****SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from Season 5, Volume 2 of “Stranger Things, now streaming on Netflix.

The biggest show of the streaming era is turning out to be, in large part, about one young man’s coming out process.

In the final episode of Volume 2, released on Christmas Day, Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) realizes he needs to talk to his friends about something. They’re, together, fighting Vecna, the malign force that wants to destroy the entire world, but that has been bedeviling Will in particular since the show’s first episode. Back when he was first kidnapped and taken to the Upside Down, Will had been a slight and awkward boy who found himself picked on and scrutinized. Older and somewhat more secure now, Will realizes that Vecna, the evil being, is manipulating his insecurities. He’s trying to prise him away from his friends by showing him a vision of himself as abandoned by his friends and totally alone; in order to make sure that’s just a dark fantasy, Will needs to unburden himself.

In one of the episode’s final scenes, Will’s words come in a torrent, painfully earnest and meandering until he finally arrives at his point. “The truth is,” he says, “I am different. I just pretended like I wasn’t because I didn’t want to be.” Anyone who’s ever had to give a speech whose substance is like that of Will’s will recognize the halting, awkward cadence here, as well as the manner in which he announces his sexuality: “I don’t like girls.” He can’t quite bring himself to say what he *does *like, but this, for now, is enough.

This, a pivotal character opening up about being queer on a show as massive as “Stranger Things,” feels seismic — and, oddly, like the culmination of a very long journey. In the show’s earliest episodes, Will’s mom Joyce (Winona Ryder) says that her son has been cruelly mocked by his own father for being “queer”; back then, Schnapp, the actor playing Will, was a young child. (He’s 21, and an out gay man today.) Throughout the series, Will’s slight isolation from the rest of his peer group has been a note the show’s creators, Matt and Ross Duffer, have struck from time to time. He was singled out as uniquely vulnerable by Vecna, who needed an easily culled outsider to use as a vessel; this connection between Will and a being from another dimension has, this season, given Will magical powers himself.

Being queer, in other words, is a sort of superpower — and, this season, a boy who previously had stared wistfully out of windows waiting for his life to begin is now actually living it. Among the older-kid cohort of the show’s Hawkins, Indiana is Robin (Maya Hawke), who is somewhat more open about her own desires; she’s a semi-out lesbian whose brashness and ability to be forthright with Will give him no small measure of encouragement. (Will asks her how, exactly, she knew that she was barking up the right tree when she started pursuing her girlfriend; she told him that she knew how to read signals. Gaydar is its own magic power, too, honed with practice!)

And this message, that in difference one finds strength and not weakness, sits right at the center of a show watched by many, many kids of all ages. (Numbers may not tell the full story of the “Stranger Things” juggernaut; I recently attended a holiday party at which a passel of middle-schoolers bemoaned the fact that they’d have obligations on Christmas Day, like opening presents, that would keep them from binging the new set of episodes immediately.) There have been harder times, perhaps, to be growing up aware of one’s own difference — like, say, 1987, when “Stranger Things 5” is set — but I wouldn’t wager it’s terribly easy right now. The fact of queerness occupying such a crucial thematic role in the show’s endgame means that many young people may take the idea that their friends will love them for who they really are to heart.

For, after all, Will isn’t shamed or cast out by his friends; to a one, they hear what he’s saying and affirm their support. (One senses, in some of the performances, that this news does not come as an Earth-shattering shock to a few of the characters.) And then they return to the matter at hand. They need to save the world, so that they all, differences aside, may go on living in it.

Inside

the Upside Down

• The Duffer Brothers Break Down All the Volume 2 Spoilers **• **The Duffer Brothers Break Down All the Volume 1 Spoilers **• **Our 13 Burning Questions Ahead of the Series Finale **• **Noah Schnapp on That Scene in Volume 2 **• Noah Schnapp **on Turning Into the [SPOILER] in Volume 1 • **Director Shawn Levy **on Will’s Huge Breakthrough • **Sadie Sink **on Max’s Key Role in Volume 1 • Nell Fisher on Playing Holly Wheeler in Season 5 • The Cast of ‘Stranger Things’ on the Show’s Final Days **• **Variety’s “Stranger Things” Oct. 15 Cover Story About the Duffers • **Cara Buono **on Karen’s Kick-Ass Hero Moment (At Last) • The Duffer Brothers on the ‘Stranger Things’ Spinoff **• Linda Hamilton **on Being Millie Bobby Brown’s ‘Biggest Fan’ **• Shawn Levy **on ‘Sticking the Landing’ for Season 5 **• David Harbour **on How ‘Stranger Things’ Has Changed Him