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byler cinematography ramblings aka my film degree finally paying off- BA hons if analysis and rants are your thing, i’m your gal — equal parts thesis statement and emotional spiral. The metaphor is gay and so am I.

[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.

[narrativelogicofbyler]

i’m not back, but i needed to step in and say thank you all for the messages you’ve sent, messages that have felt less like notes and more like small acts of holding. i’m grateful in ways i don’t yet have the vocabulary for.

happy pride.

this year will be my first pride without the person who stood beside me at my very first march when i was fourteen. they were there at the beginning, when i was still learning what pride even meant, when the world felt too big and i felt too small. they were the one constant in every pride that followed. and now there’s a space where they should be, a space so sharply defined it feels architectural, like the outline of a missing pillar.

their sudden death last month didn’t just break my world but quietly rearranged its physics. grief has become a kind of atmospheric condition, not an event but a climate. the absence isn’t conceptual; it’s a daily, structural destabilisation. i keep encountering the negative space where they should be, and every encounter feels like a fresh discovery of the same wound.

these past weeks have been defined by that hollowed out architecture, the sense that something enormous has been removed, leaving behind an echoing interior i’m still learning how to navigate. nothing fits the way it used to. even joy feels slightly misaligned, like it’s arriving through the wrong doorway.

i will return. i will survive this. but survival feels less like resilience and more like the slow, painstaking work of rebuilding a self around a fault line that will never fully close.

happy pride, even in the ache.

[narrativelogicofbyler]

i’m going to be stepping away from this space for a while. someone very close to me passed away suddenly yesterday, and everything feels unreal and too sharp, like the world is moving but i’m not.

i wanted to say something only because i’ve met such lovely people here, and the thought of just disappearing without a word felt wrong. i don’t want anyone thinking i’ve drifted off or lost interest, i’m just trying to hold myself together in a moment that’s taken more out of me than i know how to name.

right now i need to be with my family, with the grief, with the quiet. with whatever this new shape of life is . i’ll come back when i can, when the days stop feeling so heavy and when i can breathe a little easier.

[narrativelogicofbyler]

in my view, the persistent proximity between mike and will in group scenes isn’t incidental, it reflects a deliberate relational blocking strategy. they’re positioned as a single spatial entity within the ensemble, occupying a shared micro zone that visually encodes their bond as structurally integral rather than circumstantial. the camera naturalises their closeness; it’s treated as an unmarked default state.

and i think i’m especially attuned to this because my ex‑professor was fixated on blocking as a mode of subtext. he’d pause screenings to point out how directors use spatial arrangement to articulate the unsaid, how distance, orientation, and negative space become the architecture of emotional truth. so now, when i watch byler scenes, that training kicks in immediately.

in their duo scenes, the sudden introduction of negative space reads to me as a textbook example of what he used to call “spatialised subtext.” the gap isn’t empty; it’s a charged interval that externalises everything the characters can’t articulate. the distance becomes the narrative argument: longing, misalignment, withheld confession. the space itself is doing the expressive labour.

so from my perspective, the pattern is intentional and deeply telling:

proximity in groups establishes their bond as naturalised; distance in private scenes renders the unsaid visible.

it’s exactly the kind of blocking my professor loved, the kind where the truth sits in the space between bodies.

[narrativelogicofbyler]

what unsettles me about noah repeatedly saying “will would confess to mike then die” isn’t the hypothetical itself, it’s the cultural weight of who’s saying it and why. on the surface it reads like a throwaway joke, but historically, queer characters have been narratively disposed of the second they articulate desire. that’s not neutral language. that’s a trope with a body count.

why would a gay actor say that about his own gay character? why lean into a narrative that has harmed queer audiences for decades? but then i remember the environment he was working in. the duffers treated will’s queerness like a contaminant, something to be contained, sidelined, joked around, never centred. noah spent years performing a character whose interiority the show refused to honour. of course that shapes how he talks about the role. of course it shapes what he thinks is “expected” or “allowed.”

so when he says it, it doesn’t read like genuine belief. it reads like conformity. like someone who has internalised the narrative limits imposed on him. like someone repeating the script the show handed him: queer longing is tragic, queer confession is catastrophic, queer characters don’t get futures.

[narrativelogicofbyler]

bylerbutmakeitacademic > narrativelogicofbyler

[narrativelogicofbyler]

i want to be absolutely explicit here, because people keep trying to retrofit excuses onto choices that were fully contemporary and fully avoidable: the duffers were not “working within censorship codes.” they weren’t navigating some invisible 1950s moral panic. they made a choice, a contemporary, fully resourced, fully optional choice, to handle will’s storyline through a homophobic lens. and as someone who spent a significant portion of my degree studying queer media history, i’m not misusing that word.

what they did to one of the core four, the only canonically gay member of that group, was disgraceful. that coming out scene is a farce. it’s not just clumsy; it’s structurally homophobic. you do not stage a coming out moment with twelve characters in the room unless you fundamentally misunderstand (or disregard) the emotional, historical, and cinematic weight of queer disclosure and coming out narratives. it’s the opposite of intimacy, the opposite of safety, the opposite of respect. it’s a spectacle. it’s humiliation dressed up as catharsis.

and the blocking makes it worse. the camera doesn’t protect will. it exposes him. it treats his vulnerability like a plot device, not a person. even noah’s performance, which is extraordinary, can’t salvage a scene that was built on such a fundamentally hostile foundation. the text, the staging, the proxemics, the emotional architecture: all of it betrays him.

people can debate intent all they want, but the impact is right there on screen. and it’s ugly.

