There's spelling a word so horribly wrong that even spell check can't help you, then there spelling a word so wrong(?) you stumble upon its spelling in another language
Camazotz, Dreams, Stories and a secret fourth thing
When I was watching the last few episodes of this season of st I just couldn't understand what Vecna was even trying to do. I mean what does he even mean by reshaping the world ? And How ? It's not like we've ever seen him actually build or change the nature of anything, he just scares people and kills them. Maybe this was a just a strange way to say that he would infect the world with Mind Flayer particules, but even that is a stretch. But as barely anything made sense anyway I burshed it off at the time.
Now with my conformitygate glasses I tried to look into it again and it took me a while and 400 layers on photoshop to put the literal pieces together but I think I got something solid. Also Paprika.
So strap on, we've got a LOT to cover.
Edit: I'm now calling this theory paprikagate for the sake of clarity
First off let's quickly go over what Camazotz is, it comes in two parts:
First it is presented as a prison by Max, a labyrinth of memories, often painful, that is made to make you suffer by forcing you to relive your own trauma. This is where Vecna takes his victims after he curses them.
From the moment that his victims are cursed, all the following memories are then stored in his mind, adding new rooms to the labyrinth. That’s where Max ended up when Jane brought her back from the dead. She was first stuck inside Henry’s memory but found a way to access her own memories when Lucas held her hand and played her song.
"Like a nightmare prison world ruled by an evil, psychopathic piece of shit."
"Camazotz is like this dark planet that's under the control of IT, which is this giant disembodied, evil brain."
Max describes Camazotz as a nightmare while Holly likens it to a planet.
The other part is the one where Henry traps Holly and the other kids, the Creel manor. Henry remodeled his own memory of the house that he grew up in to create a world that looks perfectly happy and peaceful, a sanctuary. However we know that this is just a facade, for some reason he needs the kids to cooperate so he created this fantasy to lull them into a false sense of security.
One thing interesting to note is that although he was able to turn the Creel Manor into a bright place this world is very small, he forbids the kids to wander past the playground because they would soon find out that this place isn’t real. I imagine that is because Henry’s power is limited and creating a vast illusion like this isn’t easy to do for him. Despite how convincing the manor is, it’s still a part of Camazotz and therefore the kids could easily find themselves accidentally wandering into the other parts of the labyrinth.
This part of Camzotz is dreamlike, it's perpetually sunny there. There are banquets of cakes and candies, toys and the wardrobes are stocked with pretty dresses.
His MO in season 4 it the following; first he tortures his victims psychologically, inflicting horrific visions until he pulls them into a trance and kills them. He used to present himself as the monster that he is, haunting and terrorizing his victims, much like Freddy Kruger and IT. He used the deepest fears of his vicims against them to create their own personal nightmares.
However we see this season that he does the exact opposite with the kids, instead of openly scaring them, he becomes their friend and gains their trust. And he does this with gifts and half-truths. More preciseley he inverts the truth. We're going to put a pin that.
He tells the kids that the manor is their santuary when it is their prison.
He presents himself as their savior when he is their captor.
He tells them that the monsters are hiding in the woods when talking about Max.He tells Holly that the only comfort that her parents have is knowing that she is safe with him.
So he he lies but only partially, and that's what is so convincing to the kids, because to them it sounds like he is revealing truths. Now with that we can try to look into what he tells them for clues about his plans.
He keeps talking about reshaping the world, and he did so back in season 4 as well, but Vecna/Henry doesn't have the abilitiy to actually build anything as far as we know. His goals seem really vague, he doen't even says what he wants his perfect world to be like.
Let's first go back to season 4 and his monologue to Jane.
"Like you I didn't fit in with the other children. Something was wrong with me. All the teachers and doctors said I was… “Broken” they said. My parents thought a change of scenery, a fresh start in Hawkins, might just cure me. It was absurd. As if the world would be any different here."
He blames the world he lives in for making him feel different and ostracizing him. He was an outcast, alone and misunderstood by the people around him. He then likens himself to Jane despite the fact that he participated in pitting her against the other kids, encouraging her to compete with them when he knew what Dr Brenner was doing. He could’ve helped the other kids too, making them realise that the competition was only created for the benefit of their captors but he was never after true human connection.
