Azz-cited!!

Hey y’all!! It’s Nat <31 18 yrs old, weirdos DNI

[bamsara]

YOU WROTE FIGHT ME???

I did indeed

[katsumorning]

Bamsara’s awesome writing

[remanence-of-love]

[patientno7]

my humor 2016

[patientno7]

happy 3 year anniversary of wheeze man

[rubinaito-inactive]

Finally, the original has crossed my dash.

[lavena]

@strangezeroz welcome to tumblr where the app decides when you can be gifted with the sight of og memes, you cannot look for these yourself via the search engine, you won’t find them, you have to wait to be gifted them

[miss-nerd-alert]

For those of you who might be new here, Tumblr has no algorithm, legendary memes are brought to your dash by mutuals like pet cats bringing you dead birds.

[caramelwhim]

so..! to recap !!!!

we don't know why will was taken specifically

hopper and joyce just happened to conveniently forget going to school with henry

the painting lie hasn't been addressed

we don't know why el recognized will in season 1 without having ever seen him before

we don't know who opened the door the night will was taken

mike and will's colors just HAPPEN to be blue and yellow and the cast, crew, and WRITERS THEMSELVES telling us to "pay attention to detail" was deadass just generational queerbait

after everything, mike STILL couldn't say i love you to eleven

patty newby is non-existent and creelby just happens to parallel byler for literally no reason 🩷

will was about to FORGIVE henry.

the duffers genuinely forgot their OWN MAIN CHARACTERS BIRTHDAY AND AGE MULTIPLE TIMES

the russian involvement in s3 and s4 was never explained so it was prob just capitalist propaganda except they don't want us to realize that so they gave jonathan an entire anti-capitalist film storyline for the sake of "screwing conformity" i guess

ohhh but! critiquing society???? fuck that! because they also didn't show us vickie in the epilogue at all, giving her and robin a completely ambiguous ending in which 90% of the fandom believe they broke up off-screen!!!!!!! A+ for representation !!!!!!

not only that, but will doesn't even have a CONFIRMED epilogue boyfriend. that is full well a cute lil headcanon that MIKE has for him.

terry ives, lonnie, enzo, max's mom, suzie, argyle, dr kay, the turnbow family, the school counselor with the clock necklace, and dr owens just vanished into thin air, ALONG WITH ALL THE DANGERS OF THE UPSIDE DOWN???? where were the demodogs, the demogorgons, the demobats????

max's letters were just completely insignificant and had no reason to be mentioned again i guess

november 6 just happened to be a funny coincidence

they ALSO happened to forget that nancy had a vision of mike being killed by vecna in s4 bc that boy wasn't even remotely in danger at all while every other wheeler was put through hell

dr brenner's obsession and fascination with the upside down and abyss stemming from how his father was involved in project rainbow was also not addressed

not to mention that the dude is literally horrendous at drawing animals but when it comes to the flipping hexcore he's da vinci

melvalds, the general store, just happens to sell milkshakes

will adores getting lost in the woods because that's such a fun activity for him

henry just gave holly her favorite song because he was feeling kind

they never actually defeated the mind flayer !!!! which is wonderful

we actually never find out whether or not will lost his powers

el's water tank in the upside down being completely full although there has literally NEVER been water in the upside down before

mike is somehow the only one who has ever understood el even though she was 10x happier with max. could they not have just admitted that they made the elmax reunion so incredibly lackluster because they refused to let ANY gay ships win regardless of how much chance they had of being canon?

the 'lovebirds' parallel between jonathan + steve and mike + eleven??? what was that even for

all the dick jokes, mike listening the a band called the BUTTHOLE SURFERS, the camera panning to mike 7000 times during will's coming out scene, mike not being able to touch will, all just happened to be fun coincidences

not only that, but the mike-will-eleven and nancy-jonathan-steve love triangles were resolved by none of the couples working out! wow.

they really just made us wait 3 whole years for something BEYOND mid.

[danmeicoffeecat]

so they made jancy break up becoz their love was built on trauma bond and not healthy, but mileven is true love????????

fucking pick a side, i wouldn't have really cared about mileven, if it was endgame or not, if they didn't fuck it so bad. they just pushed the narrative of both of them not understanding each other and being miserable, they made a gay character deeply in love mike and then using his to further push their relationship, and now it is true love???? he couldn't even say i love you too back, when she was going to die

[rhincowave]

the mileven ending scene was SO FUCKING ASSSSSSS??? el framing her suicide as being "her choice" and therefore justifiable???? mike absolutely crashing out even though these last few seasons he could have not cared LESS about el's feelings??? speaking of, el saying "you understand me more than anyone else" BITCH WHERE??? HE HAS BEEN SHOWN AGAIN AND AGAIN TO BE THE ONLY ONE WHO DOESNT UNDERSTAND YOU?? just look at the fucking "from, mike" fight in s4????? and then that stupid ass montage to purple rain. and mike not even saying "i love you" back. its just...... i thought that at the very least, even if byler wasnt canon, mike and el would break up, but apparently the moral of this story is "yes abused people, the first person you cling to after you escape your abusive situation IS your soulmate." im genuinely speechless

[prodigal-daughter]

you know what actually im done being all nice about it. fuck the duffer brothers. fuck netflix. you had the opportunity to do something incredible for the queer community and instead you diminished and sidelined queer characters and storylines when you claimed everything would be resolved. you used the feelings of a queer character as development to benefit a cishet relationship. you wrote an extremely tone-deaf and borderline homophobic coming out scene which compared two completely different characters purely because they were both the love interests of a queer person – essentially boiling down every queer journey to the same thing despite being vastly different. you gave the queer character who has been through hell and back a lazy epilogue boyfriend after getting over his lifelong love in a single day. and you got away with it. you got away with it because its a queer storyline. so yeah, fuck you. you ruined what the show was supposed to be about. you forgot who the real audience was.

