Will the Wise: An Asexual Analysis of Will Byers from Stranger Things

Image description: Will Byers from the Netflix series Stranger Things, the subject of today's post. Although there are many reasons why I don't think Will is actually aspec (read on for why), there are a lot of aspec parallels in his story that offer what I feel is an interesting opportunity for analysis.

If you follow pop culture at all, you may be at least somewhat aware of the wildly successful series Stranger Things, a thriller/horror series streaming on Netflix. Stranger Things follows the residents of the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, beginning in the year 1983. By all accounts, Hawkins seems like a typical small town in the Midwest where nothing much happens; however, the town is home to Hawkins National Laboratory, a laboratory full of secret sinister experiments. During the course of their research, the Hawkins scientists accidentally discover an alternate dimension that mirrors the real world but is full of terrifying monsters, which break through and come into the real world from their own, which becomes known as the “Upside Down.” With the release of the monsters come very real consequences, including the disappearance of a young boy named Will Byers.

Will’s disappearance creates ripples through the town and pulls his mother, his brother, his best friends, the town’s sheriff, and others into the frightening mystery. Their paths eventually cross with an equally mysterious young girl called Eleven, a subject of one of the laboratory’s many experiments, which have given her dangerous psychokinetic powers. As the story unfolds, the residents of Hawkins are forced to confront the monstrous creatures that threaten their town and the world at large. But long before the Upside Down has potentially world-altering consequences, it has consequences for Will and his family that serve as the backbone for the rest of the series, and give us an extremely interesting character to boot.

I’ve been waiting to write a post about Will Byers for a while now. Originally, this post was scheduled for 2021, but due to COVID delays, the fourth season of the show was pushed off until 2022. Since I knew I wanted my post about Will to be done as close as possible to season four’s premiere date, I ended up keeping the post as a sort of floater for 2022 until we had a more concrete date. By sheer dumb luck, Netflix announced that the first part of season four would be released on a blog update day – today – and I knew I couldn’t pass up the perfect opportunity. [Don't worry, I haven't watched any of season four yet, so no spoilers for the new stuff] And so, at long last, I can take a look at the character of Will for the blog today as we prepare to dive into season four and ask the question – can we look at Will as an aspec character and what lessons can he teach us about representation?

Spoiler warning! 

Stranger Things (all three seasons)

Content warning: Use of the word "queer" to refer to non-straight sexual identities, with occasional mentions of "queer" as used in a derogatory sense

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Will Byers and “Queer-Coding”

Before I get into the main analysis of Will’s character, I’d like to acknowledge the fact that Will Byers may be a gay character, although this has not yet been confirmed onscreen. Will is what TV Tropes describes as “Ambiguously Gay” – a character who has moments within canon where it seems they might be gay, but is never actually confirmed as such canonically. There are several moments throughout the show that seem to support this theory, and as such it seems like Will might fall under the umbrella of something known as queer-coding. Similar to the “Ambiguously Gay” trope (or perhaps working hand-in-hand with it), queer-coding occurs when a character is not ever explicitly stated to be of a particular sexual identity, but are given certain attributes that make it seem likely they may be. In Will’s case, the fact that he’s a small, somewhat delicate-featured, soft-spoken boy could all be seen as examples, potentially serving as a sort of shorthand indicator that he is meant to be understood as “not straight.”

Throughout the show thus far, there are other examples that could be seen as “Ambiguously Gay” or queer-coding moments for Will. For instance, early in the first season when his mother Joyce goes to the police station to report him missing, she mentions how hard her estranged husband, Will’s dad, is on the young boy. She specifically mentions he calls him “queer,” to which Sheriff Hopper asks, “Is he?” Joyce doesn’t reply to this and instead tersely says, “He’s missing.” In addition to Will’s bullying father, other bullies likewise refer to Will this way, which of course could just be seen as him being picked on for being smaller, unathletic, and geeky rather than any type of indicator of the character’s actual sexuality. In general, introducing Will’s potential sexuality through bullies has its own problems, but it may nevertheless serve as another sort of shorthand.

Image description: Will at the beginning of season one

There are other things fans have pointed out that could be potential queer-coding moments – such as in season two when Joyce is describing a moment from Will’s childhood in which he drew his own design for a spaceship of many colors which he described as a “rainbow ship,” potentially a nod to the rainbow-colored gay pride flag. However, one of the most notable moments comes in season three, in which Will, the only member of his friend group not in a romantic relationship as they enter their teen years, is accused of “not liking girls.” I’ll cover this moment more in depth later in the post, but in the short term, I’m sure you can see why this moment contributes a great deal to the thought that Will may be a queer-coded character, and also why I myself am interested in analyzing Will through an aspec lens.

