Stranger Things & Queer Characters on TV

Image description: A promo image for the sci-fi horror series, Stranger Things. At the end of 2025, this series came to its long-awaited end - and ending which turned out to be highly controversial for a number of reasons. Today, I'm going to unpack what I feel was one of the most glaring issues in this conclusion in the hopes that analyzing it reveals a bigger problem in our media landscape.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about a sort of strange phenomenon that characterized my late twenties and is shaping up to likewise be a large part of my early thirties – the sense that so many of the things I cared about, derived value from, and even loved have started to become shells of their former selves. Admittedly, I’ve been experiencing this for far longer than just within this time period; for instance, the conclusion of Sherlock was a massive letdown, as I discussed in my retrospective of the series, and that show concluded in 2017, when I was 22, following a decline that had been ongoing since at least three years earlier. But for some reason – whether because I had a good run of great media for a few years or because the passage of time has made me more aware of it – I feel like I’ve experienced the same patterns of media failure a lot more in recent memory.

But also strangely enough (and no, that is not a pun on the subject of today’s post), I also feel like I’ve recently experienced the feeling of watching media I love atrophy, but doing so at something of a distance. For the best example of this, you don’t have to look any further than Dragon Age, my favorite video game franchise. Throughout my blog’s six-year history, I’ve discussed various facets of Dragon Age (and its queer representation) dozens upon dozens of times, often with a lot of passion behind these emotions. However, you may remember that, back in 2025, I did a lot of analysis surrounding the fourth game in the franchise, Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

Because I didn’t have the ability to play the game and later lost the desire to do so, watching the way this game all but imploded was a bizarre experience for me. While it of course was personally devastating to see the way a franchise I loved and cared about was meeting its sad end, there was a sense of remoteness that came from not actually experiencing the game, but instead hearing about its failings secondhand, both from friends who played the game and hated its story and through criticism from online content creators in the Dragon Age fandom. This all led to me consuming the story of its downfall with both an intimate sense of personal involvement and an odd sense of clinical fascination.

Now, in 2026, I find myself doing the same thing with the Netflix series, Stranger Things, which had its series finale on New Year’s Eve of 2025, and which I therefore waited to consume in full until early 2026 – by which point I pretty much already knew it was doomed to be a disappointment. Unlike Dragon Age, Stranger Things is not something I have as deep of an attachment to, but I still really did love the series and enjoy its characters; as such, watching the frustrating decline of the series and its disappointing termination left me once again feeling that same sense of odd displacement, wherein I could really see how much the show declined, while also feeling some level of distance from it in the process. And, just as I did with Dragon Age: The Veilguard, this has led to me consuming a lot of media discussing why the fifth season of the show was such a disappointment.

Throughout my own observations and the research I’ve seen of other people, it’s almost scary how many parallels I can see between the failure of Veilguard and the failure of Stranger Things 5, which has led me to think a lot about why these two pieces of media both failed. There are obvious ones, of course, such as the length of time in between installments of the franchise (three years between seasons of Stranger Things and a whopping ten years between the third Dragon Age game and the fourth one); there are ironic ones, such as the fact that both pieces of media met their fate at the hands of some of their OG creators rather than due to an outside team coming in and ruining things. On some level, I think they even fell prey to some of the same writing issues. For instance, so many people derided Stranger Things 5’s tendency to halt the plot in order to blandly explain things to the audience in excruciating detail, but as someone who consumed plenty of content related to Veilguard and saw its habit of halting the plot so the characters could have meetings recapping what had just happened in the story, it was almost like having déjà vu to watch these scenes.

I think the fact that similar issues brought down both pieces of media are mere coincidences in some cases. But I also believe that some of the other shared issues are proof of certain storytelling fallacies and larger issues that plague media on a broader scale nowadays. That’s a more complicated topic than I have the time or ability to really get into today, but one issue they both share that I think I can begin to unpack is the way these pieces of media fumbled their queer representation. This is something I discussed a lot for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, chiefly in its representation of the character Taash, but have also explored for years more broadly when it comes to the way the franchise consistently ignored having any kind of aspec representation. In a sense, I also briefly touched on this with Stranger Things, exploring Will’s character through an aspec lens in a post I did back before season four.

But I think that Stranger Things 5 has now crossed into the territory that Veilguard and Dragon Age as a whole crossed into, wherein they wanted desperately to be a piece of media that got the credit for telling queer stories, and yet dropped the ball so completely in doing so, which made the story as a whole weaker. Although there were a lot of factors that contributed to the failure of Stranger Things’s fifth season – just as there were many contributing factors to the failure of Veilguard – I believe that these pieces of media were actively harmed by not including more and/or better queer representation in a way that begs to be analyzed. So, in this post, I am going to be specifically looking at Stranger Things with the critical eye I previously analyzed Dragon Age with, looking at how the show’s final season completely missed the point of its own queer representation and why I believe this shows us something about representation in media more broadly.

Spoiler warning! 

Stranger Things (ALL seasons, especially season five, including the finale)

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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Disclaimer

During this post, I am going to be talking about queer representation at large. While there are no aspec characters in the series, I think there are a lot of themes, plot points, moments, and ideas that kind of relate back to some of the things I’ve most wanted media to do in order to convey aspec-adjacent ideas. For that reason, I will be discussing things that don’t necessarily have anything to do with aspec-ness, but I may use that language to discuss them. I am not trying to erase or hijack any other queer narratives in the process.

