It's picked back up again as needed, like when Max (Sadie Sink) is singled out by Vecna due to her secret suicidal feelings after Billy's (Dacre Montgomery) death. The power of the show's central metaphor - of the Upside Down as the isolating void that ostracized young people can fall into - mostly dissolves. When he was finally saved–and then saved again, from a later manifestation of his lingering trauma - it was by the people who love him exactly the way he is.īut then Will comes back from the Upside Down, and spends the next three seasons feeling left out. He was isolated, cut off from his sense of self and community. As the first person to find himself in the Upside Down, Will embodied its metaphor perfectly. The lonely, the ill-adjusted, and the outcast always seem to end up tied to its dark power. Long before Vecna's origin story was explained, it was obvious that the Upside Down pulled in outsiders. At a certain point, it doesn't feel like it's society that's excluding Will, but the show itself. Instead, Will gets a bad bowl cut and a wizard hat his friends think is corny. Every character at one point or another seems to gain confidence and a sense of identity through something that's grounded in the show's beloved, nostalgic setting. Dustin gets his Farrah Fawcett hairspray moment. Eleven and Max get their "Material Girl" mall fashion montage. But it wasn't a void for queer pop culture (pop music, in particular, was gayer than ever), and it's frustrating to see it portrayed as such. The '80s were an incredibly tough time to question one's sexual identity, as the AIDS epidemic forced many back into the closet out of understandable fear. It's disappointing that the series, which revels in all things '80s, can't seem to find a place for a queer-coded kid in its zeitgeist - and doesn't seem willing to try very hard. In what appears to be an attempt to stretch out a plot related to Will revealing his lingering feelings for Mike, series writers have instead hung him out to dry. This season, we know more about the interests and ambitions of Dustin's long-distance girlfriend and the Russian smuggler who likes peanut butter than we do about Will, one of the show's main characters. But it would be nice to see "Stranger Things" at least try to give the character some of the interiority it lends to everyone else in its ever-growing ensemble.
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