[narrativelogicofbyler]

i genuinely cannot overstate how jarring mike’s character derailment is in volume 2 and the finale. it’s not just a writing choice i disagree with, it’s a structural collapse. the duffers spent four seasons building a very specific emotional language around mike: loyalty, protectiveness, emotional intuition, and a narrative function tied directly to will’s arc. then suddenly, in the final stretch, he’s flattened into this weird, unrecognizable version of himself. from a craft perspective, it’s almost surreal to watch.

and the will situation is even more baffling. from a storytelling standpoint, you cannot position a queer character as the emotional core of your ensemble, the one whose internal conflict literally shapes the thematic spine of the show, and then make him the only character denied a romantic arc. especially when every other character, even the ones with significantly less narrative weight, gets a fully realized love story. it creates a glaring imbalance in the emotional architecture of the season. it’s not just disappointing; it’s narratively incoherent.

what makes the whole thing even stranger is the tonal whiplash. episode 4 is a legitimately brilliant piece of television. it’s tightly paced, emotionally calibrated, visually cohesive, and character-driven in a way that feels intentional and deeply considered. it’s the kind of episode you’d show in a screenwriting class as an example of how to escalate stakes while grounding everything in character psychology. and then the rest of the season feels like it was written by a completely different team who didn’t read the show bible, didn’t track character arcs, and didn’t understand the thematic groundwork laid in earlier episodes.

the inconsistency is so stark it becomes distracting. you can literally feel the shift in authorship, the loss of internal logic, the abandonment of character motivations, the sudden reliance on plot mechanics over emotional continuity. it’s the kind of thing that makes you pause and go, “did they change writers mid-season. did someone swap out the outline. did they forget what story they were telling.”

from a tv craft perspective, it’s not just a misstep. it’s a breakdown in narrative cohesion.

[narrativelogicofbyler]

i think people flatten “queerbait” into “a character isn’t canonically gay,” when that’s not what the term is critiquing. it’s about how a narrative uses queer-coded dynamics, longing, framing, subtext, emotional mirroring, to generate drama and emotional stakes, and then ultimately refuses to resolve the tension it deliberately built.

byler wasn’t just fans projecting onto two boys who happen to be friends. the show constructed that dynamic through its craft: cinematography, blocking, lighting palettes (the pink sky isn’t accidental), the van monologue, the parallels to established romantic arcs, the score cues, the way scenes are framed to echo heterosexual love stories. these are not neutral choices. they’re the visual and emotional grammar of romance.

and when a narrative leans into those signals, when it deploys queer coded longing to heighten conflict, deepen character arcs, or raise emotional stakes, it’s inviting queer audiences to read that coding as intentional. that’s the whole point of film language. so the issue isn’t “will is gay but not with mike.” the issue is that the show used queer coded tension as a storytelling engine and then withheld resolution. that’s the textbook structure of queerbaiting: exploiting queer subtext for narrative payoff while denying the characters any actual payoff.

fandom is absolutely about interpretation and choice, but it’s also about critique. engaging with a text means acknowledging the signals it sends and the emotional investments it asks for. dismissing all of that as “you chose to read it that way” ignores the fact that the show itself crafted those beats and invited that investment through its framing.

[narrativelogicofbyler]

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.

[narrativelogicofbyler]

i wasn’t manifesting anything, i was literally analysing the cinematography, the blocking, the colour theory, the narrative beats, all the stuff i was trained to look for during my TV degree. the signs were there because the show put them there.

the duffers absolutely queer baited the audience. everything I learned academically about visual storytelling was pointing toward a byler slow burn, and then they completely abandoned their own setup. we didn’t hallucinate subtext; we didn’t “make up” a ship. they built it, then pretended they didn’t, and the result reeks of homophobia.

they didn’t subvert expectations, they ignored their own narrative groundwork. that’s not clever writing, that’s just bad writing. they tore down a storyline they spent years constructing, and now the overall story makes zero sense.

[eeriesilkworm]

I'm... so confused?

What was the purpose of the scene about queer signals, if Will was never going to receive queer signals? Why was the question concerned with the obviousness of signals, and not the mere presence of them? Why use the term "shared looks" when that was a known call and response on set for Noah and Finn?

What was the meaning of the snowball and avalanche metaphor? Why include that scene at all? Where was the payoff?

You're going to write an entire meta scene on queer signals of attraction, include examples that we have already observed, indicate an eventual pay off... and not let it pay off? Why? To be malicious?

You tell the audience through Will that Mike was just his Tammy this entire time and expect us to believe it? Was Tammy in Robin's video tape? Did Robin know Tammy since she was five? Did Tammy run after her in the rain or recognize her breathing over the radio?

And Will Byers never got kissed. Will Byers witnessed queer love, queer joy, and queer intimacy through a kiss at the beginning of the season, wanting that for himself because he's a romantic... and never even got kissed. Not even by his epilogue boyfriend.

[bebx]

I’m sorry but all these plot holes in Stranger Things 5 were insane. They said the finale would answer all the questions but not only did it barely answer anything, it just created dozens more

Also RIP to all those pregnant women in the lab who were literally blown up

[petitprincess1]

"I'M FROM FUCKING FLORIDA!"

Can't believe I'm saying this, but poor Val pffffff

[persianmom-deactivated20251026]

[armandology]

fuuuuck i just realized that the future idealized version of myself cant exist without current me being the catalyst for change and doing hard things. has anybody heard about this

[boozehund-blog]

ppl who celebrate fictional character birthdays are annoying pass it on

[wolfprud3-deactivated20170620]

FUCK this post and happy birthday sonic

[bitterblackboricua]

[worldheritagepostorganization]

World Heritage Post