Ten years ago, my mom and I started watching this new Netflix show that she thought wouldn’t be a horror show since the main characters were kids, and therefore, I, at the ripe age of 9, would be okay watching it. Around 15 minutes in, she turned it off and told me not to watch it. About two days later, I went to my then best friend’s house for a sleepover, and she had parents who didn’t really care about what their kids did, so we started this new show I was hooked on: Stranger Things.
At nine years old, I found myself falling in love with this show. At the time, I just thought it was a funny, scary show with (and yes, I knew this at 9 and I stand by it at 19) the love of my life in it—Mike Wheeler.
Throughout the later ten years of my life, I found myself adamantly falling more and more in love with this show. I would rewatch it when the new seasons came out, I would ‘illegally’ download Netflix on my ‘phone’ to watch it at night, since until around season three, I was not allowed to watch it. The person I was when I first started watching it, compared to the person who watched the finale, is two astonishingly different people. Well, one thing didn’t really change. I stayed in love with Mike Wheeler until I realized I was just in love with Finn Wolfhard, but hey, who isn’t?
Anyways, as I grew up with the show, I started to see the things that were there. New details, added subplots that the show writers were adding. Since I would rewatch the seasons every time a new one would come out, I can proudly say I wasn’t a member of the general audience; I was a solid member of the fandom.
This is all to say that after watching the last episode, I find myself completely unable to even try and watch this show again. And if I am being honest, it isn’t because I am sad this show has ended, I have dealt with shows I love to death ending and being able to rewatch them. Hell, I love when shows end because it is like a book, it ends, and now I can rewatch and see how the story always leads to the satisfying ending. Because I was too young to ever go through a show ending that was lackluster or just completely disappointing—I was in middle school when Game of Thrones (GOT) ended and it honestly was more of my moms show rather than anything I would watch since there was way too much sex for my young eyes— I never fully understood people’s devastating reactions to some show finale.
However, no, I can’t watch this show anymore, because the finale didn’t just ruin season five for me, but the whole show. I am not going to compare this show’s ending to GOT because the GOT fans get very pissed off at that, and I understand. I’ve seen the table read, everyone was crying, and no one really hid their contempt with the ending. Personally, I can’t wait to see what the Stranger Things cast says once it has been long enough for them to say stuff without it hurting their career or relationships, because, honestly, it is that serious.
My first and foremost complaint is Jane/Eleven’s story arc. My opinion on her story stands alone from my opinions on Mileven or Byler (which I have a lot of opinions on, but right now I just want to look at her story). This point, actually, was one I saw on Tiktok by the tiktoker @freddiesroommate, and after watching this video, it left me so angry I had to read one of my favorite Season five rewrites on Ao3! He talked about how one prevailing theme of the whole show is friendship and love conquers all, and can/will bring you back from the brink of death. Will’s return, El’s survival in season two, how Will was saved from position, Billy saving El in season three, Joyce saving Hopper, El resurrecting Max, Max running up that hill, and so on. Every storyline, character relationship, and everything is centered around this idea. Until it came to the end, because suddenly, El thinks even after ALL of that, the only way to end this all is to stay in the Upside Down as it caves in on itself.
Then the stupid documentary where the Duffer Brothers didn’t even have the empathy to talk about this act as anything other than “El has to k**** herself.” Look, that sure is what she is doing, but talking about it like that is insensitive and disgusting. Thereafter, these brothers go on after the show ends and talk about how El had to do it because she represented the magicalness of childhood, and “she had to disappear for the boys to move on.” Let’s pack that. They basically, and continued during the press following the ending, to contradict any ambiguity they gave her. If anyone in the fandom was keeping up with the press, they basically told me Mike’s theory is wrong, and she is dead. Right.
Then they write this character that people see themselves in, that people love. They write a teenage girl who experienced so much trauma and pain as such a complex and round character, only to, at the very end, dumb her down to being a personification of childhood, that— and these are their words— the boys have to lose. Not the party, not Max, the boys. They wrote a beautiful love girl for ten years only to force her into becoming a disposable female character. And since that is how her story ends, when I tried to rewatch season one, one of the best seasons—argue with the wall. I am sorry, I immediately started crying when El came onto my screen because that is her ending. Becoming disposable for men, just like she always was. Maybe I am being too woke or feminist, but this actually makes me want to throw up. El was a girl with a family, sure misshaped and abnormal, but the Byers and Hopper loved her. They wrote (I doubt it was the Duffers who wrote this monologue because it was actually good and didn’t sound like ChatGPT) a beautiful monologue for Hopper, begging her to see her future, all for what? It goes in one ear and out the other.
