I'm so normal about this video...
I love the fact that if you showed every parallel where byler is compared to the confirmed romantic ships - it would be (at least) 40 minutes long .That's how often it happens 🤣
This scene 🩵💛
This little scene does such a beautiful job of showing us how Will’s relationship with Mike differs from his friendship with Dustin and Lucas.
After hugging Will in the hospital, Dustin and Lucas immediately jump into telling Will about all the crazy things that happened when he was gone. Meanwhile, Mike just watches him, smiling. The mood is light and Will is smiling and excited. Their little bubble of fun and normality bursts though when Will starts coughing and the atmosphere quickly becomes tense. The reality of the situation seems to set in and Dustin and Lucas immediately go quiet and start to look visibly uncomfortable.
While Dustin and Lucas pull away a bit, Mike reaches for Will. He taps his arm and asks in his softest Will voice if he’s okay. Knowing that he’ll understand, Will looks at Mike and Mike only when he says “It got me. The Demogorgon.” Mike responds with a soft “We know” and reassures him that they’re safe and that the monster that took him is gone. Will seems to relax a bit and Dustin and Lucas rejoin the conversation to tell Will more about Eleven.
We know that the show likes to use the ending scenes of each season to hint at or foreshadow what happens in the next. For example, Mike looking back at El’s empty tent foreshadowed his struggle with grief and PTSD in season 2. That’s not the only part of his arc though in S2, and that’s hinted at in the hospital scene. At the hospital, we start to see more clearly how Mike’s role in Will’s life differs from Lucas and Dustin’s. We’re reminded that Lucas and Dustin are great friends to Will and are able to have fun with him and make him smile. They obviously care about him very deeply. We’re also shown though that they aren’t as equipped as Mike is to support him emotionally. When things get real and uncomfortable, like when Will starts coughing at the hospital, it’s Mike who reaches for him and who provides the comfort and reassurance he needs while Lucas and Dustin give them space. They defer to Mike in these situations.
It’s a beautiful set up for S2 where the writers go out of their way to show us that Mike is not like Lucas or Dustin. His relationship with Will is much deeper and more emotionally intimate. As we saw at the hospital, Mike doesn’t run away when things with Will get heavy and uncomfortable. He’s the one that we see constantly reaching for Will and checking in on him, and it’s Mike that we see Will look to for support and comfort. Again, it’s not to say that Lucas and Dustin are bad friends. There’s many scenes that show the care they have for him. For example, there’s the way that Dustin reached for Will after his episode on Halloween, or how frantically Lucas searched for him at the school. They’re good friends, but they’re just that - friends. That’s what makes Mike’s behaviour stand out so much. His devotion to Will goes far beyond normal friendship and that is made clear by the fact that it is Mike, and only Mike, that we see back at his bedside during his darkest hours in S2.
I know some of you already shared it but I wanna share it too. Also, I noticed that people made two other petitions so I wanna say that we need to focus on this one!
It has over 3,000 signatures which is amazing in less than 24 hours. So keep sharing it 🩷
Okay some of you NEED to read this.
Johnlock wasn't queerbaiting. The show never tried to make them look romantic, even if they did look romantic sometimes, and the showrunners made a fucking point of saying they weren't gonna be a pairing. If anything, the show made a point of mocking the fans for shipping the characters. Remember that there's an episode where the characters spend like 15 minutes reading theories about what happened to Sherlock and Moriarty and mocking them. It's a very obvious, very clumsy way to make fun of the fans of the show and their theories and fanfics, and honestly, i don't know how they got away with it to the point of still having enough audience to make another season after that.
Klance was only partially queerbaiting. Netflix totally used the interest of the fans on the ship for marketing purposes, which is a way of queerbaiting, and iirc some of the voice actors said they shipped it as well, but here's the thing: the show itself never treated them as anything remotely romantic. They were rivals that became friendly rivals. Lance was consistently written as annoyingly heterosexual and spent a big part of the show openly interested in Allura. And Keith's most important relationship through the whole show was with Shiro. Most of the disappointment was on the fans themselves, not on the show, because Klance is very obviously written as platonic.
Byler would absolutely be queerbaiting. They would have used Will's feelings to help a straight pairing and he, the only male gay character of the show, would be the only one not only to not get his happy ending, but also to not have had a romantic relationship in the whole show. They also made a bunch of merch of his painting, an expression of his feelings for Mike. It would be a total queerbait because it would be inside and outside the show. Byler is undoubtedly written in the show and not going on with it would be deceiving the whole audience, not only the Byler shippers.
It is indeed not the same. Byler would be way worse than anything you might have felt with the other pairings, because the other cases ARE cases of fanon ships that people took more seriously than they were. None of them were written as romantic in their respective stories. Byler is, to the point that not making it endgame would make the whole show objectively worse.
“I’m with you. No matter what else you have in your head I’m with you and I love you.”
- Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden
didn’t see anyone do this yet, so figured i’d make sure rotpl got a proper delivery of news on tumblr
How come all these amazing shows with amazing representation, are getting cancelled is beyond me but beyond signing petitions, I’m starting a praying circle for another streaming platform to renew all these shows.
mostlylurkinbarelypostin