Infinite Summer & the Katabasis of Will Byers

On fictional worlds that never imagined queer characters living in them

Hi Friends,

Summer break is here for those of us in the Academic School Year Club, although so are the challenges that coincide with suddenly having twelve or fifteen weeks of open time: hustling for income (for those of us who are unemployed until September); feeling pushed to work on personal and creative projects while still feeling exhausted and bogged down from the just-finished semester (the tension between needed rest and expected action); trying to reconnect all the interpersonal relationships one dropped during the grueling academic year alongside addressing other neglected areas of life, including personal health; increased expectations on the self to use "free" time responsibly and catch up on all one’s deferred personal and creative projects; and what is toughest for me: moving from a fixed schedule to walking into the open expanse of unstructured time. Unstructured time can be criminal for those who are autistic, anxious, and/or have ADHD.

My final grades were turned in two weeks ago, and I still feel like I'm healing and trying to find solid ground to walk on. I've been planning calendars for June, July, and August with the help of spreadsheets and SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely). It feels cheesy, I know, but these methods have proven to be helpful for me in trying to lasso my wildhorses.mp3 brain. I'm also trying to stop myself from feeling shame for needing to rest up and slow down. I'm also simultaneously trying to *not* feel guilt over everything I've set aside this past academic year while focusing on my studies (friends' new books I couldn't read, popular TV shows and movies I couldn't make time to watch...). Beside a brief repose in January, this is my first time in nearly a year I've felt comfortable indulging my whims.

I took a brief trip to the city since two of my friends were getting married (and what a beautiful wedding it was—located at an unexpected NYC destination: the vintage-inspired TWA hotel at JFK). Staying in Greenpoint, it took nearly 90 minutes each way to get to the hotel by train. I started reading Ursula K. Le Guin's incisive 1979 essay collection, The Language of the Night, on the subway. Some of the most productive reading of my life happened on the subway, so I'm trying to mentally channel the space without signal, in a tube, underground. I've also been considering writing by hand again. I’ll have more to say about Le Guin's essays (and Jung—who she summons a few times—and I might summon today too) soon.

Although I'm trying to minimize my distractions, I've also been allowing myself my indulgances to honor all the much-needed downtime I've neglected the past four months or so. It’s important to rest, especially as you process and feel overwhelmed by the grief this world introduces. Over the weekend, I watched the new season of Stranger Things (or at least what is the first 7 of 9 episodes—the last 2 premiere in July). I wouldn't say I'm a stan, but I will say I can be the type of media consumer who feels that after X amount of hours I have a duty to see something 'til the end. I believe in commitment. More that, I tend to get fixated on types of textual analyses, which holds my interest longer. This is all to say I've been thinking about Will Byers and his silly mop of hair again.

(I should say part of this will have some spoilers about S4 of Stranger Things. I'll signal when I'm about to delve into deeper spoiler territory, so read at your own risk.)

Will Byers is fascinating to me, because Will is half a person (wait until he discovers the Smiths). He's more plot device than character. In the first season, he is a MacGuffin: what is generally defined as a sought object that is key to plot progression, although largely insignificant in itself. One might argue that Will's a foil, but even that implies some type of greater personhood that I'm not certain Will embodies. At the same time, Will is seen by many of us. We raise an eyebrow at description of the shy, sensitive, artistic boy (who also plays a cleric in D&D—mmhmm). We eyeball the Boys Don’t Cry poster in his bedroom.

Will has been queer-coded perhaps even before the Duffer brothers fully realized how deep Will’s queerness goes. In fact, I'd argue that what makes queer readings of Stranger Things so fascinating is because these characters are all connected to a space of either gender nonconformity or sexual nonconformity. Even if there were early plans for Will to be someone who struggles with sexual identity, the connection between queerness, villainy, and death seems to be a rendering of the unconscious mind on the writers’ part. Will finds himself comfortably situated in a place of ambiguity. Is he an outsider due to his geek status or is he untouchable do to his dormant sexuality? I even suspect that the writers began to lean into including questions regarding Will's sexuality into the show itself because fan speculation brought this ambiguity to the conscious mind. They’ve certainly dragged their feet on moving toward lucidity though, as because once you have a definitive gay character, you have to ask what that character desires in the world they inhabit.

In the first season, Will is the missing boy, the one who lives off-screen. He exists as the plot device who must be rescued, allowing all the other characters to flourish while he's kept in stasis in a dim and damp world. In the second season, the writers run this trick again, a trauma-stricken Will left connected to the villainy of the initial season, unable to progress. As the actors entered their teenage years, the writers learned harder into the problem of Will. Not brave enough to confirm his sexuality and unsure how to integrate it into the plot, they give him an infantile fixation on D&D while his peers move away from role-playing wizards and into role-playing the rituals of puberty and heterosexuality.

