Read More Across its entire run, Stranger Things has made it clear that Will is not like the other boys. In the first season, he’s the one quite literally set apart from his friends when he’s kidnapped into the Upside Down. But after he’s rescued, his differences become manifest. He’s been infected by the poison from this other dimension, and it’s left a darkness within him that separates him from the others. In Season 2, he’s even bullied for what happened to him and comes to see himself as a freak. By the third season, as his friends start to show more interest in girls than in playing Dungeons & Dragons, Will feels left behind. “It’s not my fault you don’t like girls,” Mike (Finn Wolfhard) spits at him during one argument. In that moment, Will looks stung, but both kids seem to be grappling with the ramifications of what Mike’s words might ultimately mean. Advertisement By 2022’s Season 4, though, Will’s queerness was becoming much more overt. For a school project, he chooses to study gay mathematician Alan Turing, and he’s even shown recoiling when a female classmate tries to flirt with him. He complains to Mike that he feels like a third wheel during their time with Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), and hints that he’s worried about being honest with his friends about what he’s feeling inside. “What if they don’t like the truth?” he says. When he and Mike eventually share a tender moment during a car ride, Will’s words about Mike making Eleven feel cherished also transparently apply to himself. “When you’re different, sometimes you feel like a mistake, but you make her feel like she’s not a mistake at all, like she’s better for being different,” Will says, before sobbing quietly. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Watching Will’s journey throughout these seasons, I can vividly recall my own feelings as a budding gay kid. I too resented when friends began having adult conversations about girls, wondering why we couldn’t just be kids a while longer. I remember feeling left behind before coming to understand I was on a different track entirely. But this wasn’t an overnight realization. Before you can be closeted, you have to first realize there’s something different about you to begin with, and, as Will has learned, this can be a messy, confusing, and frightening process. It’s for this reason that I have a lot of grace for the slow pace at which Stranger Things has built out Will’s sexuality. In addition to being realistic, it has also allowed the denouement of his character in the fifth season to feel much more impactful. When Will spies on Robin (Maya Hawke) kissing her girlfriend Vickie (Amybeth McNulty) in the fifth season’s first episode, he’s shocked not at their queerness, but at their happiness. There’s a longing on his face as he sees the tenderness with which they embrace. That comfort isn’t something he was even aware he might one day be able to have. It’s important, then, that Robin acts as a mentor to him as the episodes progress. She’s only out to Steve (Joe Keery), but she can sense a kindred spirit in Will—someone else who doesn’t quite fit in. “I’m not like your other friends,” she told Steve back in Season 3. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement When she and Will eventually discuss her kiss in the third episode of Season 5, there’s an instant affinity between the pair because of this shared language they both speak. He wants to know what signs Robin saw that Vickie wanted to be more than just friends. “There were signals,” she tells him. “A brush of the knee, a bump of the elbow, a shared look. It all just kind of accrued, like a snowball rolling down a hill, until it was obvious.” It’s only when she sees him playfully pushing Mike in the next episode that Robin realizes who Will is looking for those signs from. Advertisement In the fourth episode, Robin purposefully hangs back so that she and Will can speak as the gang navigates the tunnels under Hawkins. She tells him how she once felt that developing a crush on another girl in her class for the first time made her finally feel confident that she could be her full, authentic self and accept a dark part of her that scared her. But it was only later, when she was watching old home movies of herself as a carefree and fearless child, that she realized that she had always had the power to accept herself. “I was looking for answers in somebody else, but I had all the answers,” Robin says. “I just needed to stop being so goddamn scared of who I really was. Once I did that, I felt so free. It’s like I could fly.” Advertisement Source: https://slate.com/culture/2025/12/stranger-things-season-5-will-byers-gay-powers-mike-robin.html