the first fic
you attempt to figure each other out
Steve tells Robin about the mermaid
you are nearly discovered
you spend a few hours in bed
Steve takes you back to the pool
you meet Dustin and Eddie
Eddie teaches you how to swear
Steve gets hurt by the pool
you ask for company
you have a hand to heart
Steve gets you some bikinis
you, Steve, and unending eye contact
you donât understand and get upset
you give Steve an important gift
everyone tries to cheer you up
an animal outside scares you
you make a big change
Steve takes you to the mall for clothes
Steve explains âwantâ
Robin discovers your new features
you take your first bath
Steve feels you âpurringâ
you get the wrong idea about Nancy
you go klepto, to Steveâs distress
you take a bite out of Steveâs arm
you need Steve to explain real kissing
Steve gives you your kiss
thereâs an intruder in the house
you hurt yourself making a bagel
Steve realises whatâs missing
you wake up in an unfamiliar room
Steveâs guilty conscience creates distance
you and Hopper have a talk
you get a kiss for your headache
Steve takes you to lovers lake
when i try to be nonchalant but i remember that they killed jane after a life of suffering and said she was always just an allegory for childhood even though she was sixteen and they made her sacrifice herself and her death was so cruel violent and brutal and they made her lose hope after all those years of development to accept herself and find who she is and they made her kill herself in a skin-tight swimsuit in the cold upside down so they just sexualised the actress on top of giving her character an unsatisfying ending and they never allowed her to be herslef outside of men and powers and in the end she killed herself bc of her powers and her role was always to be mike's girlfriend and hopper's daughter and they sidelined her friendship with max and she never asserted her personnality and her entire death was about mike and not about her even though she's the one who's fucking dying and in the end it's still ambiguous so we don't know if she's alone and isolated or dead and she deserved the whole world and her writers never allowed her to become a person and learn what life is about even though that's all she ever wanted
the real finale: part one (we're all time travelers)
okay, i haven't had much time to organize my thoughts surrounding this but i've just had some thoughts that NEED to be written down re:conformitygate, the real finale, and what i think could come of this.
this is gonna take us through a theory that i... don't have a name for. we're just gonna rest it on the assumption that there's another finale out there in the ether that will be released soon.
first, some background knowledge required for this theory:
mike and will's relationship is the backbone of this show. the narrative arcs DO NOT FUNCTION and CANNOT BE COMPLETED without mike and will's love at the center.
need some proof?
none of the kids would have gone looking for will if it wasn't for mike in s1.
mike is the one who calls lucas and rallies the party to search for will. without mike's initiative, they would not have started the search or found eleven.
2. mike is the first to notice will's behavior in s2, long before joyce sees the outline of the mindflayer in the tape footage.
(not my gif)(yearn white boy yearn)
3. in s3, the fight with mike leaves will vulnerable and able to feel the mindflayer's presence in hawkins again. in addition, that fight cracks open the discussion about will's sexuality and, by extension, mike's feelings for will. the separation of the two in the finale provides the distance needed for 1) mike to question his relationship to el and 2) will's feelings to grow via the painting.
4. will is essentially the reason that not everyone gets slimed out in s4. without his encouragement to mike-- via the painting (and the cyrano trope but that ain't the point) and a steady presence alongside mike-- el would not have had the strength to even face vecna. although max and eddie end up as casualties, the teens are able to disarm vecna and el is able to heal max in the void.
(not my gif) (yearn white boy yearnnnn)
5. i fear this really needs no explanation, but... mike is the reason will activates his powers. yes, yes... rockin' robin helps out a lot too, but that's only because will asks her about mike in an indirect way. this'll become important later in our analysis.
(hello beautiful)
okay, so we've established that mike is critical to the plot. will is also critical to the plot. now i'll start making actual connections that matter.
let's go back to season 4, episode 1. el writes a lovely letter to mike with a really interesting phrase.
(snagged this picture from reddit. it's from a collector box)
el starts her letter by saying:
"joyce says time is funny like that. emotions can make it speed up or slow down. we are all time travelers if you think about it."
when i was rewatching s4 after volume 1 of s5 dropped, i was immediately gagged by this line because it helps make sense of not only season 4, but season 5.
from the beginning of the show, we've seen multiple references to the hit film back to the future that was released in 1985.
our first parallel happens within the first five minutes of s1 ep1.
this is marty mcfly, the protagonist of back to the future.
this is wiw, of course!
their outfits are very similar.
we also have doped-up steve and robin watching back to the future at starcourt in s3:
and, of course, when poor joyce gets fleeced by will and robin in s5 by leaving her to "fix the flux capacitor":
not to mention harrington's precious beamer that goes hurtling through SPACE AND TIME:
there are even some out-of-universe references to back to the future that we can discuss, if we're going meta. the stranger things VFX team has shirts like this:
(pulled this from reddit as well. someone found it at a thrift store in atlanta. curious.)
and matthew modine (papa), who doesn't appear in s5, posted about the s5 premiere, captioning his instagram with "see you back in the future". (forgive me, i don't have a screenshot because i abhor instagram and i'm not going to log in just to grab that. someone can add it in the reblogs).
FINALLY, lucas is dressed just like future marty in the snl skit about finding el in iceland and joking about conformitygate.
there are enough parallels, both in-universe and out, that suggest it is more than just nostalgic movie references. so what does it mean? the characters are all time travelers?
well, sort of.
we know that, canonically, the upside down is stuck on the day that will goes missing: november 6th, 1983.
but from the outset of the show, we learn that movement is parallel between the upside down and the rightside up. everyone can see each other, hear each other, and even use telemetry trackers and get a radio signal.
so the upside down isn't the past-- not in a "different timeline" sort of way. it's more like a snapshot of hawkins on the day that will went missing/el opened the gate. i've seen people suggest that will created the upside down in an image of something comforting to him, but that wouldn't explain the places he's never gone/things he hasn't seen like nancy's diary.
it's not a parallel universe. it's just a snapshot of one.
getting that out of the way, the real time travel isn't physically going back in time-- although i've seen a lot of good theories about that. it's more about going back in time via memories and emotion.
our first experience with this is through the nina project in s4. el wakes up in a memory and it loops several times as she tries to escape:
well, well, well, sleepyhead!
panicked and confused, el has to navigate her way through her own memories to discover the truth about vecna and the massacre at hawkins lab. until she calms herself down with papa's instructions, she can't really do jack shit and keeps repeating the memory.
it's not a classic time loop. she's in her own head. but it is a time-memory-loop. she can discover (alongside the viewers) her lost memories of the past.
we've seen her go into memories before, as early as s2 when terry shows el her memories, and in s3 when she's able to get into billy's memories and then max's in s4.
she's time traveling-- through people's brains.
henry basically does the same thing in order to prey on his victims, drawing out their most traumatic memories and harnessing that negative energy.
remember that little bit about time moving slowly/quickly depending on emotions?
in order to "join worlds" as henry calls it, he doesn't need just physical space-- he needs time. space AND time are the key ingredients to the creation of the new world.
time slows down with negative emotion, and speeds up with positive emotion.
el is stuck in the loop until she harnesses her emotions to discover the truth of the lab massacre and one.
max is stuck in the loop until holly's arrival spurs her to shift from an attitude of despair to an attitude of courage to escape.
that's why, although weakening the boundary between hawkins and the upside down, vecna's serial murder of the teens in s4 didn't work to merge worlds. time is too slow when negative emotions, like traumatic memories, are at play.
time and space speed up exponentially when you have twelve kids giggling and roughhousing in your fantasy mansion with sweets and games and music.
if my theory is correct, negative energy cracks the edges of dimensions-- killing the teens via trauma, terrorizing will for a billion episodes straight, even el sending henry into dimension x/the abyss in the first place. even the mindflayer contacting henry via the mysterious rock.
