scoops troop code girls / decoding robin / ted / steve "it's obvious" shades bylers / derek is here too ig / in OST powers / infinite dereks / dustin's mentor / holly
will REALITY ITSELF / receiver / in 8 powers / jack frost / poetry / hangman / i am become death
mike chance & closures / mike’s gay fault / watcher / deviant / real boy / darth vader / sisters / white lightning / promotion for the show / Every Hearse has a Writer / The Eastern Circuit
el chimera / the day the music died / tfs notes (babygate) / more on the el cut / elsus hopchrist / 8 force / manly things / fate / clone / madoka / madwise / willmax dna / wing woman / of hearts /samsara / illusionist / el-zilla
lucas the last dragon / sisters / brother bear / master chief / balloons / THE LEGEND OF LUCAS / The Replacement / vs. the world / lightbringer
misc monty python & the pacific theatre / terror / the incident / movie reccs / sweet moment / end poem / 824 / fanart(?) / the dark knight / THE LASAGNA IS A LIE / great works / the d bros / The Touchdown / CATCH THEM IF YOU CAN
I forget to tag my posts so good luck finding everything else in here
"Door one, you take your own life. Door two, accept your fate. Or door three... You escape."
❌ You are needed by someone, or, you need your own belief in magic.
❌ We don't wave white flags on this blog.
❌ Escape...
Where? Into some imagined better world where things turn out right? That's called fantasy. Fiction.
Mike isn't gonna just walk through a portal to find El alive or byler canon. I feel like we forget that the constructions Henry makes aren't fake. They are, or were, real. Memories. Max calls them echoes. Saying the epilogue is a construct doesn't at least match with what's been established about Henry's powers. Kali can only warp pieces of reality, so she would only be able to warp aspects of those memories if 8/1 teamed up. So, they both need source material.
The epilogue is at least partly Mike's "real world".
Well, that seems bleak.
✅ Change.
Brenner tells El the story of Nina, who waited daily for her lover to arrive by train. "Leave your train station. Stop waiting. Focus. Listen. Remember."
Brenner left out that Nina never gave up, and her lover arrived.
Mike can still choose. There just isn’t a shortcut.
You don't need to escape. You just need to choose.
The symbol of the House of El means 'hope'; embodied within that hope is the fundamental belief in the potential of every person to be a force for good.
Make here your dream. Change yourself AND the world.
The unicorn was there as a star is suddenly there, moving a little way ahead of them, a sail in the dark.
You may remember that I talked about the unicorn in El’s room and how it likely represents the unicorn from Blade Runner a clue that Deckard is in fact a replicant/synthetic himself as he dreams of a unicorn and these dreams are implants.
Just like the owl can point to synthetics - as well as a being a symbol for surveillance or even the Wendigo - as the owl which is also used in the corporation’s logo is synthetic. The logo does appear on Dr. Tyrell’s robe
Sidenote: the crest of House Tyrell in Game of Thrones is heavily inspired by the Tudor rose – the whole plot is essentially a fantasy version of the War of the Roses to which ST itself points to.
Anyway, another possible reference for the unicorn is The Last Unicorn - both Peter S. Beagle’s novel from 1968 and the movie from 1982.
Why?
Because of this paragraph:
Molly said, “If Lír is the hero, what is she?”
“That’s different. Haggard and Lír and Drinn and you and I—we are in a fairy tale, and must go where it goes. But she is real. She is real.” Schmendrick yawned and hiccupped and shivered all at once.
The Youtube Video that inspired this post:
“She is real.”, as Schmendrick says. And turned a unicorn into a human, and she learns about mortality, love, what it means to be human … there's this statement by the Duffers of El being a representation of childhood magic which everyone enrages. On the surface level, I get that, until you get to the unicorn that is also a representation of childhood magic.
From the novel:
Where have you been?" she cried. "Damn you, where have you been?" [...]
"I am here now," she said at last.
Molly laughed with her lips flat. "And what good is it to me that you're here now? Where where you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?" With a flap of her hand she summed herself up: barren face, desert eyes, and yellowing heart.
Where have you been? she cried. Damn you, where have you been? She took a few steps toward Schmendrick, but she was looking beyond him, at t
I shortened the paragraph a bit. What does tell us? Not much except it sounds as if Molly met a unicorn when she was younger? Are only children able to see her? Or people that kept a childlike view and fascination? “Where have you been?” – If we think of childhood magic then the unicorn as a metaphor for that makes sense. You have these things, unicorn, dragons, your imagination can run amok and it was much easier to go into these worlds of imagination. The older you get you seem to lose the ability because you have to deal with the world as it is as much as this childhood magic, this capability of imagination at least to a degree and in its more innocent form, seems to drift away. Not necessarily for everyone in the same way but social conformity is trying to put people into a mold.
Look at the ending of ST. Characters that are barely 20 suddenly have midlife crisis and a new generation takes turn playing the games they played and they aren’t allowed to do so because they adults now? This is what it feels like. Conformity. Conform to an adult life. Game time is over.
That is what a good portion of society thinks I’d argue ; if you keep going as an adult, barely anyone will openly judge you but adults that still do this, playing games, going on conventions, dressing as their favorite character …that is at least be seen as odd by many.
And even if you can keep this imagination alive, reality has its ways to ground you because you have to care about certain things kids don’t have to.