He does not want to break the cycle. No, he was trying, much like Brenner, to create a new him. A cold and inhumane killer. So he made Jane feel like him, alone, ostracized and broken, hoping that she would see what he does, that she too, would choose to hurt others in an attempt to feel whole.
"But the human world was disrupting this harmony. You see, humans are a unique type of pest, multiplying and poisoning our world, all while enforcing a structure of their own. A deeply unnatural structure.
Where others saw order, I saw a straitjacket. A cruel, oppressive world dictated by made-up rules. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades. Each life a faded, lesser copy of the one before. Wake up, eat, work, sleep, reproduce, and die. Everyone is just waiting. Waiting for it all to be over. All while performing in a silly, terrible play, day after day."
Time was nothing but a constraint to him, he hated the rules that were imposed on him by his parents, his teacher and eventually Brenner. His vision of the world is very bleak, he sees the mundanity of work and the performance of happiness that his parents put on as lies but to him there is nothing underneath those lies, no love, no dreams, just nothing but the slow wait for death.
Existence is utterly hollow in his eyes, he felt trapped in a prison that he couldn’t escape from. So one would think that this is strange then that his motif is clocks and time itself, especially when he tells Jane that he wants freedom.
"I could make my own rules. I could restore balance to a broken world. A predator… but for good."
He says that he wants to make his own rules, but even when he is able to create illusions he can’t seem to be able to ever break away from the world that he hates so much. He is only capable of hate, to the point where it looks like it’s physically consuming him.
His vision of freedom is not to break free of the rules and to abolish them but instead to become the enforcer. That's why he made Camazotz. He is unable to conceive true freedom because he is blindsided by his hatred. It narrows his own personal world, reducing it to the view that he has of everything else, a prison. Reshaping the world to him only means that he will recreate the oppressive systems that have hurt him in order to become the oppressor on top. There is no place in his vision of the world for love, beauty or kindness, he does not understand these concepts. To him there are only preys and predators.
"I saw my parents as they truly were. To the world, they presented themselves as good, normal people. But like everything else in this world, it was all a lie. A terrible lie."
So, just like his parents, he uses lies and deceit to use and hurt others. He chose to perpetuate the cycle himself to gain a sense of control, that’s what he is after, revenge and total control over the people that he sees as beneath him. His parents made him feel like an actor in his own life and Brenner tried to puppet him and turn him into nothing more than a tool for violence. So he became a puppet master and a stage director. He appropriated for himself the tools that oppressed him, including time.
When he talks to the kids he tells them this:
"In my travels I discovered another world. A world far from Earth. This world is much like ours, only... good. Free of monsters and darkness. It is the light."
And to Will he says this:
"Some minds, it turns out, simply do not belong in this world.
They belong in mine"
As he points to his head, the world he is refering to is Camazotz.
"With each life I took I grew stronger."
"They're still with me. In here."
He consumes people's mind to strenghten his own.
When he talks about reshaping the world, he talks about Camazotz, he reshapes memories, that's his power, his entire MO. When he says that he wants to "draw the worlds together" I believe that he wants to merge reality and Camazotz, he wants to project his mind into the physical world to create a world of lies and be its master. And I think that's also why he chose Hawkins' library as the junction for the cracks splitting Hawkins.
We rarely get a good view of it but the library has a belfry. Vecna seeks control, and what better sit of power for him than a clock tower to be the master of time. He took 12 kids for the same reason, he uses them to amplify his power and 12 stands for the hours on a clock. He wants to trap all of Hawkins into HIS own personal nightmare, that is of course conformity.
"Each life a faded, lesser copy of the one before."
Plenty of people have made posts analysing in depths the epilogue and theorizing that it's all fake so I won't expand on it, but we'll work on the assumption that it is an illusion.
When looking into this I was wondering if Vecna's illusions were real or not at the end. Is this a Matrix situation where everyone's minds are trapped in a fake wolrd while their bodies are left to wither and eventually die ? Or is this Paprika where dreams bleed into the real world ?
And the more I thought about it the more I saw some really intersting parallels with Paprika. Was this an excuse to watch it again ? Absolutely. But I also found many more parallels than I originally expected to the point that I think it might have been an inspiration for this season.
