This really put the nail in the coffin for me:
The Mike monologue to El is NOT supposed to come across as romantic, at least, not in the sense that you would expect.
In Mike's monologue, he tells El "You can do anything! You can fly. You can move mountains. I believe that."
This is important, because this part of the monologue sounds a whole heck of a lot like the speech that Brenner gives El when she tries to leave to go save Max.
In this scene, Brenner says, "You came to me broken, and you've learned to walk again, but if you want to stop One, you'll need to do more than walk. You will need to do more than run. You will need to fly."
This is not the first time in the season that we see Mike getting paralleled with Brenner. In fact, this happens at the end of the S4E2 when Mike sees El hit Angela over the head with a rollerskate and says "What did you do?," the exact same thing Brenner said after finding El in the rainbow room surrounded by the other lab kids who were all killed.
Before we get deeper into the monologue itself, let's take a look at the note that Mike and El leave their relationship on before she leaves. We see their fight in her bedroom where El brings up that Mike never expresses love to her. El tells Mike that she doesn't belong anywhere, and that everyone looks at her "like a monster," and accuses Mike of seeing her this way too. Here he deflects the allegations and calls her "Eleven," not El. When he attempts to mend this with her, he uses the words "incredible," and "superhero" to describe El.
We've already talked about the implications that using these adjectives describes idolization rather than love, but what's more here is that he puts the same emphasis on her powers that Brenner does. By referring to her as Eleven, not El or Jane, he subliminally sends the message that he is thinking of her as an "other," and to her, this holds the connotation of an experiment since that's what the numbers signified in Brenner's lab.
It is made very evident here that we are supposed to align Mike with Dr. Brenner.
Before El leaves, in her last scene with Mike when she is being placed in the cop car, we see him say to her, "Eleven, Eleven, listen to me, okay? Eleven, will you please look at me? Everything's going to be fine. I'm going to fix this."
Not only does he repeatedly once again call her Eleven, instead of the affectionate nickname he gave her, but he specifically uses the word "fix," perfectly mirroring what Brenner says when he refers to El as "broken."
So when we then see language from the same conversation El has with Brenner come back in during Mike's love confession with the word "fly," the viewer is once again subliminally meant to associate Mike with Dr. Brenner.
What's so interesting about this confession scene is that it also heavily mirrors Mike's shared memory with Will in season 2 as he's trying to break through the Mind Flayer's possession of Will.
In this scene, we see Mike describing the first time he met Will. We see Finn give a shockingly visually similar performance to his monologue with El, but here we see Mike shedding tears, and the way in which Finn delivers these lines is not frantic or off-the-cuff, but instead the tone is quiet and the strength of the speech lies solely in the emotion behind his words. This scene comes across as much more tender and genuine, and stands in stark contrast tonally to the way we see Mike speak to El.
Here, Mike says that he "felt so alone" during that first day of kindergarten, but then he "saw [Will] on the swings, and [he was] alone too," establishing a kinship and connection with Will immediately. Mike continues by saying, "I just walked up to you, and I asked. I asked if you wanted to be my friend. And you said yes. You said yes. It was the best thing I've ever done."
In this monologue, we not only see that similar language is used in the Mike love confession scene in which he tells El his "life started" when he found her in the woods, but we get this interesting contrast in which Mike's words are actually able to break through to Will here, whereas when he is confessing to El, Vecna's grip tightens until she looks over at Max.
By drawing this parallel, it simultaneously codes this monologue from season 2 in a romantic light, since we are meant now to associate the scene with the "romantic" love confession in season 4, but it also discredits the genuineness of Mike's season 4 monologue as we see the stark contrast in Finn's performance. In both scenes, the stakes were high and people he cared about were in danger, so why does one read with such deep emotion while the other comes off as clichéd and inconsistent with past events?
When we combine the messages of these two parallels in Mike's monologue we are left with a rather confusing and disturbing message: that Mike and El's relationship is entagled with other parties, and here's why it's important to consider these points together:
Subliminally, El is associating Mike's words during this monologue with the way Dr. Brenner makes her feel, while Mike subliminally associates his words in contrast to the way he feels about Will.
Therefore, for El, what's getting in the way of her relationship with Mike is that he seems to see her in a similar way to how Dr. Brenner does, zeroing in on her powers, her usefulness, and her otherness.
But for Mike, what's getting in the way of his relationship with El is repression and the complicated feelings he has for Will. I've tried, for arguments sake, to find a non-romantic reasoning for this parallel, but I really don't think there is one.
If we're able to take these parallels and draw these conclusions, then the exchange that occurred within the Mileven monologue is not the romantic triumph that I think a lot of casual viewers saw it as. We are meant to feel the wrongness in this scene.
