#like obv mike loves el platonically

[alex-the-bringer-of-chaos]

Look, people can ship them if they want (even though I'm severely judging them), but to think it's endgame? Darling, that's only gonna happen if the duffers are garbage at their job and decide to go with what makes no logical narrative sense

people still shipping el and mike- and thinking they're supposed to be endgame after s4 is genuinly insane to me like, did they not notice:

el lying to mike in her letters for over half a year?

will being present in every single scene of them together except for their big fight?

that mike described said fight as "a fight you can't come back from"?

the fact that they both feel like they can't be themselves around each other? (which was the reason for el lying, for example)

mike lashing out on el in a similar way as dr brenner which made her get flashbacks to the lab?

the storyline of mike not wanting to say he loves her, and didn't do it until she literally was on her deathbed right in front of him?

the fact that most of what mike said in the monologue heavily contradicts what's actually been shown since s1. especially that he said he feels like his life started when they found her in the woods, which is when will was missing...

the fact that at the end of the season their relationship is literally based off a lie of will's feelings for mike disguised as el's?

that they weren't even speaking at the end of the season?

[runninguplenorahills]

and last questions of my spam of questions:

1. thoughts on (platonic obv) Madwheeler? isn’t it funny how she hung up on Lucas in s3, but still kept on the line for Mike even if he treated El not great? i feel like they good friends. And she had his back when lucas was calling him out at the beginning. And overall I feel like they care a lot but won’t admit it.

2. what does your Pinterest look like? First 4 photos to show ur aesthetic.

3. last question. Who is your comfort character (pt.1) and who is your comfort ship? (Pt.2)

Thank you so so much for this ask!!!🌷💗

Question number 1:

Mike isn’t a self proclaimed leader, the whole party genuinely sees him as that and the heart of the group. They have an insane amount of respect for Mike even when they are in an argument with him/aren’t on good terms with him and Max is not an exception. She spent a lot of her time in s2 trying to get Mike to like her/his approval and her bad attitude was never a result of her not liking him, but thinking that he didn’t like her. Max really wanted to be friends with Mike and she’s also actually very fun and silly. Someone who obviously has something of a bad temper but isn’t generally rude at all. Most of the time she’s simply scared. She cares about Mike and respects him and I think this seeking for his approval bled into the beginning of s3 which is why she tried to defend him against Lucas’ jokes. We also cannot forget that Max was fascinated by El and wanted to be friends with her which El denied. So Max was out there not knowing a single thing about Mike’s girlfriend but wanting to as well as wanting to be on Mike’s good side and therefore maybe feeling like this wasn’t her place to joke around/criticize. Which of course all changed after realizing that she doesn’t have to be pro-melvin because Mike treats El like garbage (El also treats Mike badly but that, of course, went unnoticed). Mike’s behavior towards El was not okay and Max helped El to realize that she doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment. She stood up for her and supported her and while she was of course mad at Mike for his behavior it didn’t change that she still likes and respects him generally. He’s still one of her best friends and fighting, criticizing and calling him out for his mistakes doesn’t make her like him any less (every other party member has done it before and they obviously all love Mike). Mike and Max are good friends and they do care and respect each other even though they fight a lot. And if I’m being 100% honest I don’t even think that they wouldn’t not admit to that. There’s no “we hate each other”-image they want to keep up. Not in front of others nor in front of each other. They are friends and they obviously do like each other and especially to Max it’s really important that Mike likes her as it makes her feel like she’s a true part of of the group. I personally like Madwheeler a lot but it’s also very frustrating that a lot of people in the fandom only look at their friendship through a s3-lens and completely ignore how their dynamic was the season before. They literally only look at how their dynamic is when they’re currently in a fight which is ridiculous! Especially Max actually usually makes an effort to be nice to Mike! She is not shitting on him and picking fights with him for the shits and giggles! Their fights are genuine fights and yes, when they’re fighting they sometimes say mean things to each other but that’s not how their friendship usually is. A whole lot of people first seem to think that the whole party is affectionately rude to Mike and then settle on only Max being affectionately rude to Mike, but even though neither is true, even when Lucas and Will were joking about Mike’s relationship with El, Max doesn’t join in (as we already discussed). I’m just so over people pretending like the party sees Mike as a total loser and since they especially project that onto Madwheeler I really don’t enjoy the fandom content even though I do like the friendship.

