as someone with a degree in television and a background in cinematography and narrative analysis, i genuinely cannot understand what the duffers were doing with mike and will. the sheer amount of intentional groundwork poured into their dynamic wasn’t accidental, and wasn’t something you can dismiss as audience projection. it was craft. it was design. it was the kind of layered visual storytelling you only build when you’re setting up a payoff.
the costuming alone charted an emotional arc, colour palettes shifting in tandem, mirroring, contrasting, signalling internal states long before the characters verbalised anything. the blocking and framing consistently positioned them in ways that highlighted intimacy, tension, longing, and narrative centrality. the camera lingered on them with a specificity that, in television language, means something. you don’t shoot two characters like that unless you’re building toward a reveal or a culmination.
and then there’s the emotional architecture: years of subtext, coded longing, parallel arcs, mirrored traumas, narrative foreshadowing. every tool in the tv writer’s and cinematographer’s kit was pointing toward byler as a deliberate, slow burn queer storyline. it wasn’t just possible, it was textually supported by the show’s own visual grammar. even the pink sky in the field scene, that gorgeous, deliberate wash of colour, was doing thematic heavy lifting.
which is why the lack of follow through feels so jarring. from a craft perspective, it’s almost nonsensical. you don’t invest that much visual and emotional capital into a relationship you plan to abandon. from a storytelling perspective, it’s a structural rupture, a setup without a payoff, a thematic thread left dangling. and from a queer audience perspective, it’s heartbreaking, because this could have been monumental. byler had the potential to be an epic queer narrative with genuine depth, history, and emotional resonance. it could have been groundbreaking.
instead, it feels like all that potential was discarded at the last minute. years of careful build up rendered pointless. a beautifully constructed arc left unresolved. and i can’t make sense of it, not academically, not narratively, not emotionally. it just feels like such a waste of what could have been one of the most compelling queer storylines in mainstream genre television.
tangentwithtanner
andulkaphoto
areudirty
annaxmalina
janainaart
pixelskylines
baratheonpilled