but positive energy?
positive energy will send worlds HURLING towards each other.
that's why the plan worked. henry was able to create an illusion so powerful that time itself sped up, allowing that "merge" of worlds to happen way quicker than the gang initially thought.
that's why once they're in the upside down, something has already shifted-- thematically, dialogue-wise, etc. because they lost. the worlds already merged.
so... how did it happen? how was vecna able to slow everyone down enough to start his ritual and merge worlds?
by a really massive distraction.
vecna's lies, perfectly planted in will's head at the right time, were the key to distracting everyone.
THIS ISN'T TO SAY THAT THE COMING OUT SCENE WASN'T NARRATIVELY IMPORTANT. I'M NOT SAYING THAT AT ALL, BECAUSE IT IS. IT'S VERY IMPORTANT AND WE'LL TALK ABOUT IT LATER.
it's to say that if i was an evil villain trying to keep a gang of losers and outcasts from thwarting my evil plan, i'd use their secret nuclear weapon against himself and have a sit-down talk.
all while i merge dimensions.
in my next part we'll circle back to my points about mike, but i gotta go screw around at symphony rehearsal for a few hours.
i believe in conformity gate in the sense that the duffers like saying fuck conformity and then turning around and making their characters conform anyway bc they as straight white men don't know shit about non-conformity and what it actually looks like.
My current bottom place bullshit theory is that this whole thing was an attempt to push AI being good and it backfired horribly. (Or maybe a giant elaborate anti AI plot?? Like being pushed by execs to use AI and then them letting it flop horribly so Netflix second guesses letting it happen again?? I highly doubt this for the record but my brain won't shut the fuck up.)
Iâm sick of the language that people in these tags are using.
âI feel schizophrenic.â Or âSchizophrenic Mike.â or some other bullshit.
Believe me, please! Believing in an internet theory about a TV SHOW is NOTHING like being schizophrenic.
Mike had a hallucination or false memory of saying goodbye to his friend before he lost her because he never got the chance to before. OR Vecna gave him that vision. Schizophrenic people arenât the only people who have hallucinations, anyway.
For a group that constantly says they root for the outcasts and are mad at the Duffers for putting them down, yaâll love to put down an extremely marginalized group of people.
And when I try to tell people, they are just like âSorry :/â AND DONâT CHANGE ANYTHING!
Please stop using this language!
Sincerely, someone who actually suffers because of this illness.
I am like. A grown ass adult woman with a job and a rent and a family and a life and i was no more than like a casual stranger things fan at best.
But the confirmitygate thing... never in my life have i been so entirely consumed by a fandom theory. Seeing everyone coming together with their evidence and all the youtube videos debunking everything and thd pure joy and excitement in the tags and the tag trending and reaching mainstream media and the anticipation and everything!!!! I felt like i was a teenage fangirl all over again for a little moment there. I was just so genuinely excited. This was so fun and wholesome, this will go down in fandom history. I will never forget this moment.
If conformity gate isnât real you shouldnât be embarrassed about believing it, about wanting the show to be good. The duffers should be embarrassed about writing this fucking ass of an ending. So bad even the GA didnât like it, so bad EVEN THEY are waiting for this supposed 9th episode
conformitygate is real but not in the âsecret ninth episodeâ kinda way itâs just so incredibly meta that the duffer brothers who consistently claimed they were against conformity ended up being the exact ones who conformed along with the ga and theres only a few of us who actually understand that.
thatâs the real conformitygate. stranger things ended up being a lesson about a failed lesson.
Actually thinking about that scene where Kali is running through the hallway of pregnant women dying all in very obvious late stage pregnancy tied down on tables in the upside down and thinking about the mental toll that would take on me. Like. Absolutely full body horror and like they just never talked about it after that? Obviously the realization that they were only there because of her. Only dying because of her. I'd be suicidal too.
