#but like... i'm also not completely certain he has bones yk.

[dieinct]

DONT SAY THATS NOT GANSEY GANSEY IS DEAD. IT IS GANSEY. in fact Cabeswater canonically being a fae creature Ronan manifested rather than a dream means Gansey being a fake copy is pretty disproven because it circumvents the dream replacement concept entirely!!!

okay i would have been very willing to be like agree to disagree about this however i do not understand at all what you are talking about with the greywaren fae reveal and also now i disagree more strenuously because

tdt not necessarily canonical to trc; they are at least nominally self-contained

maybe it's real gansey that ronan pulled back into reality but if ronan had done the same thing for gansey that hennessy does for adam it could, i suspect, have been denoued in some way so there is actually no evidence that it was fae-manifestation or anything other than "making up a new gansey from scratch and memories."

i'm not sure gansey is exactly a dream, but we also don't actually know if he fell asleep when all of greywaren happened or whether/how he recovered or what/exactly blue did wrt him, magnification, clone-tree forests (and in fact i think that he and blue got up to clone-tree forest shenanigans tends to make me think there's something going on with him that is not simply a normal case of gansey iii mark 1 original), so you really could make a decently supported case either way, which means i don't want to be told what to think due to im stubborn

i think new gansey is pretty close to old gansey but he is definitely not the original and i do actually try not to think about this too hard because it upsets me too much and your solution is also not better so i don't see any point in changing my mind about what i think happened to gansey

[urdearestmom]

i feel like the reason why mike is so hated by the fandom is that the writers ideolize him a lot and then just don't write him to meet those expectations.

like he's supposed to be the heart, the glue, the hero. and then they make him ignore his friends for eight months. like. what the fuck is up with that??? do they expect me to belive that???

like his behaviour could be explained by all the trauma he's gotten that lead to behavioural issues or something but even that wasn't acknowledged or put as a possibility so far.

and apologising wouldnt really do anything because every single one of his apologies lead to little to nothing changing.

and it makes me so mad because like the way his character is portrayed in earlier seasons and what his friends think of him doesn't really align with that yk? and everyone just hates my protegee mike wheeler because the writers did him dirty.

i feel like he's to worried abt el. which makes sense. all the sense in the world and im not saying he shouldn't. but make him worry abt the rest of his friends out loud too??? especially will??? most of his interactions with people who were not el were just sending will deeper into the friendzone and treating him kinda badly after apologising to him for doing exactly that and it's like. no. he wouldnt do that. wtf.

if i can get past everything wrong that happened in vol2 then i like it. i like it a lot. but seriously????

(i am not blaming this on mike, im blaming this on the writers if that wasn't clear)

I really liked vol 2 but I do have some bones to pick and this is one of them!

Mike gets a lot of flack because he's too complicated an individual to be an immediate fan favourite, the way El is for example. Not to say that she isn't also a complex character, because she DEFINITELY is, just in different ways. A lot of his motivations aren't clear (as opposed to El, whose motivations ARE clear and easy to understand. They have to be because the story doesn't move forward without her) and I don't know if that's because the writers are bad at writing him or if it's on purpose and it's Mike himself who doesn't actually even recognize what's going on with him.

I do think this is a symptom of plot-driven storytelling rather than character-driven. There's so much going on in the plot that they don't have the time to get into each character in depth. What ends up happening is that the characters are used to further the plot instead of the plot happening because of character actions. It starts to cheapen some characters and they become flat (a flat character is a character with little to no complex emotions, motivations, or personality. They also don't undergo any kind of change to make them more well-rounded). I think that's what's starting to happen to Mike and it SUCKS because I love him so much he's great!! They just made him so difficult to understand and then he doesn't have enough screentime to fully be developed (again because there is so much going on in the plot that this just isn't possible). And I get it because he's not the main, but in that case could they make the shorter screentime he has more meaningful?

He definitely does have trauma because they all do. There's no way you can come away from all the shit they've been through unscathed! I've said this on this page before, Mike has seen so much shit and literally nobody ever asked him how he felt about it. Tbh he probably wouldn't even answer completely because when does Mike ever talk about his feelings, but still. A LOT of the way he is is completely reasonable for someone his age who's been through the shit he's been through. People are difficult sometimes. He's also been bullied basically his whole life and I'll tell y'all right now that shit takes a toll on you. I'm 22 and I still struggle with certain things because I spent my whole childhood being bullied too. The writers are just choosing not to address any of it when it's not relevant to the plot because- you guessed it- plot-driven storytelling does that. All the other things that need to happen in the limit of 9 episodes make showing each character's struggles impossible, and since Mike isn't central to the plot (like El always is, and like how Max was this season) he doesn't get to have any of his problems really delved into. The only thing that gave a little insight to his psyche was the Lois Lane bit, but I could write a whole other post about that. I probably will at some point 🤷🏻‍♀️

But you're right when you say he was TOO worried about El and nothing else. He absolutely should have been worried about her and it makes total sense that he was because she's his girlfriend and he's in love with her, but there are other people he cares about too. The only time he really showed that was in episode 4 when the agents were explaining what happened and he said, "My family lives in Hawkins!" Nothing after that, about his family or his friends.

I think Mike as a person definitely was thinking about everybody else, they just didn't show it because that wasn't relevant to the point of his character this season. The whole point of Mike's character this time around was literally just to help El fight Vecna and make Will sadder, lmao. I was waiting for that moment where he usually snaps into action and starts leading everybody into battle with some deranged ass plan! Left me disappointed because it didn't really happen. The Cali crew going to Suzie was like a watered down version of that. I loved the Mileven moments season 4 gave us, but it's still a total disservice to him because people are more than their relationships, but there's that plot-driven storytelling again. Mike IS the heart, he IS the glue, you can tell by the small things his friends say about him or the way they react to him. He just doesn't look like it anymore because the writers don't have the time to show it since they're so busy doing everything else.

Another thing is also that the majority of people who watch this show aren't sitting here analyzing everything. Even if you are a fan, you don't typically think super in depth about characters that aren't your fave (I don't anyway. The only characters I really really think about a lot are Mike, El, and Max). What that can lead to is taking characters at face value instead of thinking about what their reasons for doing/saying a certain thing might be. It makes sense why people are annoyed by/dislike him, though, because he does make a ton of mistakes and he never gets a chance to explain himself properly because the writers don’t give him one :/ Everything is nuanced, people aren't black and white. And it's fine really because this is a tv show and these people are fictional but it does say something about how we react to others around us. Cancel culture is an insidious thing and I think that has a little bit to do with why so many people don't like Mike.

As usual y'all this is me rambling completely unedited so forgive me if it's incoherent LMAO

Thanks for this! Mike Wheeler will be my baby forever even if the writers keep doing him dirty 🥰 that's what my fanfictions are for