can I just say something cause I'm still really fucking angry.
I always said that if Stranger Things didn't make byler canon it would be a massive flop, and some people (at least around me), even though they were byler shippers, thought that was too far, but I genuinely don't think they could have even made that shit good without making byler canon. It's like what people were saying with conformitygate, 'if they do it but byler doesn't happen, I don't want it'. Byler was such a strong narrative force in the show. To subvert the conformist ending they would've had to make byler canon. To make the ending good in the first place they would need to be true to the show, and how could they be true to the show while forgetting all these laws they had set up with byler?
By ignoring byler like they did, they had to ignore the laws of writing. The laws that they set for themselves when writing it in earlier seasons, especially season 4, because that painting was the point of no return. You can't introduce something like that and never address it. It's just unfinished business that doesn't make any sense because you never resolved it.
And they can't resolve it with a rejection, because I think they knew how stupid that would've been, or maybe they didn't care and wanted to break our hearts, but I digress. If they did some slow burn rejection thing, that would have been a very strange and genuinely anticlimactic writing choice. They would have had to actually explain the painting and make it undeniable for the viewers. They would've had to acknowledge that how Will spoke in the van is how he feels about Mike, and what is that if not love? Pure love, the way they wrote it. The way they acted and directed it, scrutinising it for hours and telling Finn 'it'll pay off.'
If I had done all that, just to end it in rejection, I would be embarrassed of myself.
So they didn't do a rejection, they acted like it was never real in the first place. The coward approach, even more embarrassing In my opinion, but at least all the casual watchers will forget there was ever a painting in the first place.
My point is, no matter what they did with byler, without making it canon, there were always going to be cracks in the dam.
It could be one of the reasons they nerfed Henry And Patty, because the parallels were too obvious. Mike and Will were meant to be their foils, I will die on this hill. Where things ended in tragedy for them, Will and Mike's story was going to be different, because Will was possesed, but he wouldn't lose to the mindflayer like Henry did, right? Mike would have pulled through, not because of a speech from his best friend, but because it was what was in his heart.
In the end, they literally just annihilated all of that. Henry was actually just an evil sycopath with no feelings, who wanted to do everything he did, going against canon lore that they created/approved of with the First Shadow. Patty wasn't even introduced, which should have happened in a good ending for Stranger Things, but they already had a cast of like 80 people by then. They couldn't have forgotten fucking Murray because we all know how important he is.
I don't know what the stance on this is, but I genuinely believe that Stranger things was going to have it's good ending, and something happened behind the scenes that ruined it. I'm not glazing the Duffers, I hate them. I'm saying that Stranger Things was written for misfits at some point. I didn't make that up. There were genuinely beautiful moments in that show and for all it's flaws, it's relationships were what held it all together. I don't really know how it all works, and I guess we'll never get answers, but what the Duffers wrote did not take two years. That took six months at least. It was the definition of rushed. And I know the Duffers never cared about their representation, you can tell by the way that they talk about it, but someone did. Someone laid byler into the groundwork. Someone wrote down those laws and said, 'hey, this is how it works. Don't fuck it up.'
And they did, catastrophically.
In order to nuke byler, they also had to do a last minute save for mileven, cue Jane carrying all the weight.
There were rules for mileven, too. And they broke all of them, too. They wrote again and again about how little Mike and Jane didn't understand eachother. They bored us with fights instead of giving those two something to stand on. In order for Mike to have his big saviour moment for Jane, he needed Will. You can't be told what comes from your heart. Only you can decide that. But Will decided it for Mike, and the show went along with it. Making it difficult to understand how Mike's feelings for Jane worked or whether he even had them.
They wrote Jane's season 4 arc in support of an ending where byler was endgame, and when they backed out, they had to throw her under the bus. Literally get rid of her. Suddenly, Mike always understood her and mileven was all that mattered and all that she was in those mere four years she was out of the lab. Barely able to speak when she had her first kiss with someone she thought of as family. Crying because Mike wasn't loving her right, and gaining her final strength in season 4 not because Mike said something from the heart, but because Will did.
Can't you see? All of this was leading to their endgame.
jbbartram-illu
andulkaphoto
annaxmalina
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
kaledo-art
