Latest Posts by generalstorecashier - Page 3

In s3, Will realized he was stupid for believing Mike wanted to go crazy together with him.

In s4, Will realized he was stupid for believing Mike asking him to be his friend was the best thing he ever did, when in reality Mike’s life started the day he found El in the woods, the day Will’s life ended.

Will is now at a point where he feels naive for believing Mike could possibly like him back. From his perspective, Mike has only doubled down in proving he doesn’t feel the same way about him.

This got me thinking.

You’ll notice Mike is sitting on the couch, literally in the same spot he was sitting almost a year earlier when Will confided in him for the first time about the mindflayer. Will also asked that Mike not tell the others because they wouldn’t understand.

And here we are again. Nothing's changed.

Except it has.

Now, instead of Will being right beside Mike, with them on the same level both sharing something that is weighing down on them, we have Mike sitting next to Lucas, while Will is sitting higher up above all of them. It’s only now after several signs of the mindflayer, and with everyone present, that Will is deciding to come clean about what he’s been seeing. Not one on one with Mike like before.

Just makes me wonder what Mike could have been thinking at this moment, in this exact spot.

I wonder why Will lied to me about being okay that first time at Day of the Dead? Did he really think it wasn’t a big deal? Or was something else stopping him from opening up to me like he normally would when I asked if he was okay?

Then he’s suddenly thinking about the second time it happened, at the field, which is when he ran off with El. Obviously Will wouldn’t have been able to tell him then. And then the final time at castle Byers after their rain fight… yeah that's when Will finally told them, but look what brought them here?

This also makes the ending of s3 hit a bit harder. 

I guess I’ve been feeling distant from you. Like, you’re pulling away from me or something.

While Mike has his own battle he’s dealing with when it comes to choosing El over Will and the party at times, I think this realization that this played a role in Will distancing himself instead of confiding in Mike like he did before, is such an interesting concept.

I was worrying too much about El and… I don’t know. Maybe I feel like I lost you or something…

It's as if Mike has already outright told us why he latched onto El in the first place and how it directly correlated with why he felt like he lost Will (lost exclusive best friend perks? idk dude is dramatic).

That it was about worry for him when it came to El. Concern. Care.

What he feels for El is deep and meaningful, but it also comes with a dose of obligation and responsibility. Mike feels extremely indebted to El after everything she has does for them. Not only has she had to endure so much because of those around her expecting things from her, but that also includes Mike. His worry for her is fairly warranted.

Mike's attempt in s3 to be as normal as possible, while simultaneously trying to juggle his care for El and his relationship with Will and his other friends... it's just interesting seeing how it plays out and where it all leads to.

In s3, but especially s4, there is this distinction that Mike makes, where he separates Will from their other friends. He also then compares his relationship with El to theirs and how it's negatively impacted them because of his feelings and behavior...

If it was really platonic between him and Will, why in the hell is he making these distinctions at all? Why is he separating Will from the category with his friends and putting him into a category with his gf...?

surprise bitch, i bet you thought you'd seen the last of me

S2 shed scene -- Will/Vecna POV -- part 1 of 2.

[I bit off more than I could chew with this piece, so I had to split it up to get something done in time for @bylerween2023. Maybe if we're lucky I'll have part 2 done in time for bylerween2024. :p]

2023 Byler Big Bang Fics & Art Masterpost

Now that December is here, that's a wrap on the 2023 Byler Big Bang! We welcomed 22 fics and even more art into the fandom over October and November, and now we want to celebrate everyone's hard work one more time with this masterpost of all the fics and art links completed for the challenge. A huge thanks to everyone who took part or otherwise supported the fics and art of the creators!

We will be back in summer 2024 with info about next year's event.

[The full fic collection on Ao3]

Masterposts here on Tumblr with fics + art:

Second Chances and Dances

remember to remember me

Theatre and Pom Poms

a swingset stuck in amber

Teal Streaked Ribbons

in the springtime, in the sun (we can be alone without anyone)

it's nice to have a friend

What a Time to Be Alive

under the stars with you

Ain’t it enough that I'm laying my heart out?

