The Stranger Things Creators Respond To Those Byler Fans
“You have to tell the story that you are always intending to tell.”
The Duffer Brothers have thoughts on Stranger Things fans shipping Will Byers and Mike Wheeler, aka Byler. Will’s crush on Mike became obvious to audiences in Season 4, and by Season 5, it seemed that Mike finally caught onto his best friend’s feelings. As the fifth and final season progressed, some audiences began to hope that Will and Mike would get together. Initially, the show’s creators stayed quiet on the rumors, but now that Stranger Things is over, they have revealed that Byler was never in the cards.
During a Jan. 1 interview with Collider, the Duffer Brothers were asked if they ever were tempted to shut down those fan theories directly. “For us, there’s always noise,” Matt Duffer told the outlet. “But when we sit down to write a season, the goal is — I mean, you have to block it out, and you have to tell the story that you are always intending to tell.”
“This story and the story of Will has been planned and has been building to this moment for eight years now,” he continued. “So, that’s all we really wanted to do, was to just be truthful to what we wanted to do and what we’d always been planning to.”
In a December appearance on Watch What Happens Live, Noah Schnapp (who plays Will) addressed the Byler shipping. “I think… I mean look, it’s like a real kind of authentic representation of a queer kid in the ‘80s. I’ve dealt with that myself, being in love with a friend and maybe they don’t love you back or they feel differently,” he said at the time. “I’m not gonna spoil anything but the Duffers close it really well.”
Another Stranger Things star, Gaten Matarazzo, shared his take on the “Byler stuff” in an exclusive interview with Elite Daily. “I also find the Byler stuff very funny. I see them as just very good friends,” he said in December. “Will is going through his own journey the way that a lot of young queer kids do in small towns, especially back in the day. It’s a very universal experience that a lot of gay kids probably go through. It’s like noticing a crush on a friend you grew up with and not being able to talk about it. There’s something more powerful there than just, ‘I wonder if they’re going to kiss.’”