Question number 2:

So this is just a screenshot from my for-you-board (this is what you meant right?…. Right!?) which is very easily influenced because I’m not all too much on pinterest. Pretty much only there to search for clothes for my character closet boards and st stuff in general. But as you see I’ve also been looking at strawberry shortcake stuff lately <3

Question number 3:

Mike is my favorite character but I guess Will is more of a comfort character to me? Idk, it’s generally both though. And my comfort ship is obviously byler <33

[azaleadynasty]

sometimes i think el stans on byler tumblr are the only el stans that acc know el as a character

like esp when i see “el stans” (usually milkvans) talk abt how she would “cry for days” if byler were to happen, like HUH??? did you like watch the show with your eyes closed??? cause like we’ve been shown the opposite,,

like in no way am i saying she wouldn’t be the least bit annoyed abt the situation, but primarily against mike for not telling her the truth,, lit one of the first things he tells her is ‘friends don’t lie’

also el is so obvs happier outside a romantic relationship,, but ofc she loves mike, just moreso platonic love

[kaiculus]

OH MY GOD OK

first post here obv has to be something byler/stranger things related but first i just wanted to say that i rly enjoy analyzing stuff so i think ill prefer to post on here rather than twitter since here its nicer or smth IDK BUT IF U WANT u can go follow me on twt @poloplopnko

ANYWAYS

I wanted to make an analysis on how I realized something after making a joke tweet on how calling El 11 was like calling her a slur or something since she isn't something to be numbered and is her own person. I realized that in I think every scene especially during their fight scenes Mike always calls El "Eleven," and I found this odd. You'd imagine that her boyfriend, someone who she is supposed to be comfortable around, wouldn't call her a name that may remind her of her past.

I mean everyone else calls her El or Jane, so why?

Well, I had an idea that maybe it has something to do with Mike's attachment issues and his people pleasing.

Now hear me out.

I believe it's shown many times in the show that we can safely assume that Mika has a fear of being "nonuseful" to the others around him. Many people have different opinions but I feel as though that Mike is the type of person to believe that if someone doesn't find him useful once they know him they never will. This is why I think he's so afraid that El won't need him anymore, platonically or not. He's afraid she doesn't need him after believing she did after so many years.

This is why I think he calls her Eleven.

Maybe it's to bring them back to how it was before when she was just a girl who escaped a lab. To be able to send them back to when El wasn't her own person just yet, just so Mike can believe that she does need him.

I know Mike doesn't always call her Eleven but I think he calls her it much more than the others, and not really in the "oh a special name for you" kind of way.

I LOVE MAKING ANALYSIS' SO THIS WAS ACTUALLY RLY FUN TO MAKE I MIGHT POST MORE AGUSHRVF lol have a nice day :]

[alex-the-bringer-of-chaos]

Okay gang, regarding the script: no fucking wonder Finn says Will's love is beautiful. No wonder basically everyone on the cast is rooting for byler. Otherwise this shit is the saddest there is. We know David knows the ending, he called it beautiful. There's no fucking way he would be saying that and giggling and shit if byler wasn't endgame.

El's journey has ALWAYS been about her sense of identity and the need for familial and platonic love. Her romantic relationship with Mike holds her back, makes her miserable (as we saw on s4) and when she dumped his ass and spent time with her friend Max was the happiest she's ever been.

Will and Mike's journey has been connected from the start, no, before that. The story wouldn't exist if they hadn't been friends, they NEED eachother in a healthy way, they make each other happier, the love they want/need is the love the other one gives them. But their story has also been about self-love, just like El's. The difference is where that need come from.

El needed to learn self-love because of the whole shitshow of trauma and the growing up on a lab, abusive af place. She struggles with seeing who she is because she has only been seen as 2 things her whole life: a superhero or a monster - and her relationship with Mike reinforces that viewpoint, which is why she is happier without that romance.

Mike and Will's struggles come from being gay in the 80s and from their family - Mike cause his parents are more worried with fitting in causing them to be in a loveless marriage and Will cause of his piece of shit of a father - those things affected their view of themselves and of their future. They need to learn self-love on their own, obv, but they're relationship is key to it. They've always needed each other, always will. They love each other so much!

At the end, El's happy ending is being her independent self with the love of her family and friends, and Mike and Will's happy ending is together!

[robthegoodfellow]

I think I finally put my finger on why aspects of the Mike/El relationship bother me, and it’s pretty much summed up in this video I watched years ago about the longstanding sci fi trope wherein an utterly naive yet powerful female character meets and ultimately falls for an average Joe male character who must teach her how to human (and also inevitably how to romance).