[narrativelogicofbyler]

with my degree we went deep into queer media history, and that’s exactly why byler makes me so furious. because what the duffers did isn’t just “bad writing”, it’s part of a long, documented pattern in film and television where queer desire is mined for emotional intensity and then discarded the moment it threatens the heteronormative centre.

queer cinema has always had to fight for scraps. for decades, queer characters were only allowed to exist through subtext, tragedy, or metaphor. the “coded longing” era wasn’t an aesthetic choice, it was survival under censorship. filmmakers used lighting, blocking, colour, and performance to signal queer desire because they weren’t allowed to say it outright. that visual grammar became a language of its own.

and the duffers used that language. deliberately. expertly. cynically.

the slow push ins, the pink golden washed lighting, the confession proxy scenes, the emotional monologues framed like romantic declarations, these aren’t accidents. they’re techniques with a lineage. they come from decades of queer filmmakers carving out space where they weren’t permitted any. they come from a history of audiences learning to read between the lines because the lines were forbidden.

so when people say “it was the 80s” or “realistically it wouldn’t happen,” i want them to understand the irony. queer cinema of the actual 80s was already pushing boundaries. already telling stories of longing, rupture, confession, community, and survival. already refusing to be erased. pretending that a queer coming of age arc would be “unrealistic” is not only historically wrong, it’s homophobic in the exact same way the old censorship codes were.

and narratively? thematically? structurally? byler made more sense than anything else in the show. the entire premise was “the outcasts,” and yet the one queer outcast with the clearest emotional arc gets shoved aside so the creators can maintain a heteronormative status quo they themselves destabilised through their own cinematic choices.

that’s why i call the duffers liars. they didn’t just queerbait, they appropriated the emotional labour of queer cinematic history. they used the tools queer filmmakers developed under oppression, they used the audience literacy queer people were forced to cultivate, and then they pretended none of it meant anything.

they wanted the ache without the accountability. the longing without the love. the queer emotional intensity without the queer story.

[narrativelogicofbyler]

saw the most beautifulest woman today, blue and yellow dress, sunlight doing the absolute most, and my brain just went “oh. right. this is what byler has done to me”. no further elaboration is required. this ship has fundamentally restructured my perceptual framework.

[narrativelogicofbyler]

it’s honestly staggering how openly people will articulate homophobia when they think they’re making a “neutral” point about narrative tropes. saying “bylers should be happy their characters survived because the gay one usually dies” isn’t media literacy, it’s the casual repetition of a historically violent pattern in storytelling, one that has been critiqued for decades in queer film studies.

the “bury your gays” trope isn’t an inevitability of narrative structure; it’s the product of a long history of censorship, moral panic, and representational policing. to invoke it as something queer audiences should be grateful for avoiding is to reveal exactly how little one understands about the ethics of representation. it frames queer survival as an exception, a concession, a bonus prize, rather than a baseline expectation.

and the fact that they’re not even hiding the homophobia tells you everything. it’s the quiet part said out loud: that queer characters are still seen as narratively disposable, and queer viewers should accept scraps and call it generosity.

[narrativelogicofbyler]

i genuinely don’t know who some people think they are. the entitlement is wild. don’t message me telling me to delete my previous post before volume 2. don’t patronise me about how i was “wrong” or how my degree is “useless”. i spent six years studying this craft, structure, subtext, visual rhetoric, narrative payoff, and every single thing i learnt is exactly why i was confident in byler happening.

the duffers didn’t “change their minds”. they betrayed the story they were telling. they violated the fundamental principles we’re literally taught not to break: narrative continuity, emotional logic, character trajectory, thematic integrity. they undercut their own groundwork. that’s not me being dramatic, that’s basic storytelling analysis.

so no, i won’t delete my previous posts. i’m not ashamed of the hope or the enthusiasm i had. i’m not embarrassed that i trusted the text to honour the arc it built.

what i am is disgusted by what the duffers chose to do. and i refuse to let anyone rewrite that or talk down to me about it.

[narrativelogicofbyler]

please don’t waste your time sending me asks about tales from 85. i have not watched it, i will not be watching it, and every accidental glimpse i’ve caught has done nothing but raise my blood pressure.

from a film and tv perspective, it’s infuriating: either this is one massive joke and conformitygate actually is the long game they’re spiralling toward, or they’re genuinely attempting to retroactively rewrite the dynamics of their own show via animated stand ins.

either way, the whole thing feels like a duplicitous exercise in narrative self harm, and i want no part of it. they genuinely disgust me.

if you want analysis, i’m sorry, i’m not engaging with a text that’s actively trying to gaslight its own audience.