Speaking of which, my own queer identity is that of an aromantic asexual, but my experiences as an AroAce person are not indicative of all aspec people, nor are they in any way, shape, or form representative of other queer identities. Stranger Things’ queer characters are, as far as we’re aware, gay and lesbian characters specifically, and thus I cannot personally describe or accurately give voice to those experiences. When I critique plot points related to these characters, I am not doing it from a firsthand perspective, but am usually more broadly relating these elements of the characters back to the story itself, and discussing how these characters could have made for better representation with a bit of narrative tweaking. Even though these characters are not aspec, I think the way they were portrayed is nevertheless something we can discuss when we talk about representation in media, and the show’s failure in how they were portrayed not only teaches lessons both about gay and lesbian representation in media, but about representation more broadly.

Part One: How It Started, How It Went

To start off the post, I think it’s essential to discuss what this show is even about. Stranger Things begins its story in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana in the early 1980’s. One night, while biking home after playing Dungeons and Dragons with his best friends, twelve-year-old Will Byers seemingly goes missing – but we in the audience know that is abduction was actually more of a supernatural thing, perpetrated by an unknown and terrifying entity. Will’s disappearance sets his family and friends on tilt, even as the rest of the town – including its police chief, Jim Hopper – seem convinced the boy will show back up in due time.

At the same time, a mysterious little girl known only by the number “Eleven” also turns up, encountering Will’s friends as she flees from “bad men.” It turns out Eleven is a human test subject at the nearby Hawkins National Laboratory and has telekinetic powers as a result of the experiments she has been subjected to there, experiments which are also responsible for opening up a portal to an alternate dimension known as “The Upside Down.” The Upside Down is a terrifying mirror realm of Hawkins, and this is not only where Will is currently trapped, but the place where the creature who took him resides, a creature which the D&D-playing children dub “the Demogorgon.”

If you know anything about Stranger Things at all, you likely know that many people consider the first season to be an absolute masterpiece, and I don’t think they’re off base when they say it. It creates a cast of extremely compelling characters and everyone – from acting veterans like Winona Ryder who plays Will’s mother Joyce to the at-the-time unknown actors who played the children – is absolutely terrific in their roles. The series manages to be deeply suspenseful and at times utterly chilling, but at the same time has so much heart and nostalgia that it’s almost cozy at times, despite the horror.

But to me and to so many other people, the main appeal of the show and its story was the characters, specifically the bonds they all form together. At the core of the show, so many of the characters of Stranger Things are outcasts, and I believe that’s part of what makes it so beautiful and compelling a story. Even in the cases where characters seem to have perfect lives or seem to have everything figured out (for example, Nancy as the typical good girl or Steve as the typical jock) there are clear cracks in these supposedly perfect lives in ways that I think are deeply resonant. The mystery and horror at the core of the story serve to show these characters that their regular lives are not actually serving them and force them to break out of these harmful molds.

This is part of why Steve Harrington is one of my favorite (if not my absolute favorite) characters in the entire series, because in him we have an example of how the typically desired and acceptable life is actually toxic and corrosive to him. That’s not to say that all his problems are magically solved when he breaks out of the toxic expectations other people and his society have placed on him, of course, and in many cases he struggles with his identity when he’s no longer able to define himself using these narrow visions, but these things allow Steve to become the best version of himself and become a protector and loyal friend. 

This is true of so many of the characters, in which the events of the story bring them together, causing them to forget their divides if anything divides them, strengthening bonds that are already there, creating entirely new ones, and especially helping those who are otherwise alone and misunderstood find their people. All of these characters find out so much about themselves, and their unique talents and perspectives are what’s able to make them win the day. This is my favorite thing about the series – an opinion I know I’m not alone in – and even in later seasons, when the show admittedly goes off the deep end at various points, this element still remains the thing that works the best.

Image description: A group hug in season one, demonstrating why the bonds between the characters are so wonderful.

The rest of the series continues to explore the way the Upside Down and its influence plagues the characters, evolving the lore of Hawkins and the Upside Down in turn. We are introduced to new characters, many of whom also fit this mold – such as season two’s introduction of Max, a snarky and sarcastic girl who moves to Hawkins with her family and who struggles to escape the influence of her abusive stepbrother, eventually finding acceptance and connection within the Party. Different bonds grow among the characters as well, and while some of these are romantic (see Mike and Eleven, Lucas and Max, or Nancy and Jonathan – more on this latter pair later), many of them are beautifully platonic.

From Max and Eleven’s super rewarding and empowering friendship, to Dustin and Steve becoming awesome BFFs, to Steve and Robin, who is introduced in season three, the friendships in the series are among some of the best, and even when the show messes up, I believe these bonds are still amazing. The unfortunate thing about the series is how it continued to balloon until it was unrecognizable – and how, even now that the series is over, it’s clear that Stranger Things as an intellectual property will continue to trundle on, forgetting that its strength has always been these characters.

While this diatribe might seem somewhat pointless to the idea of season five’s failure of its queer characters and why it matters, I believe setting the stage matters because characters are the heart of Stranger Things and the way the show betrayed its characters is a huge part of why it fell utterly flat as it approached the finish line. These characters are amazing and beloved, and seeing how the entire series started as a love letter to the marginalized, forgotten, and outcast among us makes these mistakes even more glaring. All of this context is essential as we step into the real conversation, beginning with how the show consistently mismanaged one of its most important characters – right down to how it handled the reveal of this character’s queer identity.

Part Two: The Vanishing of Will Byers’ Representation

It’s hard to say that Stranger Things has a “main character,” since every character is essential at some point in time. You could say the main character is Eleven, since she is the driving force of so many of the mysteries and plot points of the entire show. You could argue that the main character is Mike, since he’s the core and the heart of the party, although I think that does fall apart in later seasons due to Mike having embarrassingly little to do. Joyce being the main character falls apart for similar reasons, but I do think she could be argued as among the most important characters of the series, especially since the show represented a huge comeback for Winona Ryder as an actor. I even think it could be argued that Jim Hopper is the main character, due to the way the first season unfolds as a mystery he’s solving.

