Okay yeah I was already convinced that the wormhole was bs before but now it's just certain that everyone the lab is under the effect of an illusion or smth.
This is Dustin's map when the group is in the church, it's a bit hard to see but notice how Lover's Lake is inside the wall ?
Now this is his map when he compares it to "Brenner's".
And this is "Brenner's" map. Dustin's map CHANGED to match the one in the lab.
Okay so this makes the WSQK stuff I was talking to you about even weirder. Because the WSQK map matches the one in the lab. Here's like 4 different examples of it lol.
The area of town covered by the G label is west of Lovers Lake rather than north of it. Part of what I was saying about WSQK being a chess board is that the zones on the WSQK map are marked by chess notation but excluding where the black pieces (El's pieces) sit on the board.
They're scouring a playing field that Vecna's already won cos the party's pieces aren't even on the board.
When they are planning the crawl in front of Steve and Robin there are Cheez-its (if you 'cheese it' you do something really easily) a book with the letter E and a copy of the section of the map that falls in E3. Pawn to E3 is Henry's first move when he plays against El.
So basically the crawl is Henry's first step towards an easy win.
Here's a graphic of chess notations to prove it:
I already analysed some of the other chess moves and I'm hopefully going to make a post putting them all together but yeah.
It took me a minute because it was hard to see but it's definitely Dustin's map.
On the WSQK map we can clearly see Erwin road right above Old Brook (the red dot). When Steve's group is looking for Hopper he says that he is going to "turn on Erwin" and shortly after they get interference, meaning they are getting close the the wall. I drew the wall following Dustin's second map
I drew over some roads and highlighted the area to make it easier to read and recognise. Dustin's (2nd) map corresponds to the one in WSQK and to the info we get about Erwin road.
This is his first map, we can also recognise the area, literally the only thing that we see move significantly is the lake. The wall itself moves slightly, it doesn't cross Erwin street on the first map.
Like how can you be consistent on little details like making sure that the Wall is indeed close to a street we hear about just twice but not see that an entire lake moved ??? I will never believe that this is because of carelessness.
Also the lake moving when he gets to the lab reminds me of Dustin's compass progressively breaking the closer they got to watergate. There's just a lot of weird or impossible things happening in the lab idk. :p
Also the soldiers being attacked in G5 as Vecna's first move is incredibly cool ! Thanks for that addition !!
Okay yeah I was already convinced that the wormhole was bs before but now it's just certain that everyone the lab is under the effect of an illusion or smth.
This is Dustin's map when the group is in the church, it's a bit hard to see but notice how Lover's Lake is inside the wall ?
Now this is his map when he compares it to "Brenner's".
And this is "Brenner's" map. Dustin's map CHANGED to match the one in the lab.
Steve wanting to bring Nancy flowers when her parents are in the hostpital and both Jand and Hopper aare lost is yet another weird moment that can be explained by characters regressing.
This was so out of left field even for him, the only time we see him with flowers is all the way back in season 2 when he wants to apologize to Nancy for accusing her of cheating on him.
Hello and welcome to another episode of "all roads lead to byler" today, fittingly we'll talk about hearts, queer love and Will. This is the follow up to the post about Mike and traumas, so I guess it's technically part 3. I'll post the links below with a very brief rundown of the content of the posts.
Part 1 : HERE : the upside down is a memory
Part 2 : HERE : Vecna is Stradh, Hawkins is Barovia and Mike is Nina (I suggest reading this one before this post because it ties in nicely with Mike, X and the vampire references)
First we must go back to how it all started and figure out what does Henry/Vecna want with Will. I'll take a look at the most widely accepted theories, is Vecna after Will's psychic power, if he did have some, or after his creative power ?
"There is much power within you. But make no mistake, boy. They are my powers, and they are stronger than ever before. Much stronger"
this can be intertrepted two ways, either Will is indeed simply siphoning Vecna's power via their connection or Vecna is claiming ownership of Will's innate power because they were given to him through his blood like Jane and the other kids from Brenner's experiment, it's his power because it comes from him.
I think that this is the answer to the questioned directly posed to us this season, why was Will chosen. We know that Vecna went after Will deliberately, in season one when Will is about to leave Mike's house the lights flicker briefly. The light on his bike flickers when he is alone on the road before the demogorgon shows up. It went after Will and this is confirme by Vecna himself.
"At long last, we can begin. We are going to do such beautiful things together, William."
Vecna wanted Will for a specific reason, if he needed any kid for his plan he could've sent the demo after another kid when he realized that Will was hiding and evading the demo. No he needed him specifically, and the fact that he calls him by his full name seems to indicate that he had been observing him for a while now.
"But remember, I am the one. The one who invited you in."
This line perplexed me for the longest time. Invited how ? The only thing this remind me of is in s4 when Henry invites Jane to come with him, to leave the lab together and remake, reshape the world. Well, he does tell Will that he needs the kids to reshape the world, and what did he do to the kids ? He plugged them in what I assume is the hivemind and they ended up in Camaztoz, in his mind. So it's possible that he did the same for Will, he "invited him" in his mind.
If he wanted something from Will, like he wanted something from Jane he might have tried a different approach, after all when he invited her as a peer, as an equal, he got sent to litteral hell. Maybe he tried to convince Will back then by pulling him into his mind and showing him his plan and Will refused so he took away the memories so that he wouldn't remember his plan.
Either way, whatever he said or did to Will all seems to indicate that he took him inside his mind because he needed something from him, and still does. And I don't think that he needs him just as a vessel or a bridge to Hawkins because if he did then why target just Will specifically ? There are two possibilities here.
Will had latent powers, Brenner experimented with other pregnant mothers in Hawkins by finding ways to make blood transfers to them without them knowing like when they needed to go to the hospital. Vecna wanted to harvest and exploit that power for himself, and he stole Will's power like he stole Jane's in season 3. One element that could support this theory is the way that Will managed to use his power in episode 4. He remembered some early memories where he felt happy, safe and loved, similarly to Jane remembering the day of her birth and the love of her mother.
Or, Vecna wanted Will's imagination and creativity, hence why Vecna calls him his "builder". This is also one of the fondamental difference that separates Will and Henry.
While we see Henry draw directly and only from reference, Will can both draw from reference and let his imagination run wild. His passion and dedication to art is one of his defining trait and a great source of joy for him. But it's not just that, his creativity stems from the way that he sees the world, it's his ability to find beauty and create his own meaning and happiness. He used "all the colors in the box" when he drew that rainbow ship, on the other side Henry only sees the world in black and white.
His art only stems from his obsessive fascination for power. I developped more on his motivations in this post but, to sumrise, life as a whole, is completely hollow to him. Although he could see the facade and the lies of the happy familly built by his parents but to him there was nothing underneath but a slow wait for death. In his eyes there are only preys and predators, opressed and opressor. And he wants desperately to be the opressor. That's why he draws blackwidows and the mf, because they represent the supreme opressor that he wishes he was.
Vecna/Henry is empty and tries to fill that void by "emptying" others and predating on them. When he kills his victim there eyes are pulled inside their head like a black hole was opened at the back of their skull that sucked the literal life out of them. He consumes them from within and takes everything, leaving nothing but a husk behind.
Will is the cleric of the party, the healer, the artist. He heals wounds, brings light and finds meaning. He doesn't take or steal, he gives of himself to people because he is kind and sensitive and good. Will is full, full of love and care and warmth and Vecna is hollow and cold like the upside down, he is a vampire.
He needs Will's imagination whether to build the tunnel or Camazotz because he isn't creative like Will.
I believe this option is the more likely one, it makes a lot of sense thematically and narratively speaking. I think that Henry chose Will because he was both very similar to him, a young ostracised boy, and fondamentally different. Will has something that Henry/Vecna never had, passion and heart. However these two options aren't mutually exclusive and could both be true at once given how powers in st work based on strong emotions.
Now what's the deal with the heart imagery this season ? We need to look at what Vecna was telling Will and at what he was trying to accomplish with it.
"And you... You were the first . And you broke so easily. You showed me what was possible, what I could achieve. Some minds, it turns out, simply do not belong in this world. They belong in mine."
He is telling, and showing him that his queerness will always make him different, it will other him to him pears. Vecna is trying to convince him that his queerness is fondamentally alienating, that there is something immutable in him, an intrisic quality that makes him weaker, lesser.
The second time that Vecna tries to break his spirit by reminding him of everything he had to endure it sticks and Will finally fully believes that there is something wrong with him. The difference here is Will's guilt and the memories he uses to fight back.
These memories represent three things, his creativity and passion for art, his imagination and whimsy with his persona of Will the Wise and his deep connection and understanding that he always had with Mike as well as his love for him. They are what makes him him, these traits are the very core of Will and they are inextricably tied. They are all a source of joy for him. By omitting or separating the three Will lost his strength to fight. The memories he used the second time are only tied to his wizard persona, Will the Wise. There's no trace left of his drawings or of Mike.
He remebered/realized for a moment that his queerness can be a source of happiness and strength in ep4. But all hope is now gone in ep6, he believes that it's his weakness, and from that point on he never comes back from this given that the Will we see in the epilogue is vacant.
Vecna tells Will that he built the tunnels, he is the reason why everything happened, because he was too weak to stop it.
"You're wrong. You're wrong, mom. It's my fault."
By extention it's his fault that he suffered because he loved Mike, it's his fault for loving someone he "shouldn't". His inherent weakness is his heart, the thing he cannot change. It's who he loves, and his greatest mistake was the arrogance of ever believing that it was okay and that he had a chance. His love is his problem to fix.
"The truth is I never stood a chance. Because he knew I was weak, and he knew he could control me. And he knew it. He's always known it. That's why, out of everyone in Hawkins, he chose me."
He points at his heart when saying that, because he believes Vecna's lies, that his heart is weak and flawed. He has accepted the idea that he does not belong, that it would be better if was gone because he is convinced that none of the bad things that Vecna did would have happened if he wasn't there. Which might explain why his subsequent coming out felt more like a eulogy as some pointed out.
"You are like Vecna."
Mike likens Will to Vecna but I think that the reverse is also true, Vecna is like Will, he can also siphon power. We've already seen him do that in season 3, through the meat spider he was able to take all of Jane's powers and use them against her. As we've discussed previously, Vecna steals poeple's powers, abilities and memories and feeds on them. I think that's why we get this parasite imagery with the giant heart.
This entire season Vecna is focused on will, he tries very hard to break him, to keep him hopeless and scared. As long as Will believes that he is powerless then he is, that what makes him maleable, controllable. Fear is also what the mf uses and as I discussed in this post Will is very likely being possessed and puppetted against his own friends again.
This image of Vecna as a parasite is very striking and odd at first glance. We get a number of shots of him connected to this giant heart. I think this is supposed to represent Will's heart, his ability to love, to imagine and to create. Without (queer) love he is stripped from the very thing that protects him and gives him strength. This is what vecna was trying to do, to taint every aspect of his queerness with guilt and fear. He is siphoning his strength, his power by targetting his heart.
This is why when Vecna says that the powers within Will are his, we get mutliple shot of the beating heart. He is controlling and vampirising Will's power at the very source, his heart.
We also get another reminder of the importance of Will's heart here.
Will's coming out scene is the very antithesis of Robin's coming out, at that moment he isn't driven by love or a profound sense of trust but entirely by shear fucking terror. Vecna knew he coudln't stop Will from coming out. Ever since he suprised Robin's intimate moment with Vickie, Will latched on to the hope that he too could have that and never let go, that he deserved that joy and warmth and that it was actually possible for him.
So vecna did as vecna does, he twisted and reshaped Will's coming out. Will wanted to do it originally for the main purpose of confessing his love to Mike. So Vecna took and replaced Will's reason for coming out with another, instead of hope it was exchanged with fear. Fear that he'll end up alone and alienated from the ones that he loves. Some people already pointed out this detail and it's particularly relevant here, Will's confession happens in the WSQK room with a chekered floor, reminiscent of a chess board as if Vecna was controlling the characters like pawns.
What Vecna did (or what Will claimed he did) is that he showed him a world where there was no safety, staying in the closet was the same as leaving it because it would mean that his familly and friends would grow distant and leave him all the same. And he would be the one responsible for it, it would be his fault again for pushing people away.