In terms of the unconscious, the Upside Down can be read as an anxious space of non-normative gender and sexuality. Most—if not all—of the characters who had plot-related dalliances with the Upside Down are the ones who are most open to queer readings. Eleven and all her test-subject ilk are united by buzzed hair and androgynous hospital gowns. They are outcasts united in a neutralized gender. For brevity, I’ll avoid going deeper with some of my trans readings of Eleven’s character.

In a precursor to Will's own divergence from his friend group, we already see a split between Nancy Wheeler and her best friend Barb during the first season, as Nancy moves deeper into rituals of a permissible gender and sexuality, earning her increasing popularity (she is rewarded for her quest for becoming the heterosexual ideal).

Barb, on the other hand, is outside of these structures. There is ambiguity where her envy *of* Nancy's growing popularity and budding romantic relationships can be read as the trope of the closeted friend who is masking infatuation *with* her best friend. She's not only bitter that Nancy can easily move into these new heterosexual spaces, but she's frustrated that Nancy is abandoning her to be left alone inside own subtextual world. Barb is at the periphery: her gaze always falling upon Nancy. Unable to express her own sexuality, she is left as a voyeur, a designated driver, a sartorial deviant, a virgin, a prude. Like Will, unable to advance into a world that was not designed for him, she is stuck in permanent pre-pubescence. Unable to develop as a character, she attracts the Demogorgon, who drags her into the Upside Down, where she is killed. With unexpected poignancy, Barb faces Thanatos in the Upside Down while Nancy is upstairs in the main world having sex with Steve—the Eros of heterosexuality keeping her alive.

It was arguably due to lesbian readings of Barb's character—which opens itself up to the pernicious "Bury Your Gays" trope—that lead the show-runners to introduce Maya Hawke's closeted lesbian character, Robin (her big S3 plot climax is coming out of the closet to Steve). By the way, Robin fucking slaps. She's one of my favorite characters, although it feels like she came into existence out of both a remediation for Barb's death and an anxiety of touching upon Will's unresolved sexuality (although in all of her development, Robin remains isolated).

The show purposefully leans into the possibility of being a social pariah in a yesteryear small town in order to resist having to give these characters meaningful queer relationships. One could also argue the show is now trying to cast more actors of color in a world that wasn't quite written for them either (Lucas’s quest for popularity and acceptance in S4 potentially opens itself up to many readings about race). With the show's growing popularity, there have been various on-screen pushes to rectify the lack of diversity of the early seasons through new, ancillary characters.

In the third season, Will's stunted growth is addressed diagetically. In a heated argument, Mike angrily says Will "doesn't even like girls." It's purposefully unclear whether this comment was about a delayed emergence into heterosexual courting rituals or a dig at Will's hidden homosexuality. Either way, it gave way to more media outlets speculating about Will’s character. By this new fourth season, the creators have leaned all in. Well, at least on a subtextual level.

I groaned within the first minutes of the season when Will walked out of the house carrying an Alan Turing poster board for a class presentation (a too-on-the-nose nod to the intersection of Will's geekiness and latent homosexuality). Perhaps to the writers this was supposed to be as subtle and soft as a Mazzy Star song, but it felt closer to attending a My Bloody Valentine concert for me.

Will continues to be frustrated with Mike, who almost seems to be avoiding Will for the same reason the showrunners are—unconscious fear of the homosexual. Will follows Mike and Eleven as Barb followed Steve and Nancy: a third wheel to heterosexual courtship rituals. There is much emphasis on a painting (not revealed to the viewer yet) that Will made for Mike (Mike is oblivious and does not accept the gift).

Much emphasis is on Will's hidden homosexuality seems to now be centered on his unresolved feelings for Mike. Although, I will say, Eleven presents an interesting crux in this triad, as she is also someone who has not quite learned how to conform to the gender norms expected of her, resulting in Carrie levels of bullying (both in and out of school). In a later scene, when Mike shares regret at not opening up to Eleven, Will makes a wink-wink-nudge-nudge speech about how sometimes it's scary to open up to the people you care about—what if you say how you really feel and they reject you?

Ah, subtley.

With two episodes left in this season as well as a fifth season on the way, there is still possibility for Will to have a satisfying arc and ending, although I hold many doubts. It's more likely Robin (who has a crush on another girl in the school band in S4) will get her own girlfriend as a surrogate for Will. In shows like Stranger Things that cater to geeky young men, it’s less risky to depict the lesbian relationship over the gay one. Paging Laura Mulvey. I would be surprised if both characters are able to advance in the way their heterosexual peers are allowed to develop on-screen to a meaningful degree.

I’m very, very curious with how they will do this though with an ever-growing ensemble cast. There's too much telegraphing for Will not to come out, right? But what will they do? How will they accomplish this? For the writers, this will probably be enough of a culmination of Will's arc: being captured, sequestered, traumatized, isolated, and reaching a type of nirvana as a self-aware queer character in a world of fictional heterosexuals. It’s depressing that we’re now in the 2020s and someone might think “coming out” is a satisfying reveal and culination of a character arc across five seasons.

There are also arguments for the interpretation of Will as aro or ace, although I don’t feel qualified to delve into those analyses. Nevertheless, they also provide other queer interpretations of his character.