But in my opinion, one of the unsung main characters of the show is and always should have been Will Byers himself, since his disappearance and everything that comes after is absolutely central to the entirety of the show. While the last season seems to agree with that assessment and perhaps even wants the audience to understand how important Will is, I think the show never really gives Will his due – not in character development, not in role in the story, and not even in the reveal of his queer identity. In fact, I think it can be argued that the show does Will an extreme disservice in this latter element, but I also believe the show began fumbling the ball on Will much earlier than that.

Image description: Will Byers as he appeared in early seasons of Stranger Things

For the first season of the show, Will is understandably absent, due to the fact that finding him is the main driving force for many of the characters. In the second season, we get to see more of him, but this season reveals he’s still connected to the Upside Down, even after having been rescued from it, and that a powerful entity in that realm (known as the Mind Flayer) still has a hold on him. Thus, the second season once again focuses more on his peril than his actual day-to-day life and we don’t really get to see his pathos as a character until the third season. During this season, Will is no longer in immediate peril and is instead trying to enjoy the life that has been taken from him due to the tragic and terrifying circumstances of the first two seasons. There’s only one major problem with this: during this time, his friends have started to leave behind the things that used to unite them, such as D&D games, and now want to spend time with their girlfriends, leading to Will feeling an intense amount of alienation.

I discussed Will Byers at length in that aforementioned post I did before season four. In it, I mentioned that Will was most likely going to be revealed to be gay, but that I could nevertheless relate to a lot of his struggles as an aspec person as well. Just like Will can’t relate to his friends’ obsession with their dating lives – both because he’s trying to reclaim the youth that was largely taken from him and because he literally cannot relate to their desire to date girls at all – I spent a lot of my adolescence completely unable to relate to the way the people around me began developing their own romantic and sexual desires. Thankfully, I was able to explore these things with freedom and was able to quickly understand my own identity; these are not luxuries Will has as a young person growing up in a small town during the 1980’s, and this understandably informs a lot of his story moving forward throughout season four and into season five.

To be clear, the idea of Will being gay is not something that was only teased in these later seasons. Will, due to being a smaller, more sensitive kid, is often called “queer” in the derogatory sense by the bullies who harass him and his friends, things that are revealed literally from the first episodes of season one. Many people have also noted tiny details, such as something Joyce says in season two, describing when Will was a child and drew a rainbow-colored spaceship, which many people view as a reference to the gay pride flag. Season three shows his alienation from his friends, making this queer-coding more clear, and then season four cements this even further, particularly the notion that Will is quietly in love with his best friend, Mike.

The center of this is an admittedly very poignant moment in which Will gives Mike a painting that we know he has been working on as a solo passion project of his own making – Eleven even says at the beginning of the season that she knows Will is working on it, but he won’t show her, and that she thinks it might be for “a girl he likes.” So later, when Will claims that Eleven commissioned him to make it as a gift for Mike, we as the audience know the truth. The picture is of the D&D party fighting a dragon with Mike in the forefront, leading the group because he is the heart – something Will reiterates later as well. When Will gives Mike the painting, he is unable to contain his emotions and silently breaks down crying, something only his older brother Jonathan notices, leading to a heart to heart between the two of them in which Jonathan assures him he will always love him, no matter what.

This leads us to the episode in season five in which Will decides to come out. As is true of so many pieces of media with queer characters these days, there were of course people criticizing this episode merely for including a coming out scene at all, foolishly deriding it as “woke” – which, as I just pointed out, is a take that makes absolutely no sense if you’ve been watching the show from the beginning. However, even among the majority of fans who reject this bigoted take, the scene was nevertheless almost universally criticized for how it was handled for a few different very valid reasons.

Chief among these complaints is pacing and tone. Not only did the scene grind the pacing of the episode to a screeching halt due not only to its poor placement within the episode and its length compared to other pivotal scenes throughout the season, but I’ve also seen so many people point out how ridiculous it was to have nearly every pivotal character present for it. The scene could have been poignant if it had been between Will, his mother, his older brother, and his closest friends; but to also have characters he’d barely ever interacted with present in the moment is not only laughable, but I believe cheapens the scene.

However, my biggest complaint with the scene is something I clocked right away upon watching the episode and which I saw more than a few reviewers mention as well. When Will comes out to the group, he says he is doing so because Vecna, the series’ main villain, showed him a vision of everyone he loves finding out about his identity and turning their backs on him because of it. Not only is that somewhat jarring, because it seems like it makes Will’s coming out less something he wants to do and more something he feels he has to do or else will be exploited by Vecna, but here’s the thing: we, as the audience, are never shown that scene, and thus Will saying this loses all its emotional punch. I actually wondered if I had missed a scene somehow when he said this, only to be validated later by the many reviewers who likewise stated that “telling” rather than “showing” this piece of information was a missed opportunity, something I agree with wholeheartedly.

At the risk of stating the incredibly obvious, I believe that the episode needed to show us Vecna’s threat (problematic as that plot point might otherwise be) if the coming out scene was to have any emotional impact. It was clear that the show really wanted Will embracing his sexuality to be a decisive factor in his ability to fight Vecna, as we see earlier in the season. During the episode “Sorcerer,” there is a terrific scene in which Robin, one of the show’s canonically lesbian characters, reveals how she was able to alter the course of her life by simply embracing herself and letting go of the fear she felt in doing so, which inspires Will to do the same (albeit not out loud yet). When Will does this, he is able to unlock powers that save his friends, powers he has because he is connected to Vecna. By embracing all of himself, he is truly able to embrace this power too, and many fans agree that this moment is the best of the season. But, despite this incredible episode and scene, the show still plays it safe with Will’s identity, bungling the way in which this story unfolded so that his coming out scene felt like an awkward, clunky time-waster, squandering all the emotional impact that it had gained for itself earlier through “Sorcerer.”

Will understanding this part of himself in season five begins near the beginning of the season when Will sees Robin and her girlfriend Vickie secretly kissing, which is why he later talks to Robin and gets the advice that lets him embrace himself. For me, I think all of these scenes would have made more sense if we had had a scene of Vecna intimidating Will right off the bat – or at least as early as possible. This would have planted the seed in his head that he had to hide this part of himself or else lose everyone he cared about, a seed that would then be challenged by seeing Robin and Vickie together, which could have been portrayed as a lifeline. Overcoming this fear and doubt then could have become a throughline for Will for the rest of the season, leading to the coming out scene being a true culmination of all these emotions, especially if it had been shared with only his nearest and dearest at a time when it made more sense.

Having the context behind Vecna’s supposed threat to Will could have brought every part of Will’s story full circle, in which he was able to overcome several things at once, from his own fears to the pressures of his society to the continual abuse that Vecna has inflicted on him this whole time. Rather than a stilted and awkward moment, it could have been something truly powerful, in which he fully unpacks everything he’s gone through thanks to the machinations of this evil villain and is able to rely on his loved ones more fully. But more than that, I actually don’t think Will’s coming out needed to have these big consequences at all, nor did it need to be tied to something so life and death.

Image description: Will in season 5 during his coming out scene

I think the thing that frustrates me the most about this botched coming out scene is that Stranger Things already had a really top notch coming out scene in season three when Robin came out to Steve, creating a truly touching moment while also cementing their friendship and status as an iconic duo in the process. Of course, Will’s own coming out couldn’t and shouldn’t be exactly like Robin’s, but I think the fact that we already had a character come out in this manner made it even more ridiculous that they couldn’t write a better scene for Will, one with more subtlety and intention. Contrary to what some viewers might think, this scene didn’t fail because it was too queer; I believe it actually failed because it wasn’t queer enough, and because it didn’t bother to respect Will as a character or his journey. Or, rather, it might be better to say they made the story queer, but in the wrong ways.

Fast forward to the end of the season – aka, the very last episode of the entire series. The final scene involves the main characters playing D&D together, bringing their campaign to an end. Mike, who is leading the campaign as usual, gives all of their characters, and thus all of his friends, a good and fitting send off, which we are shown mirrors their own actual journeys. For instance, Dustin’s character is said to go off on new adventures to get new knowledge, and we are shown Dustin himself heading to college. When it comes to Will, Mike describes Will’s character, and thus Will himself, moving to a new city where he finds happiness and acceptance.

On the face of it, that’s actually a beautiful concept for a character who was afraid he would be hated for who he is, but more than a few fans have pointed out that this ending feels a little hollow, since so many of Will’s other personal traits are stripped away, replaced only with the idea that finding a partner would be the thing that makes him happy. This is something I’ve pointed out for other queer characters, how media seems to think that the only way they can be happy is by stripping away all their other personality traits and desires in order to find a romance, something which I think is completely reductive. In this way, Will was never allowed to be good representation because the show never felt like it respected him enough to actually flesh him out. He was always going to be reduced and limited by the plot in this way, and I find that very disappointing.

Admittedly, the question of how to improve Will’s character and the representation he could have been is a much more complicated issue. I believe season five is so flawed that there was likely no way that even small cosmetic changes – such as a better ending scene or a more coherent coming out – could have turned this failure of representation around. Rather, the work to do that should have started in season three when he felt alienated from his friends or in season four when he was struggling with his feelings for Mike. But by this point, the show seems to have forgotten about Will and seems to have been unwilling to do the work that was needed to craft a good queer character.

Although I can’t say for certain, I don’t think this was done on purpose. In the aftermath of season five, it’s become increasingly clear that the series’ creators, Matt and Ross Duffer (aka, the Duffer brothers), seemed desperate to just have the show end. I’m not sure when exactly they soured on it and began mentally and emotionally checking out, but I don’t think the brothers had what it took to craft the queer character that Will should have been, especially not here in the home stretch. While this laziness is its own problem and has been discussed by many creators, I think at least we can say that the mishandling of Will’s identity was not something done out of malice, nor was it necessarily even done out of ignorance, but simply through the mismanagement of a show that went on for far longer than intended, ballooned too much, and was eventually helmed by people who no longer wanted to work with it.

While that is all rather depressing, especially for a show as cherished and iconic as Stranger Things, there’s an ironic flipside to this – if the show had ended in season one, we never would have gotten Will Byers as canon gay representation at all. I think this is a bit of a double-edged sword, since this representation turned out to be so middle of the road; but the bungling of this element of the story doesn’t change the fact that Will is a great character, regardless of any missed opportunities, nor does it change the fact that watching his story unfold has some deeply meaningful elements, regardless of the misfires.

While there will probably always be debates about that coming out scene and conversations about whether or not the show "queerbaited" its viewers into believing Mike and Will might have one day been endgame, I’m glad Will is canonically queer. Both he and Robin are proof that having queer characters and queer storylines is very powerful, and Will himself represents what that power could have looked like, both metaphorically and literally. But when it comes to queering the narrative (a phrase I’m borrowing from a friend of a friend), I can’t help but see the missed potential more than the wins – albeit that missed potential comes about for me in ways not many other people might expect.

Part Three: The Complicated Nature of Vecna

In the last section, I mentioned that the villain of season four and season five was a character known as Vecna – an antagonist who is not just the villain of these last two seasons, but who is retroactively made to be one of the main driving forces of the entire series, working in the background of so many of the central events of the story. Vecna is a great villain and his terrifying powers give the story a pathos that really spoke to me, as he seems to prey on people who are at their weakest, exploiting their fears and pain to destroy them, convincing them they are irredeemable, and escaping him is only possible by choosing to reject his mind games.

