to michael wheeler. people have been hating on him for years because, if you aren’t looking at his consistent throughline of subtext, his actions don’t seem to make any sense. NOR are we given any explicitly stated reasons or alternate explanations for his behavior! but, under a queer reading, literally every single one of his actions in previous seasons can be explained, and logically fit in alongside each other. there is a visible progression of an arc there if you know what you’re looking at, and there aren’t any ill-fitting details nor inexplicably bizarre scenes that get in the way of its portrayal. it is literally impossible to have him be the way he is unintentionally. if episode 8 were genuinely the end, then that would make byler a deliberately planned, intentionally plotted queerbait from people who fully understood what they were doing. it could not have existed in its current state otherwise.
…so then, that doc literally has to be fake. the interview answers have to be fake. they’re playing dumb on purpose. (because, really, how do you have someone sitting directly next to you while holding a giant camera pointed right at your computer screen and not be immediately overly aware of everything currently visible in your tabs?)
which should then make you want to ask…why? why deliberately make yourself look incompetent? conservatives aren’t going to care about queerbaiting, but they are going to care about shitty writing and plotholes in the same way anyone else would. why would you willingly invite a larger group of people to get mad at you for no reason? voluntarily tank your own reputation? if there isn’t more content coming intended to ‘redeem’ them, there is virtually no reason to do this.
(also, if you look closely, the rain scenes in the documentary are absolutely staged. so we can already say that they are being told how to act in At Least one scene. nothing stopping them from staging more.)
i was watching drew gooden’s video on the finale, and when he got to the doc he said something along the lines of “well, and there was my answer. they rushed it, and they didn’t really care.” to the GA, which consists of many fairly casual viewers who have never really looked at outside press, this is a perfectly acceptable explanation for what happened to the finale. but for bylers? some people have been analyzing every single bit of information pertaining to this show for years, and should have a whole laundry list of interview quotes and one-off comments (and the SHARED LOOKS TATTOO, for christ’s sake) that directly contradict everything we’re currently being told! incoherent and unintentional writing makes an incoherent and unintelligible arc. bylers haven’t been analyzing nothing! hasn’t that been proved, time and time again?
and the issues with episode 8 weren’t just contained to byler— everything was off, to an almost uncanny degree. how do you study bad finales, and then insert nearly all of their elements into your own unintentionally? that’s absurd. getting All of the answers wrong is far more suspicious than getting only some of them wrong, and is actually more indicative of you knowing all the correct ones.
truly, the finale not being intentional and conformitygate not being a thing would require such an endlessly long list of things to coincidentally, simultaneously Occur that i think it’d actually be something of a statistical anomaly. conformitygate is the more logical answer here. i’m not trying to place myself as someone wholly promising that this is all 100% confirmed, because nothing truly is, but it is absolutely the explanation that makes the most sense out of everything the internet has come up with thus far.