The video brings up how in almost every one of these stories, there’s a scene where the ingénue, so innocent of social conventions and norms, strips or almost strips off her clothes in front of her later love interest and must be instructed on the proper way to behave. Of course, in most sci fi stories intended for adults, this scene is presented in a titillating manner that is meant to play into hetero male fantasies—but basically the PG version of this scene happens almost immediately upon Mike, Lucas, and Dustin finding El in the woods and bringing her to Mike’s basement: Mike offers El dry clothes and El stands, reaches for the hem of her shirt, and the boys recoil in horror; Mike then teaches El the notion of “privacy” and directs her to the bathroom. I’m not saying this scene was presented in a creepy way—but it is very much part of long tradition related to this trope of establishing very lopsided power dynamics between the main romantic couple of the narrative.

I only remembered that scene when rewatching the video essay just now—at the time, it didn’t strike me anything noteworthy aside from highlighting El’s total lack of socialization. In context of the rest of the show, though, it does inform why the dynamic between El and Mike in season 3 REALLY rubbed me the wrong way. Because narratively, El is so naïve and so lacking in basic communication skills that she and Mike might be similar ages, but El is operating from a place of HUGE disadvantage re: her knowledge and familiarity with human society, norms, agency, language, etc. I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but Mike’s developmentally a middle schooler, and El’s developmentally a fair bit younger.

(Not blaming Mike in all this... he’s a kid. On top of which, it’s unreasonable to assume a character knows what genre trope they’re in. This is a storytelling decision I’m taking issue with!)

On top of that, the show presents El at the start of the season as incredibly isolated and very much dominated by the two men in her life (who are apparently the ONLY people in her life?), and Hop mentions to Joyce that this has been the state of affairs for months. So for months, El has been totally dependent on Hop and Mike as her windows into the human world—the former a controlling father figure (sorry Hop, but you were such an immature ass that season) and the latter a boy who wants to make out with her. And I gotta say, I really, really did not like that. El’s superpowers do not even scales in this regard—they hold all the cards re: her socialization (other than the TV, I suppose?), and have far too much sway over how she therefore views the world and herself.

(You could argue that her socialization occurs piecemeal off-screen/during the clusterfuck Secret Sister ep, and/or during her months hiding in Hop’s cabin, but... that doesn’t cut it for me.)

Obviously (thank GOD), Max intervenes and plays a major PLATONIC role in El’s growth for the rest of season 3, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that having El involved in any kind of romantic relationship so early in her relative development is… dicey. Obviously, I don’t wanna deny her the agency she does have, and if she wants to date Mike, great. But she’s been fixated on the literal first non-lab boy she’s ever met. And a part of me wanted her to have some space to figure herself out a bit more.

Idk if the move to Cali helped with this, any—but I was kinda relieved at first that she was getting away from Mike and Hop for a while (bc obv Hop wasn’t dead dead). And then s4 happened, and the booster shot I got yesterday is kicking my butt way too much to parse all that.

[yes-hi-its-ur-mum]

dude

dude

okay so in s5.

Will becmoes the bad guy, and like runs into the upside down and kills vecna for good, but then gains conrrol of the mind fkayer and reeks havock, in absolute homosexual rage, then mike comes looking for him after piecing all of the pieces together, like "holy god i must go save my platonic bestie, *to el* bye babe, don't do anything super cool and awesome while im gone" then he runs away and ofc lucas and dustin know wats up so they follow behind him. theb Jonathan steve and nancy and robin go into the upside down through a different way and see eddies body...but its just his bandana...da da daa...and then mike finds will and does another monologue about why he was such a little djjshs jsjsjbdjjsn isjsj jsjdjdj ajjdkd to will, then it rains and then they kiss, but then will is like possessed and so mike runs away. and then steve becomes fixated on finding erddie so he does that with the gang. dustin and lucas have a bonding session over max and eddies deaths/almost deaths, and lucas tells dustin abt how much he loves max and all abt their movie date he had planned. meaniwhile el is with unconcious max and joyce/murray/hopper etc. and when the mind flayer is doing harmless property damage el absolutley kicks its ass, then enters its "mind" which is just wills mind, and they have sibling bonding time, inside wills mind, and will comes out to her, and explains what being gay is bc obv she wouldnt rlly know, and anyway she says "will i love u but u need to stop", and he says "i want to but it has my brain, and i cant control it anymore, is controls me", and then mike finds lucas and dustic, who finds steve and nancy and jonothan and robin and they all talk about what they've seen, and also they had found eddie, who had made a home for himself in the upside down, and try to devise a plan, and so, oh my god, and then--

LMAO bestie you are Unhinged i love it

[wheeler-things]

Re the comments in your tags: El’s eyes are actually closer in shade to Karen’s than Mike’s are. Her hair is closer in shade to Nancy’s (and likely Karen’s natural colour) than Mike’s is. Her hair is actually allowed to be curly like Karen’s and Nancy’s (at least in s2). Obv she also looks like the Ives family because whoever makes these casting choices for ST is really good, but it’s really interesting to me that, while El is clearly NOT a Wheeler, she could pass for one arguably more easily than Mike does.