Through A Dark Glass, Wanting

nosebleeds from epiphanies (i took full in the face)

Autumn Leaves

this must be the place

And the Wonder of it All is That You Just Don’t Realize How Much I Love You

Lips Like Sugar

never did shine as bright

afterimage

On the Same Frequency

At the Time of Sight

ai! ai! (fūnestaque littera ducta est)

Sick of Meaning (I just want to hold you)

Okay hear me out—Mike takes a turn watching Max at the hospital, and he accidentally falls asleep. He “wakes up” to the monitor beeping rapidly and then just flatlining. He’s screaming for help, but no one seems to be coming and all at once he realizes that it’s not Max on the bed, it’s Will. And then we just hear, “See, Michael? See what happens?”

christmas season in st5 and theyre having a christmas party clinging to a sense of normalcy and blue christmas is playing while will looks longingly at mike across the room who is conversation with their friends but catches will looking and smiles but then will turns away shy and mike keeps looking at him as the song ends *cue mike contemplation/determination face* next scene is him sidling up to will later while he stands by himself to recharge while looking out the window at the snow (/spores lmao) in a dark room only lit up by the rainbow christmas tree lights and mike's all teasy and on the tipping edge of flirty making will pleasantly surprised and flustered, mike happy to have caught will alone and we can hear christmas music and everyone else talking and laughing in the next room

I love how I ended up calling this “A Longing Desire”

a longing desire to KISS EACH OTHER ‼️‼️‼️‼️

ok jokes aside I’m very proud of this. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to say this but I feel like I’m intruding in on a private moment between them. I mean..

The looks, the way they’re posed, the lighting I’m sorry I can’t get over how this turned out 😭

enjoy some sweet DND byler :)

Through A Dark Glass, Wanting

Tags: Rated M, Graphic Depictions of Violence, Canon Typical Horror, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Suicidal Ideation, Aged-Up Characters, Fantasy AU, DnD inspired AU, Friends to Lovers, Slow Burn, Will Byers is so loved if he only accepted it, Will keeps making bad decisions bear with him

Words: 90k

Summary:

When a dark corruption spreads from the Deep Woods north of the kingdom of Roane, it falls to Will and his friends to investigate the cause. But as they close in on what seems to be the inevitable final confrontation with the Mad Wizard they have been fighting for years, Will finds his magic failing him as the darkness that scarred him during his first encounter with that very man finally overtakes him. Will stands no chance at stopping the demons that have been haunting him – after all how can he fight for a happy ending when he doesn’t believe he deserves one? - Or, Will learns to accept that his friends love him a whole lot more than he thinks they should.

It's finally time for me to post the Byler Fantasy AU I wrote for this years @bylerbigbang! You can read it here on Ao3, and then you can go check out @katimanki's wonderful art here and some additional pieces here!

I move that if byler isn't canon we take @bookinit02 's 'I know the end' series as canon s5 instead

5X04: LOCKDOWN

Faced with a new wave of threats, Owens puts his foot down. Dustin takes a curiosity voyage, Lucas fights the system, and Max finds a way out. For Mike and Will, it all comes back to the quarry.

click here for the playlist!

click here for the comment-free pdf.

!!!!!!!

california show your teeth - fireflywitch (me! hi hello)

T/142K - complete

Fourteen months after a rash of unexplained disappearances tore an Indiana town apart, a new chief of police and his very normal, nothing-to-see-here family moves to Hawkins from Lenora Hills, California.

The Weirdos from Poplar Street

MADMIKE

Argyle, Do You Copy?

