Me When I Get To Chapter 90 But I Cant Deal With That Tonight So I Just Close The Tab And Die

me when I get to chapter 90 but I cant deal with that tonight so I just close the tab and die

I know what you are Mike, no allistic moves their hands like that....

Look at baby Will doodling alone :((

pov: Will gets a walkman and never takes off his headphones anymore so he starts dressing how he wants to dress and literally doesn’t hear the haters. (he only ever really takes them off to talk with Mike)

Gay mike, autism, and his signature grimace.

[most images used as examples were taken from @howtobecomeadragon because they were already compiled in this wonderful series for easy access so thank uuu teehee]

The Mike Face. we all know it, we all love it, but do we all understand it? to some degree, yes, but Im going to pull apart it’s insides and look at it under a magnifying glass because it honestly kind of confuses me sometimes—almost like its the wrong facial expression to make 👀—even though it usually works in our favor (gay mike).

The main consistency is that he does it when he doesn’t understand something. but not that he doesn’t actually know what something means, more that he doesn’t understand the logic behind it. and it pisses him off.

This is a very common experience for autistic people, we often get agitated by our lack of understanding and feelings of confusion toward things that nobody else seems to question. or similarly, why everyone else understands something, when you don’t, or can’t, no matter how hard you try.

It can make you feel “othered” or maybe even less than, compared to your peers. everyone is confused sometimes, and everyone gets frustrated from being confused sometimes! but the difference is, when you just can’t seem to grasp the reasoning for things over and over again, and are made to feel bad about it, it can result in the person feeling broken or hopeless (which lucas literally calls him for not getting his metaphor for an opportunity to talk to his ex girlfriend).

honestly it’s probably one of mikes biggest insecurities, he’s ridiculed by his own friends for not understanding simple things that come easy to them, for being oblivious to things, being ‘blind’ to things, constantly.

Mike just so happens to make this face a lot when things having to do with girls come up. especially in s3 when lucas is trying to guide mike in his relationship with el, something he seems to know a lot about and understands easily compared to mike. almost everything lucas says to do, mike just simply doesn’t get. but again, it’s not that he doesn’t understand the words coming out of lucas’s mouth, or how to do the things he’s telling him. he’s confused by his own disinterest and lack of motivation to do what lucas is telling him he needs to do in order fix his relationship with el, in contrast to lucas, who is completely confident in his methods. he doesn’t understand why people would do these things, or why they would actually work.

And I think this also shows just how well he actually knows how to go about these situations in a way that works for him, because he does it flawlessly with will every season.

In s1 we see him do the Mike Face (that’s what i’ll be calling it for consistency) before being presented with anything having to do with girls, he hasn’t even met el yet. this gives us some lore of the expression (lmao), and let’s us see what it really means before attaching it to anything specific (like distaste for women).

Here we see him grimace in response to bullying:

If we apply what i’ve already said about the expression, he clearly doesn’t understand the bullies’ motive for making fun of them, which reflects his personal values. re: “so? the x-men were weirdos,” and “I think it’s kind of cool. it’s like you have superpowers or something,” etc. which is kind of obvious, most kids who get bullied don’t agree with it, but why have him make this face in response to it rather than anger or fear or something. instead he looks at them like he’s smelling something bad lol. he just looks so confused, like, ‘why? why are you doing this?’

Mike rarely makes fun of his friends. he only judges their motives, reasoning, approaches, plans, and ideas. which also plays into how his understanding of other peoples logic is shown. mike is always the one to make a plan that works, he doesn’t dislike other peoples ideas because he didn’t come up with them, he dislikes them because he can see the flaws in them. mike can create a perfect plan that takes everything into consideration. because he is autistic. 🤭

(btw Im not saying every single person on the spectrum is a fucking genius that can detect every inconsistency in any given situation lol mike is just shown to be good at the devising part of plans in the show, and why have that as one of his strengths if not to show how his brain works, just like other characters having strengths in different areas to show how their brain works)

And I know he’s also just simply upset over the fact they’re getting bullied in the first place, nobody wants to go through that. but it’s the presence of this specific repeated expression that will give us some background for future reference in the different circumstances it shows up in.

