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bylrlve · 6 months ago

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403-404 thoughts

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Murray’s prophecy of the kids playing too much Nintendo, eating too much junk food, smoking some ganja, pounding some beers, and experimenting sexually is actually eerily accurate. Nintendo, as @gayofthefae brilliantly observed, has been equated to the Nina project. Eating junk food? The boys presumably survived on the (quickly cold) pizzas and the sodas Argyle delivered to their house - and if they stopped at gas stations… these boys would have little to no money on their persons, so junk is all they could really afford, one assumes. Smoking ganja? Jon and Argyle. Pounding beers? Not the Cali gang, but Lucas did.

Experimenting sexually? No one has sex during s4 - Jopper makeout but that’s hardly experimenting, and certainly not for adults, and he was specifically talking about the kids. None of them are in the mood for it, naturally, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is foreshadowing… something between a certain pair of boys. It couod be a cheeky reference to Will growing into his sexuality but, and forgive my crudeness here, right-hand solo sex doesn’t really fit, especially since he was talking about Jonathan, El, Mike, and Will as a group, implying a plural. In fact, this scene takes place directly after El and Mike fight, and after she is arrested. Experimenting is a very loaded word…

Never fails to get me how Mike just threw her last letter into the trash - it had already been explained that he may not see her for months, and here he is, treating her last missive to him with such disrespect. This attitude isn’t even new - he crumpled up and tossed aside the letter she’d painstakingly written and drawn rainbow designs on in the opening minutes. Meanwhile… there are Funko Pops of him proudly showing off the new painting Will made for him.

“You’re packed already?” “Yeah, I mean, I never really unpacked.” is the most blatantly subtext-ridden thing to come out of Mike’s mouth all season, and it’s the biggest piece of in-verse proof that he was fronting hard during 402 - and that was the lovey-doviest he was with El.

Can we all just take a moment to appreciate Mike saying that home isn’t home without Will? Fuck the monologue, that is the most romantic thing Mike says all season.

@bylertruth3r made the above video, showing the eerily similarity between the Byler 404 reunion and a scene in 13 Reasons Why - and this scene was originally scripted as Mike coming up to Will kneeling oj the ground, meaning it was conceived as them being much closer together.

I don’t think we appreciate, enough, that Mike monologued to Will in this scene. Not only are Jasons’s ily to Chrissy at the pep rally, Jancy’s ilys, Argyle and Eden’s LAFS, Max’s saving herself from Vecna with flashbacks, and Dustin’s ILY to Eddie all contrasts to the Mike monologue sequence in 409… but this is, too. Here are Mike’s three big monologues lain out:

"El? I don't know if you can hear this, but... but if you can, I want you to know I'm here, okay? I'm right here. And... I love you. El, do you hear me? I love you. I'm sorry I don't say it more. I... It's not because I'm scared of you. I'm not. I've never felt that way. Never. But I am scared that one day you'll realize you don't need me anymore. And I thought if I said how I felt, it would somehow make that day hurt more. But the truth is, El, I don't know how to live without you. I feel like my life started that day we found you in the woods. You were wearing that yellow Benny's Burgers T-shirt. And it was so big it almost swallowed you whole. And I knew right then and there, in that moment, that I loved you. And I've loved you every day since. I love you on your good days. I love you on your bad days. I love you with your powers, I love you without your powers. I love you for exactly who you are. You're my superhero. And... I can't lose you. Okay? Do you hear me? I can't lose you. You can do anything. You can fly. You can move mountains. I believe that. I really do. But right now, you just have to fight. Okay? El. Do you hear me? You need to fight! You have to fight. Fight!” Tearing up, not crying.

“Do you remember the first day that we met? It was… it was the first day of kindergarten. I knew nobody. I had no friends. And I just felt so alone, and so scared, but… I saw you on the swings, and you were alone too,. You were just swinging by yourself. And I just walked up to you, and I asked. I asked if you wanted to be my friend. And you said yes. You said yes. It was the best thing I’ve ever done.”

“Hey also, about the last few days… No, no, no. You didn’t deserve anything. Listen, the truth is… the last year has been weird, you know. And I mean, Max and Lucas and Dustin… they’re great, they’re great, itd just… it’s Hawkins. It’s not the same without you. And I feel like I was worrying too much about El, and I don’t know. I feel like I… lost you, or something. I have no idea what’s going to happen next. But whatever it is, I think we should work together. I think it’ll be easier if we’re a team. Best friends. Cool.”

