Your Plastic Pal

[yourplasticpal]

I have to go on a bit of a personal hiatus, so let this be the last thing on my blog (for now):

If you intended for your final season to quash all the "noise" around a beloved pairing, to destroy all hope that they could ever be, don't you think you should have told your actors that BEFORE they filmed their final scene together?

Like, if I'm watching an interaction between two halves of a romance that NEVER WAS, and what I see could reasonably be read as one of them putting his foot in his "straight" friend's crotch whilst thoroughly eye-fucking him, and NOT being rebuffed, quite the opposite ... I feel like any mistake there wasn't mine.

[yourplasticpal]

Can we counter program this Tales from 85 bullshit? Flood the zone with fics and art set in 85, created by people who actually give a shit about these characters? Heavy on the miwi, ideally?

[yourplasticpal]

It just keeps hitting me how beautifully byler could fit into a Merlin universe, because young Prince Michael, brave and good-hearted but not terrifically competent with a sword, and servant William, childhood friend and secret sorcerer and the only reason Michael is still breathing with all the trying to prove himself worthy, and Michael is sure that William has magic but that's a death sentence in his father's kingdom so he's certainly never going to say anything, but they'll know each other fully in time, and vanquish hate and division in the kingdom, and thrive in a love worthy of legend, and one fateful day, when good King Michael suffers a fatal wound, William hides both of them away to sleep and heal in Avalon until they can return in the hour of their people's greatest need WHICH IS NOW PLEASE COME SAVE US.

[yourplasticpal]

In case it still needs to be said in 2026: fuck you Neil Gaiman, we have NOT forgotten, and we STILL believe the victims.

[yourplasticpal]

I feel like this must exist, so I'll ask outright: is there such a thing as a lesbyler cleradin fic, with a princess Mike who longs to be trained as a paladin, despite expectations of "appropriate" femininity and politically beneficial marriage, and a court magician (or apprentice thereto) Will who learns the spells to give her beloved princess magical armor and/or a spectral steed, knowing that said princess will eventually, inevitably charge into a battle nobody else will properly prepare her to survive?

[yourplasticpal]

*impatiently waiting for the lesbyler version of bravebyers*

[yourplasticpal]

Like, maybe I was simply never the target audience, but the only reason I was watching Stranger Things beyond season 3 was that I loved the characters (or who I thought the characters were) and I wanted to see where they ended up, but given how catastrophically that was fumbled ...

You know what? You want to redeem this in a way that might make me watch your animated cash grab spinoff? Put it in a frame of middle-aged Michael "The Storyteller" Wheeler, reminiscing with his husband Will and his sister-in-law Jane about all the trauma they went through back then, and how it's a miracle they all survived, figured themselves out, and ultimately turned out as happy and well-adjusted as they did.

LOL and even then I would still probably only experience the thing via clips on Tumblr.

Fuck you, Insufferable Brothers.

[yourplasticpal]

It occurs to me that I keep thinking in terms of modern D&D, not 1st edition, which is all the Party would have had access to (until 1989, I think). The Sorcerer class wasn't created until like 2000, and there wasn't really a class with "innate" magic before that. Paladin and Cleric WERE period accurate, Insufferable Bros, and right fucking there. You could have stuck with that. But no, that was all too tainted by queer fandom cooties and "noise". Blargle.

I'm never going to stop being pissed at this wet fart of a final season, am I?

At least we got canon Mike believing that Will is innately magical, even if the analogy was anachronistic ... and the romantic implications got stabbed in the lungs and sunk in the quarry. Or Lover's Lake. Reader's choice.

[yourplasticpal]

We can argue about who is more likely to bottom going forward, but you know the first time Mike and Will have penetrative sex, Mike will be on the bottom, because he's not doing anything potentially painful to Will before he knows exactly how much it does or doesn't hurt.

EDIT: He's mostly uncomfortable and unimpressed, squirming and making faces, until Will hits his prostate exactly right, and suddenly it's oh, fuck yeah, you need to try this.

Next time, next time, don't stop ...

