hounds of love are hunting...

26 | she/her | bisexual | currently writing about stranger things and byler

[eeriesilkworm]

⚓🍦 Welcome to eeriesilkworm's menu 🍦⚓

You can call me Eerie 👁️ (I promise I'm not scary). I focus my writing on visual storytelling, queer subtext, character psychology, and symbolism, through a Byler-centric lens.

🕸️ THE WEB OF TIME THEORY MASTERPOST 🕸️

My overarching theory on the supernatural mechanics and metaphorical meaning of Stranger Things. → If the canon finale disproves this theory, I'll still keep this as is because I'm proud of it, and I think there's some good stuff in there. :)

Index of theories, analyses, and other tidbits below the cut!

🌈QUEER-FOCUSSED ANALYSES🌈

🔺 It's All Relative → Mike's Escher print as queer-coded set dressing, triangles, and the matter of perspective in queer politics and representation. 📡 How Obvious? → How Stranger Things uses authorial intrusion and queer-coded signalling to gesture toward Mike and Will's romantic arc. 🚪 Stranger Things and Doors → How Stranger Things uses recurring door imagery and metaphor to communicate that Mike is closeted, and needs to open the door. 😈 Exposing Mike's Slutty Demon Poster → A playful breakdown of Mike's demon poster through the lens of homoerotic power fantasy, adolescent shame, and secrecy in season 4. 🔮 Byler is Narrative Destiny → "Decoding" the narrative of Byler through colour psychology and Jungian archetypes. 🩸 The AIDs crisis informed the writing of Stranger Things → The AIDs allegory, broken down very simply and visually.

🕷️SUPERNATURAL THEORIES🕷️

🧠 Will's partialism and stalled ceremorphosis → Why Will is part human, part mind flayer, and Vecna might be acting as a double agent. 🔌 Vecna and Will need to be "connected" → Possible foreshadowing that Vecna intends to "plug into" Will. 🕸️ Stranger Things' Web of Time → The Mind Flayer as a time-weaving extradimensional god, using Will and Vecna to restructure reality and seed a new hive-mind colony. 👥 Mind Flayer vs. Shadow Monster → The Shadow Monster is a manifestation of Mike's shadow, representing forced conformity and self-hatred. 🚀 Vecna is building a Nautiloid and Will is the transponder → The Mind Flayer is building a vessel to transport children through space-time to establish a colony, with Vecna and Will acting as its transponder. Queer love is the force that disrupts the Grand Design.

✨MISCELLANEOUS POSTS✨

🌳 It's In The (Family) Trees → A detailed exploration of Will's hinted intrafamilial abuse trauma through visual narrative and environmental symbolism. ⚾ Is Henry's cave a "trauma dump"? → Speculating about the potentional connections between Henry's cave, fathers and baseball fields, and Jung's concept of the Shadow. 🍽️ Murray's subliminal messages at the dinner table → Byler has already been "murrayed" and he handled it with discretion. ☁️ I miss clouds. I miss you. & Cloudbusting → This Kate Bush parallel provides a metaphor for Mike and Will's "orgone energy" and pent up emotions. 👬 How Will's CSA-coding recontextualizes Byler → An alternative explanation for the Will Voice™, Mike's complex comphet, and the nuances of navigating queer love with healing trauma.

[nightnut]

I’m not sure whether it’s funny or sad, but I’ll leave it here 🥲

[vanscene]

more than anything conformity gate is like. the tumblrina's final revenge. "just noise" huh? okay fuck it *mobilizes the entire internet into calling out the 10,000 plot inconsistencies and production errors you left in your $400million slop finale*

[narrativelogicofbyler]

as someone with a ba hons in film and television, i honestly think people underestimate just how deliberately constructed this moment is. when mike goes to put his book with the rest of the party’s, he looks at wills book, the blocking alone tells you everything: he hesitates, and the camera holds just long enough for us to register the emotional rupture happening behind his eyes. that look isn’t casual. it’s not friendly. it’s not even ambiguous. it’s sorrow, it’s longing, it’s the kind of internalised ache directors rely on when they want the audience to feel something a character refuses to articulate.

this is classic repressed queer reading, not because fans are “projecting,” but because the visual language is doing the heavy lifting. the cinematography is telling the truth the dialogue won’t. that’s literally how coded queer storytelling has functioned for decades: the camera betrays what the character cannot.

and then you add the gay bar sequence. the fact that mike imagines will in a queer space, a space mike himself has never been shown to inhabit, is already telling. but the man will is with? styled to look strikingly like mike. same silhouette, same colouring, same soft, slightly awkward posture. that’s not a coincidence. that’s projection. that’s desire refracted through repression. that’s a character imagining will with “someone like him” because he cannot yet imagine will with him.

and i genuinely believe that will and mike will eventually get together, even if the show never gave us the full on screen payoff. the emotional architecture is already there. the longing is already there. the narrative keeps circling back to them like it’s gravitational. and honestly, they deserved to have their story told properly and explicitly, not ambiguously, not left up to “interpretation,” not buried under subtext that only people trained to read visual language can decode. their arc has always been about yearning, miscommunication, and the slow, painful process of recognising your own truth. that deserves clarity.

mike is framed, lit, and directed like a repressed queer character, and will is framed as the person he cannot stop orbiting. whether or not the show ever says it out loud, the story they’re telling is already pointing in one direction, and it deserved to be allowed to arrive there openly.

[faaremi]

This is what happened off-screen trust me🤞

[ju-nebugg]

every universe except this one, i guess.

[bunnymenbyers]

STRANGER THINGS 5x08: The Rightside Up

[eeriesilkworm]

I hate all these “oh so Mike will be in the closet forever and lost Will forever” takes because…says who? The characters are in OUR hands now. If we agree that Byler belong together, then dang it, they found each other again someday and lived happily ever after. Canon has never stopped any fan displeased with the ending of a series before, why should it now?

