my two cents on Conformity Gate
prefacing with this: you don't have to take me seriously, I am heartbroken over the finale, so I am coping. but, being cursed with analysis skills, I can't not make this post. I've just noticed way too many things.
okay so. I feel like I'm going insane but conformity gate is so real (to me). even my brother was saying that the vibes were so off in the epilogue. it felt like Camazotz.
it starts off by showing us Robin, looking a lot more feminine (femme lesbians exist btw!! but Robin has always been shown to express herself in a more masculine way.)
she's also wearing a huge cross earring on her left ear (I'm not able to see what she's wearing on her right ear). the only other person who wears big cross earrings like hers is Tammy Thompson.
Robin's dialogue is highkirkenuinely suspicious, too. I'm sure if you go back to it you'll feel like something is off.
the first thing they show us is Steve, now coaching baseball. BASEBALL. in case you're not sure why that's alarming to me, baseball (and sports in general, but mainly baseball) has always been shown in a negative light in Stranger Things. it represents conformity, abuse, and violation. in season 1, we see Jonathan talk to Will about how Lonnie played baseball with Will, but never did anything Will actually liked. in season 2, when the party is looking for Dart, Will gets assaulted and violated by the mindflayer on the school's baseball field. in this same season, Ted tells Mike "you're on the bench, son" and Mike gets irritated and upset with Steve when Steve uses a sports analogy. he says "this isn't a stupid sports game!!". Mike also shows some hostility towards Lucas for playing basketball.
and then in season 5, we see Max in her memory labyrinth. she's in the rainbow room, but she tears through a poster to get to her memories. it's a baseball poster, and it zooms out to show us Mike.
and to open up the epilogue with Steve as a baseball coach is just so weird. and then Steve, Nancy, and Jonathan's outfits are all very Mr Whatsit suit like. very weird.
and just for good measure, because she really haunts the narrative, Tammy is singing the national anthem in the scene we see her in. on the basketball court. and the epilogue has so many American flags up everywhere? it just feels so weird and intentionally Camazotzy.
also, they told us to watch Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind (ESOTSM). Mike is dressed exactly like the main character, Joel, and Will is dressed like the main character's girlfriend, Clementine.
this is something they've done before, like dressing Lucas and Max in outfits that the main couple from That 70s Show wears.
If you don't know what the plot of ESOTSM is, basically, Joel and Clementine break up, and Clementine undergoes a procedure that erases her memories of Joel. Joel, heartbroken upon finding out, undergoes the same procedure and erases Clementine from his memories. Joel has to go through each memory.
I feel fucking insane, but birthday gate is screaming at me.
when people saw Holly wearing under armour, they went to edit it out. but birthday gate? no, it's still the same date on that camrecorder. they didn't bother to cut that out, and they keep making references to it.
and then, they make Henry share the same birthday as him?? like, no, you can't "forget" a characters birthday and make the antagonist have the exact same birthday as them lmao. you have 365 days to choose from. they definitely didn't forget... but it's unaddressed... so what the hell?
I truly, truly think this might have something to do with ESOTSM. when we see the "For Will" mixtape promo, it says "bar" at the top, with blue and yellow lights. We see Will meet Carlton at a bar, but there are no blue or yellow lights or a mixtape. Rink 'o mania (rink of craziness or insanity, which is how I feel right now) famously has blue and yellow lights, and it also parallels the gay BAR shown in Dawson's Creek (the show the D*ffer's love Dawson's Creek). It was Jack McPhee's first time at a gay bar, and Jack McPhee is paralleled to Mike, not Will. (see here)
Mike obviously isn't in this bar where we see Will and Carlton, but he is the one telling the story. In Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, Joel (Mike's name was originally going to be Joel btw... which is the main character in Eternal Sunshine, but also a character in The Last Of Us. Joel is Ellie's father figure, and Joel from tlou actually parallels Hopper. With all the familial mileven parallels, this is quite interesting to me), and Clementine have a very important scene at a bar.
there is an argument at said bar (like the "in the closet (at rink 'o mania)" argument) and some other stuff takes place there. because Joel's memories are actively being tampered with, some people who are in that memory were not in the original memory, and there are a lot of out of place things because obviously, we don't remember everything like it's a photo. they have to start the process a few times over again, actually. I think there are 3 times we see this bar, and each time, the memory is a little different.