And as a result Will repressed his feelings again (or forgot them) and, again, queer love has gone missing from the narrative. The literal love was taken out of his coming out, which is why Will says "I don't like girls." instead of saying that he likes boys. He defines his queerness by it's "abnomality" and strangeness rather than by the joy and love that it brings him.
Either Vecna convinced Will that Mike would never love him, or that it was wrong of him to try to break him and Jane up or the mf is targetting his memories with Mike, potentially both. So even though he came out to his familly and friends it wasn't enough, it's not the whole truth, his truth. Will is still repressing himself, shrinking himself down to try desperately to be accepted and to belong. He attempts to prove Vecna wrong by coming out, that he can still belong but he does the oppposite.
The memories that Vecna used against him in ep4 was the ones where Will felt that Mike would never love him. By backing down on his confession he resigned himself to that idea, he proved that he feels that he couldn't really be accepted as he is fully. His love is still something to hide and repress. Coming out was never his end goal, confessing was.
His love was stripped from him and as love is the only way to fight the mf's control Will inevitably lost, he was assimilated. This is why during his coming out he talked about "milkshakes at Malvald's" and "getting lost in the woods", his memory was overlapping/merging with Henry's because he is getting flayed.
I think we can all agree that the final fight felt staged from start to finish. We all pointed out that it made no sense that Will felt nothing when Vecna was being executed in front him, he never severed the link that ties them together. But at that point I believe that he is being controlled. This whole sequence is a ploy to make the cast think that they have defeated Vecna so if Will was visibly in pain or dying they would have to stop and find another way to really defeat the mf.
And I think that we do see Will in pain, the collection of traumatic memories shown to us as Joyce is decapitating Vecna feels like both a call for help and a farewell. Looking back at it, it's very disturbing.
"Mom you're killing him!"
"HELP!!"
"Why don't you go ahead and go home ?" (is this a fcking pun ?)
"NANCY!!""I didn't run away this time."
"Eddie !"
"I love you man.""Goodbye Mike."
"EL! El where are you ?!"
"He did not make me into this, you did."
"Will, wake up!"
"Go away !"
"I just want this to be over."
This sounds like Will's last attempt at calling for help. Midway he says goodbye to Mike and at the end it almost looks like there's two people talking. "Will, wake up!" and he answers "Go away ! I just want this to be over." It could be the last piece of him that still clings to life while the rest has accepted his fate, that he does not belong. That things would be better if he wasn't there. The heart withers and dies, and with it Will's hope and love and at that moment he is finally lost to the mf.
The implications of this are honestly upsetting, however in the transition to the epilogue we hear a single heartbeat that turns into a ticking clock that turns into tapping on bricks as the epilogue starts. If the heart was indeed supposed to represent Will's heart then as long as Vecna lives, then so does the mindflayer and so does Will. He is still in there somewhere. Without heart Will did fall apart and he will need to find hope again and embrace his truth (and Mike). Aaand we go back to that fucking painting once again.
We can't speak about love and hearts without it, this painting is a narrative knot that is begging to be untied. This damn thing is haunting the narrative like the ghost of Christmas past to remind us of what is still missing. This is Will's true confession the thing that holds him back and the physical embodiment of all of his love and fear of rejection all bundled up in one package. There can be no real resolution without it.
On a more meta note, byler has always been the heart of the show from the very start. Their relationship was portrayed as unique compared to everyone else's and was pivotal to the plot. And this season, as Vecna took the queer love out of Will's story, the Duffers did the same and took byler out of the show and everything fell apart as a result. Whether narratively, thematically or in terms or simple storytelling everything went wrong because byler was interwoven with it all. It's like pulling the strings that helds st together.
The shot on the bottom left is when Will has a vision of Holly in ep1, the one on the bottom left is Will in the epilogue in Mike's basement. I brightened it and color corrected the fuck out of it so that the orange glow of the room wouldn't skew the comparison too much.
His eyes seem to change colors multiple times throughout this season as well.
His eyes are normal when he sees Robin and Vickie and in the scene where Mike tells him that he's a sorcerer. They look brown in the first episode when they are getting ready for the crawl and in ep 3 when he talks with Joyce outside the barn.
I'm not about to check every single frame because it gets hard to see in some scenes, we rarely get to see his eyes up close in a good light but you get the gist.
@wendygoestohollywood here's a few pics to compare:
Both times Will is in a dark room, I brightened them both and you can clearly see that onthe left pics some blue is visible in his eyes. The quality won't get better than that since we're talking about low light pics
And again, he has worn contacts in the past for s2 and in the post that I linked up above I explain that Will is showing all the same symptoms of possessions that he had back in s2.
This is from ep 8, he is lit by the window behind him, so natural light, and his eyes are still completely brown. Also I had to color correct (de-orangify) and brighten most if not all of them, so the glow of the "unnatrual" light woundn't change the color of his eyes that much. The one in the hospital is also very dark originally.
something something "without heart, we'd all fall apart. "
I can't get out of my head all this heart imagery. The fact that Vecna is portrayed as a parasite and hangs right below a giant beating heart feels important. The x on Will's heart and him pointing at his heart when he says that Vecna knew that he was weak...
There's the circle on Will's head, Vecna gets decapitated and his heart is crossed out then Vecna gets "staked through the heart" and the giant heart above them dies. And as Vecna dies the montage of memories makes it feel like Will is dying with the "you're killing him mom!" from Jonathan.
I'm too tired to form a coherent tought about rn but there's something there.
I was thinking about this post by @chirpsythismorning
💬 0 🔁 25 ❤️ 130 · So we know the scenes at the end of the sorcerer at MAC-Z took over a month to film. Rewatching it, I can see that the c
I think that what's happening is that Will is supposed to "see the children" from the demogogons' perspective, he can't see them simply because they are behind him and probably just took the gate right behind them. It's just Mike that doesn't see Will nor Vecna.
Earlier in this scene when Vecna is about to cross the gate we have the following shots:
These interposed shots make it look like Jane is the one that is about to cross the gate instead of Vecna. I thought that was a weird choice even if the goal was to convey that Mike was expecting Jane to be the one to enter the scene. Now looking back at it I think it serves two purposes.
It's a forshadowing of when he sees Jane stand there in episode 8, and he thinks it's her but she's just an illusion created by Vecna to make him believe that she died.
"And so the sister cast a spell from far away. Safe from the power of the suppression stone. A spell of invisibility."
And it also ties it with Mike's interpretation of Jane's death. He was right about the spell of invisibility, he was just wrong about how and when it was used. It's not a coincidence that the "spell of invisibility" happens exactly at the same place than where Vecna and Will disappear.
The last time that we see Jane before she teleports to the gate, she is in the middle of the MAC-Z.
Literally right where Vecna and Will are standing in ep4.
These two shots are both from Mike's perspective, that's important because we repeat the same thing. He sees what Vecna wants to show him only both times. And when Vecna enters the scene in ep4 there's a single clock chime, it's usually used to tell us when Vecna uses his illusions.
Mike is getting Vecnaed, just like Max, Chrissy and the others. The difference is that this time it's much more insidious. Vecna doesn't just show him a grotesque nightmarish vision of his fears, probably because that wouldn't work on him, Mike is smart and might not get scared or discouraged by these tricks. Or because Vecna doesn't want the others to know that he is targetting Mike.
The shot on the bottom left is when Will has a vision of Holly in ep1, the one on the bottom left is Will in the epilogue in Mike's basement. I brightened it and color corrected the fuck out of it so that the orange glow of the room wouldn't skew the comparison too much.
His eyes seem to change colors multiple times throughout this season as well.
His eyes are normal when he sees Robin and Vickie and in the scene where Mike tells him that he's a sorcerer. They look brown in the first episode when they are getting ready for the crawl and in ep 3 when he talks with Joyce outside the barn.
I'm not about to check every single frame because it gets hard to see in some scenes, we rarely get to see his eyes up close in a good light but you get the gist.
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.
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.
“Id like to think he made his illusions real” OOOOOOO I HAVE ACTUALLY BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS but i havent worked out a way for it to fit in with canon in a coherent way yet…..
In a nutshell its the theory that els ability to open gates is actually opening physical portals into people’s minds (henry getting trapped in his own mind when she banished him into dimension x hence hollys line “that would mean he’s trapped in his own mind”) (and MAYBE when she came in contact with the demo (vecnas illusion ?) she actually opened a gate into wills mind (and we’ve seen el touching ppl in the void to enter their minds, so maybe when she touched the demo she saw vecnas intention ? And how will was involved ? Maybe that’s how she recognised will ?)
And so i think if the abyss is camazotz like you said (im pretty sure you said), then the upside down is inbetween consciousness and a physical place bcs i think its a merging of henry and wills minds (illusions + physical manifestion)
Which brings me to how i think will has powers of physical manifestation, (and i THINK this has been said before already but i want to expand on it😁) which is why vecna targeted him bcs he needed someone to build his illusions
We don’t actually see the demo touch will until he’s in the upside down which makes me think he was seeing vecnas ILLUSION of the demogorgan, which caused will to physically manifest it once he was in the upside down (bcs his power is strongest in his own mind—and also since the upside down is the prime place for radio signal transmission like youve said in your other post!!!)
Which ALSO makes me think this is why wills powers activate in s5, since the upside down is bleeding into hawkins and i think will is unintentionally physically manifesting things EVERYWHERE AND he is actually encouraged and believed in…at least in vol 1 (courtesy robin and mike) which makes me think ep4 was him finally unlocking the full potential to his manifestation, proving his positive strength rather than assisting vecna in harming himself
Plus i think its interesting that wills powers manifest EXACTLY how mike told him they would
OR wills powers are actually illusions and since the upside down is bleeding into hawkins, almost everything is an illusion of sorts
Im also thinking about brenner and how the lab had a fake body for will so maybe brenner (with the knowledge that contact with the shadow particles gives a person powers—like henry) thought that will was the key to making more lab kids since he’d be an original like henry
I really love the theory that the UD is Will's mind and that he can manifest things into reality sadly I'm pretty sure that a scientist gets murked before by a demogorgon before Will comes into contact with it so it was definitely real. God I wish we had a way to tell if the illusions had an impact on reality and what was exctly an illusion. There's the obvious ones but it also looks like there are so more subtle ones that are almost undistinguishable from reality. It's still possible that Will can make illusions real but there's no way to confirm this right now, not that I see at least.
Will's powers are really strange tho, like you said it's strange that it works just like Mike said they would but also it's weird that he called him a sorcerer at all. How are his powers inate when it looks like he got them from Vecna ? And how could Mike even know that ? It's possible that Will had dormant powers before he was abducted but Mike has no way of knowing that. And then in the credits he is called an illusionist, so which is it ? Is Will a wizard, a sorcerer or an illusionist ? Vecna is compared to an evil wizard too If I recall correctly, Will's character in dnd is a wizard Mike calls him a sorcerer and in the epilogue he plays a sorcerer (meteor swarm is a sorcerer spell), and then he is called an illusionist by the credits.
We're missing something, it feels like like Vecna and Will are overlapping/merging. Will used Vecna's power when he killed the demos since it killed them in the exact same way that Vecna killed Chrissy and the others in s4. So that means that he can use the other powers too, like entering into poeple's minds and creating illusions, so maybe he went from a sorcerer to an illusionist because in the end he is creating the illusion trapping Mike and potentially Hawkins.
Also meteor swarm sounds like what Vecna did the scene where he tried to stop Max from escaping. He threw debris and flying rocks on her.
I think if Brenner had know that will was the Key he'd just have abducted him and made it look like he died. I don't think he thought either that the spores gave people powers od he'd have sent an army in there.
UGH GODDAMMIT I FORGOT ABOUT THAT DAMN SCIENTIST!!!!😫😫 yeah unfortunately its less a theory and moreso word vomit of me trying to answer the NEVERENDING questions😔😔😔
Sigh every single day i rattle my brain for answers on whether will is a wizard, cleric, sourcerer or illusionist….
That entire epilogue dnd game was STRANGE im pretty sure all of them were different to their usual classes ? I know at least will, lucas, mike (ik he was the DM but its strange they refer to him at the storyteller instead of the paladin) were. And max being a “zoomer” was kinda weird too bcs it still feels like she’s not actually part of the game ? question mark question mark
Ooooo i wonderr if vecna can possess will and use his own powers while controling him at the same time….