The way Vecna attacks and the way our characters, especially Max, escape him throughout season four feels not only very relevant to our group of heroes, but to anyone who has considered themselves an outsider. Anyone who has ever been rejected by society at large or has otherwise not fit into the accepted molds of the world around them knows the pain of alienation. Vecna’s mind games are an extreme and terrifying example of that, and I think there could have been ways to highlight this even further, especially when we get into things like Vecna’s backstory and where he comes from.

This backstory as we learn it in season four is as follows: the monster we know as Vecna began his life as Henry Creel, a young boy whose family moves to Hawkins in the 1950’s. From the jump, it seems that Henry does not feel understood or seen within his family, but it’s also made clear that he’s not just misunderstood – he’s unique. Much like Eleven and the other children from Hawkins lab, Henry has telekinetic powers; but unlike Eleven, he is shown to be clearly devoid of any type of moral code or empathy. He tortures and kills small animals, he begins to harbor the idea that humanity is obscene and views people the way spiders view their prey, and eventually he brutally kills his family using his powers. While his father is accused of the grisly crime, Henry himself is taken in by Doctor Martin Brenner, the very same doctor whom Eleven knew as “Papa” during her time as lab experiment, and thus becomes Brenner’s first test subject – Number One.

As Henry grew into adulthood, Brenner began to realize he was dangerous and took measures to suppress his powers. As an adult, Henry worked as an orderly in the Hawkins Lab, eventually meeting Eleven, and tricking her into thinking he could be trusted. He manipulates her into removing the device that suppresses his abilities, only to immediately go on a bloody killing spree, slaughtering everyone he can find in the lab, from the telekinetic children to the doctors to the other orderlies. A horrified Eleven fights with him and eventually gains the upper hand, sending him through a portal to an alternate dimension (not the Upside Down yet, but another alternate dimension). It is here that he is slowly transformed through time and the supernatural elements of this hellish place, eventually becoming Vecna as we know him.

The direction season five takes with Vecna after this is… admittedly pretty strange (again, pun not intended). Season four made it seem like Henry Creel created the Mind Flayer when he was sent to the alternate dimension, encountering a malevolent but formless energy that he, through his powers, coalesces into the form of one of his beloved spiders, thus making it the Mind Flayer we know from season two. Throughout season four, the characters believe that Vecna is working for the Mind Flayer – they even describe him as the Mind Flayer’s general – so this is supposed to be quite a twist, revealing that Vecna was the mastermind all along. I feel it’s obligatory for me to mention that Dragon Age: The Veilguard also had a similar twist, one that was extremely poorly received by the fandom, and so that perhaps somewhat colors my view on this same twist with Vecna.

However, season five swerves back in the other direction, perhaps seeing that people didn’t like the idea that Vecna was the hidden mastermind all along. So now, the show instead tells us that Henry Creel’s powers were not innate – they came from the Mind Flayer, who already existed long before Henry made it to the alternate dimension – and that the Mind Flayer is the one who made Henry into the unfeeling and psychopathic boy who eventually became a monster. This backstory is further complicated by the fact that a lot of Henry’s further backstory is only alluded to in the season itself, since much more of it is fleshed out in a stage play known as Stranger Things: The First Shadow.

What we do get of Henry’s further backstory in the show massively muddies what we’re supposed to think of him. Season four made it seem first like Vecna was one of the Mind Flayer’s stronger soldiers before swinging things back around to make it that Vecna, when he was still Henry, is the one who created the Mind Flayer in the first place, thus making him responsible for all the other events of the series. But then season five makes it seem like the Mind Flayer manipulated Henry for years, eager to seduce him and use him for its own purposes; Will even tries to convince Henry that he has never been the evil one, that it’s been the Mind Flayer all along. However, Henry rejects that notion and the show seems to want us to view Henry and the Mind Flayer as a unit now, so that one cannot truly be separated from the other. In fact, when the team finally kills Vecna, it seems like we’re supposed to definitely understand that Vecna is every bit the villain we thought him to be and thus has to take responsibility for every action.

Just to be clear, I don’t think Vecna/Henry should have had some sort of redemption arc. I am personally a huge fan of when a piece of media can humanize a villain without redeeming them, where we can still see and understand the circumstances that made them evil, but where we know they’ve passed the point of no return. It’s a tragic storytelling technique that I think absolutely could have worked with Henry in really interesting ways, especially because season four already largely set that notion up. The real problem here, in my eyes, is the massive back and forth retconning of the character’s backstory, to the point where I’m still not quite sure what the writers wanted us to believe about his character. Was he evil all along? Was he not? Was he originally not evil, then was corrupted by the Mind Flayer, and then made the conscious choice to be evil? Any of these could have been interesting, but by mashing them together, the show deviated massively from any kind of relevant commentary.

Image description: Henry Creel as he appears in season 4

All of that, of course, leads me back to the main point of this post and how I believe Stranger Things did itself a disservice by chickening out with its characters. Since the season ended, I’ve been kicking around a very complicated question in my mind: should Henry Creel have been queer? I admit I don’t know the answer to this, chiefly because queer villains are, by their very nature, extremely controversial because you run the risk of portraying queerness as bad, amoral, or evil. In the case of Vecna, this becomes even more of a loaded question, because many fans have seen parallels in what Vecna does to Will as evoking ideas of sexual assault and making Henry Creel queer would have undoubtedly made this so much worse.

