you didnt have to.

ao3 zombiewheeler / 18 years old / lesbian !!

[zombiewheeler]

Byler thmblr i am so drunk and guys when i was 14 i dated a girl who i really really liked and the fact ghat she went out with me meant the world to me but she was so embarrassed of me and nobody took our relationship seirously and that hurt me so bad but byler gave me hope that queer people fould be taken seriously and that they cluld be given beautiful stories but then they fucking proved my ex girlfriend right that gay relationships are shameful and guys i kkow that isnt true and queerness is so so beautiful and it is my favorite thing ablut myself but imagine. Imagine the impact it wouldve had on the queer youth, how many 14 year olds like my past self wouldve seen that it isnt something to be taken as a joke, oe to be ashamed of. Ive seen so many insensitive jokes and memes about byler and so many casualy cruel comments and it makes me so upset because it touches a nerve deep inside me, something that has been hurting since i was a kid. But guys queerness is a magical thing. It allosw you to love in a way that other people would never understand. Your love is so precious please dont ever ever stop loving. I love you byler tumblr wow goodnight

[leyrinoh]

haunted in his dreams

[karust]

Stranger Things epilogue tweak - Mike the Wise

bonus below

[zombiewheeler]

Steve growing up to be a sex ed teacher makes me remember Mike’s joke about Steve and Nancy studying “human anatomy” in season 1…

[exywhat]

hey mike what's on your mind right now buddy

[zombiewheeler]

Seeing all these memes and jokes about Mike seeing Dead Poet’s Society, Brokeback Mountain, Good Luck Babe, and Conan Gray in the future is actually NOT making me laugh it is making me incredibly sad and I feel a pain in my chest when I think about how his story ended

[emblazons]

"How does gay Mike tie into Mileven having a good ending"

Because the concept of Mike stopping his pursuit of a still alive El for anything but his own lack of desire for women is, canonically, nonsensical. We see that he cares for her a painful amount season over season; its clear he cares for her no matter what, and romantic or not, both Mike and Eleven clearly hold each other in high esteem. So far, he's always done his best to get back to or with her, despite Eleven dumping or ignoring him three different times.

The only way to justify him (in a meta sense) "letting El go" in that case was to kill her or give him another reason to stop chasing her. The Duffers going with the former, knowing damn well they set up Will having insane romantic feelings for Mike AND putting those feelings between Mike and El in the form of the painting, tells me that something went wrong or shitty with the idea of Mike's growth being tied to queerness ('not liking girls') because in the end he STILL ends up without a girlfriend, in his basement, playing dnd with Will...and yet they're not together.

You see this with how even some of the general audience thinks Mike and Will are together without prompting! The queerness is what they left out—which means the only way out of that relationship for Eleven, at least in the minds of the general audience, is death. Hence the ending that played on you screen, even if the suggestion of her 'still being alive' is the maintenance for the IP.

We could have kept El 100% alive too (we had the elements, especially with Kali in the picture) if we leaned into her connections beyond Mike...but that would also require acknowledging Mike wasn't as important to her as marketing would have you believe. So death is where you land, functionally if not literally, because now she can never go back to her friends for some reason even if you choose to "believe" she is somehow alive.

This ending, for every character in that trio, is the bad place. And for no reason barring an act of God or capitalism, because we set it up perfectly to be better than it was. ☠️

[ju-nebugg]

every universe except this one, i guess.

[hona-hona]

will stages an intervention!

(don't you love how, due to the duffers' not committing to their own ending, absolutely nothing prevents this from 100% happening)

[narrativelogicofbyler]

i honestly think byler stands as one of the most blatant cases of queerbaiting the industry has produced in the last decade. and i don’t say that lightly. this isn’t a case of fans “reading too much into it” or projecting subtext where none exists. this is a case where the text itself deliberately builds a queer emotional arc, frames it with all the cinematic language of a romantic storyline, and then cannibalises that arc to reinforce a straight couple that was already structurally unstable.

they took a queer character’s feelings, his longing, his emotional labour, his narrative vulnerability, and used them as scaffolding for a relationship he isn’t even part of. they lifted will’s emotional beats, his confessions, his heartbreak, and simply stamped el’s name on top like it was an interchangeable sticker. from a craft perspective, it’s not just sloppy; it’s narratively unethical. it treats queer interiority as a tool rather than a story. it treats a queer character’s pain as a convenient emotional engine for a heterosexual romance that couldn’t sustain itself on its own terms.

and the thing is, this isn’t subtle. it’s not buried in symbolism or blink and you’ll miss it gestures. it’s right there in the blocking, the framing, the colour theory, the dialogue, the emotional pacing. it’s the kind of thing you’d pause in a lecture hall and say, “okay, class, here’s what happens when a show wants the cultural capital of queer representation without committing to the narrative responsibility of actually following through.”

it’s genuinely one of the worst cases of queerbaiting i’ve seen in mainstream tv, not because the queerness wasn’t explicit, but because it was explicit, and then it was repurposed to prop up a straight romance that the writers were too afraid to let fail on its own merits

[kirsssche]

I'd rather pretend there was no season 5

[karust]

[phoebebyers]

mike wheeler is growing his hair back out in college and he has a gayass friendgroup he found in his fuckass woke creative writing classes and is probably bestfriends with like a goth dyke who reminds him of max but is somehow even more intense and he goes to parties and kisses boys and feels guilty about it and one time he accidentally called this guy will and he goes back to his dorm room that night and throws up about it. and he smokes a cigarette for the first time and coughs up a lung he's kind of like the loser of his friends but they all love him but they bully him his music taste and they all probably like write bad poetry and go to open mics and weird local band gigs and mike opens up about will after Realizing and everyone kind of clocks him over the head for being that clueless and breaking this poor boys heart but then they hype him up to reach back out and he does. and he does

[prfctmxxnlight]

what's all this then?

[zombiewheeler]

I refuse to lose hope until we hear EXPLICITLY from MIKE that Will’s teelings are not reciprocated. Until Mike flat out gives his answer, his stance remains ambiguous and therefore Byler remains a very real and beautiful possibility.

[zombiewheeler]

My first ever tumblr post was in 2021 when I was 14 years old.

It was pre-season 4, pre-gay Will confirmation, just me and my theories and the friends I made online.

I was struggling with my own queerness and my unrequited love for my female best friend. I felt lost and isolated in my own life and Stranger Things and Byler helped me feel seen and understood.

Now I am in college, an hour away from volume 2 of the final season, with real hope and certainty that Byler will happen.

I’ve found peace in my own life, too. In some ways, it feels like my journey with my queerness has followed a parallel trajectory with Will’s.

This is why Byler is so important to so many of us. I’m so grateful to Stranger Things for guiding me through my queer experience during my most formative teenage years. And I’m even more grateful to you all on Tumblr who gave me such a meaningful community.

Thank you for a wonderful four years. I love Byler with all my heart💙💛

[zombiewheeler]

Will getting a hug from the rest of the group while Mike waits behind them... then the group pulls away and Mike hugs Will alone...