Which makes me think about the term “vessel” and the possibility of vecna abandoning his body to use wills….so maybe killing his physical body just prevented him from being able to return to it, instead fully inhabiting wills.
I dont think brenner thought the spores gave people powers either, but rather contact with the shadow particles/shadow monster did
Bcs surely he would have been dead set on finding out the origins of henrys powers—im sure he connected it was from the shadow particles (in the play i think its the shadow monster but for some reason in the show its shadow particles in a rock)
I think it would have been too risky to send people into the upside down with the intention of getting them flayed bcs that could have backfired very easily and he could have unintentionally given henry an army. And i think he would only want one flayed kid bcs he just wants their blood to replicate the powers—through giving pregnant women blood transfusions—without the risk of them being overtaken by the shadow monster like henry was—bcs we see that, while all the lab kids have henrys blood, they dont struggle with fighting the shadow monster for control
The way i see it, theres a couple options as to why the lab had a fake body ready to stage wills death
1. They had multiple fake bodies of kids all over hawkins prepared for if they wanted to kidnap them or needed to stage their deaths to avoid people finding out about the upside down and how theyre at fault
2. They specifically had a fake body for will ready bcs they wanted to stage his death, either to avoid consequences of his disappearance being traced back to the upside down (which would have meant they made this fake body in a very short amount of time), leading people to find out how they’re responsible for it opening, OR they wanted to kidnap him specifically for something
So i feel like brenner had to have some sort of plans for will
Another thing that i havent seen speculation about before is the possibility that el recognised will because of his fake body
This whole time ive been wracking my brain for answers on when el and will could have crossed paths pre s1/beginning of s1 and i never considered that maybe they didnt cross paths after all—maybe while el was escaping the lab, she stumbled into a room that held wills fake body
But then i start thinking about how in the s4 scripts, it says something about will recognising brenner (im not sure if this got proven fake since tho) so im not sure where that could fit in, UNLESS its showing how wills memories are merging with henrys bcs in s2 he talks about memories at the back of his head that arent his and how they arent obvious or smth ???? Like maybe seeing brenner in s4 made him remember him from henrys memories, or he just recognised him and couldn’t understand why
I wanted to answer earlier but I just kept thinking about what you said about the UD being Will's mind and it reminded of a theory that I had read like months ago and I just spiraled. I even went back to my conspiracy board to modify it because I needed to organise my thoughts (if I can call that organising lol).
About the dnd classes yeah I think they're all weird, Mike is supposed to be the game master, so it's strange for him to be called the story teller, but I think it goes with everything in the epilogue being slightly off. Btw Will doesn't have a miniature on the board at all, we see Dustin's mini gets knocked over when he gets killed/downed by the vampire and some others but Will's mini who should be standing and quite visible is nowhere to be seen. And on top of that Mike's vampire mini disappears between two shots (mirroring when Mike himself disappeared on the tower).
I'm certain that the Will we see either isn't Will or is possessed like you said. And actually that might be why he doesn't have a mini, Will isn't there. And I'm even wondering if he wasn't killed in some way when they "killed" Vecna in the fight.
About Brenner and Will I got a theory, we learn this season that it was actually Henry's blood that gave Jane and the other kids their powers and not the drugs given to the pregnant women. Assuming that this is true then it's even weirder that Will has powers too. Mike insists that his powers are inate which is really strange because how does he know that they are in fact inate and not a byproduct of Will's connection with Vecna ? Is he assuming this or is there something more ? This might just be forshadowing.
I think that potentially Brenner experimented on other pregnant women but he didn't kidnap their kids like he did for Jane's mom. Will was one of them, Brenner made blood transfusions to pregant women in Hawkins and then monitored their kids from a distance, which is how he had a body double for Will. He prepared one in case one of the kids manifested powers so that he could kidnap them.
That would explain why Will has powers and why Brenner had a body double of him ready. I rewatched s1 before s5 droped and Jane doesn't just recognise Will, she knows that he is in the UD and that he is hiding from the demogoron.
My best guess was that when she made contact with it she felt it's intent to capture Will but that doesn't really work because how does she know that he is hiding ? The thing that makes the most sens to me is that she is the one that opened the door that night. She was scared that it would get her and she sacrificed Will for her own safety, or she was told to do it. That's why she knows that Will wasn't dead or taken, she was there that night.
I might do a post about the UD and Will's connection to Henry/Vecna in the week to talk about all of that in more details when I have the time.
OK IM ALIVE ive been thinking about this a lot😮💨😮💨😮💨 HERES MY SCATTERED THOUGHTS
Omg if you do make that post about the upside down and will and henrys connection, i will be the first sat!
And to me its weird that when theyre talking about their futures for themselves, mike is still a storyteller instead of a player character. Theyre not playing the game anymore so it doesnt make sense to me that hes referred to as a storyteller instead of a paladin unless its to show him detached from his own life
And omg!??? Will not having a miniature on the board is INSANE that is such a good find!! and almost a direct parallel to s1 when el is showing explaining the upside down to them with a board and she takes wills miniature off the board before flipping it upside down….
Mikes mini disappearing like he did on the tower!!!! Woah
Omg abt will and vecna!!! In my last reply i had typed up how i thought it was possible will was in vecnas body when joyce killed him (except it didnt really kill him, it just FELT like it did, and he was still in henrys mind while henry possessed his body ?? Meaning he was still in his own mind ?? Idek) but then I deleted it bcs i was doubting it BUT THEN a day later i saw this post and i was gobsmacked!
Maybe vecna was trying to replicate what gave him his powers on will
Maybe thats why theyre still innate, yet vecna claims that they come from him (bcs he orchestrated it) and maybe thats what hes doing with the other kids—a direct parallel to brenner creating superpowered kids from henrys blood, except he’s creating their powers straight from the source (the shadow monster)
But i think its likely will was ALSO born with powers ontop of this, making him more powerful, also setting him apart from the lab kids, the kids in camazotz AND henry
Oooooo i like that theory about brenner!! My only hold up is that i dont see why the blood transfusions wouldnt work ? Unless it was just a gamble like that, but then why would he kidnap the others as babies? How could he have been sure theyd develop powers from the experiments but then not sure about others like will?
I do also like the theory that el opened the door in ep1!! Im not sure that el would sacrifice will to the demo for her own safety, mainly bcs i think she feels a certain responsibility with her powers, and subconsciously a lot of guilt from all the kids at the lab that died bcs of henry, so maybeee it mightve even been to try and help will ? Maybe el was trying to trap the demo in the house where she could kill it while will could escape to the shed ?? Bcs in the shed, the demo appears at the back of the shed, BEHIND will—where hopper later finds a slimey hole, making me think the demo flipped into the upside down to escape el and reappear in the shed to kidnap will
(Something i dont understand though is why the demos dont flip from the upside down into the rightside up more often to escape situations and reassert themselves as the predator ??)
OR parts of the sequence could be illusions, and i say that because the door opening in ep1 reminds me of s2 when will gets up in the middle of the night and his front door opens by itself and he sees the shadow monster in the sky
I also wonder if this scene is gonna hold a lot of importance if time travel gets involved
Bcs i keep thinking about this shot that was on the cover of the first episode but was never in the episode,,,,which makes me kind of think there was some interference from the future (hes also wearing his marty mcfly outfit here) or maybe they really just wanted to add a bts picture as the cover for the first ep….idk
I meant to answer sooner and things got busy, but I'm back!
About the post about Will, it turned more into a post about the upside down, trauma and a bunch of other things, oh and it's going to be two posts because it was getting too long. I'm halfway there I think, it was particularly hard to make something coherent because I was just rambling so much. I got really scatterbrained, I had to get back to my conspiracy board and rework it (I'm now at 700 layers it's bad) and it doesn't help that my hyperfixation on st is fading so I'm running on fumes now.
About Will himself tho, my best theory is that the birthdaygate thing is because Will is getting flayed in some way even back in season 1 and him acting like Henry is the result of the hivemind affecting his behavior and memories.
Or it's this; "Maybe vecna was trying to replicate what gave him his powers on will" I feel like Vecna/Henry is sort of trying to replicate what happened to him, maybe that's why Will's birthday changed and why Joyce was mistaken about his age in s5 ? But maybe it's not so much about the powers but about trauma and perpetuating the cycle, ot it's both? After all Henry's powers come from emotions and making people afraid makes them more vulnerable to him. (And I talk about cycles and trauma in my upcoming posts but they play a huge role both thematically and in the st magic system so it might be related to that).
Yes ! I didn't think about Jane flipping the board but that's such a good catch ! I made a short post that Will was getting flayed this season, just like back in s2 and I think that has to be linked to that, like he isn't there anymore, it's just the mf that we see in the epilogue. However I don't know why Mike's mini is disappearing like him and it's making me angry, wtf is happening to him ? Is he being replaced ? Is he in a trance ?
About Brenner, my theory is that maybe blood transfusions don't have the same effect on everyone, after all Jane was the most of all the kids taken by Brenner. Terry Ives said that she knew her kid had powers even though she was taken from her at birth so there must have been signs that Brenner was monitoring that Jane was special even when she was in her womb. And maybe not all kids show signs very early on. So Brenner must have tried different methods to try to replicate Henry, some like with Terry, he experimented on her closely during her pregnacy and for others he simply made blood transfusions on pregnant women without them knowing hoping that something might come out of it.
I rewatched the scene where the door opened in s1 and I don't see how this can be anything other than to let the demo inside. The demo approaches the door and stops for a moment and then it opens which prompts Will to run away. Idk if Jane would be in the capacity to make a plan like opening the door to scare Will to help him tbh. It doesn't mean that she necessarily had bad intentions or knew exactly what she was doing.
I doubt it was an illusion, I don't see what would be the point of making Will believe that the door opened.
Time travel would be a very hard thing to plan on a 10 years project, not impossible, just a lot of work (and I don't personally like time loops so I'm hoping that it's not meant to be like Jane from the future that opened the door or smth like that). Although there are some things that might hint at that like the marty mcfly outfit.
Realness im always sidetracked and bad at remembering to reply!!
This two part will post sounds EPICCCC and i get what you mean with strugglinh to make coherent thoughts😔😔
You are so brave for running on fumes, i truly admire your dedication🙏🙏🙏
OMG YES wills birthday changing!!!!!! I just saw something about this and made it into a post bcs i completely forgot about the funeral flyer in s1 that said his bday is 28th of august!!!!
It almost feels like things started changing after his funeral, almost like a version of will did die when his connection to henry was formed and he’s been slowly erased every since
Yesss it being about henry perpetuating the cycle seems very on brand. Vecna relying on peoples negative emotions reminds me so much of hawkmoth from miraculous ladybug😭😭😭😭
About brenner trying different methods with terry to replicate henry….. i wonder if he tried giving blood transfusions to the father before the baby was conceived AS WELL AS giving it to the mother during pregnancy👀👀👀👀👀 to make the child more powerful…. That child being el
Ok wait what if el was actually inside the byers house when will got there?? What if she was hiding there since no one was home
Bcs wills dog was also barking when he got home,, which could have been bcs something was off in general, but i wonder if it was bcs someone was inside the house
And since we don’t actually see the door open for the demo bcs will had run away by that point, what if this is when el emerged from her hiding place to unsuccessfully face the demo, like maybe she wanted to, but got scared seeing it so close up which allowed it to flip back into the upside down to then reappear in the shed to take will ?? I actually have no idea im kind of just talking to see what words come out atp😵💫😵💫 its soo confusing
I'm going to start putting "view more" everytime now because this reblog chain is really getting out of hand
That's what I was thinking too! El could've tried to hide in their house. I wonder if she saw him get taken and them tried to find him after. She knew that he was in the UD but she also knew that he was hiding in his house in the UD specifically. That could explain how she knew that but not how she knew about the UD. Because when she is "looking for the demo she is "searching the darkness" as she calls it in s4, she can only see the people that she is looking for not their environment. I wonder if she has been in the upside down and that's how she knows what it is.
At the beginning of s1 the demo is loose in the lab and kills a scientist, so when Jane opened the gate it started to kill people in the lab causing them to flee. I wonder if she used the gate to escape, she could've used the gates that the demo leaves behind when it flips to go back to Hawkins. It would also explain why she was where the demo is, she needed to remain close to walk through his gate because they close fast.
