Stranger Things, the worldwide Netflix phenomenon just released its fifth and final season, with the last episode airing on Christmas Day of 2025. The first episode aired on July 15, 2016, and over the last ten years the show’s fanbase has grown exponentially, with over 1.2 billion viewers over all the seasons, making it Netflix’s most popular show.
Naturally with a show as beloved as Stranger Things, the anticipation and expectations surrounding the last season, which was released in 3 volumes, were sky-high. There was a lot of attention on Ross and Matt Duffer, aka the Duffer Brothers, who have been praised for the show’s creativity, uniqueness, and craftful attention to details in the plot. As Matt Duffer stated in the recently released documentary, One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5, “”It’s terrifying because you see these shows that people love and adore and the ending falters. They just discard the rest of the show.”
Needless to say, the pressure was high.
Now that the show has come to an end, fan reactions have fallen on many different points of a spectrum. With some fans praising the ending for its storyline and for mocking the ‘80’s ending’, while other fans are disappointed by the exorbitant amount of plot holes and inconsistencies that the Duffers have always been known for tying up. This is largely due to the huge TikTok community that is dedicated to Stranger Things. Over the past few years, especially since 2020 and the rise of TikTok use and sub-community culture, where many individuals with specific obsessions, in this case Stranger Things, can come together and converse with people about this interest and often expand their knowledge on it.
For Stranger Things fans, this has taken flight with ‘theories’. People rewatch the show and find tiny details that support their chosen ‘theory’, and then they post all the evidence strung together. There are hundreds of theories posted everyday, but the two that have gained the most traction and even onto their own sub communities are #Byler and #ConformityGate.
#Byler is a community who researches Mike Wheeler and Will Byers and their alleged love story. The #Byler fans dive deep into color theories–where Will is yellow and Mike is blue, camera angles and frame positioning, and body language between both boys during the whole show. Although Mike ended up kissing Eleven and confirming their romantic relationship that was in question by most fans, Byler subscribers and not, the Byler community is ‘going down with their ship’, and they continue to maintain that their evidence was not false, but rather the Duffers had planned their love all along and chickened out by the ending of the story, not wanting to ruffle feathers.
#ConformityGate is a theory that began midway through the final season when Volume Two began to disappoint fans due to many aspects including attention to detail, plot speed, lack of connection between the characters, and the overall change in the feeling of this volume in contrast with Volume One and the other seasons. #ConformityGate subscribers are among the most savvy of the fandom, pulling the tiniest and sometimes not explicitly stated details from all season of the show and the play the Duffers produced and made ‘canon’ (a term applied to theories in literature universes that the universe creators validate as true) to piece together the theory that the Duffers were planning a fake out ending. They claim that the audience is under Vecna’s curse and we are in his mind, hence the ‘easy’ ending in the finale, and they believe the Duffers are releasing one more episode that will truly end the series and tie up the plot holes. In season 5, Lucas Sinclair seemed to break the fourth wall when he delivered his line, “I don’t believe in coincidences. Not anymore”, which added even more fuel to the fire for subscribers. The date of this last episode’s release was supposedly going to be January 7th, which is Orthodox Christmas, and since there was no new episode, this theory has been debunked.
Although #ConformityGate itself was debunked, the huge online following it attracted is very telling about many fans, especially young fans, reactions to the show’s ending. For many high school seniors, like myself, they have grown up watching the show. From watching them in Season One trying to figure out the Hawkins mystery, to keeping up with the actors’ different projects and passions, to now the last season watching the kids graduate; the younger fans of the shows are feeling unsatisfied to what was supposed to be a symbolic ending to their childhood.
Season 5 of Stranger Things wasn’t just the end of a show, it was the end of an era. The end of us growing up. The end of our childhood. So whether you loved the ending or hated it, take a second and appreciate what the show has done for its audience. The ending wasn’t perfect, but maybe that’s an even bigger metaphor for growing up. There isn’t always a neat bow tied on the end of a life chapter. More often than not, we will simply have to choose to believe in the lessons we learned from it, walk up the stairs, and close the door.
To come back to Matt’s quote at the beginning–don’t write off the whole show just because of a bad ending. Stranger Things has been a huge part of an entire generation’s experience growing up. It didn’t just tell a story of a few kids fighting monsters, it taught us how to analyze and question our reality, how to view the world with wonder and excitement, and most importantly, how to connect across the world and against all odds. And to always, always choose to believe.
Example of Pro-#ConformityGate Post on TikTok
