This winter, Stranger Things released its long-awaited fifth season. Fans watched as beloved characters battled the forces of evil, grew closer together, and cried a lot. They debated the quality of the episodes, theorised about secret episodes and cried a lot.
The scene that sparked the most debate and discussion wasn’t a climactic fight or touching ending; rather, it was the scene in the penultimate episode where Will Byers (played by Noah Schnapp) comes out as gay.
Will is one of the original characters of Stranger Things. His kidnapping by the demogorgon is the inciting incident of the whole series. Throughout all five seasons, he is portrayed as shy and awkward. He never shares his friends’ interests in dating, preferring to play D&D instead.
In the first few episodes of season five, heavy implications of Will’s queerness begin to appear. He learns about the older, more confident character, Robin’s sapphic relationship. As they become close, she tells him about how the embracing of her own sexual orientation made her more confident.
This all crescendos into a six minute and eight seconds or four minutes and 23 seconds (depending what you count) coming out scene where Will gathers his friends and family around him and tearfully tells them his identity.
Due to this, fans have universal disdain. Online fans criticized its length and placement in the plot . Although the scene, technically, has plot significance, the majority of fans see this scene as an annoying and unnecessary addition to the end of the beloved series.
Some queer fans of the show have bigger issues with the storyline than finding it annoying. Etta Leonardo, a sophomore at Ida B. Wells High School, said it felt “rushed, like they were trying to get it over with. I think it would have been a lot deeper if it was more cared about. I don’t think it reached its full potential, especially with what Noah [Schnapp] could have done with it.”
KJ Ramsay, a junior at IBW, said he was expecting the coming out scene to be “something happening between just Will and Joyce or Will, Joyce and Jonathan, which at the start of the scene, it seemed like it was going to be, and it was leading up to something great. But then it’s like, they go into this whole group setting and then everyone’s like ‘and me, and me.’”
Both Ramsay and Leonardo agreed that the group nature of the scene felt unnatural and not representative of how queerness plays out in the real world.
Byers’ coming-out scene is not the first in Stranger Things. In season three, Robin comes out to Steve Harington in a bathroom while they are under the influence of Russian truth serum. Both Leonardo and Ramsey agree that that scene felt much more authentic and less scripted. Leonardo described it as “very organic and realistic.”
With this scene, Stranger Things has proved that in 2025, queerness remains a subject that needs to be handled with care. People across the spectrum of sexuality are tired of storylines that deal with stereotypical situations and are ready for realistic portrayals.