For those who haven't seen or don't know about the movie, Paprika is an animated movie released in 2006 about the duality of dreams and reality. Dreams both as in what we dream of at night and what they represent and our personal aspirations. I will try not to spoil to much of the plot for those who might want to watch it.
In the world of Paprika, a genius scientist, Okita, has invented the DC mini, a device that allows two people to share a dream. This device was created for psychotherapeutic purposes, it allows the therapist to help the patient explore their trauma safely within their dream to confront them and heal. The device records and can broadcast the dream on a computer, allowing a third person to monitor what's happening inside.
However someone steals a DC mini and starts to invade people's dreams, infecting them with a the dream from a patient with severe delusions. And he even invades their dreams while they are awake, meaning they fully believe that they are in a dream and act as such. People start spewing nonsense and jumping from windows, thinking they are flying.
They can't escape the dream on their own and are unable to recognise what's real anymore.
It starts to get worse when Atsuko, a dream therapist notices that her colleague who was trapped in a dream and is still sleeping isn't dreaming. She can't access his dream from the computer despite the fact that he is still asleep.
"it's as if their cousciousness itself has been taken away."
This is exactly what happens to Max and Will when they get trapped in Camazotz, their cousciousness, their mind isn't in their body anymore. Jane can't find them at all.
The dream terrorist starts merging people's dreams meaning all the people that he traps are all sharing the same delusional dream together. They are "invaded by a collective dream".
This is what he says about this collective dream.
"In a world of inhumane reality... it is the only sanctuary left. That is a dream.
The parade is full of refugees who were unwillingly chased out of reality."
"There are no boundaries to dreams. The spirit will be freed from the constraints of the body and gain limitless freedom."
That's very similar to how Henry talks, how he felt constrained by the world, he wanted to break free of it, that's what he told Jane. He invited her to follow him and be "trully free". He sees spiders as gods and wants to become one, just like the antagonist in Paprika.
"I control the dreams and even death."
And speaking of Henry, during his spiel to the kids, he says something when he talks about drawing the worlds together that I find odd everytime I watch it.
"And as the light... reaches the darkness, the light will expel the darkness, your loved ones will be saves and you, you will be heroes."
The themes of night and day come back alot in Paprika, night representing the realm of dreams while the day is waking reality. More specifically there is one scene that struck me when rewatching it. In the dream there is a giant parade, and the guide of the parade appears to chase out the invaders, he says the following:
"The sun during midday will light up the dark night.
Night dreams of day.
Light dreams of darkness.
But the ignorant sun will chase away the darkness and burn the shadows, eventually burning itself."
The night represents the dream, and near the end of the movie the dreams and reality merge together, causing chaos and death. This dialogue forshadows that.
Now it's time to go back to the pin, how Henry inverts the truth, he called Hawkins the darkness and "his world" the light. But just like in Paprika, Hawkins is reality, the physical world, it is the light and Camazotz is the darkness and it will eclipse Hawkins.
Camazotz isn't made of dreams but it's compared to nightmares by Max and it works very similarly to how dreams do. Doors will lead to completely different places, breaking a panel in a merry-go-round leads to a mirror in a wall and much like dreams it's a place of repressed trauma. Vecna himself is designed after Freddy Kruger after all. So it's fair to say that Vecna and Camazotz are heavily thematically tied to dreams and nightmares.
Now I'd like to talk about the other part of the movie that made me decide to make this post about Paprika.
Here are Atsuko (on the left), a dream therapist and Parpika, her dream self. Paprika is spontaneous, soft, bubbly and very expressive while Atsuko is the exact opposite, she’s very serious and quiet, with a lot of sharp angles, she’s not very approachable and doesn’t show emotion easily.
They are the two halves of the same person but they are disconnected. Whilst Atsuko enters other people's dream she can't see her own, she considers Paprika to be a completely different person from herself. When talking about her, she refers to "her" saying for example that she'll "pass the message to Paprika".
Paprika represents her childlike wonder, her innermost desires and her aspirations. She is very playful and enjoys childish things, the same one that Atsuko holds in contempt. As a result Atsuko doesn't accept her, she represses her feelings and ends up pushing away the man she loves as a result.