And the demo's priority must've been Will because as he is about to leave Mike's house the lights flicker to tell us that the demo is close, he follows Will and waits until he is alone to then show himself and hunt him down.
The idea that Jane wanted to confront to demo could work, it would make more sense for her character if she either failed to stop it from taking Will or if she tried to help it get to Will so that it would leave her alone. Then it would give her an arc where she decides to confront the demo and saves her friends this time.
"It almost feels like things started changing after his funeral, almost like a version of will did die when his connection to henry was formed and he’s been slowly erased every since"
He did die right at the end of s1 actually! He wasn't breathing when they "unplugged him" and Hopper and Joyce had to reanimate him similarly to Max.
"when One kills, he doesn't simply kill. He consumes. He takes everything from his victims. Everything they are and everything they ever will be. Their memories, their abilities."
If as we speculated Will had powers back then, maybe Vecna needed his powers and that's why they never manifested after, because they were stolen. The only time where they manifest is when Will remembers his childood (and Mike) and embraces his queerness. This reminds me of s4, Jane had lost her powers because Vecna/the mf had stolen them and she had to remember the day that she was born and the love of her mother to find them again.
And something that I've been mulling over the past few days, when Vecna says "But remember, I am the one. The one who invited you in." I don't know exactly what he's refering to. The only thing that makes sense to me it that he "invited" him into his mind. He tells Jane that the other kids from Brenner's experiments aren't gone they're still with him "in there" suggesting his mind. And when Holly and the others get "plugged in" like Will they are in Camazotz.
So I'm guessing that for the few hours that Will was caught he was in Vecna's mind ? He doesn't seem to remember that tho so idk ??? Still that would make sense if that's how he started to be replaced, Vecna established the connection and Will slowly started to merge with Vecna and the hivemind from that point on.
Lol don't worry I'm the same, just saying words here. But just throwing shit at the walls helps me figure things out, even if it's not 100% correct. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I can't find the account that posted screenshots of that netflix page of maple street that angles further into the sky. it was one of the pre documentary early proofs, and we compared it to camazotz. since you've got the camazotz theory going on, it thought id ask you. don't have netflix, so unsure if it's still there. but s2 ends like that! it angles into the sky, goes upside down and then the next shot is hawkins gym in the upside down. relevant?
Hi!
So I've been cheking regularly, the "It's a strange world" thing was supposed to be a st collection regrouping all the seasons, spin off and BTS. But recently the banner with the image of maple street is completely gone, I don't know when it was taken down exactly since I don't check everyday but it's been a few days at least. I don't know why they would do that tbh, they've got a spinoff coming out soon. There is still a st collection but it doesn't have a banner and it's just called stranger things now. I just don't see why they would take it down/change it like that, it's just been a little over a month since the finale aired.
And yes absolutely the image in itself was really confomitygate coded ! Especially since it was Mike's street and he's the one that we focus on in the epilogue.
I found a more complete version of the banner, on TV it showed a bit more of the sky apparently. The thick clouds absolutely remind me of the ones in the UD. As I mentioned in my post about the UD, the storm is tied to both the UD and the mf even though we don't know exactly if the storm itself IS the mf or just a byproduct of it.
Obviously we don't know for sure if this is a direct callback to that scene in s2 but with the dozens of callbacks to s2 in s5 this is very much a possibility. They could've chosen any image for the collection, there's plenty of advertising material for st but this nightmarish view of suburban hell maple street certainly doesn't really look like it's st related at all on the surface. It was an odd choice for sure, and it's another thing that could only make sense if the epilogue was meant to be interpreted as being "fake" and happening in Vecna's mind. At least that's how I see it.
In this one I don't bring up a lot of new things, I mostly connect the many oddities that people found around s5 and the epilogue to build a working theory and expand on my "Camazotz merging with Hawkins" theory.
When looking at the wiki page for Shadowfell I found something very interesting.
"In remote corners of the Shadowfell there were demiplanes created by the Dark Powers which served as prisons to trap creatures of extreme evil to serve as sustenance.
One such demiplane was the valley of Barovia, ruled by the vampire Strahd von Zarovich, himself a prisoner of the Dark Powers."
Shadowfell is linked to Barovia where the campaign that the group plays in the epilogue takes place. And they defeat Strahd the Vampire. Dc Kay was compared to a vampire by Kali so the analogy seemed clear that Strahd was supposed to represent her in the campaign, she even had her "supression stones" that stopped magic users to cast spells. However Vecna was compared multiple times to a vampire in season 4 as well.
"It'll be like slaying sleeping Dracula in his castle."
This is said of Vecna when the group discuss the plan to kill him while he's in a trance. And the Dark Powers here are the mf.
"The Dark Powers were an unknown mystical force that had the ability to pull complete regions into the Shadowfell as well as corrupt many individuals.
The Dark Powers could grant individuals, among other terrible gifts, immortality and great magical possession. The Dark Powers tailored a Domain of Dread for each of the evil individuals pulled into the Mists"
We know that Henry has received his powers from the shadow monster, a mysterious, incorporeal entity that made him immortal, unkillable and that controls him. The shadow monster in stranger things seems to be a mix of the Mindflayer and the Dark Powers in DnD. It's a hivemind that invades and controls people's mind and it's also a mysterious force that can grant them power like it did for Henry.
The analogies used in the show are never a one to one, they usually serve to understand one aspect of the phenemenons and monsters that the crew encounters. The shadow monster borrows both from the Mindflayer and the Dark Powers, and it's the same for Henry. He is both like Vecna and like Stradh in different ways. So at the end of ep8 it makes sense for the analogy to move from Vecna, an undead powerful wizard that can curse individual people to Strahd, a tyrant that made a pact with the Dark Powers and is ruling over a valley where all its inhabitants are prisoners, effectively all trapped within a massive curse.
"When One kills, he doesn't simply kill. He consumes. He takes everything from his victims. Everything they are and everything they ever will be. Their memories, their abilities."
Moreover Henry was already a little like a vampire in s4, he doesn't feed off of blood but he still consumes his victims. When he kills them he gains power, seemingly consuming, absorbing their minds/souls. He goes from a simple nondescript vampire to Stradh the Vampire.
"The valley of Barovia was the oldest and best known of the Domains of Dread. Originally a location in a forgotten world of the Prime Material plane, the entire valley was transported to the Shadowfell by mists controlled by evil entities known as the Dark Powers. The realm was a prison for its darklord, the vampire Strahd von Zarovich, as well as the entire population of the valley."
Barovia was originally a place in the real world until it was pulled into the "mists" where it was then turned into a demiplane. This fits perfectly with conformitygate as a whole and my own spin on this, the fact that Vecna is merging Camazotz and Hawkins to create a world that he alone can control. If memories and the real world fuse then his power over memories becomes power over matter. He isn't just a ghost in people's head, he would become like a god, a tyrant. Camazotz is also a prison, like Barovia wich becomes one when it is pulled into the Mists, and Hawkins would a be a prison too if it indeed fused with Camazotz (or even if Vecna recreated a version of Hawkins in Camazotz).
In the previous post I discussed the fact that trauma has the capacity to trap people in a single moment, almost like stopping time from moving forward from that point on for them.
If everyone is trapped in this Hawkins Camazotz fusion then that would explain why there is no date on the films or on the main cast's watches. Reality has merged with the mind, with trauma and since trauma "stops time" it looks like time is frozen like in the UD, or nonexistant. Henry has succeded in his plan to "free" himself of everything that constrained him, including time itself.
I've seen some posts about there being a time loop, with everything around traumatic memories looping and trapping people plus my own Camazotz-and-Hawkings-merging theory, I feel like that's definitely a possibilty. However we don't have much to go on for this theory as far as I know so I won't really get into it. It was already pointed out that the show ends the same way that it started, with the main crew, plus Max, playing DnD in Mike's basement.
But I'll add this, in this post, I theorize that the dial turning red is it going back to how it's supposed to be and that when we see it in the first episode it's not the real one. Beyond that the other two grey objects that we have seen are in Camazotz, we've never seen objects turning grey in Vecna's visions before. So it could mean that what we see in the first episode is already a memory and that the characters are reliving the events of s5.
If at the end of s5 Vecna is actually merging Camazotz with Hawkins (or at least trapping everyone in Camazotz) then he would need an immense amount of power to do so. In st magic is fuled by emotions and Vecna gets his from anger and by proxy, and from the generates terror in his victims. Since he stole Jane's power to open gates in s3, he needs to recreate the same fear that she felt the first time that she made contact with a demogorgon in order for him to open his own gates. He also needs his victims to be scared because it makes them more vulnerable to his powers and to be taken into Camazotz and he has been terrorizing Hawkins for years now, Mike says so himself in s5.
"Everyone in Hawkins is scared shitless."
As I discussed in the previous post, we know that unresolved trauma and repressed memories can act as a prison, trapping people in a loop. Camazotz is made of the memories of all the people that Vecna has cursed, so if he wants to trap all of Hawkins it's likely that he would need everyone to have bad memories that he can exploit, thus comes the mass child kidnapping and retraumatizing of our main cast.
If his goal is create and trap everyone in a collective, town-wide, time-loopy trauma prison, reenacting deeply traumatic events at the time that they happened would make sense as a way to "cast his curse". He generates fear and pain and he reinforces the trauma loop, the cycle, by doing that. And he weakens the frontier between Hawkins and the UD in the process.
And one person in particular that seems to have been the target of this campaign of fear is Mike. Will is the obvious target but when looking at the bigger picture, whilst Mike was never directly targetted, his close familly and friends always are. And we know that he was traumatized because the show tells us so in season 2.
"It's called the Anniversary Effect. And we've seen this with soldiers. The anniversary of an event brings back traumatic memories. Sort of opens up the neurological floodgates, so to speak."
In season 2 the doctor that Will sees regularly says that Will's episodes where he sees into the UD and feels this presence that wants to kill is due to his PTSD manifesting itself.
"-So what does this mean for the kid? He's gonna have more episodes, nightmares?
-Yeah, That. Maybe some personality changes. He might get irritable. He might lash out."
And right after this scene we get Mike at a dinner with his familly where Mike show theses exact symptoms, he has been acting out and the entire season he gets angry easily. He is visibly and loudly irritated by Max's presence in the group, probably because he feels that she is "replacing" Jane.
Although it's never adressed, Mike is clearly deeply traumatized, he lashes out and misbehaves, showing clear symptoms of the anniversary effect. During my rewatch of s2 I took notes about the ongoing themes and characters, mostly about how they deal with their respective traumas and the anger that stems from it. Hopper apologizes to Jane and choses to be finally honest with her because lying won't protect her, Nancy and Jonathan seek justice, Max lowers her defenses and lets Lucas in, finally becoming friends with him. They all get better (to some extent) and better themselves by the end thanks to that, and then there's Kali, and as I explained, by accepting the label of "monster" or "weapon" put on her she will just continue to hurt. But I don't think that Mike has a resolution to his own trauma.
I don't think that Mike ever healed from Jane and Will's disappearance. They both came back but that alone can't heal him on its own. And in season 5 he gets to see the same terrible things that scarred him, his sister disappears in the same way that Will did, Jane sacrifices herself in front of him and Will is possessed and in pain as Mike remains powerless to help him. He even makes the exact same face when he loses Jane the second time than he did all the way back in season 1. He relives ALL of the most traumatic moments of his life.
I think that Vecna uses the anniversary effect to make his curse more powerful, to "open up the neurological floodgates" .
It's mostly Mike that is subjected to this, Dustin doesn't relive having to see his best friend die in his arms,
He needs Will to remain scared of him, he needs him to feel powerless. He wants to break him so he hurts him and his loved ones through him and makes him feel both powerless and guilty. He even traps him into his own trauma. Mike is therefore a problem because he inspires Will, he gives him courage, comfort and safety which combats the fear. So in order to keep Will weak he needs keep him and Mike isolated because they will always want to be there for each other when they are in danger. If Vecna targetted Mike directly it would draw them together further and it would give out his plan. So he targets him indirectly by targeting the people around him, he makes him suffer, he makes him afraid by forcing him to relive the worst moments of his life.
