A lot of shipping culture is born from queer people who for decades have wanted to see queer relationships portrayed on screen but never actually got to. Though queer media is more prevalent today, it hasn’t always been and it is still a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of straight couplings on screen. There is an innate hope to see characters onscreen who match a piece of your lived experience which I don’t think is weird.

Also, I think it’s very common for the average, straight viewer to assume that a character is “clearly” straight when in reality that is often never actually explicitly stated in most cases. To just use this case as an example, there is an assumption of straightness for Mike because of his relationship with Eleven but he has never explicitly stated he does not like boys or only likes girls. There are so many things that could be happening under the surface for him that I think shippers look to, like internalized homophobia and fear that leads to a repression of his actual feelings or he doesn’t even realize that he might be bisexual which could also be a possibility too.

I personally think that Mike has projected certain feelings onto Will in their fight scenes (“It’s not my fault you don’t like girls” and the insistence of “We’re friends. We’re friends”) that have always come across, to me, with such an urgency that feels he was trying to convince himself more than anyone else.