Zany, Jane-y

The Body Behind the Dumpster

Dear Billy Pilgrim

The Upside Down is in Indiana

Dig Dustin

Hide and Seek, Freak

The Vanishing of Michael Wheeler

The Real Monster

XOXO, The Mind Flayer

Will the Weary

The Flea Goes Back

The Spies

Close the Motherfucking Gate

E Pluribus Unum Et Undecim

The Monster and My Brother

Epilogue: California Rest in Peace

when you’re running from demogorgons but your dog missed you all day long

The fact that Mike brought up the whole "spending the rest of our lives together without never getting girlfriends" concept even in a fight is so interesting to me bc Will was not saying anything like that before like bby where did you get that idea from hm? And then Will breaks his facade by AGREEING with it and making Mike feel guilty bc now this means he was implying that HE didn't want that too just....wow...they're so gone for each other.

Same vibes come from the rink o mania fight because when Will said "and us" he was talking in a platonic way but Mike took it in a romantic way immediately as if that's something that was in his mind all along. Will even clarifies that he was talking about their friendship but he could've totally seen right through him again and asked "Wait why are you even thinking of us like that?".

I think those moments correlate with each other because both times Mike's bringing something that has many romantic undertones to their fights without meaning to and trying to make it sound like Will is the one thinking those things even tho he was the one who brought it up first bc those are things HE was thinking about.

Drawing for my awesome bigbang partner @newlesbianprideflag ‘s fic “What a time to be alive”!!! Go read it if u love ghosts and all things byler ;D

@bylerbigbang

torn between wanting mike and will’s first kiss to be this life or death situation fueled moment of i thought i’d lost you again where they hold on to each other like their life literally depends on it OR if i want it to be mid fight moment of i’m tired of pretending this thing between us doesn’t exist where one minute they’re yelling at each other and the next they’re kissing OR if i want it to be this sweet soft moment of we finally found our way back to each other by the swing set where they’re both bathed in light

the goopy tumblr logo is fine but it is nothing compared to the ghoul from last year

…..bring him back…

who's gonna take one for the team and draw byler like this

You know about yesterday? It’s fine, Lucas. You don’t have to say anything.

some byclair for your wednesday💗

part 25 of cleric's radio au!! after this, i'm planning two more installments and then we're totally done 🥲🥲🥲

all other installments here!! thank you guys so much for all the love on this au :')

Day 5 of @bylerween2023 Flayed!Mike/✨Flayed!Will✨

english teacher Mike Wheeler who comes across as this Serious Intimidating and pretentious jerk until you discover he's just a nerd who all the Troubled and 'Difficult' kids surprisingly love and look up to. No one knows how he does it. (he was, once, that angry troubled teen).

art teacher Will Byers who absolutely every student loves. You cannot hate him. Queer kids are especially drawn to him and he's the best at reassuring them and helping them feel comfortable and safe. He's always followed by at least two or three students and he gets the most notes, gifts and hand-made crafts during holidays.

and yes they're married

please tell me they went trick or treating in lenora

Day 1 of @bylerween2023 Ghosts & Hauntings

saw people talking about how the deliberate hand/face touching in this scene and had to draw it to for my mental health <3

the shadow monster

mind flayer will is an absolute most for season 5

here’s my take!

clear ver:

5X03: THE FIRST TO DIE

After months of radio silence, Vecna finally starts to show his hand. Passions ignite, secrets are exposed, and Will makes a decision that could put everything at risk. Dead dogs tell no tales… or do they?

click here for the playlist!

click here for the comment-free pdf.

there's a new article out about the play. i think it's paywalled for people outside of the us, so here's a twitter thread with screenshots. i've also typed it all out under the cut here:

LONDON – Next month, the Upside Down extends its tentacles into London’s West End with “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a prequel stage production that expands the world of Netflix’s sci-fi/horror blockbuster. 

And the creative team behind it hopes the play will be as groundbreaking as the series itself.  

“We’re about to bring the actors, who’ve just been in this cocoon of a rehearsal room for seven weeks, into [the theater],” producer Sonia Friedman says of “The First Shadow,” which is set to open Noc. 17 at the Phoenix Theatre. “We’ve been making sure it can stand alone without the special effects, because it’s all about story. We are going to blow people’s minds. We are going to terrify with some of the most startling, extraordinary things with the physical production.” 

The project originated with director Stephen Daldry, who approached Netflix’s then-content chief Cindy Holland after the show’s first season aired.  

