She Was a Mayfly - novels don't get better than this
As promised to @wavesketcher-sq, these are pics of my binding of her wonderful novel "She Was a Mayfly". The story would deserve much better, but I wanted it to feel "personal" so I've done as much myself as I could (which is not good for the result). First and foremost, I wanted a physical copy I could put in my bookshelf and take out and read whenever I felt like it. I will be forever grateful for the chance to read it and how brilliant it was (and for the future times I will reread it too).
I also had the invaluable help of everybody in the Renegade Bindery Discord server (@renegadeguild).
To create this book, I had to improve my LaTeX typesetting skills (not learn LaTeX, for that I still have to give credit to @cinnonym and me wanting to preserve their tumblr ficlets, like this great one)… anyway I digress, I had to improve LaTeX, learn basic binding, source the right off-white paper from the UK, the right tools and thread from Germany, natural silk thread from Milan, buy a new printer, learn how to make bookcloth, find the right fabric, learn how to do paper marbling (badly), (not manage to) learn how to do suminagashi, build a DIY book press, learn how to sew endbands (badly), and more… I started in August.
I can only see two explanations, either the novel is truly amazing, or I am completely crazy. I tend to favor the first option (though they are not mutually exclusive).
I have a companion booklet in the making for Author's Notes and comments, and then I have so many ideas for stories I might bind…but so little time.
Anyway, I am so happy about this. Because this is really what I wanted, a hardcopy to browse and read, and "vandalize" underlining sentences and writing notes in. I am afraid I am a boring alphabetical order woman, so here it is in my English language fiction section, after Carlene Thompson.
This is an amazing analysis of the subtext of Stranger Things (written before season 5). It's super long but worth it, I encourage you to read it if you feel like falling in love with that story again ☺ I sure did ! At the very least it has made me feel better about thinking that the show is written around Mike and Will. We're not crazy, just good at reading subtext! A few excerpts :
Stranger than you think (example: “Stranger Things”)
tvmicroscope
Jul 01, 2025
Excerpts :
What I mean by ‘subtext’ are structural writing tools: mirror characters, mirror scenes, allegorical characters, entire narratives that run parallel to each other. This is subtext. (…) I mean the structure of the text itself.
The Upside Down is the closet. (Well, it’s a bit more than just that, but we’ll get to that in a sec. For the purposes of the first season, it’s the closet.)
You can take a boy out of the closet, but you can’t always take the closet out of the boy. (about season 2)
We don’t know where Will went. And we don’t know where El came from.
He disappears off the face of the earth. She appears out of nowhere.
That in and of itself should already tell you that there is something fishy going on in the story’s subtext. All of your subtext-detecting alarm bells should be ringing once you realize that there’s this strange parallel.
I think Eleven is a personification of the feelings that Mike Wheeler has for Will Byers.
Suddenly, this whole scene in season four gets a different meaning: Mike feels like his life started when he ‘found’ El, i.e. when he found his love for Will, when he discovered this love.
And no wonder it is Will who is pushing Mike to finally say it in that scene. No wonder Mike and Will are being framed together, just the two of them, again and again here, with cuts to a captive, bound El in the Upside Down.
You are probably all wondering if I believe that Mike and Will will become a canonical couple in the final season of ‘Stranger Things’ (i.e. in season five). Honestly, there is no way to tell. And if I’m completely honest…I don’t think they will.
The thing is just… Writers very often introduce subtext into their scripts that they then don’t follow through on. There are so, so many shows and movies where anyone with even just the slightest experience with screenplays could tell you what the subtext says and does, and yet those same shows and movies don’t bring that subtext up to the surface and never pull the subtextual information out into the light.
What’s more: Stories where the subtext hints at a protagonist being gay or bisexual, stories with a subtext that gives us a same-sex love story like that, almost never follow through on that subtext. Unfortunately.
Am I convinced that the subtext is there for Mike and Will?
Absolutely!
