Corruptiongate p.3: Bad parent Jim Hopper, byler field scenes and Will taken to the Lab (p.1, p.2 + bonus, p.4)
It’s a theory based on cues hinting that m11 is byler in s3, the idea of which is the show being built upon corrupted memories. There are more significant posts revealing what exactly was altered (links will be below), but the ones based on El’s character, explaining cues around her, are its base.
Have you ever felt that Hopper yelling at El the way hatred for him feels with the whole body is in the heaviest way ooc after everything he’s done by this time? That’s because it’s not Hopper.
If you know corruptiongate, then you probably know how suspicious El’s room in s3 m11 scenes is. T85 didn’t make it ‘easier’, turning orange objects (as if orange being Vecna’s colour wasn’t enough) into pink and placing the bird poster in two rooms at once (in part 1 I theorised what it can mean, but I’d genuinely recommend to keep up with all three main posts).
What stood out for me this time is that s2 room looks nothing like s3 room (as if s3 room is not real at all): the walls are not green, the curtains are not yellow, and even El’s bedside table is different.
And, as much as t85 timeline is questionable (pretending to be post s2, while it heavily feels like post s5), I mind you: if anything in T85 even is real, it wouldn’t make sense for s2 to end at Snowball in the end of December with no plans for Hop and El to renovate her room, and in two weeks to have a fully new look for it (as T85 takes place in the middle of January). And even if we dismiss t85 as it’s still not a continuation of s2, but of s5, take into consideration just the og show and imagine that even though they had half a year till July to do that, it still doesn’t seem reasonable, as El lived with Hop for almost one year, they prepared the place for it, but they never coloured the walls and didn’t have a reason to do it urgently for s3.
Now I need to take you back to the opening scene of the episode: it has a parallel that I caught later in the notorious scene of the fight between El and Hopper. Let’s check how Will is doing (not great).
… your little what trip? your little field what? 👀
1️⃣ In the show playing a lot with a topic of drug trips, is what Will experienced at the field anything but a trip 💨? (yes, that’s trippygate over here)
2️⃣ Who are we even looking at this scene? Who is Hopper speaking to? Is it Will?
Let’s move for a second to the way Hopper grounds El: he forbids her to watch TV. The show playing (and the shot implies that she likes it) is Cheers… who else, as we know, loves this show?
Doesn’t it seem reasonable that out of all kids Will would be the one loving Cheers, bc he used to watch it with his mother?
I started the post claiming that this is not Hopper. You know, as many times as I watched this scene, I always tried to excuse Hopper as his arc is surely constructed to make us want to trust him, and bc of that this scene feels like a whiplash.
I get that people can lose their temper, even (or especially lol) when it comes to their kids, and we know that he’s so nervous for El etc… It seems like we have every reason to understand him even here, but his anger looks too beastly, not normal at all, so, the way he behaves throws us off.
I caught the feeling of something being wrong about Hopper behaving like this again this time with a thought yelling in my head “this can’t be him”, so I started rewatching trying to understand how it is even possible that it’s not him… That’s when I found the field line. That’s when I suddenly understood that the kid kept in the cabin is Will, and the bad parent is not Jim Hopper, but Lonnie Byers, known for suspicions in kidnapping his own son since the very beginning of the show.
There is a theory that Lonnie was the one to take his kid to the Lab for money, as we know that he’s very capable of it as he infamously known for not giving a damn about his family at all. And he’s also of course disgustingly homophobic.
We know Will’s powers are “innate”, so he was a person of interest for the Lab: it also explains all the supernatural stuff El does in the scene.
Now, remember the weird drawing of Paladin that El had in her s3 room that made no sense (weird bc she doesn’t care and knows nothing about D&D, has no idea who Paladin is, doesn’t draw as good as Will, there’s no reason for her to have this depiction of Mike at all)? If we consider those s3 scenes as Will’s corrupted memories, it suits perfectly well: he lives with Lonnie (not all El’s scenes are his, but at least a specific one is) and has a drawing of Mike as Paladin on his wall. Lonnie hides Will, doesn’t let him leave, the only thing that can support Will is a drawing of Mike.
Looks like Will escaped from the Lab/was taken back by Lonnie, but Lonnie doesn’t want to be caught, and his supernatural kid is his pain in the ass. He still has contacts of the Lab though, and he still threatens Will to take him back:
Meanwhile, he manipulates or even truly believes that he’s doing something good for them both, Will included: let’s say he’s the shittiest parent, but probably still thinks that Brenner is evil, worse than him, so he explains himself, let’s Will know that he keeps him safe, but also…
confirms that he is in danger too. Will’s being found by anyone is not in his interests.