“One of the conversations Stephen and I had been having was, ‘What theater have we ever seen where you get genuinely scared?’” Daldry’s co-director Justin Martin says. “It was an interesting challenge and provocation. We talked about other [Netflix] titles, but this one felt like the most imaginative and the most challenging to try and find a stage language for.” 

“The goal was to figure out, what does a mega episode of ‘Stranger Things’ look like on stage?” adds Matt Duffer, who created the series with brother Ross. “It was a very long, multi-year process to figure that out. But where they’ve landed is incredibly exciting.” 

For the Duffers, the idea of expanding the “Stranger Things” universe in new forms was an exciting prospect. They're currently working on several spinoff shows, including a children’s animated series and an anime series. The play exists on its own, but it also informs the narrative and characters fans know.  

“The idea was to explore Henry Creel and his backstory and fill in a gap that we don’t explore in Season 4,” Ross Duffer says of the villain also known as Vecna. “The play was being developed simultaneously with us writing Season 4 so we were adjusting as we went. It was an interesting way to develop a story, but to do it concurrently like that made sure everything locks in mythology-wise.” 

Development on “The First Shadow” began during Season 2. Daldry approached Friedman after seeing the magic and spectacle in her company’s production of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” at London’s Palace Theatre. The creative team spent time brainstorming the story during the early months of the pandemic with screenwriter Jack Thorne, but eventually decided they needed someone who knew the series intimately. 

Kate Trefry, a writer on “Stranger Things” since Season 2, was an obvious choice for Daldry, despite the fact that she’d never written a play before.  

“Season 2 is really when we started to expand this world and mythology,” Ross Duffer says. “So Kate knows that as well as us. She's been with us in the trenches for so many years that we were so happy that she had this opportunity to do this.” 

From early on, no one wanted to simply remake the first season. Daldry wanted the story to be what Martin calls “in the center of the conversation,” rather than a secondary narrative, so a prequel made the most sense. 

“When we met with Stephen we had just cracked this Henry Creel stuff in the writers room,” Ross Duffer says. “We said, ‘Well there might be an opening here.’ And Stephen really fell in love with it.” 

“There are questions of ‘Why Hawkins?’ and ‘How did all this stuff happen?’” Martin adds, referring to the show’s fictional Indiana town, which becomes a hotbed of supernatural activity. “This felt like a good way to address that.”  

“The First Shadow,” set in Hawkins in 1959, is told over two chapters. Several familiar characters appear, including Bob Newby, Joyce Maldonado and Jim Hopper, who are in their last year of high school when a new student named Henry Creel arrives. Nearby, Dr. Brenner is getting his start in his lab. There are also new characters, like Bob’s sister Patty Newby. Trefry calls it an ensemble play with Henry Creel as the “spine” of the story. Beyond that, everyone involved is as tight-lipped about the plot as they are about the forthcoming grand finale of the Netflix original. 

“It’s about outsider kids who come together to solve a mystery,” Martin says. “And in doing so find themselves and each other. That's really ultimately what ‘Stranger Things’” does so well and why so many people connect with it.” 

Trefry adds that it’s also “about the loss of innocence and coming of age and how you are changed and ruined and saved by these formative events that happened in high school.” 

“So, hopefully, you’ll see that Hopper and Joyce and Bob are all presenting echoes of the trauma that is at the center of this play,” she says. 

In the first season of “Stranger Things,” Joyce, Bob and Hopper seem surprised by what’s going on in Hawkins. But Trefry confirms there’s an explanation for why they don’t immediately connect it to their high school years.  

“The climactic events that happen within these two stage episodes had to be something that could be written off as not magical or science fiction,” she says. “It had to be spectacular and make sense, but we had to go forward in honesty with our characters.” 

As a TV series, “Stranger Things” has a recognizable aesthetic. The Upside Down and its monsters are familiar to viewers, so a stage version needed to incorporates similar visuals.  

Because Trefry had never written a play, she didn’t worry about whether certain effects or scenes would be possible, which upped the ante for everyone included.  