To illustrate this I made a graph of Mike's close familly and friends suffering affecting him. I certainly forgot a few things because I haven't rewatched s3 and s4 since. With the events of s5 it makes things even more clear, his entire familly was targetted specifically.
And beyond all that Vecna might even need him for his plans, if Camazotz is built on wounds that haven't healed and repressed memories then Mike must be great source of these. He rarely, if ever confronts his own pain, instead he shuts it and burries it. He bottles up his feelings and lies, like in s4 where he refused to admit that he never said "I love you" to Jane even when confronted by her. He waited until she was about to literally DIE to admit that he was scared of losing her. And he couldn't tell her he loves either when she was about to die in front of him in s5, neither could he break up with her. He would rather double down and keep repressing his feelings than confront the truth because he is afraid of what will happen if he does.
Even in the epilogue both when Hopper talks to him and when he puts his binder in the shelf he looks like he is desperately trying not to cry instead of simply letting out his emotions flow. He looks like he is clenching every muscle in his body to stop the tears from falling. Even when he is alone that boy doesn't himself to cry !
The rare moments where he dares to be vulnerable and confides in someone it's pretty much always Will, they've always had a unique bond compared to his other relationships. Like when in s2 he feels that only Will can understand his grief of losing Jane but feeling like she's still there.
(I don't need to put it here because like, we all know but imagine that there's a montage of Mike pining for Will and looking at his lips to illustrate their very gay bond okay)
In s4 and s5 Mike is seen multiple times with a shovel. He buries a body in s4 and in s5 he uses one to fight the demogorgon and has one again in ep4. This represents him burying his feelings for Will to not deal with them, specifically in s4 where he is actively pushing Will away and refusing physical contact. And I think that he did the same thing for his traumatic memories, he just bottled them up and that's why he tends to be so protective of the people he cares about, he is still scared of losing Will and Jane again because he never delt with his own feelings so he ends up pushing them away.
And what does he find when he tries to dig his way out in episode 4 ?
His own feelings for Will. Water is often being associated with feelings in st, in this very season we have Will dropping his can of coke on the ground when he sees Robin and Vicke, and it leaks out when it hits the floor. And in this scene where both Will and Mike are trying in vain to contain the leak, to bottle their feelings, the meaning is very obvious.
The ending interestingly lacked any of Will's most important moments, despite the fact that the moments chosen for the illustrations were mostly from earlier seasons, when Will was at the center of the plot. And he literally gets erased from this shot, taken from the season where Mike starts to be associated with shovels and is actively burying his feelings for his best friend.
(It could also be an effect of the mf, maybe it's easier to erase the memories he wants to repress.)
"Nicolas Dalayracwrote an opera called Nina. It's the story about a young woman whose lover was killed in a duel.
Nina was so traumatized that she buried the memory. It was as if it never happened. Every day, she would return to the train station to await her lover's return. A return that would never be.
[...]
You'll have to find your own way out. Leave your train station. Stop waiting. Focus. Listen. Remember."
What Brenner tells Jane when she is trapped in her memories and trying to get her powers back parallels heavily Mike's journey here. He can't move on from what happened and waits for Jane's return at the place where he last saw her, where she died.
"Treasures are always hidden in the deepest depths of the dungeon."
Another X is also tied to treasure with the Hawkins lab in episode 5.
Holly, who is represents Mike, has to meet Max at the X, in the epilogue. "Finding X" takes us back to s2 where it represents Hopper being buried alive by the vines and also a "pirate treasure", X is another callback to burying things here. Mike is waiting on the X shaped monument, (in the same spot where the gates formed an X) where he buried his feelings, where he is waiting for his lover's return in a prison shaped by his own trauma. If he wants to escape he has to stop waiting and act.
Every season characters find themselves in a situation where they are told to stay put and wait for help. And every time they have to do the exact opposite. Joyce tells Jonathan that he needs to stay and watch ove the kids but he and Nancy decide to bait the demogorgon instead allowing Joyce and Hopper to find Will. Hopper wants to wait for reinforcments in s2 and s3 and both time it's a bad idea because they come in too late.
Just waiting is never presented as the solution to their problems, except interestingly right at the end where their plan is to wait for Vecna to enact his plan and it doesn't end well for them if we're to believe in conformitygate.
"Seconds, minutes, day after day. 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."
Henry also states that people like his parents, those who lead a normal, dull life (in his eyes) are just waiting for death. They pretend to lead an empty life, conforming and going through the motions just so that they can reach the end. Waiting here is just leads to death, those that wait simply accept their fate and condemn themselves to die quietly.
Holly is the one to tell Max that they have to stop waiting, she also equates waiting for Jane to come and rescue them to resigning themselves and accepting their fate. This echoes what Hopper tells Mike in the epilogue, that he has to "find a way to accept what happened". And that's what he does, he invents an impossible story where Jane is alive and living in a distant land in order to accept her death. Even though Mike knows that Jane would absolutely NEVER just leave without saying goodbye and telling them that she's alive at the very least.
Here, the lie that traps Mike in his delusion (just like Nina) is the one that he tells himself to accept Jane's "death". Her death makes no sense, neither Kali nor Jane could've used their magic to talk to him but he still lies to himself and actively choses to believe in that lie. And he also encourages his friends to believe in it too.
In order for him to leave Mike has to confront his feelings, accept himself and dig up everything that he has buried to save himself and finally break the cycle. Escaping isn't enough, Kali tried that, Jane did too but it's only a temporary solution and they knew that. Camazotz is built on lies and trauma and the only way to trully escape is through truth, love and acceptance, that's why he must find Will.
Only when he finaly opens up about how he really feels (and they adress that goddamn fucking painting) can they find the power within themselves to fight back, effectively destroying this prison of lies. For Jane that power was her mom's love that she had forgotten, for Mike it's his love for Will and vice versa.
This one will be more rambly than the previous ones so I apologize in advance. The hyperfixation has run out so now I'm just incredibly scatterbrained, and there was a lot to cover so it didn't help. For reasons that'll be very clear very soon I had to make this a two-parter. A more reasonable person would have cut this up into 5 or more posts but unfortunately for all of us I'm physically incapable of that.
This post comes after the one about Paprika (that is linked below) where I talk about Vecna's motivations and his plan, it would be better if you read it first but I'm not your mom so go little rebels, dive right in if you want!
The Paprika post HERE
Another post that I refer too about regressions HERE
Stranger things if anything is about abuse and trauma and how trauma changes and shapes us. How it affects our lives if left unresolved, we see it in Hopper and Joyce who both respectively hold on to Jane and Will too tightly, so much so that they smother them. Hopper has anger issues caused by his fear of losing Jane, instead of communicating he tends to lash out at her. Steve acts the same in s5 towards Dustin, he fails to be vulnerable with him and instead they fight because they can’t understand each other.
In st people who experience trauma and pain tend to turn to anger as a defense, to protect themselves. That's what season 2 is all about, Max, Billie, Hopper, Jane, Mike and Kali are all angry and lash out because of their own respective pain. And Kali is the only one of the lot that chooses to keep hurting others to “heal” her pain, she is a foil to Jane but also to Nancy. In season 2, Nancy is mad that the Hawkins’ lab is still operating after what they did and that they are still covering up Barb’s death. Her way to address this is to expose them with the help of Jonathan to stop them for good in order to bring justice to Barb and peace for her parents that are bound to look for her their whole lives.
Nancy seeks through justice to end the cycle, while Kali wants revenge. Her actions won’t stop other kids from disappearing and getting experimented on. And although it’s true that the men that hurt Kali deserve to face justice for what they did, murdering them in cold blood won’t heal Kali. In fact when she comes back in season 5 she has realized that the cycle continued and that what she needs to do is to stop it, however she feels that her only choice to stop this is to die.
---I need to make a quick sidenote here, usually in these posts I just analyse the text to understand the overall plot and worldbuilding without giving my opinions on the writing itself. I need however to talk about Kali, I hate that the only brown woman of the show is the stereotype of the "woman who wants to punish those that have abused her but goes too far and must be stopped". First it's a shitty sexist archetype and having Kali incarnating that is gross. They villanize and demonize her in s2 and keep doing it in s5. She's not allowed to have any real depth and is completely forgotten by the plot after her appearance in s2, only to be brought back and killed off.
I just wanted to make it clear that while I will keep analyzing her character as she is written I don't support or agree with how she was portrayed. If you want to read a much more in depth post about it, @kaypeace21 wrote this post about the racist writing in st and other problematic things.---
“Pregnant women. A secret government program Does that not remind you of anything?
It's a cycle. A terrible, vicious cycle.”
Kali talks of cycles, very obviously referring to cycles of abuse. And this season we have a number of them, there’s the military kidnapping kids, just like Brenner did, and potentially experimenting on pregnant women (if we assume that Kali isn’t lying since we never actually see the pregnant women on screen), Vecna kidnapping kids via demogorgons, Mike watching Jane sacrificing herself again and even Will getting possessed again.
“I ... I just know I'm having serious déjà vu, because this is exactly what happened to Will at almost exactly the same time.”
And with characters seemingly getting flayed and regressing to how they used to be in season 2 as well, this has to be intentional. It all adds up, the events of season 5 look like a deliberate attempt to retraumatize the characters by making them relive the exact thing that they experienced in the past. Vecna specifically reminds Will twice of the day that he captured him and brought him to the library. He finds power through fear, he weakens his victims by scaring them, making them more vulnerable to him, and while that’s definitely part of his MO I think that there is something much deeper to all of this.
This is where we need to talk about Terry Ives. After she attempted to free her daughter that was taken from her by Brenner and failed, she got caught and to silence her Brenner used electroshock therapy on her, effectively crippling her indefinitely. Since then she is stuck reliving her own most traumatic memories again and again, a sort of forever PTSD. Although a part of her is still somewhat conscious, as seen when she uses the lights to call Jane to her, she can’t seem to be able to really “escape” from this unending loop.
Her trauma entraps her, she is stuck in the past and can never move on from what was done to her and her daughter. She tragically relives it like it’s still happening to her everyday. Now that might remind you of a few things, some that we see in season 5.
"-It's like everyone Vecna targets has something in their life. Something that's-
-Hurting them. Haunting them."
This is what Max says to Lucas in season 4 to explain Vecna's vissions. Pain is also how Vecna tortures and traps his victims, he uses their unresolved traumas against them, reminding them of it, making them relive their deepest pains. Traumas act as a force of stagnation and entrapment, it keeps you locked away in the past. In Camazotz Max is lost and finds herself right at the beginning, looping the same memories again and again.
This is why and how Vecna captures his victims, he chooses hurt people against whom he can weaponize the bad things that have happened to them. In st, trauma can both metaphorically and literally cut you off from the present and anchor you in a frozen state.
This is the foundation that Camazotz is built on, Henry's own painful memories of when he was a neglected kid. It's a mind prison fueled by traumatic memories.
Jane, similarly to her mother, was also stuck in her memories in season 4 when she was trying to get her powers back. They looped back to the same moment and the only way forward for her was to relive and confront what has happened in order to escape and move on.
This is further proof that trauma works as a mental prison, because although this wasn't Vecna's doing, Jane still found herself trapped in a loop of her own memories where she felt the most vulnerable and scared. She was trapped within her own mind.
The show touches briefly on PTSD in season 2 through Will, it's only named directly by Hopper in passing. But it comes back frequently in subtle ways, and first we need to define what PTSD actually is.
"Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition that's caused by an extremely stressful or terrifying event - either being part of it or witnessing it. Symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares, severe anxiety and uncontrollable thoughts about the event."
Vecna is a sort of physical, albeit magical, representation of PTSD. He haunts people with their past through nightmares and hallucinations until he can kill them. This ties in with his motivations, as I said in my post about Paprika, he abhors time. To him, time as a concept was as much of a constraint as Brenner's secret government prison. This is why his power is memories and trauma manipulation specifically because they are a way for him to circumvent time. What is a memory if not a moment frozen in time, outside of time even.
"I felt, frozen. [...] Like how you feel when you're scared and you can't breathe or talk or do anything."