[yourplasticpal]

You know a fandom/character/pairing that let you down is going to haunt you forever when, long after the betrayal, you keep rediscovering songs from years ago that resonate now on a new frequency. For example, turns out CAKE wrote a song about suicidal conformitygate!mike way back in 2001. It's called Shadow Stabbing, and contains such gems as:

"Adjectives on a typewriter / He moves his words like a prize fighter / The frenzied pace of the mind inside the cell"

"I'm so nervous / I'm so tense / My heart can't forget about this self defense / The air is so hot / And my breath comes fast / I thumb the cool blade but I know this can't last"

[yourplasticpal]

So what's the consensus on Will's D&D epilogue necklace: he leaves one of those two charms with Mike when they (temporarily) part ways, or Mike is the reason there's two charms in the first place?

[yourplasticpal]

My brain just blindsided me with, hey, what about a The Last Unicorn/Stranger Things crossover dealie, with Will as Schmendrick the Magician, Mike as Prince Lir, and Eleven as the Unicorn/Lady Amalthea ... but not a lick of actual story came with those character swap thoughts so, if any of that sounds fun for you, it's all yours.

"I love whom I love," but not about the mysterious lady ...

[magentamee]

omg im crying. theres people on twitter saying their moms watched the st finale and said how happy they were that mike and will got together. there's ga watchers out there thinking mike and will ended the story in love and in a relationship. there are ga watchers out there who thought mike gave el a pity goodbye kiss back since she was dying especially bc he didn't say it back. i love the world that some people live in who watch st and never touch the internet.

everyone and quite literally their moms: I HAVE EYES

[elephantshoetoo]

I've seen this idea going around about how the GA is interpreting the epilogue to indicate Byler endgame. Which I would have to agree - Karen assuming Mike is at Will's house, the shared looks across the D&D table, the way Mike caresses both his and Will's binders... it's all there. I kind of interpreted Mike's heart-to-heart talk with Hopper as being an important step in him allowing himself to move on. Because even if he did realize he had feelings for Will prior to the coming out scene, he was still in a relationship and also probably trying to repress those feelings. And then with El dying, the survivor's guilt and remorse from losing her would likely hold him back from even considering pursuing another relationship for a while. So I can definitely see that scene as leading towards Mike's self-acceptance and allowing himself to consider a future with Will. It just sucks that we don't get to see it happen - we have to imagine it for ourselves (which we have been all along anyways) because they're either not allowed to or too cowardly to actually follow through with their story and tell it out loud. This would explain Max throwing a fit about the ending (she's us) then calling it trite and Mike reassuring her there is another story, a hidden story, that can't be told.

In the end, I believe we won. Not the way we wanted to, not the way we deserved to. But it's something.

[yourplasticpal]

Blargle, I don't want to give them my eyeballs anymore - rot in obscurity chatGPT bros - but maybe watching the finale again while not distracted by the absent TEXT I kept expecting, would let me savor the subtext better and do some healing.

It's so telling that the bros were actively hostile to byler by the end, but somehow, totally mysteriously, not intentional on any creative's part, honest and for true, it got in there anyway.

[yourplasticpal]

If this alleged live action Stranger Things spinoff comes to pass, and the plot at any point involves a prolific but obscure author from the Midwest who still lives in his parents' basement and has a questionable grip on reality, I am going to break something.

One of y'all will have to tell me, cause I ain't watching that shit.

[infinitely-astro]

Did anyone ever tell El what "gay" means or was the Will Byers coming out moment just really confusing for her?

[yourplasticpal]

That's my head canon for why Will feels he needs to clarify that he DOES like girls, just not that way, so his less-informed-about-life sister won't think he's just disliked her the whole time. When she survives - which she does, lalala I can't hear you - there will definitely be a follow up convo where she explains that she understands, she likes boys too, but she also likes girls, and she doesn't quite get (a) why Will wouldn't like girls too, they're so pretty and nice, and (b) why this is such a big deal in the first place.

LOL El telling Will, you should kiss Max. Or Lucas. Or both at once. That always makes me feel better.

[yourplasticpal]

Randomly remembering that time I posted how season 5 felt a lot like AI to me, and maybe homophobia was inevitable because that shit is all over the source dataset, and then deleted it later because it felt too MEAN.

[yourplasticpal]

Quite the era for stupid men releasing footage that they think absolves them of blame, when it really, REALLY doesn't.

Was that too dark? Sorry. I'm in no way making light of horrific real life events. Just ... fuck, the last few weeks have been a heck of a decade in America, huh?

Whistling past the graveyard, and all that.