considering the fact that rink 'o mania has a mindflayer shaped decoration over it, idk if this is a coincidence. remember: rink 'o mania is where all the time fuckery started.
where birthday gate started.
in the credits of that last episode, we see Mike and El holding hands while skating at rink 'o mania. Will was supposed to be between them, but he's not, in that drawing. they erased him
in the rink 'o mania scene, we also see El hitting Angela with her rollerskate, and this is a direct parallel to Henry hitting that man in the cave with a rock. she is then taken as prisoner, and Mike says "are the handcuffs really necessary?" because no, Mike, handcuffs aren't really necessary for you to be imprisoned. Holly and Max know that.
in the epilogue, when Mike is sitting next to Hopper on the bench, (where we have a big ahh American flag looming over them as well a red light turning green over Mike's head) he's wearing the exact same shirt that MJ wears in Spider-Man No Way Home... and in The Crawl, Will is wearing the same clothes that Peter Parker wears. at the end of Spider-Man No Way Home, MJ has her memories of Peter erased. she remembers everything except Peter.
there's also something to be said about Max telling Holly (who is Mike, according to Max) that she needs to look for things that are out of place in order to get out of that memory. Holly notices that the disc of the roundabout is supposed to be yellow, but in this memory, it's gray.
when we look at the playground, (play ground?? oh playgate) the swingsets are all different. we have a blue and yellow one, the one that Mike and Will meet on. in the show, we also see that the swingset changes colours and even physicality. we have a blue and white one, as well as a blue and red one. we have a two legged one, and we have a three legged one, and we have one where the swing seat is broken, and we have one where there's a bench next to it. it's so meta, as Max tells us to look for things that are out of place. the swingset is right there. don't even get me started on the dial being gray and then red.
and then, in the final scene, Mike says he sees Will the Wise in a faraway land where he finds acceptance in a big city.
this is quite literally SMALLTOWN BOY. Mike, that's YOUR song.
when Robin was talking about "the replacements", did she mean "make a deal with God and get him to swap our places", as in, Mike and Will swap places?
Mike introduces El to Mr Clarke as his cousin. Nancy also mentions having a real cousin named Eleanor.
Will and Carlton are the names of the cousins in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. "this is a story all about how my life got flipped turned UPSIDE DOWN." why are Mike and El framed as cousins and why are Will and Carlton, too, framed as cousins?
Will felt alone when Mike and El were together. now, Mike feels alone.
Will talks about how he just wants to play dnd and Nintendo in Mike's basement forever and ever. but Mike is the one who ends up doing this.
then, the songs Smalltown Boy and Should I Stay Or Should I Go are used for Mike and Will respectively. Will completes the Smalltown Boy prophecy... leaving his small town, and moving to a bigger city to find acceptance. Mike, however, chooses to stay in Hawkins. "If I stay it will be double." and, from California Dreamin', "you know the preacher likes the cold, he knows I'm gonna STAY."
also, Mike, our left handed character, wears his watch on his left hand this season. and Will, a right handed character, wears his watch on his right hand.
and in Mike's imagination, every ending feels sooooooo byler coded.
Max and Lucas go on their movie date, but in season 3, Will and Mike went with them.
his theory about El is that she's living a lovely life, at a place with 3 waterfalls (we only see her with two waterfalls though, and a rainbow over the cliff. El is rainbow brite and Mike and Will are her twinks lol.)
and Will? Will is our meeting someone at a bar. like rink 'o mania.
like the scenes from ESOTSM.
Joel, from ESOTSM? played by Jim Carey. Truman, from the Truman Show? also played by Jim Carey.
and Will is wearing a similar shirt to the one Sylvia, Truman's real love interest (as opposed to his fake, "perfect" wife who is only acting) (Will's eyes look brown in the picture below btw... which could mean nothing)
we also have this rainbow next to Mike and Holly, and the blue line says "reach for the clouds"
and Mike saying "she'll never understand. why I can't walk the stage" like OHHHHHH they think they're SO funny.
also, "It's Karen, she can't find Mike" is a direct parallel to season 1 when Will goes missing. Joyce calls Karen, and Karen says "it's Joyce, she can't find Will" and tells her that Will left around 8:15.
Robin walks behind Mike (and he is centred and focused in that scene) when she says "yay!! another kidnapping plot!!"
MIKE WHEELER BLINK TWICE IF YOU CAN HEAR ME.
