Mike Driver
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Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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@mikewtfdidyoudo
i cant believe hellfire mike from s4ep1 is canon and not some like thing we made up. thats not a headcanon/fanon. we got mike wheeler with a mullet and angry scowl and black jeans and chucks with a superiority complex about being a weird loser freak
mike permanently marked with will’s art, and will temporarily marked by mike in other ways (more tattoo artist x florist AU)
based on this tweet i made as i jumped on the bravebyers bus:
“the storyteller… keeps telling stories.”
the stories in question:
byler is not a ship. it's a story that hasn't been finished
me still in 60 years talking to anyone who’ll listen: at the very least, they could’ve given will the possibility of another boy in the beginning of the season who would reappear and who would be easy to root for (instead of doing all that). they have no problem introducing and focusing on new characters
imagine telling yourself in november that we wont get a confirmed gay mike wheeler but we will get finn playing a gay harry potter
Epilogue Mike
It’s always gotta be some fuckass painting,
that godamn swing set,
a traumatised gay boy
and finn fucking wolfhard at the crime scene
I quit.
this is insanee
also what was the point of having the byers in the wheeler house if they werent gonna do some juicy forced proximity byler bullshit. they coulda stayed at hops cabin.
"mikes gonna hear good luck babe in 40 years and lose his mind" "mikes gonna hear conan gray in 40 years and go crazy" mike is gonna watch dead poets society like a week after will leaves hawkins and in a fit of insanity is going to fly to new york and show up at his door unannounced like the messy gay disaster that he is
the duffers never addressed that fuckass painting because there’s no heterosexual explanation for mike being in love with will’s feelings
No like… it’s actually fucking insane. I don’t think people realize how INSANE it is from a writing standpoint. Mike is CANONICALLY in love with Will’s feelings for him. They couldn’t resolve this plot point without byler being canon because acknowledging it would have made it obvious that Mike was in love with Will. He ends the show IN LOVE with WILL and thinking it’s all from El. That is crazy.
They had to completely ignore the narrative they wrote to avoid byler. They had to straight up pretend it never existed, leaving the story itself unfinished. For what? Because they’re too scared to make two boys kiss? Omfg it’s unreal!
It's canon that Byler isn't dead.
So Duffers, you're willing to "leave it up to (homophobic) fans" who want Robin and Vickie to break up, even though nothing is said or onscreen showing this?
Okay, then:
That "leaves" US to say Robin and Vickie are still together, AND that Mike and Will get together after the epilogue! Especially since there's actual evidence ONSCREEN that they do:
If we reject heteronormativity, take the entirety of what's in the show over 5 seasons, and don't accept at face value that "Mike was Will's Tammy" or that Mike "understood" El (BS!), then a picture emerges where the chance for Byler, within canon, was not shut down but was merely postponed by the death of El.
I had a different reaction than most did, to the "Friends? No way... best friends!" scene. I TOTALLY see the cruelty of the scene in hindsight. But at the time I wasn't aware of any cast/creator statements suggesting Byler wouldn't happen, and I still saw a through line for Byler. So I saw the tower scene as a stepping-stone to Byler. I never for a moment thought Mike would casually confess right there, overcoming his internalized homophobia just hours after he had found out Will liked him and soon before the world might end, with his girlfriend trying to save said world. (Like duh!) The only believable ways for Byler to culminate were if it was key to saving the world (e.g., Will overcoming Vecna), or if destroying Vecna meant the apparent death of Will.
What shattered any possibility of Mike confessing his feelings to Will any time soon was El's death. After she dies, he is torn with crippling survivor's guilt.
(Side note addressing Mike's high emotions and kissing El... Bylers have always insisted that their limited life experience has caused them to mistake their love, created by trauma and circumstance (AHEM JANCY AHEM) as romantic. When they're officially in a relationship and El is about to DIE, of course they'll kiss. Notably he didn't respond to a DIRECT "I love you"... how PECULIAR was that??)
Eighteen months later, Hopper tells Mike that El would have wanted him to move on.
(At this point I actually freaked out while watching thinking there'd be a clear sign that Byler would happen in the epilogue, because how ELSE would you make this pay off, but to show that Mike is moving on by dating Will? Going to his own graduation doesn't cut it!)
It's clear that Mike had felt so guilty from El's death that he had not let himself move on with his life, perhaps to even have a life. Especially when it came to romance.
When Mike goes missing and Karen calls the Hopper/Byers cabin looking for him, she says she hasn't "seen him since last night." Apparently Mike often sees his best friend Will and maybe even stays over sometimes, like in the old days!