Of course, it’s entirely possible for Will to be both aspec and gay/some other queer identity. However, the aspec part of that may be a bit harder to prove. For a start, because the show takes place in the 1980’s in small town America, it’s highly unlikely that terms such as “asexual” or “aromantic” would be in Will’s lexicon, or in the show’s. Although it would be possible to show Will as being on the asexual or aromantic spectrums without use of the terms in so many words, it does increase the unlikelihood of aspec-ness being included in his story. Stranger Things has tackled the issue of marginalized queer characters before, such as with the character of Robin in season three, so it does seem more likely that, if they did decide to portray Will as a queer identity, he would be gay exclusively.

In general, the TV Tropes page I mentioned earlier also leaves open the possibility that Will may indeed be asexual/aromantic, or maybe just hasn’t developed sexual and romantic desire as quickly as his other friends, which would honestly make a lot of sense for him. Although fans aren’t exactly sure what Will’s sexual identity may be, I still believe these open-ended moments can be seen through many lenses, including an aspec lens, hence my analysis today. Whatever Will may be, there are still definite aspec parallels to his story, especially in later seasons. Therefore, while future seasons may disprove everything I’m about to say, I’d still like to use Will’s storylines and experiences as examples of aspec topics for as long as we remain within that ambiguous zone. I in no way, shape, or form intend any type of erasure with today’s analysis, especially if Will is indeed canonically confirmed as gay in the future.

The Story of Will Byers (So Far)

Image description: Will in season 2

As stated above, Will’s disappearance is one of the first things that occurs in the plot of Stranger Things after the monsters tear through Hawkins National Laboratory and get out into the world. Due to the fact that searching for him is a huge part of the plot, Will is of course absent for most of the show’s first season; we really only get to see him in flashbacks and in a few minutes of the first episode as character establishment. However, despite the brief nature of these scenes, they tell us so many of the things we need to know about him as a character. From the start, we see he is a kind-hearted, forthright sweetheart, as is evident from his first scene where, while playing Dungeons and Dragons with his best friends, he is willing to put his character in danger just for the sake of being honest.

Even though Will is missing from this point in the story onward – having accidentally broken through into the Upside Down and now being stuck there – he is not missing from its narrative. Something the show does extraordinarily well is allowing Will to be present even when he’s not physically there. Due to the Upside Down being a sort of mirror to the real world, he is able to interact with objects in his house because he can see them in the Upside Down. Realizing this, his mother Joyce eventually uses Christmas lights to communicate with him, which allows him to first communicate simple things and then more complex messages. Even through this system, we see how caring Will is, using the system to try and warn his family whenever dangerous things try to get through from the Upside Down.

Additionally, we see how brave he is, despite his young age, and despite the fact that the narrative shows us he’s a very tender-hearted character. The Upside Down is as perilous as it is terrifying, but he manages to survive it long enough to be rescued and restored to his family, despite the odds. This alone would make Will incredible, but he is not so easily free of the Upside Down, even once he is back home. This leads us to season two where we arguably get the most (thus far) of Will, who, as far as the other residents of Hawkins are concerned, is back from the dead. This leads to the cruel moniker “zombie boy,” which not only haunts him, but serves to mark him as “other,” even more than he already had been as a shy nerd.

The phenomena of being treated as other is something I talk about a lot in regards to being aspec, due to the fact that the world views aspec identities as outside the norm and thus worthy of being treated as different, foreign, or strange. However, I’m sure many different types of people can relate to this feeling, whether because they are nerds like Will or are part of another minority identity of any kind. The notion of being pushed aside and treated as different is a poignant struggle, and also not one that happens just in society at large, but within family groups and friend circles as well. Will exemplifies this throughout season two, during which he is still in the clutches of the Upside Down despite being back in the real world. Those who love him want to understand and try to help him, but are unable to really understand what he’s going through. This of course all takes a supernatural bent, but by the next season, it takes on a very real-world flavor, one which makes his struggle even more relatable.

By season three, Will is mostly free from the influence of the Upside Down and is ready to get back to a normal life. There’s just one problem – all of his friends have moved on from the things they used to enjoy, such as the Dungeons and Dragons games that Will cherished so much. And beyond just that, they all have girlfriends now, while Will notably does not. This creates several problems for him and serves to alienate him in a way completely unrelated to the horrors of the Upside Down. In those cases, the people closest to him actively want to help him, and it’s clear they care deeply for him; however, by the time season three rolls around, it’s also clear that while they may love Will, they have definite ideas for what they want to be doing with their time or how they want to live their lives, and those are things that he cannot relate to. They aren’t actively trying to hurt him, of course, but there are several times when he is either ignored or left behind entirely, which leads to the scene I mentioned earlier in the “queer-coding” section.