It feels like a lot to say “let’s set these things aside” for the sake of analysis, since I think these points are so valid they’re pretty much insurmountable. But if it is possible to set these valid points aside for a moment, I do think there’s something that could be said about portraying a queer villain to be pitted against a queer hero, and I especially think being queer could have made a lot of sense for the type of villain Henry is. As I said before, it seems like Henry is alienated from his family in a way that has reminded more than a few viewers of the alienation Will feels from his peers; but more than that, Henry as Vecna makes it his entire mission to prey upon other people who feel that alienation. He tries to use their trauma – the things that ostensibly make them different from those around them – to convince them that there’s no helping them. That they don’t deserve to be saved. That they belong with him because the rest of the world can’t possibly understand them.

In season four, we see Vecna target four victims in particular (not counting when we see Henry murder his family). The first victim is Chrissy, a cheerleader at Hawkins High who seems to have a great life – she’s beautiful, popular, in a stable relationship with the school’s star athlete, and so much more. But underneath all of that, it’s clear she struggles with body image issues, which are shown to largely be the fault of her verbally (and possibly physically) abusive mother. She clearly keeps these issues to herself, but the struggle is slowly wearing on her, something which Vecna exploits. We see Vecna do the same thing with Fred, a young man who is carrying an immense amount of guilt, self-loathing, fear, and shame regarding a fatal car accident. Later, Vecna kills Patrick, a member of the basketball team, who seems to suffer verbal abuse much like Chrissy did.

The most notable victim is, as I mentioned before, Max, who carries both survivor guilt and complicated grief following the death of her stepbrother Billy in the previous season. When Vecna gets her under his control in the episode “Dear Billy,” he tries to convince her that she is beyond redemption – that she’s secretly glad Billy is dead and this makes her a terrible person, which is why she has isolated herself from her friends. In his manipulation of her, I think it could be argued that he’s trying to make her feel like she doesn’t belong in the world of “normal” people, but instead belongs in the world he’s created. This makes it especially noteworthy that it’s only through thinking of her friends and her happy memories that Max is able to escape. I can’t help but think this notion would become even more powerful if Henry Creel was queer – if he too had this element of his personality as part of his alienation from the rest of the world and if his actions were a twisted way of trying to make his own world away from the people he so reviles.

The idea of Vecna creating his own world is something that comes up again in season five, during which his next victims are children, whom he removes from the real world and traps within his mind. Using his connection with Will, he mocks the heroes by showing them what he’s done. “Some minds, it turns out, simply do not belong in this world,” he says to Will, “They belong in mine,” further cementing the idea that Vecna is removing people he thinks are either already broken by the trauma of the world or else is trying to break young minds the way he himself was broken. And, as we see in season four, this is something most of his victims submit to because of how much the world has already hurt them and how little recourse they have to climb out of the despairs he shows them.

I saw someone theorize once that the only reason Max is able to escape is because she chooses to – she doesn’t allow herself to be manipulated by the terrible, dark thoughts Vecna represents, and instead lets the power of love and connection save her, which is what prevents him from being able to stop her escape. I think this idea is so powerful, and if Vecna had been queer during his life as Henry Creel, I think it would make it even more poignant. If Henry had grown up isolated, misunderstood, or even abused because of his sexuality, it would have made even more sense why he would hate people around him and why he would detest the “normal” lives they lead; it would especially make sense why he creates his own world, and why he – who would have doubtless suffered a great deal – would have drawn power from making people relive their worst traumas and pulling them into his mind to be manipulated.

Again, having Henry be queer and also this deeply psychopathic might have been a huge problem, but I think it could have been interesting if handled well, especially since we see him square off numerous times with the canonically queer Will Byers. There are numerous times where the show draws parallels between Will and Henry, as mentioned before – even down to Will being able to use Vecna’s powers and inhabit Vecna’s mind. As such, they could have represented two sides of the same coin, with Vecna representing the tragedy of someone who isn’t accepted by the world around him and becomes a monster because of it, while Will shows us the power that comes from love and acceptance.

Remember earlier in the post when I mentioned that throwaway line about how Vecna tried to show Will the consequences of what coming out would mean? Can you imagine what a scene like that might have meant not only for Will but for Vecna himself if Vecna was showing him something he himself had experienced so many years earlier? Imagine if this torment Will was shown was a variation of something Henry had experienced when he was younger, further highlighting the parallels between the two characters. During the final showdown, Will comes to understand Henry and his motivations, trying to convince him to turn away from the Mind Flayer because he realizes that the Mind Flayer used Henry just as it used Will too, and I think it might have been a very satisfying way to end the character if we realized that Henry – while perhaps too far gone to be redeemed – had once been someone just as lost and alone as any of our outcast characters, someone who didn’t have the friends that our characters have, and lost himself because of it.

Image description: Vecna in season 4

I legitimately don’t know if this would have been a good decision or not and I can certainly see why the writers chose not to go that route, although I also disagree with how they did it. The aforementioned stage play sets up the idea that Henry is canonically attracted to women and was even in a romantic relationship, something which I think was unnecessary. I haven’t done much research into the play (given the utterly convoluted nature of Stranger Things these days, I just don’t have the energy to get tangled up in its plot), so I admit that I don’t know all of what comprises this part of Henry’s life and story, but this plot point seems incongruous for the character on a number of levels. If there was a deliberate attempt to steer away from Henry being queer, I think there didn’t need to be any mention of a sexuality one way or another.

Furthermore, I don’t think Henry had to even be queer for a lot of the points I made in this section to still stand. Season five flirted a bit with the idea of Henry’s past at school, but largely only alluded to these things in order to let the events of the play speak for themselves and to doubtless set up other spin-offs and prequels. I sincerely wish that, instead of what we got, we had seen young Henry being isolated from the rest of the world, and how having no one to love and accept him as he was led to him becoming prey for the Mind Flayer. There could have been something so poignant in showing that the same traits that make characters like Will or Eleven heroes are what ultimately made Henry a villain, and maybe could have even started to break the stigma of queer villains. Whatever the case, Vecna is an amazing villain with some tragic instances of wasted potential, something that season five will likely be infamous for for years to come.

