completely insane take that i need to archive here: nikki is another one of mike's self inserts. a cool, protective, strong girl with a pink mohawk and her cute little meow meow will byers.

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completely insane take that i need to archive here: nikki is another one of mike's self inserts. a cool, protective, strong girl with a pink mohawk and her cute little meow meow will byers.
THIS INTERVIEW??? IS MASSIVE LOVEWINSGATE / CONFORMITYGATE PROOF
conformitygate is real, but there's no way the whole season — or even a huge part of it — was mike's camazotz. what's the narrative purpose of making it all one character's fantasy when you have like twenty other characters whose journeys you need to serve? let's be for real now — they don't have that time. and why would they even do that? to show us the kid is queer? that's just unrealistic. they're all flayed. vecna messes with all of their heads, but since we're in mike's pov in the epilogue, i bet we'll get to untangle the whole thing together with him.
twitter / insta / PRINTS
sorry idk if i sent you an ask on this already or not but you should give us more of your takes/hcs on mike wheeler !!!! i really like your takes on him :D
hiii, thank you for asking! i don't spend as much time on here anymore—i've moved to twitter where i've met so many will stans who see mike exactly like i do (even if they don't always like him jgfdhj).
if you're on twitter, leave your username in my inbox and i'll follow you there. i talk about him all the time over there. but i still love tumblr—byler started here for me—so i'll think about what i can do on here too.
and i do love mike. he was at his best in vol. 1, and that was largely thanks to will's speech in the van. s4 started with mike feeling lost and insecure, looking up to someone older and cooler (eddie—and no, i never thought mike had a crush on him), and ended with will telling him he's already everything he wants to be: a strong and inspirational leader. the heart.
i see many people call him a loser, say he doesn't deserve will after s5, that he'll never move on—and i disagree.
i don't think an 18-year-old being sad on the morning of his graduation, only a year and a half after watching his ex die in front of him, makes him a loser. we know he's moved on after his conversation with hopper. we know he moved to college to actually do something he likes.
according to the duffers, he and will will always be by each other's side, and they're 'not dissimilar to jonathan and nancy'—who 'can still get together in the future.' even if he and will aren't in a situationship in the epilogue, mike will get his shit together in college the moment will gives another guy a second look. mike is a fighter and a leader. he doesn't give up easily.
he and will will be fine. i'll post about him more here too <3
I don’t know if anyone’s pointed this out yet, but the framing here is so paralleled it feels like it should be intentional.
Look at the square framing at the head of the table! The two lamps! The way the lighting feels strangely artificial when we know this crew can do much more ‘realistic’ visuals (e.g. the van scene).
Even the matching glasses with Ted Wheeler and Henry Creel?? This is crazy to me.
The tunnels were a trap. Mike was right and lots of people died in them that day.
This trap door leads to those same tunnels.
Going into these tunnels again, leads to another trap (a never-ending story if you will)
The Mac-Z fight was orchestrated. Vecna needed Will to access his powers so he could use him as a conduit, which was always his plan. All he had to do was put the chess pieces in the right place on the board and wait for Will’s move.
Will's experience being the first "weak" child is something Vecna likes to remind him of constantly. He preys on Will's empathy and humanity and particularly how helpless he felt as a kid. Now Will feels personal responsibility towards the next group of kids. His reaction to being told he needs to play it safe in finding Holly is very telling:
"Holly will die if we don't do something!" "How does that get us closer to Holly?! She's in there, Mom, all alone, I know what that's like. I won't just leave her there!"
Vecna's greatest skill is finding people's vulnerabilities.
“Can you see them, William? Can you see the children?”
Will feels like he can't contribute any kind of meaningful protection to his friends and loved one and he's the one who always needs protecting. By reminding him he is "weak" and a "burden" who doesn't belong with the people he loves (some minds simply do not belong in this world), Vecna just pressed on his worst wound and it worked…
And once he accessed those powers and continued to enter the hive mind, they grew. But as we saw in Shock Jock, Will never really got a good grasp on them for long before he was laid out on the couch with his REM going crazy. And we learned this season what his REM in a trance means. He’s building something. First it was the tunnels. But now, it's something bigger than he’s ever built. He explained it to us himself
Will is not the creator of the illusions, that’s Vecna. Just like he’s not the director of the play, that's Henry.
Without realizing it, Will has become the architect of Vecna's illusion. He is the set designer for a play the size of Hawkins.
But Mike - Mike is the storyteller. He is writing the script.
And since Will is trapped building this as long as the there is a script and a director, it seems pretty obvious that there's only one way to break the cycle.
The storyteller needs to tell THE story. The one he can never tell.
The sooner the better preferably.
the way max and mike in the epilogue told us everything we need to know about the ending we got: after all of that vampire strahd von douchebag zarovich (played by mike) just wins and sends will to a town of enforced happiness ruled by strahd von zarovich himself.
maybe it also has something to do with mike grieving his dead mother.
finn said he needed a personal trainer for a one-take scene in s5 where he'd have to run 'kinda non-stop' for three minutes. but i think we never actually saw that scene.
i know people assume it's the mac-z demogorgon attack, but that doesn't add up to me. he barely runs there—it's maybe thirty seconds of light jogging with constant stops. and it definitely doesn't last three minutes; it's barely a minute if we're just counting the part that could've been shot in one take (i'm not sure it was). respectfully, you wouldn't need a personal trainer for that, even if you're the most unathletic person alive.
the lies about the party
hey, so,,, ^what was this?
like, i get it's the same setup as the pic in the st5 poster but. to me, this pic looks a lot more like it could be a still from the show rather than one taken in a photo shoot. does it not?
of course, my eyes could deceive me. but then i have to wonder: whyyyy bother seeking out the most beautiful scenery, at the perfect time of day, with a gorgeously colored sky and sunlight shining from above and hitting just right, only to:
edit vecna's face all over it??? lmao.
!!keep reading for the biggest leap of the century!!
suzie not being in s5 is part of why i still believe in more content coming. the tower particles affected everyone in hawkins. suzie is not from hawkins. argyle is not from hawkins too, and he's met suzie.
real epilogue bf
snow
if it had been a slow-burn rejection arc, there would have been an actual rejection—but there wasn’t one. they also wouldn’t have made will hopeful out of nowhere in vol. 1. his storyline about his feelings for mike would have ended after mike "professed" his love to el in s4.
WILL BYERS IN SEASON 5 EPISODE 4
EPILOGUE WILL BYERS
STRANGER THINGS — 5.08: The Rightside Up