Maybe Lonnie doesn’t hate Will to the point where he wouldn’t feed him, for example (and that’s where good-parenting lines saving Hopper’s character in this scene build not pure evil-but still disgusting bad father Lonnie Byers), maybe he found out something he didn’t like about the Lab/stopped getting money from there, and decided to take Will back. But he surely despises his own son enough to do egregiously awful things to him (still believing that teaching and feeding him in that environment is enough to demand gratefulness and obedience).
I hope the idea of Will being into Cheers makes even more sense now as it’s literally the show he used to watch with his mother, when everything was alright, and which now helps him to feel safe and to remember the way life was going before.
Now that we look at Hop and El seeing Lonnie and Will, this line also reads (and hits) differently:
Will, not being able to see Mike for over a year (almost a year in the cabin and god knows how long while he was in the Lab), knowing that Mike still believes he’s alive (canonical events of Will’s going missing and El’s presumably being dead interestingly match here, and absolutely add up to each other, being just one storyline about Mike never giving up on Will), surely misses him, draws him and quotes him, which pisses Lonnie off.
Will desperately wants to see Mike, and Lonnie knows that. We also know how Lonnie calls him and can assume that he suspects that Mike is the one “not just a friend” to Will making him “queer”. And now even this question, that already had two layers, reveals the third:
Where’d you go on your little trip?
From Mike. To Mike.
Coming back to the first post of corruptiongate: Does it mean s3 m11/byler-kiss is a part of Will’s life at Lonnie’s? I don’t think so. (But Ig it’s time to finish my old theory of what is really going on with s3 through s5 lens.) Surely, not every scene of El and Hopper could be read as Will and Lonnie, so, most likely it has other explanations; however, El substituting Will barely leaves her as her own character with her own plotline. She might represent another character (Sara? still Jane but not Eleven?) in the right timeline/reality, but with every new detail El, as we know her, seems to be more of a concept and not her own character.
Now I suggest you watching the full scene with new eyes, and please pay attention to the OST (it starts being heard around the middle of the scene), it sounds eerie, but in a sci-fi way, like it implies that something scientific happens in this scene: like, a corrupted memory being loaded into the brain of a receiver, laying in the Nina machine, and only the sound directly gives it away.
I’ll finish this post with a picture of Hopper with matrixgate cue, i.e. blue and red [pills].
After all, if El is not fully real, it can mean that the whole storyline was corrupted since the very beginning, so we didn’t have just Snowball as the point of no return, but some memory fuckery was happening all the way through.
[ main theory posts ] [ more corruptiongate key posts ]
❗️bonus post: Will (as El) checking on Mike
_____________________________________________// tagging those who were interested in the crazy shit I found yesterday and who liked my comment where I mentioned proofs for s1-2 corruption: @sorafyr3 @gritstartar @itswhatyougive @warmglowhc @rgwriter@sidoniemoon @cypher-heart-no-key @eclecticmentalitytheorist @solariansea @wrathfulstarlightcavern @bbghostbones
I’m tempted to watch Joyce Byers borrowing the butterflies from Anna Baxter (looking like Joyce Byers) to leave with them to Lenora… or did they buy them at the market? At Starcourt? or did Anna give away them when she and Nikki left Hawkins?
Or is it all just absolute bullshit indicating that this all again is happening in one place*, not in Lenora or not in some Baxter family house?
* butterflies symbolise time/mind fuckery, but also I suspect that the bird poster indicates that El’s room is indeed Mike’s basement, and it was an illusionary part back in s3 (and that could mean that s3 is corrupted and not completely real). but now these butterflies? even without any symbolism I got so excited seeing Joyce’s butterflies in Baxter’s house, I almost screamed
I almost felt bored watching it, and that was a moment of sincere excitement… again, it was a choice to depict them there… which also stresses that those butterflies in s4 fr meant something. It seems to be obvious that everything in the shot was approved, but when it’s live action, you can assume that someone didn’t care about details, however, when it’s drawn, it’s a completely different story…
so um yeah… can it mean that these scenes, in Baxter’s house and in Lenora indeed happen in one place (like with the bird poster), not in two? (Maybe even in the 3rd place, and both aren’t real)
another detail that changed colour from orange to pink in El’s room
and yep, in tales there’s no fuck ass butterfly there, there’s a flower picture instead, maybe no butterflies and prevailing orange colours bc m11 is not happening in that room?