Second, they wrote one of the longest, most diabolical queer bait in the 21st century. According to the Oxford dictionary, queer baiting means the incorporation of apparently LGBTQ characters or relationships into a film, television show, etc., as a means of appealing to the LGBTQ audiences while maintaining ambiguity about the characters’ sexuality. Welp, we are back to the Duffers’ love for ambiguity! The ship was between Mike Wheeler and Will Bylers, coining the name Byler. When Stranger Things came out, and I have to admit I didn’t hop on the Byler train until around season 3, there was a small part of the fandom that seemed to believe that Mike had feelings for Will based on their relationship in season two. Continuously through seasons one to three, they hinted and alluded to the fact that Mike and Will’s friendship was different from theirs with the other characters. I personally felt like it didn’t start to get romantic until season three when Mike said, “It’s not my fault you don’t like girls.”
The pinnacle of these queer allusions is season four, when they pull out the Cyrano troupe. For anyone who doesn’t know, the Cyrano trope is a common romantic trope where character A helps character B with their relationship with character C. They do this by using character A’s feelings towards character B to keep B and C’s relationship afloat. Normally, what happens is that B realizes that their feelings for C are based on A’s feelings for them, and thereby B ends their relationship with C to be with A. This is a very, very standard romantic trope; you can see it in films like Roxanne (1987), The Half of It (2020), and the critically acclaimed movie Megamind (2010)!
This is exactly what the Duffer brothers did in season four with the van conversation between Will and Mike after he lied, saying the painting was El’s commission. Right, because El, who knows nothing of Dungeons and Dragons and is not even in the painting, will commission that. At the time, this was the peak of the Byler fandom, and people had started to see that this trope was causing the main part of the fandom to ship these two characters. However, this trope was left unsatisfied as they ended it with Will being forced to come out and Mike rejecting him in the last episode, around twenty minutes in. They dragged out this story with no gall to do the story that they themselves had been building up for at least two seasons.
I think the main thing is that in between season four and five, cast members and the Duffers were talking about how the van scene ‘will pay off’. Noah Schnapp, the actor of Will Byers, saying “Byler is at its peak right now, they are building that up,” at AwesomeCon in 2022; Finn Wolfhard, Mike Wheeler, saying at another press conference in 2023 that “I asked the Duffers and they said ‘don’t worry it’ll [the van scene] pay off in the end,” credit to @1dbyler on X. However this did not happen. What happened on this ship blew up. Tumblr released its top ships of 2025, with Byler being number one. AO3, a common fanfiction writing platform, has over 32,000 stories that center around this relationship; the ship is the most popular ship from the universe across many social media platforms, and nearly every cast member has been asked about it.
So, not only did the Duffer brothers write a story that completely self-contradicts, belittles, and dumbs down the three main characters, and has too many plotholes—most likely due to the usage of ChatGPT seen in the documentary on Netflix—they basically laughed in the face of many of their fans. Because that is what this has shown, the Byler fans are a major part of this fandom, if not the largest. The forced coming out and the soft rejection led to the last two episodes being the lowest-rated episodes in the whole show, with 5.6/10 and 7.5/10 ratings, respectively. They could have jumped the scary bridge they were on and show viewers and the creators alike that you can have a queer relationship in the forefront and have a monumental, phenomenal ending that is satisfying for all the characters. But instead, Will’s arc was the basic queer arc– self-acceptance with the possibility of maybe having love in a hypothetical future, Mike turning into his father, who still doesn’t say I love you or know anything about the painting, and El, a manifestation of childhood that must be lost to grow up.
We could have seen people relate to these characters because they are in love and happy, or see that it’s possible for them; instead, there are fans who saw this and thought they needed to come out or accept themselves to not end up like these characters. A viral video on Tiktok by user @screwrossduffer says, ‘character [Mike Wheeler] ending so terrifying my dad came out.’ This is the legacy the Duffer brothers will have. Maybe one day, the show creators will see that this story not only needs to be told but deserves it. Luckily, Heated Rivalry on HBOMax is going against this pattern. However, this once beautiful show about outcasts falls into the mix with the larger queerbaiting shows like Sherlock, Voltron: Legacy Defenders, and Riverdale. I guess it just goes to show when you have two white straight men writing a story about the outcasts and the rejects of society, they’ll never get it right.
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