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It's sometimes easy to forget about Will Byers, the quiet, hapless kid at the center of Stranger Things. He's not as forthcoming (or foul-mouthed) as Dustin, or as charismatic as Lucas. He's not a natural leader like Mike, and he can't flip a van with his mind like Eleven. He can't even top Max's Dig Dug score. So when he's not being used as a human vessel for the Mind Flayer, he mostly tends to fade into the background.

To be fair, it's not really his fault. Throughout the eight-episode first season of Stranger Things, Noah Schnapp's Will was little more than a mawkish phantom. The middle-school misfit's mysterious disappearance haunted everyone — his anxious mother, Joyce; his introverted older brother, Jonathan; the local police chief; and his best friends and fellow outcasts, Mike, Dustin and Lucas. As such, we mostly learned about Will through the people he left behind. The main takeaway? Will Byers is not like most boys coming of age in Hawkins, Indiana, in 1984. And it's not because of his fondness for The Clash.

He's deeply sensitive, so much so that his estranged father Lonnie used to call him "queer" — a slur that followed him into middle school. He'd rather draw than play baseball, and he frequently seeks solace and solitude under the makeshift canopy of Castle Byers, his own private fort in the middle of the woods. He's the sweet, thoughtful member of the Party, the one who told Mike he rolled a seven when he could have easily lied about it. (Turns out, he can't even lie when he's being possessed by an evil entity.)

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Will Byers has been through hell and back on Stranger Things and he doesn't deserve your hate.

But in Stranger Things 2, Will's compassion, made tangible by Schnapp's standout performance, becomes his hidden strength. He's fragile, but he's not weak. He's fearful but still fighting. (Let's not forget that he survived a week in a parallel dimension hiding from a predatory monster, completely alone. Talk about resilience!) This is evident at the end of Episode 3 ("The Pollywog"), when Will attempts to tell the Shadow Monster to "go away." He could have kept running, but he didn't. He tried to face his fears, even if the outcome was the literal worst case scenario.

In a society that tends to valorize toughness, Will's deep-seated empathy is refreshing. Patriarchy often perpetuates the notion that in order to be "strong" you must fight back, stay in control, and never show your emotions. But Stranger Things subverts this idea of traditional masculinity, giving us a group of scrappy young heroes who do things a bit differently. Will cries. He relies on others. He's vulnerable. But he's also complicated and tenacious.

So, no, Will Byers is not "the boring one." He's challenging societal norms one paranormal day at a time in the 1980s, and he deserves some respect. Don't believe me? Here's more proof: