The whole situation of Will's birthday still gives me fits.
They screwed it up in season 4 by setting the season on his birthday and not only ignoring it, but also coincidentally giving Will a really shitty day on his birthday. There was ample material to work with to simply mention it as yet another reason Will was so angry that day. It would fit perfectly with the Duffers' love of 80s movie tropes and, ahem, "borrowing" from memorable movie scenes. It's right out of 16 Candles, after all, with a family being so preoccupied with other things that they forget their daughter's birthday and the daughter feeling invisible to the object of her affections.
They claim they simply forgot. They wrote it years prior and simply didn't think about it. But it was important enough to fans that it was brought up in interviews in the first place.
And it's the second time they screwed up his birthday, really. While it may have been a random choice of a propmaker, the program for Will's season 1 funeral had an entirely different date than the one the Duffers would eventually write. I could forgive that as them not having a hand in making the original date. For all we know, they never even saw the prop. But they wrote the date of March 22.
Do you not have fact sheets about your characters, sirs? Did nobody in the room stand up and say "hold on, Will's birthday would fall on this timeline, should we include it in some way?"
One would think, though, that this would be a lesson learned. That they would be more careful with such things when writing the final season.
People in that writers room knew about Will's birthday after that. They knew that it was a frustrating point for fans, that fans notice stuff like this. They started acknowledging Will's birthday every year on social media. They surely wouldn't make such mistakes again, right?
Instead, they seemed to take these inconsistencies to an almost comical level. Now, Will is suddenly retconned to have been 11 when he went missing, and the script says he was 8 in his flashback scenes, including when he met Mike. Nevermind that changing his age in season 1 would put him a year behind the others in school. Nevermind that changing his age when he met Mike would again be ignoring what was said in the shed scene.
Was this just a big joke to them at that point? Did they think taking it to an absurd degree would make it funny instead of frustrating to fans?
One could be forgiven for thinking they had something planned with all this, that it would be woven into the plot that details of Will's past were being forgotten or changed. Hell, they even gave Henry the same March 22 birthday in The First Shadow, so it's not like there weren't people who remembered, even if the Duffers didn't.
So, again, was it all a big inside joke? Is that why the social media accounts would celebrate Will's birthday? Is that why they toyed with his age in season 5? Is that why they gave Henry his birthday? Was it all just a ton of comical overcompensation to placate people they consider nitpicking fans?
What's the deal, Duffers?
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