Will Byers is pretty when he cries, but at what cost?
Now that the series has ended, and we have witnessed how cruelly Will’s arc was handled after Volume 1—reduced almost entirely to his sexuality, weaponized to humiliate him through his feelings for Mike—I feel compelled to address something deeply disturbing: the trauma porn constructed around Will Byers.
It is no secret that Will is the most tortured character in the series, whether by society or by the supernatural. His abduction is not merely a plot point; it is the very root from which the entire story grows. And yet, despite everything he endures, there is no true payoff at the end—nothing beyond the bare minimum of survival. He is alive, yes, but the narrative refuses to truly engage with the impact of his trauma on his inner life. This absence defines the treatment of Will as pure trauma porn, made all the more disturbing by the fact that it began when he was a child.
For ten years—and especially in Season 5—the Duffers exploited Will’s suffering, pain, and violence not for healing or growth, but for spectacle and aesthetic effect. They subjected him to relentless torment, repeatedly dragging him back into it through flashbacks: the Season 5 opening revisited twice, and the recurring imagery of the Mind Flayer entering Will’s body in Season 2—scenes that stand among the most explicit allegories of sexual assault in the series, inflicted upon a child. Yet instead of exploring these experiences—of showing us, for instance, the vision Vecna forces him to witness—or granting Will a complete arc of confrontation and recovery, they chose only to torture him further. His trauma becomes a narrative excuse to humiliate him through his homosexuality, to force him to renounce the one desire that mattered most to him: his feelings for Mike. The coming-out scene, and the symbolic use of the name Tammy, exist not as liberation but as erasure.
Will’s trauma is never for Will. It is aestheticized, instrumentalized, and redirected to serve other characters’ arcs and the writers’ agenda. And when one considers that Noah was only twelve years old during Season 2—when one of the creators openly admitted to enjoying watching him scream and suffer on set, when Noah screamed so much he lost his voice—and that Season 5 subjected him to similar extremes, leaving physical marks on his neck, marks compared to those left on women after childbirth, the discomfort deepens. The cast continues to praise Noah for enduring everything “without ever complaining,” despite what he went through physically and emotionally. All of this makes it impossible not to suspect that, beyond their deeply internalized homophobia toward Will as a character, there is something profoundly unhealthy in the pleasure they seem to take in making Noah suffer, in pushing him to tears again and again.
Will does not go a single season without crying—except Season 1, when he was absent altogether. In Season 5, the frequency is staggering. There is not a single episode in which he does not cry. Yes, some tears are tender or relieving—the scene with Robin in Episode 4, the conversation with Joyce in Episode 5, the epilogue—but the overwhelming majority are tears of terror and pain. And one cannot help but wonder whether the Duffers enjoyed this, because Noah—like Will—is beautiful. He was a strikingly beautiful child, with wide, doe-like eyes, and he has grown into an objectively handsome young man. Even in anguish—crying, screaming—his face does not become grotesque. He is what is cruelly called a “pretty crier,” not an “ugly crier.” And I sincerely believe this aestheticized suffering was appreciated in a deeply unhealthy way.
There is nothing inherently wrong with portraying beauty through suffering. Entire archetypes—like the gothic heroine—are built on this very idea, and it is no coincidence that Will’s imagery in this season evokes it so strongly. He has the face for it, undeniably. But suffering is only justified when it serves a precise narrative purpose—when the character’s happiness, fulfillment, or desire is reached in proportion to what they have endured, and when trauma is explored deeply for the character’s own arc. That is not what was done with Will. Instead, he is made to suffer endlessly, to cry relentlessly, without the true compensation he deserves at the end.
And when all of this is placed alongside the coming-out scene—when we know that Noah’s own emotions and lived experiences were mined for that moment, that he was made to cry and repeat the scene for twelve hours in front of the entire cast, forced to relive it again and again—the cruelty becomes unbearable. Especially when the sole purpose of that scene was to eliminate Byler, even at the cost of destroying the series’ own narrative coherence and character integrity. The motivation behind this choice was nothing more than homophobia, following years of queerbaiting the audience and even the cast themselves—Noah in particular. That scene then became a weapon used worldwide by homophobes, turning both Will and Noah into scapegoats for hatred and mockery.
They marketed this season as Will’s season. After Volume 1—largely written by the other writers, those who still respect the characters, the narrative, and the audience—it was easy to believe. But the Duffers have never respected Will. And they confirmed it with the volume 2 and the finale. They used his trauma purely for visual aesthetic—because apparently a beautiful gay child or young man in pain is acceptable, even desirable, but allowing him the love he longs for is “unrealistic” In the same way, they reduced Eleven to a vessel for their own incel fantasies.
What remains is not tragedy with meaning, but suffering without justice—pain drained of purpose, beauty weaponized, and a character who deserved healing left suspended in silence.
They inflicted extreme suffering upon a queer, traumatized child, then denied him love, giving him the MINIMUM of agency and repair—while transforming that suffering into spectacle. Will’s treatment is narratively unjust, emotionally exploitative, and symbolically violent. And the fact that this violence was borne, again and again, by a child who grew into adolescence makes it impossible to dismiss, impossible to excuse, and impossible to look away from without moral consequence.
Volume 1—and Episode 4 in particular, once again written by the other writers rather than the Duffers or Shawn Levy—stood as a rare and powerful example of how Will’s suffering could be portrayed with beauty and purpose. It showed pain not as spectacle, but as a path: toward self-acceptance, toward the first fragile steps of healing, toward the reclamation of control. It is no coincidence that Episode 4 is the highest-rated of the season and among the most acclaimed episodes of the entire series. In a single hour, it granted justice to Will—to everything he has endured and everything he represents. His trauma, his suffering, his queerness, his feelings for Mike were not isolated traits, but interwoven threads, each given weight and meaning, each anchored to the very heart of the supernatural plot.
Had Volume 2 and the finale been written with the same care and coherence, this season could have stood as the strongest of the entire series. Instead, Will’s final confrontation with Henry fails to truly engage with what Henry inflicted upon him. Yes, Will is allowed a moment of projection—of empathy for the child Henry once was—and in doing so, he speaks to himself, reminding himself that he too was only a child, that none of it was his fault. But this gesture, however meaningful, is not enough. The narrative never lingers on Will’s trauma, on what it left behind in him, long enough to create genuine catharsis. By the time we reach the finale, his healing feels abrupt, almost instantaneous, as though reassurance from his family and friends—that they will continue to love him even if he is gay—were sufficient to undo years of terror and violation.
Once again, Volume 2 sets aside the true weight of Will’s trauma after having mined it for aesthetic effect, reducing his arc to his sexuality alone. Yes, in the epilogue, Will is healed. He has reclaimed his agency, as he deserves, and that brings relief. But the writing of Volume 2 and the finale, by pushing him into the background, renders this resolution incomplete. It is not unearned, but it is underdeveloped—glimpsed rather than lived, suggested rather than fully realized. The healing exists, but the journey toward it has been treated too lightly to feel truly satisfying.
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