Now I'm sure you see where I'm going with this, Paprika is Will the Wizard, she is the repressed queerness of Will and his desire for happiness. She is all the parts that he doesn't accept and tries to hide. She is Holly the Heroic and Mike the Brave.
When Atsuko finally accepts Paprika and what she represents, it gives her the strength she needs to defeat the antagonist. She is finally able to dream again and to confess her love for her the man she loves.
Just like Will accepting his queerness and childlike wonder gave him the power to fight back against Vecna.
She's become true to herself hasn't she ?
This is said at the end of Atsuko after she has accepted herself fully. Being true means embracing all the parts of herself and following her heart.
"We stay true to ourselves."
I already talked at length about how important truth is this season in my previous posts so I won't go into it here but this echoes what Dustin says in ep 1 about refusing to blend in.
"It's truth that came from fiction."
One of the characters has overcome their trauma and realised that they never abandoned their dreams, he lived the stories that he would dream of and lived out their dream in a way. Just like Holly found courage in Holly the Heroic the divine cleric.
Both stranger things and Paprika talk about truth as refenrencing one's inner child and wonder. Robin says that accepting herself, her truth freed her from all the fear and doubt that weighed her down. Holly can't cast spells of protection or ward off evil spirits but she found real bravery in that story. And the first thing that she did when she entered the deam part of Camazotz was to become Holly the Heroic by dressing up like her.
Vecna uses lies to imprison his victims whilst Will embracing himself frees him from his control. Lies are stories and the stories that Vecna tells are devoid of love and creativity, they only twist and corrupt reality. The lies, the stories that Vecna tells are used to oppress, conceal and weaken. Mike tells stories to empower and inspire his friends to fight and be themselves, to embrace their inner truth.
Now I believe that Hawkins is trapped in an illusion, that either Vecna can influence the physical world with his illusions or that his illusion or so convincing that everyone is unable to distinguish between what is real and what isn't. That they are living and going about their day while being trapped in a dream that isn't physically real.
Personally I'd really like to think that he managed to make his illusions real, that would be fascinating and to me it sounds like that's what he was trying to do.
As a bonus here's a few more fun parallels here and there, I won't go into details because this post is long enough already but I'll go over them quickly :
This amusement park is important to the story, it's where the dream where the giant parade was first implanted. And I noticed that the playground in front of the Camazotz Creel house has the exact same colors than the wheel. I was wondering why it was red white and blue like this and this is an interesting coincidence if it is one.
The movie gets pretty meta with talks about moviemaking and Paprika watching a client's dream in a theater while she's in his dream.
There's also some circus imagery, Paprika rides a spaceship-ship at the begining of the movie and the secret place where she meets people is an internet cafe called the radio club.
Edit: there's this very short shot where Paprika is trying to follow someone that went through a wall, when she tries to go through herself it turns white goop and reminded me of the Nancy/Jonathan scenes in Brenner's lab. It sounds like a stretch but here it is anyway.
((I adore Ferdinand the Fox, I have only known him 30 minutes and I would die for him
however i must disclose that the history nerd in me has been trying and failing to craft an Archduke Franz Ferdinand joke. Like Gavrilo Princep, I'll find it eventually. By accident.
while doing a hot print of a contract, I was trying to think of the name of a band so I could tell Alexa to put on that radio on Spotify
but I could not for the life of me remember the name
all I had was "Fort Mac" (a place in Canada, btw)
“Haha the angel people have guns how silly angel with a Shotgun.” No but from a storytelling perspective, and an in game stream of logic, why?
Okay so if you were an artificial intelligence from a hyperadvanced space civilization trying to create an elite branch of the indigenous population to control how would you ensure your newfound civilization triumphed over their brothers who are functionally fighting with sticks and proto-magic? Maybe by giving them the means to build and utilize weapons which are demonstrably superior than any technology they’ve ever seen? Maybe by altering known constructs of weapons in order to make them accessible via the form of magic they already use? Maybe by ensuring they feel they are the dominant species by reinforcing that through advanced weaponry thus setting Laterano as an intrinsically hypermilitary society and countering that by allegedly being a neutral, peaceful state???????
what I find interesting seems to never align with what others do but when I try to take an interest in what they like I fall on my face bc I haven’t had a normal life 🧍🏻♀️can I die