Image description: Will in season 3, garbed in his Dungeons and Dragons attire

The scene plays out as follows. Eventually, Will tries to seize an opportunity to get his friends to play Dungeons and Dragons with him – with cloak and staff in hand – and they dismiss his efforts entirely. Obviously smarting, he gathers his things and prepares to ride his bicycle home in the pouring rain. His friend Mike attempts to pacify him, but in his anger, Will tells him, “You’re destroying everything, and for what? So you can swap spit with some stupid girl?” Mike retorts that his girlfriend is not stupid and, obviously defensive, tells Will, “it’s not my fault you don’t like girls.” A beat of tense silence follows, after which Mike says, a bit more evenly, “I’m not trying to be a jerk, okay? But we’re not kids anymore. I mean, what did you think, really? That we were never going to get girlfriends? That we were just going to sit in my basement all day and play games for the rest of our lives?”  “Yeah,” replies Will. “I guess I did. I really did.”

This is a heartbreaking scene, and not just from an aspec perspective. I think a lot of people – no matter their identity – have at some point felt the way Will does in this scene, and have experienced the pain of not fitting in with friends or family members while they live a life you cannot or do not want to share. Following this conversation, Will rides home in the rain, devastated, and sits in Castle Byers, a little log fort he built with his brother as a child. As he sits there, looking at various mementos of his childhood, he breaks down and begins destroying everything, muttering to himself that it’s “stupid.” He then does likewise to the fort itself, knocking down the sticks before he eventually collapses into tears. It’s an incredibly emotional moment, and one that is so much more significant plotwise than just Will destroying the fort, chiefly because, while he was stuck in the Upside Down during the first season, one of the places he hides is that other world’s version of Castle Byers. It represents not only his childhood, but also a sense of safety.

I myself have never been through a trauma the way Will has, but I can nevertheless relate very strongly to the emotions shown in this scene. Not long ago, I wrote a blog post all about the ongoing effort to redefine my adulthood and how I, as an aromantic asexual person, struggle with feeling like I am not an adult by the metrics of the world at large. The implication of Mike saying “we’re not kids anymore” is that Will is like a child because of his interests and lack of interests – which in this case is the fact that he's not dating anyone, something that many aspec people deal with. In general, making Will feel stupid for cherishing these supposedly "childish things" is a larger issue, because different people experience adulthood in different ways, but society doesn’t often accept these variations and usually expects that “being an adult” can only mean one thing or be presented in one specific type of way. Anyone who deviates from the accepted norm of adulthood is made to feel “less than.” Whether or not Will is aspec, I think we can see this struggle demonstrated very clearly in him, in a way that I feel is not often portrayed in media or is not portrayed well.

What Will “Not Liking Girls” Means For His Story

Will’s argument with Mike is an example of being made to feel different and less than because you experience life in a different way from those around you, and how this can prey on your sense of safety and identity. Those themes run very deep for Will throughout the series, but this scene in particular brings these things to the forefront, and the core of it is of course Mike’s line about Will not liking girls. This line could tell us any number of things about Will and the circumstances around him. For instance, it’s entirely possible that Mike, in his frustration at the situation, lashes out unthinkingly and unintentionally weaponizes the thing that makes Will different from his friends – the fact that he doesn’t have a girlfriend and is in no rush to find one. As an aspec person, I know exactly what this phenomenon feels like. Although I have very supportive friends and family members, even someone with a great support system like I have cannot possibly be accepted by everyone or in every scenario; as such, I have definitely felt at various times as though individuals or groups look down on me for my lack of sexual/romantic interest.

Something I talk about a lot on this blog is the way society weaponizes the idea of being alone and how the fear of being alone is often used to pressure people into relationships. However, in other cases – as we potentially see with Will here – being alone can be weaponized, not in a way to cajole someone into a relationship, but simply to alienate them due to their lack of one, and make it clear that their solo nature makes them unrelatable and thus not someone other people want to be around. In this scene, I don’t think Mike means to say that he doesn’t want to be around Will, and I don’t think he really feels that either. However, what he implies is that Will should feel like he’s somehow in the wrong. Again, I’m not blaming Mike for this – despite “not being kids anymore” and despite the many horrors they’ve all seen, they’re still young, and demanding perfection from teenagers in the real world or in fiction would just be silly. But even so, this is a huge problem that aspec people and characters go through on the regular, and it’s an issue I imagine many other groups/identities can relate to as well.

