The Duffer brothers are speaking out about the backlash to Will’s coming out scene.
“We’re proud of the episode, and we’re proud of the scene, and proud of Noah [Schnapp], who gave a really brave, very vulnerable performance,” Ross Duffer told Variety, in a story published Thursday.
Matt told the outlet that “the honest truth” is that they were surprised by the backlash.
“Because it is, as Ross said, something we’ve been building for a really long time. I always say, Ross and I are many things, but subtle is not one of those things!”
“Stranger Things” ended on Dec. 31 after five seasons. In the middle of Season 5, in the episode “The Bridge,” Will gathered his friends and family and announced to them that he was gay.
Fans swiftly reacted negatively online, review-bombing the episode.
Season 5 is the show’s lowest-rated season on Rotten Tomatoes. The final season – which dropped in three installments of episodes – had an audience score rating of 73% before Volume 2 drop, which contained the episode in which Will came out. After that episode, it’s at 56%. Even post-finale, that number has remained.
“The Bridge” is the worst-rated episode of the entire series on IMDb, too, with a 5.4 rating.
After “The Bridge” aired, one fan tweeted, “Woke ruins EVERYTHING. Netflix decided to RUIN their most popular show of all-time, Stranger Things, by focusing their final season on Will coming out as a homosexual, promoting the propaganda that Will’s superpowers are because he’s ’embraced his sexuality’ & the villain telling Will that his friends won’t like him if they find out he likes dudes.”
Another fan commented, “The Will coming out scene may be the worst in the entirety of ST. Making that the most important plot point for the penultimate episode of the show is such a waste. Plus it was super cringy too. A hard watch.”
The Duffer brothers told Variety, “The coming out scene is something we’ve been building to for nine years now. It was a really important scene for us, and a really important scene for Noah — not just from a thematic point of view, but also a narrative point of view.”
Ross noted that the show has always been about character overcoming “evil,” which involves “embracing themselves, and then also embracing one another and coming together.”
Matt said that the scene was the “final step” in Will’s journey.
“Will is, in so many ways, the key to defeating Vecna. Volume 1 is really about self-acceptance, right? I mean, that’s sort of step one. And then step two is Will is talking to Robin (Maya Hawke) — it’s something that he wants to do. He’s trying to figure out how to come out, and he knows that he needs to do that, and that that’s the final step for him.”
The series co-creator added, “And he finds the courage to be able to do it. And it’s really the ultimate f–k you to Vecna. That was the intention.”