So the main things that repeatedly invoke the Mike Face are:

things that go against his principles

attraction to girls

love at first sight

When somebody does anything that goes against your own principles, it’s hard to understand why they would, or could. that’s what makes them principles, they’re things you stand by because you just can’t see it any other way. for example, think of something like premeditated murder. this (most likely) goes against your personal values, which makes it very difficult for you to understand why someone would do it.

The other two are pretty obvious in that they’re things some people simply don’t experience (which says a lot about mike if you know what I mean teehee). as we all know, it can be harder to understand things that we don’t personally experience ourselves. that is the thing that all of these have in common: mike not understanding the reasoning behind them, and his difficulty in accepting it. which is very autistic of him lmao.

Mike is not canonically autistic, but he is very coded, and if we take that—whatever the in-show equivalent to autism is—into consideration, the extent to which mikes confusion surrounding these things goes compared to his friends makes a lot of sense,*which also greatly plays into the disposition of his arc. lucas dustin and will all disagree about things sometimes, but they get over it fairly quickly. mike on the other hand is dramatic and has a hard time letting things go, which is why there is emphasis on him being confused as shit all the time! lmao

Anyway, what that means is there is a purposeful tenaciousness to the things that result in the Mike Face. they’re supposed to stick in your head, the things he doesn’t understand/like/agree with.

This is the reason it’s so obvious that mike was lying in his monologue to el despite the absence of the Mike Face (although, he did look pretty close to it a few times lol), because that would be way too on the nose, literally. instead they have connected the characters recognizable grimace with a motif in the show: love at first sight essentially equating them to each other in your head.

love at first sight? does. not. compute.🤖

We are shown time and time again that mike does not believe you can like or dislike somebody you haven’t known for very long, and so have the writers themselves. these are only two out of like four different examples throughout the show:

And surprise surprise, the Mike Face.

Now circling back to mikes difficulty understanding lucas’s instructions in s3 pertaining his relationship with el, this clearly belongs in the aforementioned area: attraction to girls.

There’s a lot of this in s3 as you can see, but it’s definitely present in every season. even 1:

^mike after reassuring el she’s pretty.

There are so many more instances that Im not going to put here because I don’t have room but that simply proves my point, you don’t need to see them. because it has been so drilled into our subconscious through the association of these two things in the show (and many others), that if you were to visualize mike flat out stating “I like girls,” it’d be really, really weird. because, other than el (supposedly) …since when?

Alright. we all know the phrase ‘friends don’t lie’ lol. this was technically created by mike, so telling the truth between friends was recognized in that moment as one of mikes core principles. if we take that and apply it to moments he’s lied to in the show, the Mike Face will be there as well because we’ve established it as one of the main things he cannot abide.

The only exception to this is when he himself lies, which makes sense because he can understand his own reasoning for it, and validate his lying based on that. but anyone else does it and it’s:

*What other character is shown to have so many strong opinions on things that other characters just don’t really care much about? It is to contradict what the casual viewer sees and hears, because as we know, a good portion of stranger things fans have mikes character all wrong. either because they trust his actions blindly (ga), or they misconstrue his behavior to their favor (milevens), or both! this was done so that when mike has his character arc in s5, despite what we’ve been shown, it will be clear that the opposite was true all along. the patterns that our subconscious picked up on will become evident.

Im not at all saying there’ll be a big reveal that mike is autistic in s5 lmao, his coding just has a lot to do with his character and gives an explanation (other than the heaps of unrelated evidence that he’s autistic) for why he makes such a big deal out of these things (girls, lying, love at first sight), or has such a strong reaction to them in contrast to other characters. because it needs to be very clear that he disagrees.

Basically what Im saying is mikes autistic traits help in demonstrating his hidden queerness through a single facial expression. lol what a sentence.

byler exes but make it Different