[narrativelogicofbyler]

i’ve run through every plausible industrial and narrative rationale for why byler’s arc was left unresolved, and none of them withstand a formal reading. the show constructs their relationship using the established grammar of romantic cinema, the reciprocal gaze, the colour motif tethering, the blocking that stages confession and deferred desire. these aren’t incidental choices; they’re the semiotic markers through which film historically encodes romantic inevitability.

when a text deploys that toolkit with consistency, it creates a teleological arc the audience is trained to recognise. refusing to actualise that arc isn’t “ambiguity”; it’s a representational rupture. and given the precision of the romantic coding, the idea that the creators were unaware of its implications is untenable.

which leaves the uncomfortable but theoretically unavoidable conclusion: the show appropriates queer affective labour while denying queer fulfilment. in film theory, that pattern has a name, structural homophobia enacted through representational withholding.

once you demonstrate fluency in the grammar of romance, refusal becomes ideology.

[narrativelogicofbyler]

i’m not letting anyone gaslight me into pretending the duffers choices weren’t homophobic. you don’t deploy decades of queer cinematic language, build an entire emotional arc on queer longing, and then yank the narrative rug out from under a queer storyline without that meaning something. intent or not, the impact is the same: queer people got told their love is optional, expendable, and ultimately less important than a het couple the show itself kept proving didn’t work. that’s not “subtext,” that’s structural homophobia baked straight into the storytelling.

[narrativelogicofbyler]

when i describe byler as queerbait, i’m not invoking the superficial metric of “they didn’t kiss.” i’m referring to the show’s sustained mobilisation of the formal apparatus traditionally associated with heteroromantic storytelling. this isn’t fan interpretation; it’s a matter of cinematic convention, audiovisual rhetoric, and genre coded semiotics.

the blocking consistently positions the characters within intimate spatial thresholds, confined interiors, and emotionally charged proximities, all of which are historically coded as romantic sites of disclosure. the proxemics collapse interpersonal distance at narratively strategic moments, producing a visual tension that aligns with the grammar of longing rather than platonic rapport.

the camera language reinforces this: slow, deliberate push ins; symmetrical shot reverse shot structures that privilege emotional reciprocity; close ups that linger on micro-expressions of vulnerability; and selective depth of field that isolates the pair from their diegetic environment. these are not neutral choices. they are the same techniques used across classical and contemporary cinema to construct romantic subjectivity.

and then there is the score, which functions as an interpretive framework. leitmotifs recur specifically around their shared emotional beats, employing harmonic suspensions, unresolved cadences, and timbral softness that mirror the musical strategies historically used to underscore romantic tension. film music theory is clear on this: scoring is not decorative but semantic, guiding the audience toward a particular emotional reading. when the music aligns with the visual rhetoric of romance, the text is making an argument.

so when i call it queerbait, i’m identifying a dissonance between the show’s formal signification, which unmistakably constructs a romance through image, sound, and performance, and its narrative refusal to acknowledge the implications of its own craft. it’s not about the absence of a kiss. it’s about the deployment of a romantic semiotic system without the narrative follow-through that system promises.

in other words: the issue isn’t the lack of textual confirmation. it’s the presence of romantic form without romantic resolution.

[narrativelogicofbyler]

i’ve just logged on for the first time since tales from 85 dropped and, to be completely transparent, i’m still not watching the show. so to the lovely people who’ve messaged asking for my “thoughts” or whether there are any clues for conformitygate, i’m genuinely sorry, but i have no analysis to give because i’m not engaging with it.

[narrativelogicofbyler]

mike’s reception across the seasons stops being “random fandom mood swings” and starts reading like a textbook example of what happens when a character’s emotional architecture is built one way and the show keeps trying to force it another. it starts being a case study in how audience empathy is engineered, and how it collapses when the text fights its own emotional logic. the pattern is almost painfully consistent.

in seasons 1 and 2, mike is written, framed, and shot as someone whose emotional centre is will. the camera treats will as his axis; the blocking reinforces their connection; the urgency in mike’s performance is rooted in that relationship. audiences responded to him because the emotional logic was cohesive. it felt human, grounded, narratively earned.

then season 3 (and parts of 4) try to reroute that centre toward el without doing the groundwork to make that shift believable. suddenly mike reads as cold, avoidant, inconsistent, not because viewers “decided to hate him,” but because the writing is pushing him into beats that contradict the emotional grammar the show itself established. the dissonance is visible on screen, so the audience reacts accordingly.

season 5 volume 1 lets him drift back into will oriented emotional clarity, and surprise: people start loving him again. the softness returns, the internal logic clicks, and the character feels recognisable. but by the finale, when the text once again tries to overwrite that trajectory, the response drops off. again. because you can’t keep snapping a character’s emotional spine in half and expect viewers not to notice.

almost like mike is compelling when the show lets him follow the emotional throughline it built for him, and collapses when it pretends that throughline doesn’t exist. almost like the audience isn’t confused at all; they’re just responding to the only version of mike that actually makes narrative sense.