What if it is this that Molly is talking about? The loss of childhood magic, of innocence , of the capability to imagine things . – Mommy Fortuna is the counter point as she uses deceptions and illusions to make people believe to see what isn’t there like for example a manticore. Something wonderous. Yet the unicorn is real. And the harpy.
Although we see some kids in the movie that fall for Fortuna's illusions as well - maybe if we interpret them as losing this kind of view on the world because they are raised in a way that pushes them to become adults way to early (think medieval times)? - Wasn't there a line by Hopper echoing this idea? Like grow the hell up!?
She's real.
The connection is just there, the "Free Max - coax" (coaxial cables are mostly silver-plated with a inner copper core called Seele/Soul) as talked about here, is therefore hard to ignore.
But wait, does that mean there are two unicorns? Well. The unicorn is an idea - just like you can see certain ideas split between characters, that aren't necessarily meant to be exactly the same character but are thematical mirrors and/or parallels.
Which is why a moment such as El drawing Max, staring at us through that drawing and saying "This is Max." is so obvious. It's so in your face that it gets disregard, yet it holds truth over any interpretation. It's just there. On screen. Literally and figuratively one could say - or that chiastic structured moment of Kali, El and Max, which is as subtle as it is obvious.
So, Kali and El cross each other thematically and literally, like the unicorn and the harpy, yet, at least as far as I know only El has a unicorn in her room. So, she stands out. Such as Amalthea. Who learned what it means to be a human.
And only Max is allowed to ask the question "Did I make you?" in this connection (which is btw mathematically insane but I'll get to this later), it's almost, well, logical that Max asks this.
As a unrelated sidenote: it is interesting that Christopher Lee dubbed "himself" in the Last Unicorn because he spoke like 5+ languages including German.
Skip right away to 1:11 when he's interviewed and hes speaking a few words, a bit further into the video there are clips of the German version.
Gone in 60 seconds
The Shelby GT 500 or Eleanor as she's called is Randall "Memphis" Raines "unicorn", a car he never catches in a manner of speaking.
Look at Otto's chalkboard - the cars have numbers, counting from 1 to 50. Eleanor is the number 47 on it.
47.... 11 and 47 is the atomic number of silver.
Shelby GT 500 Eleanor
19,8,5,12,2,25,7,20,5,12,5,1,14,15,18 = 168
168+500=668 ;6+6+8=20
1+6+8+5=20
And who is called Eleanor? Oh, yeah. El. (Is S1 El truly El or her look just bamboozled us?) And she's in disguise. Huh. That rings a bell, doesn't it? Like Lady Amalthea is a disguise. El in disguise? As a human?
And as a sidenote. El wears this wig and we get this imagery indicating that she's wearing Max's hair like a wig to disguise herself as someone else.
And in regard to Eleanor listed as number 47. Silver. Max in 4x7 (cats that walk through walls).
The Ford Mustang's emblem.
And that horse at times "eats" a snake because they put a V8 Cobra engine into the Mustang. Hedgehog. Mongoose.
💬 1 🔁 3 ❤️ 7 · Why are we still here?
Just to suffer?
...
The snake-eater, indeed.
Argos... 🤣🤣
Because why not... I guess.
Goose.
M
That horse is a ship
Phoenician trading ships were called Hippos or Hippoi by the greeks.
I did... Hippoi means: Horse. They had horses as figureheads. (link for image source down below)
Trading ship - A deal with God. A ship, as it's commonly used as a term for relationship. A ship that on the flip side of this story is probably the best option to actually win. There's a reason why they are kept apart.
A horse with a "Lone Ranger" on it. Silver. A spirit horse:
💬 0 🔁 7 ❤️ 31 · Sprite · Here we go again...
Mike holds up M&Ms asking El if her "species" likes M&Ms. (And we just learned that species
These ships were small and fast. Fast like the Argo, the Millennium Falcon or our speed queen.
💬 7 🔁 4 ❤️ 22 · The greatest ship of all time · The greatest trick the Devil Duffers ever pulled…
…was to convince the world that they ha
And the falcon points to Ra, Horus and Khonsu. But that is a story for another time.
So, you see the horse and unicorn, which is by ordinary people mistaken as a white mare in The Last Unicorn, is connected to a specific character and ship. The themes fit even though we didn't get to see an actual fairy tale, which as Peter S. Beagle’s novel and the movie proofs isn't necessarily bright and shiny, but the mockery of a fairy tale. Even the darker parts, at least to me, don't feel like a fairy tale but like how big Hollywood studios would do it (granted that might be the idea). And fascinatingly the true fairy tale would - in the ST universe - then be real, while Vecna's/the Mindflayer's fairy tale is unreal and what a child would imagine. Including a pristine Hawkins, that only needs a bit of paint in some places.
Oh...and note how El does align with the unicorn behind her. Feels familiar.
Grow the hell up
Well, I'm always thinking about what the German author or children's books Erich Kästner said about that and it fits perfectly.
"Most people put their childhood away as if it was an old hat. They forget it as if it was a phone number that does not apply anymore. They think about their life as if it was a salami which they are eating slice by slice and then they become grown-ups, but what are they now? Only those who grow up and still remain children are real human beings.", Erich Kästner
Shout out to @o11yradio @bbghostbones @noreasontobeupset @nuffit @o11yradio @anonymusauros and others. Especially noreasontobeupset added so much to my work. Insane. Thanks a lot.