Part Four: One Love Triangle, Three Character Assassinations; But There Is Some Hope

If you’ve read my blog for a while now, you know that I absolutely despise love triangles, for the reason that they often serve as character assassination for one or more of the characters involved in them. I especially hate love triangles when they involve characters I admire, and since one of my favorite characters in Stranger Things is involved in the show’s somewhat infamous love triangle, I’m sure you can predict how I feel on the matter. And yet, the reaction to this plot line actually gives me even more fuel to talk about why I think the fifth season would have been better with more overt queerness – and how maybe it accidentally made what’s usually a toxic plot point into a queer one in an unexpected way.

The love triangle I’m referring to takes place between Nancy, Steve, and Jonathan, a dynamic the show has been exploring for a while. In the show’s first season, Nancy and Steve are a couple, but when Nancy’s best friend Barb goes missing (taken and killed by the Demogorgon), Nancy teams up with Jonathan and experiences the horror of Hawkins’ monstrous secret together with him. Eventually, Steve learns they are together and believes Nancy is cheating on him, but ends up joining Nancy and Jonathan in their fight against the Demogorgon later in the season. The first season ends with Steve and Nancy back together, but there is something of an implied attraction between Nancy and Jonathan even so, something which is eventually explored fully when Nancy breaks up with Steve and ends up with Jonathan in the next season.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind these characters being in a romantic relationship, and I actually do enjoy both sides of the love triangle. Nancy and Jonathan have a lot of chemistry and their bond, forged as they try to uncover the mysteries of Hawkins, is actually pretty great in early seasons. In the case of Steve and Nancy, a lot of Steve’s early issues come about because of the plotline where he thinks Nancy is cheating on him, leading to him and his friends putting both Nancy and Jonathan through hell because of it. However, I think this plotline serves to highlight what I said earlier about Steve clearly not fitting into the archetype his society wants him to exist within, and breaking out of it. So, while I don’t think Steve and Nancy would have made sense as an endgame pairing, I also don’t mind that season one ended with them getting back together.

To me, the issue comes in how much the show tries to play up the idea that Steve still wants to be with Nancy, even though we’ve seen him form other meaningful relationships that are, in my opinion, way more compelling. This is often the problem I have with love triangles, because they are usually focused on disproportionately in stories that otherwise could be doing other things with their characters – or, in the case of these three characters, is already doing interesting stuff with them, but keeps coming back to the love triangle, which is far less compelling. To be clear, I don’t think that the love triangle completely erases these characters or what makes them great – they still have incredible storylines across all five seasons, they’re still brilliantly portrayed, and they all have their merits, whether together or separately. But I do think that, after a while, the writers became less interested in these characters and what happens to them, and became more focused on the drama their dynamic created, even in instances when there didn’t need to be any drama.

Returning to Steve as an example of this, his character has gone through so much growth and development over the course of the series that watching him repeatedly circle the drain when it comes to his feelings for Nancy is very frustrating. It’s almost as if the show is saying it’s not enough that Steve has become a protector, a loyal friend, and a caring mentor; he instead needs to be preoccupied with a dead romance. And, as I’ve mentioned on the blog many times before, this is something that media tends to do a lot, where other stories tend to be devalued in favor of romance or where romance-adjacent drama seems to be focused on, even if it is to a character’s detriment. Steve’s friendships and watching him break out of his societal expectations is easily one of my favorite things about the show, and it could be argued that breaking out of those limitations is part of why he makes such a good ally for queer characters like Robin. In fact, I have seen many fans say that these platonic relationships are not only the best in the show, but that they should be even more heavily featured for Steve and for the characters around him, something I love to hear.

And yet, the show still wants to limit him in its own way by throwing him into a senseless love triangle, something which was especially pronounced in season four, almost stupidly so, and then was dialed up even more in season five. I found these plot points not only repetitive and nonsensical, but borderline offensive to all the characters involved and to myself as a viewer. And, much to my surprise, this is something I’ve seen other reviewers and commentators mention too. More than once, I’ve heard reviewers and fans remark that this love triangle doesn’t need to exist and is not interesting – and, while that may not sound like especially groundbreaking criticism, it always feels noteworthy to see people criticize romance tropes. It makes me wonder why the Duffer brothers felt the need to rely on such a worn out trope in the first place, something that becomes especially confusing when you consider how the love triangle ends, which is to say, it ends with none of the characters actually ending up together.

Throughout early season five, Steve and Jonathan seem determined to compete for Nancy's affections. Although Nancy and Jonathan are still together at this point, they have been having problems for a while, and seem to be drifting apart; nevertheless, Jonathan has designs to propose to Nancy, even going so far as to procure a ring. This all comes to a head during a dramatic (if not bizarre) moment where Nancy and Jonathan find themselves in the Upside Down in a room that is literally melting with them trapped inside. Thinking their demise is imminent, they begin confessing to each other the things they’ve been hiding about themselves and their relationship – everything from Nancy lying that she enjoys Jonathan’s taste in music to Jonathan admitting he hates and therefore gave away one of Nancy’s pink sweaters (weird). During this, he also confesses that he was going to propose, but instead asks Nancy if she accepts his unproposal, which she does, and eventually the two are rescued and live to fight another day.