Some quick observations:

1 and 2 occur under near-identical circumstances - El and Will are under Vecna’s control and he’s trying to give them strength. 3 is entirely unprompted. The first occurs under a level of duress similar to that of a gun being held to El’s head, as gayofthefae observes here

The rain fight is all over the s4 bedroom scene, and it’s very clearly on both of their minds. Mike has spent the past nine months addressing every criticism of Will’s - he’s friends with Dusfin, he’s playing D&as, he only kissed El when she initiated, and broke it quickly, and he even got angry at Lucas for prioritising others over the Party - although his complaint, unlike Will’s, was irrational and unfair. He relapsed at the airport and roller rink by trying to be normal, but this scene is him course-correcting for that. Mike’s calling himself a self-pitying idiot and thanking Will for being sensible is likelt not only referring to the earlier scene in Will’s room, but to the S3 and 402 fights. If that is the intention, it makes one wonder what Mike was self-pitying about in the latter. @howtobecomeadragon discusses it in-depth here

Right from my very first watch, the proposal imagery in the s2 speech - ‘I walked up to you, and I asked. I asked if you wanted to be my _, and you said yes… you said yes. It was the best thing I’ve ever done.’ - jumped out at me. M*levens regularly theorise that the series will end with Mike and El either getting married, or engaged, citing that Lucas line from s1 as foreshadowing - but we see in s3 that Mike relies on Lucas to push him through every stage of the apology, while he doesn’t with Will, and we see bouquet imagery subverted with that gift of flowers at the airport (see below).

TOO MUCH? Mike spent the s3-4 break backsliding in the whole ‘say ILY to El’ plot… but did address the problems Will had with him. Not only that… he came to the conclusion that he worried too much about El? Specifically because he lost Will as a result? I said in the previous post that Bylers don’t talk enough about “Who… who said that I didn’t?” We definitely don’t talk enough about the anti-m*leven implications of this line, because they’re bonkers. Mike worries a lot about El when she’s away at Nina, but at home he’s distinctly distant from her -

while only drawing closer to Will

This is how he looked at Will during the 404 monologue btw: (gif credit to @palettehao and gayofthefae)

Lastly, I’ll finish this analysis post by swinging back to 402, and to the fact that Mike picking that bouquet? It doesn’t make much sense, timeline-wise. In fact, I honestly can’t figure out when he picked them.

Mike only says, on March 22, that he picked them ‘in Hawkins’ before launching into a nervous, distracting spiel about picking 70:30 purple to yellow, only maybe he picked too much yellow*, etc.

On the morning of March 21 he was still in his underwear reading over a letter to El, and was delayed going to with. He had classes at school, and was preoccupied during lunch bargaining with Eddie, bargaining wi5 various students, and finally bargaining with Erica. Between school and Hellfire he could plausibly have picked them, but that would have required cycling across town and back, when Nancy drove him to school - he didn’t have his bike at school. He also had nowhere to put them, except the backpack that presumably had school supplies in it - those flowers would not have looked so fresh had he shoved them in a backpack. Dustin also doesn’t mention him being gone prior to Hellfire. After hellfire, he went home to be there by 9 - he had to have done, otherwise he wouldn’t have been allowed on the flight.

His flight was at 6:30 and Indiana -> Cali takes 4 hrs 10 minutes. He would have been awake from very early in the morning with Karen, gathering his stuff, and then driving to the airport with adequate time to check-in and board the plane. There isn’t a hope in hell of Karen letting him randomly cycle across town in the dark for an undetermined length of time just to pick some fucking flowers, lmao. There is a strong chance, however, that Karen, the romantic, let him buy flowers and a pen in the Indianapolis airport before boarding the flight. Maybe she even purchased them.

The kicker? The bouquet of flowers had a fancy, polished-looking greeting card attached, one professionally made.

There is something deliciously meta about those flowers. M*levens have adopted yellow and purple as a symbol of the relationship - even though Mike only wore those colours to please her when he was being ‘hokey’ and a ‘knock-off’, to quote Argyle and the costume designer. I’m not even sure El truly favours those colours, as she doesn’t wear them much and doesn’t have any notable items in those colours. For all we know, she was asked if she had any favourite colours and simply picked two that came to mind.

What’s more, it seems very likely that Mike simply lied to her about putting in the effort of getting them himself, and instead relied on something pre-made and commercial. It isn’t impossible that he picked them, however (though the timing is a mystery) - we are shown at the end of the season that the field outside Hopper’s cabin has very similar flowers. But those… well… those have their own implications

*talk about subtext lmao…

To finish, I want to share a delicious finding from @sapphicjopper on twitter from last may - the working name for st4 was Tareco. There’s a song called Tareco & Mariola, all about a girl who knows her lover isn’t right for her, who knows that she doesn’t need him, and who is leaving him - ‘it’s not you who will give me the spring, the beautiful flowers I dreamed of in summer’. It’s reminiscent of the opera Nina - about a woman waiting for her lover, not accepting that he won’t return and be how she desperately wants him to be.

#byler #el and mike #mike wheeler #will byers #el hopper #bizarre love triangle #my post #otp: heart and light

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