Here is my one and only take on #conformitygate: I have no goodwill left to believe any of this was intentional, but as far as theories about being imprisoned in false realities go, I think The Matrix is a more appropriate movie to compare Stranger Things to than The Truman Show.
Because The Matrix is a story for queers that accidentally resonated with cishet men, while Stranger Things is a story for cishet men that accidentally resonated with queers.
The Matrix is commonly understood today as a trans allegory, but it's important to note that the Wachowski sisters were still in the closet when they made it -- which doesn't mean it isn't a trans allegory or anything, but according to Lilly Wachowski it wasn't consciously written to be about the trans experience -- she and her sister were just vibing with escapist fantasy at a time in their lives when (I presume) they still felt like their only option was to live as unhappy men.
So I don't think it's a coincidence that the movie's red pill -- a symbol of being willing to question oppressive social systems and start seeing them for what they really are--
--has been appropriated by incels: a particularly unhappy group of men who can sense that something is deeply wrong with the suffocating gender expectations they're held to, but are so damn close to meeting those expectations -- and thus reaping the reward of social and sexual dominance they've been promised is their birthright -- that they just double down on them instead of rejecting them the way queers do.
I don't think the Duffer brothers are incels, but the ending they wrote for Stranger Things is definitely giving miserable cishet men who don't want to acknowledge the real reason they're so miserable.
I strongly suspect that the movie which most fundamentally inspired the end of Stranger Things is the same movie which inspired its first season: Stand By Me.
This movie has a satisfyingly bittersweet ending about looking back fondly on childhood and knowing that its magic is gone forever. As Gordie, the narrator of Stand By Me who grows up to be a writer, says at the end:
"I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?"
This explains a lot about Mike "The Storyteller" Wheeler's closest relationships: on one side he has El, who represents the magic of childhood and who deep down he always knew he was doomed to lose; on the other side he has Will, his best friend whose ability to stay true to himself helped Mike figure out how to grow up without completely letting go of the whimsy of childhood.
(And they're all wrapped up in a double-doomed love triangle to stress the importance of accepting yourself over thinking romance will solve all your problems.)
At least, that's the most charitable interpretation I can come up with for the story I think the Duffers were trying to write.
What they actually wrote was the bleakest, most bafflingly unsatisfying ending I've ever seen, because instead of letting their characters organically reach the endings they'd grown towards over the course of four and a half seasons, they forced them to act out a predetermined ending that doesn't at all fit who they really are.
I'd call it a silly, terrible play if I had any faith left in the Duffers' capacity for self-awareness.
Making Jane a metaphor for the magic of childhood while also making her a real human girl who was robbed of her own childhood by institutional abuse is an utterly unhinged choice.
It makes sense if the point is to criticize privileged boys like Mike who are at risk of growing up into pricks who take the women in their lives for granted, but ST doesn't do that: the story places the onus on Jane to sacrifice herself yet again instead of on Mike to become part of the solution.
Giving Will a four-season unrequited crush arc (disguised as a reciprocated slowburn romance to trick the audience into experiencing Will's self-delusion and heartbreak along with him, don't even get me fucking started on that) while also making him a CSA-coded gay kid is equally unhinged.
Will did not need to learn a lesson in accepting that romantic prospects don't always work out: that lesson is for cishet kids who expect romance as their birthright, not for traumatized queer kids who think their desires are shameful and forbidden. Once again, the onus is on the abused minority character to learn Mike's lesson for him.
As for Mike himself? That clever, loving, heroic boy was slaughtered like a pig some time after S2 and replaced with a mannequin wearing his skin like a suit.
(No offense to Finn Wolfhard; he did the best he could with what he was given.)
In the end, Mike still couldn't say "I love you" to Jane or do anything to help her. In the end, he still couldn't have a genuinely vulnerable conversation with Will about how his ignorance and cowardice ruined their friendship. In the end, he still couldn't follow Will's lead to keep being his most authentic self.
Will and Jane suffered horribly for the sake of Mike's coming-of-age and it was all for naught, because Mike Wheeler is a coward who chose the blue pill: he gave in to the suffocating expectation that men should be emotionally repressed and accept the loss of their dearest friendships, and he thinks that the closest he can ever get to escaping this fate is to make up stories about the women and queers he envies for their freedom.
(Or, well, the freedom he likes to imagine they have -- much like his creators, Mike doesn't appear to be interested in their perspective on their own experiences.)
And the Duffers apparently want us to believe that this is an "inevitable" and "bittersweet" ending to the Saving Kids From the Horrors of Conformity With the Power of Love and Friendship show...?
I dunno, maybe I'm just too gay to understand why three character arcs lying pointlessly shattered in the aftermath of a fumbled allegory and 20 minutes of self-indulgent manchild ennui is supposed to read as bittersweet closure on Mike's coming-of-age, because all I see is a desperately tragic warning of how far-right sociopolitical climates turn sweet, caring boys into pathetic, self-absorbed men who can't lift a finger to help themselves or their friends.
I'm not surprised #conformitygate went viral. You don't need to think Mike is secretly gay to sense that something is deeply wrong with this picture.
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