“She cross-cut scenes as she would in the show and wrote crazy visual effects sequences as she would in the show,” Matt Duffer says. “She wasn’t limited by that because it then just presented a challenge for Stephen to solve, which is fun. The opening sequence of the play -- I don’t think anyone even knew if it was possible. I'm still not sure how they’re doing it.” 

Friedman and Daldry put together a notably skilled creative team. Friedman set the bar high from the outset, telling them, “I need to be taken to a new dimension of what is possible with theater.” 

That team includes illusions design and visual effects artists Jamie Harrison and Chris Fisher, who are responsible for the onstage magic in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” Harrison and Fisher spent nearly a year coming up with the effects in “The First Shadow” and have continues perfecting things during rehearsals. 

“It’s very pressurized because there is nothing worse than a bad effect because the audience knows straight away,” Harrison says. “We have to go through quite a lot of watching our work be quite bumpy before it gets smooth. And we have to bring the actors from zero magic skill to being very expert in a condensed period of time.” 

“When you have the world of ‘Stranger Things,’ people know it,” Fisher adds. “They have those big sequences, so we naturally are creating big sequences. We’ve pushed it and I think by us pushing, the directors and Kate have pushed us even more and said, ‘Now we know you can do that, we want this.’” 

As a series “Stranger Things” relies on CGI alongside practical effects, but onstage everything has to be done for real. 59 Productions are creating the video design and visual effects for the play, which will work in tandem with the illusions and Miriam Buether’s set design. Harrison says that “anything that can be achieved in film can be achieved in theater.” 

“In film, people want absolute reality,” Harrison says. “For the effects to be visually real. In the theater, we have a level of imagination that we can use as well. For example, in the piece we’re creating there are a lot more blood and guts.” 

Trefry adds that the stage show is genuinely terrifying. “It’s scary like ‘Stranger Things’ is scary,” she says. “There’s a little bit of like guts and gore, and then there’s also real trauma – people dealing with real stuff.” 

Other elements of the production will hint at the series as well. For instance, Harrison and Fisher met with the creature designer from the series during their design process to ensure “visual continuity,” although they won’t say which creatures appear in the play. And D.J. Walde’s original music recreates the familiar synth theme song with a theremin that matches the late 1950s setting.  

For the Duffers, bringing the “Stranger Things” universe to life on stage satisfies their love of practical effects.  

“The downside of CGI is that the audience is conditioned to the fact that we can basically do anything,” Matt Duffer says. “But there’s something about seeing it actually done. When I saw ‘Cursed Child,’ my jaw was dropping in a way it rarely does now with these big movies. We want to do the same here.” 

Because Trefry wrote the play while Season 4 was in development, the series’ writers were able to retrofit elements of that season to reflect the stage show. The events of the play will also help to “enrich” Season 5, Matt Duffer says.  

“There’s a ton of conversation and dialogue between this play and the events that happen in Season 5,” Trefry says of the final season, which is over halfway written. “It was about trying to create something that is canon, but where you don’t have to see it to see Season 5. But if you do see it, it’ll make Season 5 better.” 

“There are hints of where [the show] is going to go,” Ross Duffer adds. “I think when [Season] 5 comes together, all of those pieces will hopefully click.” 

“The First Shadow” tickets are currently on sale through Aug. 25, 2024, although Friedman confirms the case signed one-year contracts and the production is open-ended. The plan is to bring the play to Broadway and the rest of the U.S. as soon as possible.  

“Hopefully it can get to as many places as it can so as many fans as possible can experience it,” Matt Duffer says. “That’s one thing we’re trying to figure out: How do we make sure people are able to see it before Season 5 releases?” 

“The First Shadow” marks the beginning of a broader universe for “Stranger Things.” The Duffers say they can’t “focus on the spinoffs until we’re landed the plan with Season 5,” but so far they’ve enjoyed letting other artists re-imagine their ideas. 

“This was originally pitched as a standalone story and so to be here now is surreal,” Ross Duffer says. “But this has been the most rewarding experience for us creatively."