During the D&D game, Mike IMAGINED that Will had moved on from him to find another boy, sadly describing an "acceptance" that Mike is struggling to have himself - both acceptance of Hopper's advice, and of his own possible queerness.
Mike is depressed as FUCK and is struggling to go on with his life, and who better to help him through things, after people move away, than his BEST FRIEND? And wouldn't Will, knowing that Mike is depressed, insist on staying in Hawkins or ask Mike to go with him somewhere?
The FINAL SHOT is the Byler colors of blue and yellow, with a closed door that MIKE just walked through that suggests a closet door:
Yes, the Duffers betrayed us and we got 2% of what could have been. As with Rovickie, what they ended up doing with Byler was a GIGANTIC FUDGE to cave to homophobes. But there is solace in knowing that these are the seeds that ARE planted. The (additional) crime is that Future Byler is in subtext when it should have been text; this potential for gay love stayed "in the closet." It's 2026, and it's as if Byler had to comply with the Hays Code.
Their position to leave things up to the fans -- exemplified by Mike himself telling an alternate story of El -- and their commitment to limit spinoffs to different characters, means that they do not set canon for these characters from here on out; we do.
We have the unasked-for advantage over Milevens in that Mike and El's story is over; ours has just begun. And we also are fortunate that ours is entrusted to artists (ourselves) who we know can do it justice.
-teambyler
Stranger Things 5 - From a Working Filmmaker
As someone who studied film and works in the industry, the thing that really gets me about Stranger Things 5 (Vol 2 + Finale specifically) is that it's become pretty obvious that the Duffer's "it's ambiguous!" answers for every single ending plot point is code for "we didn't know how the fuck to end this"
Now, caveat, filmmaking is a subjective art form and *technically* there's no wrong way to make a movie or tv show (Tubi would literally be out of business if there was lmao). HOWEVER, I can say with 100% conviction - if I had submitted the scripts for episodes 5-8 to any of my screenwriting professors in school and then answered "IDK/It happens off-screen/It's up to the audience" for every single question someone had about a plot point (hole), that shit would have been RIPPED apart.
An ambiguous ending isn't a bad thing (see: Inception), but it has to be done right. If your entire finale is filled with loose ends and confusing everyone from the GA to people who over-analyze every single episode, at some point, you've gone off track. 1. WHY the 18-month time skip at the beginning (and end) of the season if you're not going to show us what happened? You mean to say all they did between season 4 and 5 is Go To School, Meet at the Squawk, Start Crawls, Rinse and Repeat? And you're telling me the first time Hopper had the "time to move on" talk with Mike was EIGHTEEN MONTHS after the final battle????? Why? Was Mike avoiding him? Was he putting on a happy face for everyone? 2. Why was the final battle so... anticlimactic? The Duffers claimed the demogorgons weren't there because "Vecna wasn't expecting it," but I'm not sure. I think most people assumed the demos lived somewhere around the Mindflayer/Vecna's lair. 3. What the hell was going on with Mike's vision? Did he really hallucinate everything? Was Kali actually alive long enough to pull this off? How tf did El pull him into her mindscape with all that kryptonite? (I believe the Duffer said it was in his head, but the ambiguity of it all still means there's a ton of divide amongst fans).
4. WHY DID MIKE NOT SAY I LOVE YOU BACK (even like, platonically, my guy she's literally about to die!!) 5. I'm not even going to get into the Byler of it all. If there are hours long video essays and 400 page powerpoints with evidence towards the ship, how can you come online and claim you were "never working towards it" and that the fans were just "external noise"???? Did Finn and Noah and the set designers and the costume designers and the editors and everyone except the Duffers just like, decide to rebel at some point? Long story short, if the Duffers were going for a "tied up with a neat bow" ending, they missed the mark big time. If they were going for an "open ending to please most of the audience", imo they also failed because they have literally no answers or explanations for why or how anything happened.
Me watching the careers of the duffers about to collapse because their own diehard fans of the show created an entire theory that relies on plot holes and inconsistencies that would only be explained by shitty writing, queerbaiting, and exploiting minority groups for performative representation brownie points if it amounts to nothing.
Mike having a novel dedicated to Will and Will says, "This is amazing! Did you write this?" And Mike responds with, "Yeah, well... Carlton commissioned it. He basically told me what to write."
the GA when bylers create nonship plot theories with clues from the show: omg you're so right
the GA when bylers use the exact same clues to prove that mike is queer: go kill yourselves