In terms of queer-coded characters in the world of Stranger Things, there is someone else I would be negligent to mention. There will be major spoilers from S4 in the next section, so you may want to skip it if you’re not caught up yet.

In the seventh episode of the fourth season, many of the well-paced mysteries converge together on a single plot point: an orderly played feyly by Jamie Campbell Bower. The orderly (existing in the memory of Eleven’s subconscious), as it turns out, occupies a trinity of secret identities: he is a test subject like Eleven (the first one, in fact), he is the adult version of Henry Creel (Henry's father was an important part of Nancy and Robin's S4 plot thread), and he is Vecna, the archgeneral villain of the season, who resides in the Upside Down.

Interesting enough, although he is positioned in opposition to Eleven, One has more in common with Will Byers. He is a sensitive boy who was kept in solitude. His only friends were spiders! That’s it! That’s his character! The fey, spider-lover boy. Sigh.

Oh, and he's a being of pure evil. He just… really likes killing, I guess?

Sensitive queer-coded boys as sissy villains (did someone order a celluloid closet?) confined to a tenebrous, homosexual underworld. Someone else will have to unpack all that, but I couldn't write all these words up to this point and not mention the Bower's svelte, elfin orderly character, who certainly makes the queer interpretations of the Upside Down glow a deeper red (pink?).

Although Vecna will most likely be vanquished within the next two episodes, he is a glaring new introduction to the Stranger Things Cinematic Queeriverse.

Someone might say to me: you know, there is an increasing amount of queer representation in the media. There are shows by queer creators that feature queer characters from the get-go. There are new shows like Heartstopper that have immediately drawn in a cult following. Why not indulge those shows instead? Why spend so much time ruminating over a media property like Stranger Things?

And that would be a very excellent question indeed.

Perhaps there is a fandom studies scholar who can say this more succinctly and thoughtfully than I can, but what attracts me to character like Will Byers is how open they are for interpretation. The inconclusiveness and resistance to definition is what intrigues me. I know I've used this phrase many times already, but my brain is ignited by the idea of characters existing in written worlds that they were not consciously made to exist inside. This is not to say that I'm not also ignited by shows where young gay people are out, proud, happy, and exist inside uplifting worlds. I love those shows too.

For me, this is what fandom is though: possibility and interpretation. While as someone who is pretty grown, I don't have any stakes about the direction of a character who is half my age (or maybe it's just that I find Mike an entirely uninteresting and unlikable character and refuse to ship them because I want better for Will than pining for his straight best friend!). It’s not so much how I experience these characters from the vantage point of adulthood, but my ability to see a teenage version of myself who had existed in an underworld for too long.

My very first steps to the surface were through fandom twenty years ago: imagining a slash pairing for two queer-coded characters in a world that never imagined their fullness. I see that teenage me who needed a safe space to imagine queernesss before I fully allowed myself to embody it. Maybe, on some level, this is also why I feel at home in these worlds: because I grew up with media that never imagined or made space for me to exist inside them. In a way, those worlds are my home too because I had no choice but to grow up in them. My only bivouac as I journeyed through them is what imagination granted me.

I’m intrigued how fan analysis can speak to my own nonfictional past, but I'm also intrigued by a fictional world that can contain ash-ridden shadow realms and demonic canine monsters—yet allowing queer characters to thrive is somehow too ambitious. I’m intrigued by the cop-outs. I'm intrigued by this inverted world of decay that lures and kidnaps and protects and kills queer-coded characters. I’m intrigued by the contradictions. I’m intrigued by the danger that does not want me. I’m intrigued by the infiniteness that fandom can produce.

Ultimately, a queer-coded child being dragged into stygian quagmire and being rescued by his friends is slightly more interesting to me than a queer-canon child being bullied and beaten up at school or subjected to intimate partner violence. Sorry, Heartstopper. Of course I want unapologetically queer media, but I also want queer renderings from the dreamrealm, from the void, from the Upside Down.

I want greatness for Will Byers because I was Will Byers.

Not the villainous cliché of the sissy villain, but the greatness of a shy painter who plays the Cleric in D&D and has the same unfashionable haircut for years. The greatness of a media property that grew as big as it did because it didn't have to worry about gay boys' adolescence and how to write that respectably and serve it up to viewers who neither wanted or imagined those stories either. Alternatively, the greatness of a media properly that was never supposed to get as big as it did. The paradox of having to exist inside that world as ‘the boy who struggles with his sexuality.’ I thrive in the impossibility and yearning of this space. I want the apotheosis of Will Byers, for him to culminate and overcome both the ambiguity and the paradox and the object he’s currently written as. I want more than just a coming-out speech. I want more than just acceptance. I want Will’s full personhood. I want his happiness. I want the other in-world characters and the show’s audience who was never meant to see Will clearly to see him as I see him.

Can the writers achieve that?

Probably not—but it's this space for imagination and openness to being translated that keeps me watching and reaching for infinite possibilities.

Until next time.

XOXO,
J