My understanding is that Mike chose the second door for his "ending" but obviously he's like 18 at the end of the epilogue so... it's not over for him.

Regardless, Mike is not on the same journey of self-acceptance as Will, or at least not on the same trajectory. I mean, not many queer people come out as young as 16, let alone in the 1980s...

I still see Byler as canon ngl. They're not together but their love was real. The way I see it, Mike took Will's word for it when he said he was over this "crush" and accepted that reality.

Obviously they're still best friends and will likely stay in touch, but when Mike cried while staring at Will's binder, I think that represented Mike realizing that this chapter of his life (first love) had to come to an end.

They could still find each other and make it work. Or maybe move on and only look back on their connection fondly. There's probably a lot of queer men who look back on friendships like that from their youth and wonder what could have been had they been braver.

[baddieboo123-deactivated2026042]

“the storyteller… keeps telling stories. but there is a story he can never tell. or, at least, not the real story.”

idk to me this screams mike was the narrator of stranger things all along, but he couldn’t tell the real story…the real story being of him in the closet…so the story didn’t include his pov. that’s why mike puts his binder next to will’s on the shelf in his basement, and why he looks at will’s particular binder for too long, teary-eyed. why will was the last person to leave mike’s basement, with mike framed in the background. why mike’s wearing a blue shirt. why he resembles his dad. why will’s painting is posted on the wall of mike’s college dorm. why mike seems generally..miserable.

conformitygate save my son please

edit: and oh! it’s why the story starts to get choppy halfway through the final chapter…because mike’s feelings begin boiling over.

[mikesbasementbeets]

I believe.

[wiseeggos]

Will occasionally gets postcards in the mail.

No name. No address. No matter where he is.

Always of art.

Postcards of paintings from all around the world.

He likes researching them and learning about the artist, what the paintings mean, where the paintings hang now.

He knows she wouldn’t be there if he went, but he still looks into the cities that the galleries are in. Reading about the history and imagining her telling him about it. Imagining her exploring. Learning. Existing freely.

He doesn’t tell anyone because he knows she trusts him not to. Trusts him to not try and find her.

He likes to think she still checks in with him as occasionally the meaning or subject of a painting will hit too close to home with him and whatever the current thing that was bothering him.

He wishes he could write back. Wishes he knew how to check on her as she checks on him.

But since everything ended, his powers lay dormant. Only evidence they still exist are the small ‘electrical faults’ that are perfectly timed with big emotions and always end in a nose bleed.

[partypooper1111]

Mike watching Brokeback Mountain in 2005

[thebrokengate]

If this means something:

Why the fuck wouldn't this?

[escapefromcamazotz]

so i empathize with complaints about the scene but i do think it’s weird to say will would not ever go to bars or drink. aside from yalls purity complex around him. you do get that gay bars were in the 80s (and are now) a central part of queer culture and community? you know that, right?

[escapefromcamazotz]

POST CANCELLED i forgot it’s morally wrong to drink or smoke or hook up with people. you heard it here first folks be careful in gay bars, that’s where the groomers are!

[escapefromcamazotz]

#will must spend the rest of his life frozen at the age of 16 years old so that he can remain pure and untainted. #what could he possibly gain from an environment where people drink and smoke and fuck? he doesn’t even have his crayons with him! #this is clearly not a safe space for him. what if he gets assaulted by one of those predatory homosexuals? #he’d be better off hanging out somewhere that presents the risk of getting gay bashed instead. #/s #will byers

prev tags i don’t mean to put you on blast but i think i love you actually

[sharedtrauma]

It gets worse

[nnilkyway]

what do you mean mike wheeler ends up alone in his basement playing games. what do you mean that he sits in the future will wanted to share with him, alone.

[eeriesilkworm]

No, there is no secret ending. Yes, the weird fourth wall breaking and Truman references are still intentional.

The point is, Mike Wheeler the storyteller is unhappy with his ending, and that's why he's a storyteller. He'd rather write fiction than live his reality. He is the narrator of this story, and always has been. He has little to no interiority because he's not supposed to be a character in this story. He's just there. Will and Jane are the main characters.

The show always used recurring door imagery and metaphor, and we are told quite explicitly which doors Jane, Mike, and Will chose in the end. Jane chose the first (death), Mike chose the second (acceptance of fate), and Will chose the third (escape).

Jane represents childhood magic apparently, and although I feel her character was done injustice, I can dig a character being tied to an allegorical concept. So really, that means Jane was an allegory in Mike's story. Perhaps representing childhood wonder, first loves, and innocence? Therefore her death signifies the loss of childhood, and even the death of love itself.

Mike imagines an ending where She (magic, wonder, love) lives on. She's free but she's also isolated. On her own like that, it's not so different to being kept in Mike's basement or Hopper's cabin. Mike must associate something very shameful to these concepts, otherwise he wouldn't constantly hide her away in his story, despite loving her so much.

Still, he wants to believe in this alternative ending where Jane, who is love, and innocence, and magic, lives on in relative peace. He implies that simply believing it can make it true. Will believes too. They share a meaningful look before being interrupted by an opened door, and it's their last ever interaction on-screen.

No, there is no secret ending. There are many endings, and it's just that we've only been shown one of them. The bittersweet one. Mike killed magic, first love, and childhood wonder. Then he gave Will the good ending. Mike thinks the good ending is having Will no longer love him, and sending him far away from him.

Finally, he chose the second door. This means he didn't write the ending he wanted, but the ending he felt he deserved. He will never tell the true story of the mage. As in, he will never clarify what Jane actually represented, and what her death truly meant to him.

[crazyxtogether]

and the final shot of the series is blue and yellow. how about that