I have a suspicion that there’s actually a metaphorical reason behind the familial parallels, on Mike’s end?

Like, I think for Mike the thing is that, in choosing El, specifically, as the girl he’s trying to be in love with, it’s him (metaphorically/subconsciously) trying to get as close to her as possible because she’s everything he wishes he could be but can’t.

She’s a superhero, which effectively means that she’s strong enough to protect everyone she loves (and it means that she gets taken seriously even by adults when they’re in a crisis, which is something Mike struggles to achieve, even after he’s proven himself)— WE know she doesn’t want to be a superhero but at least as of s4 Mike seems incapable of realizing that.

She’s (presumably/from Mike’s POV— I’m a wlw El truther but shhh) straight, but she’s also a (cis— though obv with a non-normative experience of gender) girl. Meaning she’s straight in the way that would have made Mike’s gay feelings “normal”. He can’t be a girl though, so he can’t do what El can. He can’t turn to his best friend and joke about how cute the Karate Kid is (well. We know he could. Will would be baffled but elated to find out Mike likes boys at all because it would mean Mike would understand him lbr. But MIKE doesn’t know that), but El can. He can’t kiss boys, but El can. He can’t like one of the boys in the Party— maybe even a boy that outside forces keep dictating “has” to be like a brother/family to him, the way people say that sort of thing about close friends you’ve known since you were very young/that you’re deeply bonded to— but El can (Mike’s described as her cousin, they can’t tell you the difference between sibling and romantic feelings in s1, but it’s all okay for them to get together because she’s a girl and Mike’s a boy).

Specifically in s1, she can save Will and Mike can’t. But this changes in s2! Which is cool!

This is a bit more of a guess but… Mike’s rude to Max when they first meet. For, like, two to four days max? All while he’s stressed about Will, thinks he’s going crazy because he keeps seeing El, is also grieving El with no support, and probably (though it’s not explicitly stated— but he’s annoyed about Max before they realize what Dart is and way more hostile to her after) worried about getting someone else mixed up in all the UD business. And their relationship never really comes back from that. They fight all s3, and by s4 they’re both pulling away from everyone (all of which makes me really hope we’re being set up for some platonic madwheeler in s5, somehow, because I think we deserve it and also Mike and Max deserve it). But El? Was immediately rude to Max, seems to have largely ignored her for the next six months despite spending at least some time with the Party, and yet the instant she wants to talk, Max is right there, willing and ready, and they become instant best friends. I’m glad that happened for them (El/Max is wonderful in any form), but it contrasts with Mike and Max’s dynamic.

She physically LOOKS like she fits in with the Wheeler family. Not to say Mike doesn’t, but he sort of sticks out next to his parents and sisters in a way that El wouldn’t.

:) She goes to California with the Byers and seems to immediately become part of the family/to immediately develop a sibling bond with particularly Will (probably also Jonathan but Will’s emphasized). And I just. If the IH interpretations of Mike’s character are correct… the sheer amount he must wish that if he had to feel “more than just best friendship” for Will, that it could have been in a brotherly way? Idk, just interesting to me.

Though, in this context, I think it’s really interesting and maybe heartbreaking that Mike’s family doesn’t seem to know who El is (despite?? Having been his girlfriend for over a year by s4???), and doesn’t seem to care about her (like??? They never even bring up that time Mike kept a maybe-Russian girl in their basement for a week????? Even when they’re telling him off for his behaviour in s2??? Like who cares about graffiti on a bathroom stall he KEPT A MAYBE ENEMY OF THE STATE IN YOUR BASEMENT FOR A WEEK). Even Nancy has never, that I can recall, showed any particular interest in El beyond what her powers can do in life or death situations, or whether she’s “stolen” Nancy’s old dress. So, you know. If I’m right about the metaphor. Even in Mike’s (metaphorical) idealized “if only I were X, Y, and Z, then my life would be better” fantasies, he STILL can’t get his family to pay attention to him. Which is fun.

Something about El being dressed in a blonde wig (Holly), Nancy's dress, and wearing Mike's watch