I need to say this, because if I don’t, it’s going to rot inside me.
I am genuinely heartbroken over how Stranger Things ended and not in a “I didn’t get the ship I wanted” way, but in a this show actively hurt me way. Pretending season 5 was “fine” feels like gaslighting myself. I cried. I actually cried. And if you didn’t see this coming or don’t understand why it hurts, then maybe this post isn’t for you.
These are my honest opinions. I’m not trying to be dramatic. I’m not trying to stir anything up. I’m just…hurt.
Let’s start with the ending.
The only Mileven kiss is in the final episode. The final episode. An awkward exchange of:
I remember sitting there thinking: are you joking?
That’s it? That’s the “emotional payoff”? That’s the “love story” that was so “amazingly written”?
And what makes it worse is that Mileven was awkward and strained all season. Painfully so. Their dynamic felt disconnected, uncomfortable, like two friends actually. The first “kiss” we even get isn’t “real”, it’s in Mike’s head, while Eleven is inside his mind explaining why she’s choosing to essentially blow herself up with the Upside Down. That’s not romance. That’s grief. That’s fear. That’s the Duffers trying to make it appealing for mileven.
And then suddenly, in the last episode, we’re told they’ve “loved each other for so long”? As if we didn’t just watch an entire season of emotional distance and strain? It felt forced. Like the writers realised they had to wrap it up and hoped we wouldn’t notice how hollow it felt.
I don’t care what the show tries to imply after, I choose to believe she died. Because Mike’s little theory at the end, that maybe she escaped, maybe she’s alive somewhere, doesn’t feel like right. It feels like denial. It feels like grief talking. It feels like the Duffers couldn’t kill off Eleven because they can’t kill off their characters.
Just ambiguity dressed up as hope.
Everyone else got their version of a “happy” ending. Or at least closure. Resolution. Peace.
Because Mike Wheeler used to be one of the most complex, carefully written characters on the show. He wasn’t just “the boy in love with the girl”. He was anxious, emotional, defensive, deeply loyal, sensitive to the point of pain. And across seasons, they layered him with something else, something quieter and more dangerous: repression.
Mike’s characterisation reads so clearly as someone dealing with internalised homophobia.
The way he clings to labels like “we’re friends!” as if saying it out loud will make the feelings go away.
The discomfort with heteronormative expectations.
The way he shuts down emotionally the closer he gets to the truth.
The way his entire emotional world orbits around Will in a way that eclipses every other relationship he has.
That is not accidental. That is a pattern.
I saw my own confusion. My own fear. My own attempts to force myself into something that looked “right” on paper but felt hollow in my chest. I saw what it’s like to love someone before you have the language, or the courage to understand what that love actually is.
So when the writers flattened him… when they stripped away his complexity, gave him clumsy dialogue, sidelined his inner conflict, and handed him an ending that was neither affirming nor transformative, it didn’t just feel disappointing. It felt cruel.
And this is where my anger really begins.
And I am not using that word lightly.
This wasn’t fans projecting. This wasn’t wishful thinking. This was years of deliberate storytelling choices that queer audiences are trained to recognise because we have always had to read between the lines to see ourselves.
Mike and Will were advertised constantly.
The Duffers leaned into it.
Shawn Levy (who is known for directing queer-coded content) posted only Mike and Will, knowing exactly how that would land.
The marketing knew. The creators knew.
The parallels were everywhere.
The complementing blue and yellow colour symbolism.
The pauses in dialogue that said more than the words ever did.
Will’s feelings are textually canon. Mike’s are coded in every way except spoken.
Not subtlety. Not “fans reading too much”. Queer coding used to draw in queer audiences without committing to queer truth.
And it hurts. Because queerbaiting isn’t harmless. It teaches us again that our stories are acceptable as subtext, as longing, as tragedy, but not as fulfilment. That we can exist in symbolism and glances, but not in resolution.
And don’t even get me started on the ending credits.
The song tied to their bond, their moments, their emotional core. A song that symbolised connection, sacrifice, and unspoken love between them.
Why use it there? Why end the entire series with that song if everything we were seeing was supposedly meaningless? You cannot convince me that was accidental. You cannot convince me they didn’t know exactly what that would evoke.
It felt like one final twist of the knife.
And then, the very last scene:
The party playing D&D again.
Mike and Will sitting there, side by side, looking at each other the way they always have. Quiet. Soft. Yearning. Like nothing was resolved at all. Like something still hung unspoken between them. Like history repeating itself.
After everything, they still looked unfinished.
Everyone else gets to move on. To celebrate. To call it beautiful.
Meanwhile, queer fans are left grieving something we were led to believe mattered.
I feel like the writers ruined deeply complex characters to appeal to an audience that was never engaging with the story on this level in the first place. And it feels homophobic, not necessarily in intent, but in outcome. Because once again, queerness was used, hinted at, profited from, and then discarded.
This shouldn’t be ignored.
Queerbaiting happens far too often.
Creators should be held accountable.
At the very least, the Duffers owe queer audiences an acknowledgement. An apology. Something that recognises the harm done when you invite people to see themselves in a story and then deny that vision ever existed.
I’m choosing the versions of these characters that were honest, brave, and unfinished, not the hollow shells they became at the end.
Because if I have to mourn them, I’d rather mourn the truth than accept a lie.
And if that makes me “too much”?
Then maybe the problem isn’t how deeply I felt, maybe it’s how shallow the ending was.
This wasn’t just disappointing.
