this took a wild turn :
hawkins school door: are they being bullied at school????
Left glass
"i want to kiss you"
"i want to bend you over and make you moan"
white scribble? can't decode. someone see this please.
Right glass: MiKe & Will
MiKE: Right side up
Will : UPSIDE DOWN (read from the left)
Note: I still need to figure out the context of these pictures. i have my doubts about the notes. @pinkeoni suggested it could be fan graffiti. so i don't know how canon all this is.
if this is indeed canon then one explanation comes to mind. We know that Will and mike are always together during school hours and now bullies are taking note of that. it's not 7th grade anymore when boys sticking together is only seen as a Nerdy behaviour. Erica said to lucas in s2 "you are such a nerd, no wonder you hangout only with boys' . In highschool things are different. if you hangout with same gender too much its interpreted as something else. Will has always dealt with bullies. being name called queer and zombie boy.
thank you @smalltownduck for giving me more food for thought. what you said makes a lot of sense.
the girl who asked will for a dance during snowball clearly had a crush on him and so his secret admirers could've slipped in notes in his locker, he is famous afterall. she calls him zombie boy. could've called him anything else. very crush coded dialogue. The notes here are too vague. unsolicited demand for hookup or its just some highschool bully.
final verdict Will has new admirers at school. Highschool girls? closeted classmates? or these are from the bullies.
Looking a bit closer to these, they look like ripped and crumbled pieces of notebook paper taped to the glass. I initially thought they could be notes passed around/thrown in class, but these are too big and the text isn't tiny. The point of sneaky notes, especially those containing romantic/risqué messages, is for them to be small enough to not be seen by prying eyes, easily move from hand to hand and to quickly hide them anywhere if you're getting caught, so these scraps don't meet the criteria.
My bet's that these notes were likely meant for someone's locker, kind of like the one Steve slipped into Nancy's locker in s1 ("meet me in the bathroom" doesn't leave much to the imagination). These might have been from people honestly crushing or looking for a hookup OR, maybe, they were meant to tease/make fun of someone (these two notes specifically being a -no context, reductively speaking- 'girly' message, even with a heart-dotted i and in bubbly handwriting, and a 'predatory/sexual' message in less polished handwriting... I wonder huh.)
Additionally, more than "boy only hangs out with boys in highschool" being suspish (idk how it was in the 80s), I think the most 'clockable' thing about Will in the eyes of homophobic bullies would be him likely continuing to turn down girls who approach him. I mean, we've seen three separate girls showing interest before the 'glow up', so we'll prob see at least one more doing it in s5. This post by luckybyler explains it much better:
Yes good point re; Will being clockable based on rejecting girls! I was just thinking that the handwriting for "I want to kiss you" is very feminine, it's definitely the type of thing a teenage girl with a crush would write. Either as a message to press up against the glass or to be slipped into a locker. The "bend you over" one is more masculine handwriting for sure. Obviously irl anyone can have any handwriting but this is a tv show they have to signify things somehow dont @ me.
My theory based on these images is that either this is a Vecna vision where he's tricking someone (Will or Mike most likely) with these letters. Or, more likely imo; season 5 is the season in which we will see Will experience violent homophobia. This thought was inspired by some tags by @byler-alarmist on the post @smalltownduck linked:
After season 4 there are still, somehow, people who are in denial that Will is gay. A lot of fans of Stranger Things do not realise how bad homophobia was in the 80s, either through ignorance or because they were straight up not born. And I don't think it'll be popular with younger fans to show Will being the victim of a homophobic hate crime, but I honestly think it would be an important storyline. Stranger Things doesn't tend to shy away from the social realities of the 80s, and we've seen lots of background objects and set leaks that show that the AIDS crisis is very much present in the background. There's a reference or two in s4, but I think it'll play a bigger role in s5.
Also, everyone should really read that post about Will being canonically attractive, I've been saying that for years! Canonically, he pulls. Remember that the vibes of the actor don't necessarily always fit the vibes of the character, especially as they grow up. Nerdy mike wheeler is not cool alt guy finn wolfhard. All the characters are played by attractive young actors, but Will is clearly meant to be the one that is a chick magnet. He doesn't need to try to get attention from girls like the others; they pursue him, which wouldn't be unheard of in the 80s but it wouldn't be all that common either.
Something we know about Will is that he's been clockable as gay since he was a child, probably before he even knew he was gay himself. This is established in one of the first scenes, with Joyce in the police station. Even Joyce doesn't deny that he might be gay. Everyone knows, except the girls who like him. If you've ever been gay in a public school system yall know that bullies can sniff out your homosexuality like fucking blood hounds. A group of bullies tricking Will into a disused room in the high school in order to bash him is absolutely possible.
I have totally lost whatever I was going to say when I started this LMAO but the main thing is; The more of this I write the more confident I am that Will is going to be bullied for his sexuality in season 5, and it's not going to be childish pushing and name calling anymore.