This is how the upside down comes into play. The nature and origin of the upside down has been one of the biggest of the mysteries of the show and the UD itself is central to this series yet we know so little of it. Now I believe that the explanation that we get this season is complete bullshit. Just another ploy by Vecna to distract and confuse our protagonists. Because, besides all other inconsitencies pointing to this being a lie, if it trully is a wormhole that means that the same day that Jane made contact with the demo Brenner created the exotic matter. And that makes absolutely no sense, how would he even been able to do such a thing ?
So we'll operate on the basis that this entire explanation is wrong for the sake of this theory. What is then, the upside down ? In season 2 Dustin is right when he compares the shadow monster to the mf, in the sense that the shadow monster does target its hosts brain.
"And there are the hippocampal abnormalities we had discussed. Nothing out of line with what we've seen others suffering from post-traumatic stress. But …this is Will from last night. And as you can see, there are now abnormalities in the limbic and paralimbic areas. And this... is from an hour ago."
Without even knowing that Will has developped abnormalities in his brain he gets it right, at least partially. I think that the other dnd analogies are key to figuring out what the true nature of the upside down may be.
"Well, if you're in another plane, you can't interact with the material plane."
"True Sight? It gives you the power to see into the ethereal plane."
They refer to the UD as the ethereal plane, in dnd it's the dimension opposite to what we'd call reality, or the prime material plane in DnD. It's an immaterial place where ghosts and other imaterial creatures reside. When traveling within the ethereal plane adventurers could move in any direction through sheer force of will like ghosts. This doesn't sound like the UD at all. The UD is very much a physical place, people are restricted by gravity and cannot pass through matter. The only ethereal thing about the UD is the mf, or as Will calls it the "shadow monster", but we don't know if it originated from the UD.
"It is a plane out of phase. It is a place of ghosts and monsters. It is right next to you, and you don't even see it."
— Manual of the Planes
However I think there is some truth to this and maybe even in the wormhole theory. Vecna tends to lie through half-truth, as seen in the previous posts. He does this to give his lies the appearance and credibility of truths to make them easier to believe in. That's why I think that the UD might very well be a transitional place, but it doesn't lead to the abyss nor is it the ethereal plane, it is more likely a demiplane.
"A demiplane is a small plane with its own unique properties. They may be created by powerful forces, but wizards and other spellcasters can create demiplanes using spells such as demiplane and Mordenkainen's magnificent mansion."
Demiplanes are usually physical and have set boundaries with other planes or dimensions. Some serve as transitional places to go from one plane to the other. Some like the Feywild or Shadowfell, are an "echo" of the prime material plane. Meaning it's a sort of warped reflection of the prime material plane and here Shadowfell is what interests us.
"It is the toxic plane of darkness and power. It is the hidden place that hates the light. It is the frontier of worlds unknown."
Shadowfell is a place of darkness and decay, inospitable and home to many monstruous creatures, it borders other planes and it allows those who travel through it to move great distances into the prime material plane.
This is much closer to the UD that we know, at least the "warped reflection of reality devoid of light and filled with monsters" part of it, and the fact that demiplanes can be created by wizards and other magical forces.
The upside down, beyond being cold and empty seems to be linked to people's minds in some way.
In season 3 when Jane entere Billy's mind she finds the same storm that Will saw when he had visions of the UD and there's even spores around it. Here the storm is where all of Billy's bad memories coalesce, and at the eye of the storm is the memory of him getting flayed. It's unclear whether or not the storm itself is the mf or simply an effect of Billy being flayed.
However we could infer that the thundering storm and darkness is a representation of Billy's anger and pain caused by the abuse inflicted by his dad being exploited by the mf and used against him.
“He uses my memories against me. But… only my darkest memories. It’s like he only sees the darkness in us.”
Max talks about darkness to refer to all of the pain, grief and suicidal thoughts she feels after witnessing Billy's gruesome death, and she uses "light" to talk about her good memories, saying she'll run towards the light when Vecna pulls her into a trance. Beyond the litteral sense of the word echoing the fact that the UD is a place without light, this darkness is also more directly tied to the UD and Vecna. When Max hides in her happiest memory, as Vecna approaches the UD leaks into her memory. The light changes, there's red flashes of light from the UD neverending storm and spores appear in the air.
The "darkness" of her mind literally seeps into even her happiest memory, with the darkness itself being the upside down.
On top of that in season 2 the UD is heavily paralled with psychic, emotional wounds or unresolved trauma. It's Kali that brings it up when she talks about her and Jane's shared trauma of being taken by Brenner and experimented on.
"You have a wound, Eleven, a terrible wound. And it's festering. Do you remember what that means? Festering? It means a rot. And it will grow. Spread. And eventually, it will kill you."
She tries to scare Jane through an illusion of Brenner into joining her crusade with these words. She's telling her that she has to heal and the only way for her is through violence.
She explains that the pain and anger she feels lingers, she can't move on from it and her "solution" is to seek vengeance like I said earlier. But although that's what she claims will heal both her and Jane, her thirst for blood is what drives her, she has completely given up on living a peaceful life and it can never trully save her. She has lost hope and has resigned herself to the role that was imposed upon her, a weapon.
Her pain will never heal because she dedicates her life to the violence that she was trying to avoid. She says it herself, after losing her found family she decided to "play the part" and to hunt down those that have hurt her. She isn't healing her wounds, she is doing the exact opposite of that by keeping them open. Her own pain keeps growing.
"They're growing and spreading… Killing."
This is what Will says about his "now memories" he is talking about the vines digging, spreading right underneath Hawkins and destroying crops and demodogs killing small animals. The exact same words are used to describe the UD spilling into the real world than to talk about trauma. The mothergate itself looks like a rotting, gaping wound, it's fleshy and organic.
The gate is a litteral wound on reality, on that needs to be closed or it will keep bleeding out monsters and abominations into the world. Just like with Kali, it will keeping killing and hurting people again, perpetuating the cycle. This means that the UD is associated with emotions and trauma, as if it, itself was someone's psyche or mind. And if the UD is indeed created from someone's memory of Hawkins, it might not be so far off from that.
"They had done things Eleven. Such Awful things. I showed them who they really were. I held up a mirror."
Henry explains that he showed his parents the "awful things" that they had done to confront them with their terrible deeds. He does the same things to Max and all his victims, his shows them the "ugly" part of themselves. He holds up a mirror that only reflects the darkness in people.
The upside down itself is a dark reflection of Hawkings, even it's name implies it, it's a reflection right below the town like it is flipped on it's horizontal axis.
"The last entry is November 6, 1983. The day Will went missing. The day the gate opened.
We're in the past."
The only really solid information about the UD is that it is frozen in time, precisely when the mothergate was opened by Jane, the same day that Will was taken. This suggests the fact that the UD was in fact created by someone or something rather that it being a natural alternate world/dimension. Now, knowing Vecna/Henry's hatred of time, his obession with clocks and his "wizard" powers of weaponizing memories, the fact that time is seemingly stopped in the UD just can't be a simple coincidence.
For all these reasons I think that the UD is effectively the halfway point, the bridge between Hawkins and Camazotz. It's a reflection of Hawkins, a dark and corrupted memory of it but is is also a physical place. It's frozen ins time because it is a bad memory of Hawkins. It IS a bridge but not in the way that it is explained in s5. That would explain its biggest mystery, why exactly it's stopped in November 6th of 1983. Time has stopped because it's a bad memory, or was built from one. The upside down is indeed a place between mind and physical reality. It's a place that is spiritual in nature and it's very likely that it was created, or shaped, by Vecna himself.
Also looking back at all of this, I just can't see how it would make ANY sense for Brenner both plotwise or thematically to have created the UD and the "exotic matter" like be so fr.
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.
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.
“Id like to think he made his illusions real” OOOOOOO I HAVE ACTUALLY BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS but i havent worked out a way for it to fit in with canon in a coherent way yet…..
In a nutshell its the theory that els ability to open gates is actually opening physical portals into people’s minds (henry getting trapped in his own mind when she banished him into dimension x hence hollys line “that would mean he’s trapped in his own mind”) (and MAYBE when she came in contact with the demo (vecnas illusion ?) she actually opened a gate into wills mind (and we’ve seen el touching ppl in the void to enter their minds, so maybe when she touched the demo she saw vecnas intention ? And how will was involved ? Maybe that’s how she recognised will ?)
And so i think if the abyss is camazotz like you said (im pretty sure you said), then the upside down is inbetween consciousness and a physical place bcs i think its a merging of henry and wills minds (illusions + physical manifestion)
Which brings me to how i think will has powers of physical manifestation, (and i THINK this has been said before already but i want to expand on it😁) which is why vecna targeted him bcs he needed someone to build his illusions
We don’t actually see the demo touch will until he’s in the upside down which makes me think he was seeing vecnas ILLUSION of the demogorgan, which caused will to physically manifest it once he was in the upside down (bcs his power is strongest in his own mind—and also since the upside down is the prime place for radio signal transmission like youve said in your other post!!!)
Which ALSO makes me think this is why wills powers activate in s5, since the upside down is bleeding into hawkins and i think will is unintentionally physically manifesting things EVERYWHERE AND he is actually encouraged and believed in…at least in vol 1 (courtesy robin and mike) which makes me think ep4 was him finally unlocking the full potential to his manifestation, proving his positive strength rather than assisting vecna in harming himself
Plus i think its interesting that wills powers manifest EXACTLY how mike told him they would
OR wills powers are actually illusions and since the upside down is bleeding into hawkins, almost everything is an illusion of sorts
Im also thinking about brenner and how the lab had a fake body for will so maybe brenner (with the knowledge that contact with the shadow particles gives a person powers—like henry) thought that will was the key to making more lab kids since he’d be an original like henry
I really love the theory that the UD is Will's mind and that he can manifest things into reality sadly I'm pretty sure that a scientist gets murked before by a demogorgon before Will comes into contact with it so it was definitely real. God I wish we had a way to tell if the illusions had an impact on reality and what was exctly an illusion. There's the obvious ones but it also looks like there are so more subtle ones that are almost undistinguishable from reality. It's still possible that Will can make illusions real but there's no way to confirm this right now, not that I see at least.
Will's powers are really strange tho, like you said it's strange that it works just like Mike said they would but also it's weird that he called him a sorcerer at all. How are his powers inate when it looks like he got them from Vecna ? And how could Mike even know that ? It's possible that Will had dormant powers before he was abducted but Mike has no way of knowing that. And then in the credits he is called an illusionist, so which is it ? Is Will a wizard, a sorcerer or an illusionist ? Vecna is compared to an evil wizard too If I recall correctly, Will's character in dnd is a wizard Mike calls him a sorcerer and in the epilogue he plays a sorcerer (meteor swarm is a sorcerer spell), and then he is called an illusionist by the credits.
We're missing something, it feels like like Vecna and Will are overlapping/merging. Will used Vecna's power when he killed the demos since it killed them in the exact same way that Vecna killed Chrissy and the others in s4. So that means that he can use the other powers too, like entering into poeple's minds and creating illusions, so maybe he went from a sorcerer to an illusionist because in the end he is creating the illusion trapping Mike and potentially Hawkins.
Also meteor swarm sounds like what Vecna did the scene where he tried to stop Max from escaping. He threw debris and flying rocks on her.
I think if Brenner had know that will was the Key he'd just have abducted him and made it look like he died. I don't think he thought either that the spores gave people powers od he'd have sent an army in there.
UGH GODDAMMIT I FORGOT ABOUT THAT DAMN SCIENTIST!!!!😫😫 yeah unfortunately its less a theory and moreso word vomit of me trying to answer the NEVERENDING questions😔😔😔
Sigh every single day i rattle my brain for answers on whether will is a wizard, cleric, sourcerer or illusionist….
That entire epilogue dnd game was STRANGE im pretty sure all of them were different to their usual classes ? I know at least will, lucas, mike (ik he was the DM but its strange they refer to him at the storyteller instead of the paladin) were. And max being a “zoomer” was kinda weird too bcs it still feels like she’s not actually part of the game ? question mark question mark
Ooooo i wonderr if vecna can possess will and use his own powers while controling him at the same time….
Which makes me think about the term “vessel” and the possibility of vecna abandoning his body to use wills….so maybe killing his physical body just prevented him from being able to return to it, instead fully inhabiting wills.