Speaking as an aspec person, I have both experienced first-hand and seen scenarios (whether in real life or in media) where aspec identities are treated as inconvenient, and where acceptance of them is begrudging. Rather than aspec people being able to flourish within our identities, therefore, we’re often made to feel like we’re a burden on the people around us. I myself often worry that I’ll one day experience something like Will is experiencing here, and that the people in my life will decide that working around me is too taxing or that my life no longer aligns with their own, because I have seen it portrayed in media many times. For instance, think about the usual suspects I discuss on this blog like Sheldon Cooper, Seven of Nine, or the spirit-boy Cole, all of whom are characters who are treated as abnormal and “less than” until they attain romantic and/or sexual relationships – relationships which they are, in some cases, bullied or pressured into.

Will in this scene is uniquely different from those characters, however, because we get to see his perspective on how this all makes him feel. I believe most people want to think of themselves as belonging somewhere, and the feeling of not belonging, even with people who you thought accepted you, is extremely painful. I think this is exactly what Will is feeling, especially in the moment where he responds to Mike’s question about assuming they’d all never grow up and move on by saying “I really did.” I think Will assumed that, no matter what, he’d always be able to relate to his friends and fit into their sphere, even if he didn’t fit into anyone else’s. Now that he finds himself the outcast even among his own friends, he is forced to confront a reality that is different from what everyone else around him knows – which is extremely apropos for a character who literally had to do that when he confronted the Upside Down. Again, experiencing a different reality is a feeling I’ve had to deal with a lot as an aspec person. But the fact that the show allows this to be a heartbreaking moment that Will must confront is extremely meaningful. Most media would frame Will as being in the wrong, but I believe the scene where he wrecks Castle Byers in his sorrow is proof that we’re supposed to sympathize with Will in a way a lot of media would not allow.

Additionally, we see that Will’s friends feel bad about this and how they go after him when he runs off. The moment doesn’t really get to go anywhere due to plot reasons, but the fact that they do care is rather touching, and again, not something we often see for characters like Will in media. Thus, I’m curious how the show plans to deal with these things moving forward. At the end of season three (spoilers!), Will’s family moves out of Hawkins and the friends all share an emotional goodbye, again showing how much they still deeply care for one another. Perhaps this separation will breathe new life into Will’s friend group, showing them how much they all need each other despite the differences between them. Perhaps it will cause them all to realize the compromises they can make for one another in order to strength their bonds, respecting Will’s boundaries while he also learns to accept the differences in their life trajectories. 

Of course, because this is still a mystery horror show, I don’t expect there to be a ton of time to explore these things while they dodge monsters and try not to die. But I do hope that the show doesn’t choose to dismiss the pain Will felt in season three, and I hope sincerely that they don’t make him carry the blame of things that are not his fault. Growth is possible for all the characters, Will included, and I hope we can have some of that in between the chaos I know will be coming. Whether Will is gay, aspec, or just hasn’t developed romantic attraction yet, I think the moments I've discussed in this post are deeply important – not just for him and for the show, but for a lot of people like me.

Image description: Will as he'll appear in season 4

In general, Will Byers is a great character. He’s brave, but sweet. He’s determined, but kind. He's a bit serious, but ultimately still nerdy. He’s selfless, self-sacrificing, and a survivor. He is exactly the type of character that would be great representation – either for the aspec community or any other queer community that might be able to or wish to claim him. Will’s story lends itself extremely well to being representation because, in addition to all the things I’ve mentioned, Will’s story is one of being on the outside looking in, something that minority identities of any kind can relate to. In fact, that is a factor for many of the characters and part of what made Stranger Things so popular in the first place. As I’ve mentioned before, I myself am not a fan of horror or gore and, with a few notable exceptions, I tend to avoid them as much as I can. The only reason I got into Stranger Things in the first place is because of those characters and their stories. Even when things get dark and disturbing – as I’ve heard they will this season (*wince*) – I hope these relationships remain in the forefront.

Overall, I don’t know what to expect from the show’s fourth season – or at least, the seven episodes that dropped today. In fact, given the highly bingeable nature of most streaming shows, it’s possible that everything I wrote today could already be obsolete. But even if that does turn out to be the case, I still believe that Will Byers allows us to make some important observations about what it means to grow up, fit in, and accept your reality. Like many characters I analyze on this blog, I don’t expect Will to be canon representation; but the way his story has been treated thus far gives me hope that better treatment for all kinds of characters is indeed possible, and I hope that stays true throughout this season as well. Someday, perhaps Will’s example will even serve as a springboard into better representation, for aspec identities and for identities of all kinds. After all, stranger things have happened.