I admit, when I first saw this scene, I thought they were finally being honest about their emotions with plans to move forward in their relationship, realizing that marriage wasn’t the magic fix-all, but that emotional honesty was. However, this scene is actually a break-up – it’s the two characters admitting that they share a great deal of love and have been through so much together, but that they don’t need to be together in the romantic sense for that to be true. Not only do I really appreciate this approach, but I appreciate that it didn’t immediately lead to Nancy then getting together with Steve. While I didn’t need this plot point to end with all three of them being single in order for it to be good, I admit it was a pleasant surprise.

However, as much as I appreciate that conclusion, it does make me wonder why the series spent so much time spinning its wheels with this love triangle or these romantic relationships if it didn’t actually intend to have them end up together. If the love triangle was never going to end with Nancy picking either Steve or Jonathan, then why was so much of their character development and storylines tied up in this question, especially when it came to the boys? Why were they still having competitions for her affections even right up until the first few episodes of this very season? Other than to create petty drama and try to subvert audience expectations – such as in the scene when Jonathan saves Steve – there was no reason to do any of it.

Image description: A scene of Nancy, Jonathan, and Steve on the hunt together

Even if this whole plotline is irksome, the fact that it exists actually gives us some great opportunities for analysis, some of which has been very exciting, as it’s the type of analysis I don’t often see. As I said before, the mere fact that other people believe Steve’s storyline should have leaned even more heavily into platonic love is awesome and quite frankly refreshing, but there are also some refreshing takes on Nancy and Jonathan’s break up too. One video I watched even used the word “queerplatonic” to describe what their relationship might be like moving forward – one where they love one another and care for one another deeply, but will not be romantically involved – and that excites me deeply.

The idea that these two characters can have a bond and chemistry, but don’t have to be romantically linked is wonderful. The video I mentioned unpacks the idea that the world in which Nancy and Jonathan live is one that deals with love and romance as a sort of binary – you have to either be a blissful couple with a firm happily ever after or it must mean you actually have no love bond whatsoever. I’ve always believed these ideas are deeply limiting, and I believe that they’re not just attitudes that were seen during the time period the show portrays; rather, we still see these attitudes in real life, in media, and in many of our fandoms, which are desperate to pair characters and real people off in order to see them fit this arbitrary but forced idea of what happiness and “normality” are. Subverting that is absolutely incredible, and I really think the show should have leaned into it so much more, something which in and of itself was a problem throughout season five and beyond.

Conclusion: The Show That Forgot Its Purpose – And Why That Matters

It’s hard to say that any piece of media is inherently “queer” or even that it should be, but if any piece of media can be argued to fall under that category, I think Stranger Things is a very good example of one. As I mentioned earlier, the heart of the entire series is that it functions best as a love letter to the marginalized – the people who are ignored, disrespected, and bullied; the people who are misunderstood, treated like freaks, or who have no one to advocate for them. It’s a story about what happens when those people come together in bonds of love, friendship, and family and are able to do incredible things because of those bonds.

That is not something that has to be inherently queer, of course, as people from all walks of life can find themselves in such a struggle – and of course, not all of the characters in Stranger Things are queer. But in the case of this show, I think it is at its strongest when it honors its queer characters and the inherent queerness of many of its storylines, not when it ignores them. The show has had a lot of problems over the years – something that’s not just endemic to season five – and the notion of it ignoring its queerness does not explain all of these faults, nor do I think that leaning more heavily into queerness would be a magic fix-all. But, that said, I do think the show ignoring its purpose as a celebration of those people who society deems “weird” is part of what made the ending feel so hollow.

By the end, the show is no longer all that interested in exploring what it means to be different, or to celebrate that it is only through these differences that the world was saved. This ranges from plot points in the show that are more of an interpersonal nature, such as the baffling decision to have Robin and her girlfriend Vickie break up off screen all the way up to the major plot points such as Eleven’s seriously tone-deaf fate (or, I suppose I should say, open-ended fate). There are a lot of reasons why season five fell flat – reasons that have been debated and analyzed a million times over by people who are a lot more in the know about the situation than I am. But to me, it can all be summed up by the idea of forgetting its own core value system.

Image description: The main four - Lucas, Will, Dustin, and Mike - aka, "the Party"

Earlier in this section, I made the statement that of course these circumstances are not just limited to queer characters and not every character in Stranger Things is queer. In that instance, I meant this in the sense of having a queer identity, but queer can also be used in another way – in the sense of meaning that something is odd or different and doesn’t fit in. If we use queer in that sense, then yes, I think it can be argued that every character in Stranger Things is queer, and that’s exactly the point. They break out of the stereotypes of their society, they reject the limitations of otherwise narrow world views, they overcome pain and trauma and fear in order to grow into something better. That’s the heart that Stranger Things forgot, and unfortunately, I see it in far, far too much media nowadays.

In a day and age where everything is treated like it has to be bigger, flashier, and more expensive, and where we are losing a lot of culture and art to the machine of content production, I think it’s important to identify what makes certain stories work or what makes their appeal timeless. As mentioned earlier, Stranger Things always worked best when it was about people who had to break out of their circumstances in order to do what felt impossible. Is that inherently queer? No. But it can appeal to queer people in a way that is so extremely valuable while also being resonant with non-queer people. Stranger Things should have been more queer, and it had countless opportunities to do so. But it also should have just focused on the true heart of things and continued to be the show where people who felt like outcasts could go and see themselves represented and realize that they too could do great things.

We may not have an Upside Down in our lives, but how often do things feel that way, even when they’re not supernatural? We may not battle demogorgons, but we do all have our own monsters, and by seeing people who are like us – whatever that may mean – I think we are better able to defeat our monsters in this world. Although Stranger Things failed to reach a satisfying conclusion, I nevertheless hope that the ideas and lessons that it otherwise inspired can continue to resonate with people for many years to come, and that maybe someday it can inspire better storytelling, or at least serve as a reminder that queer characters, in every sense of the word, have the power to save the world.