I dont think brenner thought the spores gave people powers either, but rather contact with the shadow particles/shadow monster did
Bcs surely he would have been dead set on finding out the origins of henrys powers—im sure he connected it was from the shadow particles (in the play i think its the shadow monster but for some reason in the show its shadow particles in a rock)
I think it would have been too risky to send people into the upside down with the intention of getting them flayed bcs that could have backfired very easily and he could have unintentionally given henry an army. And i think he would only want one flayed kid bcs he just wants their blood to replicate the powers—through giving pregnant women blood transfusions—without the risk of them being overtaken by the shadow monster like henry was—bcs we see that, while all the lab kids have henrys blood, they dont struggle with fighting the shadow monster for control
The way i see it, theres a couple options as to why the lab had a fake body ready to stage wills death
1. They had multiple fake bodies of kids all over hawkins prepared for if they wanted to kidnap them or needed to stage their deaths to avoid people finding out about the upside down and how theyre at fault
2. They specifically had a fake body for will ready bcs they wanted to stage his death, either to avoid consequences of his disappearance being traced back to the upside down (which would have meant they made this fake body in a very short amount of time), leading people to find out how they’re responsible for it opening, OR they wanted to kidnap him specifically for something
So i feel like brenner had to have some sort of plans for will
Another thing that i havent seen speculation about before is the possibility that el recognised will because of his fake body
This whole time ive been wracking my brain for answers on when el and will could have crossed paths pre s1/beginning of s1 and i never considered that maybe they didnt cross paths after all—maybe while el was escaping the lab, she stumbled into a room that held wills fake body
But then i start thinking about how in the s4 scripts, it says something about will recognising brenner (im not sure if this got proven fake since tho) so im not sure where that could fit in, UNLESS its showing how wills memories are merging with henrys bcs in s2 he talks about memories at the back of his head that arent his and how they arent obvious or smth ???? Like maybe seeing brenner in s4 made him remember him from henrys memories, or he just recognised him and couldn’t understand why
I wanted to answer earlier but I just kept thinking about what you said about the UD being Will's mind and it reminded of a theory that I had read like months ago and I just spiraled. I even went back to my conspiracy board to modify it because I needed to organise my thoughts (if I can call that organising lol).
About the dnd classes yeah I think they're all weird, Mike is supposed to be the game master, so it's strange for him to be called the story teller, but I think it goes with everything in the epilogue being slightly off. Btw Will doesn't have a miniature on the board at all, we see Dustin's mini gets knocked over when he gets killed/downed by the vampire and some others but Will's mini who should be standing and quite visible is nowhere to be seen. And on top of that Mike's vampire mini disappears between two shots (mirroring when Mike himself disappeared on the tower).
I'm certain that the Will we see either isn't Will or is possessed like you said. And actually that might be why he doesn't have a mini, Will isn't there. And I'm even wondering if he wasn't killed in some way when they "killed" Vecna in the fight.
About Brenner and Will I got a theory, we learn this season that it was actually Henry's blood that gave Jane and the other kids their powers and not the drugs given to the pregnant women. Assuming that this is true then it's even weirder that Will has powers too. Mike insists that his powers are inate which is really strange because how does he know that they are in fact inate and not a byproduct of Will's connection with Vecna ? Is he assuming this or is there something more ? This might just be forshadowing.
I think that potentially Brenner experimented on other pregnant women but he didn't kidnap their kids like he did for Jane's mom. Will was one of them, Brenner made blood transfusions to pregant women in Hawkins and then monitored their kids from a distance, which is how he had a body double for Will. He prepared one in case one of the kids manifested powers so that he could kidnap them.
That would explain why Will has powers and why Brenner had a body double of him ready. I rewatched s1 before s5 droped and Jane doesn't just recognise Will, she knows that he is in the UD and that he is hiding from the demogoron.
My best guess was that when she made contact with it she felt it's intent to capture Will but that doesn't really work because how does she know that he is hiding ? The thing that makes the most sens to me is that she is the one that opened the door that night. She was scared that it would get her and she sacrificed Will for her own safety, or she was told to do it. That's why she knows that Will wasn't dead or taken, she was there that night.
I might do a post about the UD and Will's connection to Henry/Vecna in the week to talk about all of that in more details when I have the time.
OK IM ALIVE ive been thinking about this a lot😮💨😮💨😮💨 HERES MY SCATTERED THOUGHTS
Omg if you do make that post about the upside down and will and henrys connection, i will be the first sat!
And to me its weird that when theyre talking about their futures for themselves, mike is still a storyteller instead of a player character. Theyre not playing the game anymore so it doesnt make sense to me that hes referred to as a storyteller instead of a paladin unless its to show him detached from his own life
And omg!??? Will not having a miniature on the board is INSANE that is such a good find!! and almost a direct parallel to s1 when el is showing explaining the upside down to them with a board and she takes wills miniature off the board before flipping it upside down….
Mikes mini disappearing like he did on the tower!!!! Woah
Omg abt will and vecna!!! In my last reply i had typed up how i thought it was possible will was in vecnas body when joyce killed him (except it didnt really kill him, it just FELT like it did, and he was still in henrys mind while henry possessed his body ?? Meaning he was still in his own mind ?? Idek) but then I deleted it bcs i was doubting it BUT THEN a day later i saw this post and i was gobsmacked!
Maybe vecna was trying to replicate what gave him his powers on will
Maybe thats why theyre still innate, yet vecna claims that they come from him (bcs he orchestrated it) and maybe thats what hes doing with the other kids—a direct parallel to brenner creating superpowered kids from henrys blood, except he’s creating their powers straight from the source (the shadow monster)
But i think its likely will was ALSO born with powers ontop of this, making him more powerful, also setting him apart from the lab kids, the kids in camazotz AND henry
Oooooo i like that theory about brenner!! My only hold up is that i dont see why the blood transfusions wouldnt work ? Unless it was just a gamble like that, but then why would he kidnap the others as babies? How could he have been sure theyd develop powers from the experiments but then not sure about others like will?
I do also like the theory that el opened the door in ep1!! Im not sure that el would sacrifice will to the demo for her own safety, mainly bcs i think she feels a certain responsibility with her powers, and subconsciously a lot of guilt from all the kids at the lab that died bcs of henry, so maybeee it mightve even been to try and help will ? Maybe el was trying to trap the demo in the house where she could kill it while will could escape to the shed ?? Bcs in the shed, the demo appears at the back of the shed, BEHIND will—where hopper later finds a slimey hole, making me think the demo flipped into the upside down to escape el and reappear in the shed to kidnap will
(Something i dont understand though is why the demos dont flip from the upside down into the rightside up more often to escape situations and reassert themselves as the predator ??)
OR parts of the sequence could be illusions, and i say that because the door opening in ep1 reminds me of s2 when will gets up in the middle of the night and his front door opens by itself and he sees the shadow monster in the sky
I also wonder if this scene is gonna hold a lot of importance if time travel gets involved
Bcs i keep thinking about this shot that was on the cover of the first episode but was never in the episode,,,,which makes me kind of think there was some interference from the future (hes also wearing his marty mcfly outfit here) or maybe they really just wanted to add a bts picture as the cover for the first ep….idk
I meant to answer sooner and things got busy, but I'm back!
About the post about Will, it turned more into a post about the upside down, trauma and a bunch of other things, oh and it's going to be two posts because it was getting too long. I'm halfway there I think, it was particularly hard to make something coherent because I was just rambling so much. I got really scatterbrained, I had to get back to my conspiracy board and rework it (I'm now at 700 layers it's bad) and it doesn't help that my hyperfixation on st is fading so I'm running on fumes now.
About Will himself tho, my best theory is that the birthdaygate thing is because Will is getting flayed in some way even back in season 1 and him acting like Henry is the result of the hivemind affecting his behavior and memories.
Or it's this; "Maybe vecna was trying to replicate what gave him his powers on will" I feel like Vecna/Henry is sort of trying to replicate what happened to him, maybe that's why Will's birthday changed and why Joyce was mistaken about his age in s5 ? But maybe it's not so much about the powers but about trauma and perpetuating the cycle, ot it's both? After all Henry's powers come from emotions and making people afraid makes them more vulnerable to him. (And I talk about cycles and trauma in my upcoming posts but they play a huge role both thematically and in the st magic system so it might be related to that).
Yes ! I didn't think about Jane flipping the board but that's such a good catch ! I made a short post that Will was getting flayed this season, just like back in s2 and I think that has to be linked to that, like he isn't there anymore, it's just the mf that we see in the epilogue. However I don't know why Mike's mini is disappearing like him and it's making me angry, wtf is happening to him ? Is he being replaced ? Is he in a trance ?
About Brenner, my theory is that maybe blood transfusions don't have the same effect on everyone, after all Jane was the most of all the kids taken by Brenner. Terry Ives said that she knew her kid had powers even though she was taken from her at birth so there must have been signs that Brenner was monitoring that Jane was special even when she was in her womb. And maybe not all kids show signs very early on. So Brenner must have tried different methods to try to replicate Henry, some like with Terry, he experimented on her closely during her pregnacy and for others he simply made blood transfusions on pregnant women without them knowing hoping that something might come out of it.
I rewatched the scene where the door opened in s1 and I don't see how this can be anything other than to let the demo inside. The demo approaches the door and stops for a moment and then it opens which prompts Will to run away. Idk if Jane would be in the capacity to make a plan like opening the door to scare Will to help him tbh. It doesn't mean that she necessarily had bad intentions or knew exactly what she was doing.
I doubt it was an illusion, I don't see what would be the point of making Will believe that the door opened.
Time travel would be a very hard thing to plan on a 10 years project, not impossible, just a lot of work (and I don't personally like time loops so I'm hoping that it's not meant to be like Jane from the future that opened the door or smth like that). Although there are some things that might hint at that like the marty mcfly outfit.
This is a direct followup to PART 1 to the post "Will was possessed from the start" about Will being possessed/controled. I suggest reading it first before this one.
Will isn't the only one that seems to be losing memories or acting strange and I think that some of the answers to that are in season 2.
Now let’s start where we left off, with Joyce and Will:
In s2 Will spends almost all his screen time time by his mother’s side, with Mike coming in a close second. In s3 and s4 he is a lot more independent from her. He feels smothered by her and his brother at the start of the season, and the same goes for s5. Will wants her to stop treating him like he’s made of glass and he wants to make his own decisions.
Also Joyce smokes again, something I’m pretty sure she stopped doing after s2. Joyce is regressing. Even after Will confronts her she back down when Will gets caught by Vecna.
She even wears the same clothes as in s2.
In s2 Jane is stuck, hiding from the feds in Hopper's cabin. Hopper lies and breaks his promise that he made to her that she would get to go out soon, he does it to keep Jane trapped and "safe" because he is worried that she'll get caught by the feds again. She ends up disobeying him after he breaks his promise and she goes to see her mother and Kali, she then comes back in ep8 to save Hopper and Mike.
In s5 the setup is almost the same Hopper and Jane are living in his cabin again to hide from the army, after Hopper breaks his promise to her she leaves, gets seen by the army she then finds Hop, helps him and goes to find Kali with him.
"-You promised... I go! And I never leave! Nothing ever happens!
-Yeah! Nothing happens and you stay safe!
They have an argument and Hopper keeps doubling down and Lying to Jane.
"-You saw the time. I saw you look down. You have to let me go with you.
-You want to find Henry so bad, don't you? So bad. Do it. Do it from the tub. Do it remotely."
[...]
"-The crawl is tonight, Hop. If I'm under 12:30, I can come with you. That is what you promised.
-Yeah, I promised that. I promised it. But I didn't see it."
And the same things happen again in s5 Hopper has to relearn the same lesson that he has already learned years ago. Exept he doesn't, he never apologies for lying and in fact keeps lying to her about his intent to sacrifice himsef. Whereas s2 Hopper decides to be honest with her and tells her that he never should have lied about her mother or about when she could leave. Hopper is regressing too, we are repeating the same things but with a worse ending.
The point of Jane rebelling was for her to gain some independance and learning to stand up for herself, the fact that Hopper keeps lying to her in s5 undermines Jane's independance and self-determination.
Jane and Max's relation, or lack thereof, is one of the most noticeable this season. After Max wakes up she never interacts once with Jane until they meet again in Jane's mind. Now if we follow my theory and look back at s2, then these two didn't even know each other, they knew of each other but they only met right at the end and Jane was still jealous of Max so they weren't friends at all. It's only in s3 where they get closer and develop their bond.
Their relationship appears to have regressed as a way to keep them apart. Their memories doesn't seem to have been completely erased because that would probably be too noticeable, Jane still shows some concern for Max.
Nancy Jonathan and Steve are stuck in a love triangle in s2, Nancy thinks that she loves Steve but actually remains with him because it is a "safe" option for her. Murray pushes her and Jonathan together, and the end up sleeping together. Steve lets go of Nancy and she seemingly ends up in relationship with Jonathan.
Edit: There's also the scene where Steve wants to bring Nancy flowers like he did in s2.
In s5 the love triangle comes back, Jonathan and Steve are both competing for Nancy despite the fact that Nancy is in a commited relationship with Jonathan. It's strange for Steve to go after a taken woman. And just like in s5 Murray is the one to push Jonathan and Nancy together in a creepy way.
Steve lets go of Nancy gain, he has regressed and has to learn the same lesson that he did back in s2. However this Time Jonathan decides to also let Nancy go and to not conform to heterormative expectations, he tells her the truth.
In s2 Jane is separated from mike for the entire season and only they meet at the end so their relationship stagnates from s1, they remain just friends. In s5 they barely interact with each other and even look like they might be broken up because they don't really act as a couple.
I've so many people state that it’s the comeback of s1 and 2 Mike, he is kind, attentive and protective of Will again. But maybe that's not a result of what happened between them in the timskip but because it literally IS s2 Mike. That’s why his relationship with will has changed, his memories were tempered with, and partially erased causing Mike's relationships to regress.
On top of everything they plan a kidnapping and a half, something typical of Vecna and that’s Will’s plan. The first one Jonathan doesn’t seem to be too on board with the idea of kidnapping a child but Joyce and Will insist. There’s orange lights everywhere in this scene and in particular behind Joyce's head.
She starts to have doubt for a moment before doubling down on the plan.
I think that the characters this season are being flayed in some capacity, something seems to be messing with their memory and maybe even influencing their actions. It's like entire months, maybe years of their lives were erased, at least partially. And it's not just that, they use mindflayer tactics like drugging and kidnapping people. And both Jonathan and Robin bring up the fact that is a dubious strategy.
Jane even forces her way into the mind of Akhers just like Vecna/Henry to steal information from him.
In the lab in s2 the mindflayer sends the demodogs after the scientists that attacked it and when Joyce sedates Will they don’t know where he is anymore allowing them to eventually escape. In s5 the demodogs keep following Lucas and Max despite the fact that Will isn’t with them and therefore doesn’t know exactly where they are. And Lucas notices it too.
Vecna probably didn't need Will at all to know where Max was and simply pretended to to break and scare him further. The fact that the demodogs were able to follow them like that implies that one or more of these characters were flayed. Or that potentially other people present in the hospital, either that or the demodogs were potentially an illusion.
Here are other parallels, some have already been pointed by other people however I want to compile the relevant ones here:
We have yet another direct callback to a scene in s2.
The reason that Suzie disappeared from the narrative might also be due to this general regression. Dustin hadn't met Suzie yet in s2 and instead Stacy makes a comeback because at the end of s2 dustin asks her for a dance and she brushes him off.
Bob comes back to haunt the narrative in the epilogue, he parallels Hopper in the dinner scene.
"-What if we were to move out of Hawkins… together?
-What ?
-I know. Whoa, Nellie, right? No, I just… I've been thinking about what you said. About how we've got all these memories here, and you wish you had enough money to move. Well, my parents are selling their house in Maine. There's a RadioShack nearby. I'm sure they'd take me on. We could just...
[...]
-It's just this… This is not a normal family.
-It could be."
Bob asks Joyce if she would want to move out of Hawkins and she seems very hesitant.
"-I wish it was the sound of something different. Maybe, um, the squawk of seagulls, or, uh, waves gently lapping on the beach.
-Well, that sounds nice.
-Could be real.
-I'm just saying there's nothing tying us down here anymore.
-But you seem to think our bank account is bigger than it is.
-Could be. I got a call from my buddy in the New York days. Montauk's looking for a new chief of police."
Their conversation is almost identical except that this time Joyce seems open to move out, and also Hopper might be trying to tell Joyce to listen to the radio in a coded way.
Bob also parallels Mike:
And possibly Jonathan as well.
Bob here represents "normalcy" and heteronormativity in which Mike, Joyce and Hopper are trapped in. In a conformist world Bob is the default model and it gets applied to other male characters.
That's again in s2 that Max states that she doesn't want to be like her brother, prone to anger and violent and yet that's exactly what she does in the epilogue.
There's talks about cycles with events repeating but it's not just events that are repeating like children disappearing, it's characters litarally acting the same way they did years ago, repeating the same actions and having the learn the same lessons. Maybe that's what the spores were used for in s4, maybe it was a way for the mindflayer to infect all of Hawkins to slowly modify people's memories.
Season 2 was when we were first introduced to the mindflayer, when it started to spy on the characters, it's also then that the tunnels were built and the characters use them a lot this season (something the demo-dogs did). We are reminded of their existence multiple times and Vecna tells Will directly that he built them. And it's no coincidence that Kali, who was also introduced in s2 makes her come back now. All these callbacks aren't accidental.
This might be one of the reasons for why things are so off this season, but I think that there are more than that. I think that beyond character's memories being modified/erased the way they act might be influenced by either the mindflayer or Vecna too. And there are also illusions and potentially other factors causing all these inconsistencies, hopefully we can start to detangle all of this mess.
In my next post I will talk about Mike, trauma and cycles, it will most probably be another long one. :p
I watched s2 again for the other post I was working on and I noticed a lot more things that I need to talk about, the rest will have to wait.
This season we've all been trying to figure out what type of fuckery is happening at any given time. Is Vecna influencing what we are the characters see ? Who is hallucinating and who is in Camazotz ? Characters act weirdly and things don't make sense and I think that one of these fuckeries is that Will is slowly getting possessed again.
First we need to go back to this scene in episode 3:
To recap what I said in a previous post, here Will doesn't wear the two coats that he was wearing (inside) in the previous scenes, Joyce is clearly cold and Will changes the subject when she tells him that he should wear his coat. The next time that we see them they are in the barn and with Erica and Robin, everyone is wearing coats meaning it's cold inside too. The composition of the shot is particular too, Will and Joyce are separated by a metal barrier and right above Will's head there's this bright orange light. These all seem to imply that Will is possessed by the mindflayer or potentially by Vecna.
Originally I thought that it was a sign that maybe Vecna was spying on them at that moment but now after rewatching s2 I believe it's more than that, I think that right from ep1 Will is falling more and more into possession in s5.
Let's take a look at how does Wills' connection to the hive-mind works in s2. First off the minflayer shows up when Will is isolated and feels scared like when he gets picked on on Halloween. Almost everytime Mike is the one to "wake him up" from his episodes.
"-It's like … It's like I feel what the shadow monster's feeling. See what he's seeing. And the more he spreads, the more connected to him I feel.
-And the more you see these now-memories.
-At first I just felt it in the back of my head. I didn't even really know it was there. It's like when you have a dream and you can't remember it unless you think really hard."
After being possessed by the mindflayer in ep3 Will started to have visions that got stronger and more frequent with time as his connection grew.
"It's so hard to remember everything. It's … It's almost like a dream. I was seeing what it was seeing and thinking what it was thinking."
In s5 Will describes the same thing to Joyce. This is the exact same connection to the hivemind that Will had all the way back in s2 when he was flayed/full of mindflayer particles but much, much stronger. And as far as we know he wasn't infected again by mindflayer particles.
Just like back then he gets overwhelmed when the demos get attacked and it stuns the demos in return.
Both in s2 and s5 he tries to spy on the mindflayer/Vecna and is used in return to spy on his friends. And Mike is the one who encourages him to use his connection against the mindflayer/Vecna.
The memories that Joyce, Jonathan and Mike remind Will of are all the exact same ones that Will uses to fight back in s5.
Joyce talks about Will drawing the rainbow ship, Jonathan about them building castle Byers when their dad left and Mike talks about his asking Will if they could be friends.
That helps him communicate with them but it doesn't free him of his possession.
In s2 after Will spies on the mindflayer and helps save Hopper he falls deeper into possession and start to lose his memories, forgetting the doctors, Hopper and Bob but not his mom nor Mike. In s5 after he gets captured by Vecna in ep6 when he tries to use his memories to fight back one of some of them are now missing, it's of course the ones with Mike in them and he fails to free himself. Mike was erased from his memories.
And furthermore I think that it might be why Will minimises his love for Mike to just a crush. He is forgetting about their connection in real time, and he interacts less and less with him in vol2. And fighting back in ep4 wasn't enough, it didn't save him from the possession.
In s2 the mindflayer uses Will to set a trap for the soldiers by making Will pretend that he spied on the mindflayer and found the way to kill it.
In s5 Will is the one saying that Vecna wants to merge worlds and has been making rifts in the Abyss and he is the one suggesting that they kidnap the turnbows.
This is EXACTLY what flayed Billy does, he gets into people houses and drugs them before kidnapping them.
Will starts to wear grey after he looses against the mindflayer in s2, in s5 he slowly loses his colors as well, he stops wearing yellow and ends the epilogue with a grey t-shirt awfully reminiscent of the ones he wore in s2. His eyes also appear quite dark and brown in the epilogue.
Now despite all these similarities and parallels he doesn't seem to outright turn evil and forget everything like back in s2, however I believe that is because Vecna has changed tactics.
Henry is smart and won't take the risk of repeating a strategy twice if it has a chance to fail. That's why he decided to kidnap the kids by pretending to be their friend, and why he is hiding somewhere where there is no light that can give away his position like in s4. I mentioned it in my post about Camazotz, Henry switched up his tactics to throw off his opponents, and I think that also applies for Will.
It cuts directly to Will when Nancy explains that Vecna is presenting as a friends to the kids and he looks nervous. After all it's Will plan to kidnap Derek.
The mindflayer in s2 tried to take control when Will felt alone and scared and in s5 Will is terrified, the only moment where he regains control is when he embraces his queerness in ep 4 but his love for Mike starts to get erased shortly after and he loses all confidence in himself in vol2. He gets more vulnerable as time goes on, Vecna has successfully cut him off from Mike, the one that could help him and made him lose hope.
"The truth is I never stood a chance. Because he knew I was weak, and he knew he could control me. And he knew it. He's always known it. That's why, out of everyone in Hawkins, he chose me."
This happens in ep7, shortly before the final battle and Will never really comes back from this. Vecna/the mindflayer then uses Will's desire to come out against him (whether by controlling him or through illusions, or a mix of both), turing a moment that should feel joyous and safe into a terrying ordeal that he feels he doesn't have a choice in. It's visible when Will talks about the "milshakes at Melvalds" and "getting lost in the woods" he isn't himself and might even be getting his memories replaced and overwritten.
I think that Vecna or the mindflayer (or both) is possessing him in a different way by not taking over completely but instead by slowly and insidiously influencing him and his memories. It seems to take more control of him by moments like the coat scene, emerging only when it needs to use him. By the end pf the season he has been fully replaced.
And I think that that scene is key to understanding this, this is a very clear callback to Will being possessed in s2. And I think that the fact that this callback also reminds us of birthdaygate with Joyce being mistaken on Will's age is not a coincidence. After all it's in s2 that we get the first hints of this with Joyce reminding Will that his birthday being march 22nd and we see the "I forgot your birthday card" on the wall of Will's bedroom. And on top of that, again in the same scene Joyce is smoking again, something she did back in s2.
This all has to be tied to Will getting possessed in s5 and I imagine that this plan started years ago. Back in s4 Will was already dressing like young Henry Creel.
In s5 Will starts to tuck his shirt in his pants again just like Henry even if it's a t-shirt.
Vecna passes the events in s5 as victories, Will being able to fight back against him yet everything screams at us that Will is slowly falling into possession and losing himself during the course of this season, and in the end they never actually defeat the mindflayer.
Now that's not where the callbacks to s2 stop and I believe that Will isn't the only one losing his memories either and I will explore that in the next post. It'll come shortly after. :)
