𝐖𝐈𝐂𝐊𝐄𝐃 𝐌𝐘𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐂

As mentioned in my other MF headcanon overview post, my Upside Down is not a "wormhole"; it is the viscera of a god, suspended between dimensions. My mindflayer is not just a random alien lifeform; it is a hunger that predates life and form itself, and Hawkins is not being "invaded" so much as it is being consumed.

In this canon, the mindflayer is identified as "god" in the truest, most horrifying sense: a primordial force of chaos, rot, growth, and annihilation. Older than the universe itself, it exists across dimensions. You can think of it most simply as a mega-parasite and a cosmic super-collective. A thing that, in its natural state, does not possess a body at all. It exists instead as a disembodied, collective consciousness, vast and impossibly ancient; a storm of thought without flesh. A presence suspended in a dead, unreachable dimension that canon chooses to call "Dimension X," though even that implies geography where none truly exists.

"The abyss" is a better suited descriptor as it is best understood as a psychic void, housing a vast, disembodied collective intelligence that cannot meaningfully act upon reality without something to anchor it. The abyss is the mindflayer's very own "mind scape". Without life to infect, within the abyss, it exists as a swirling, eternal psychic ocean — aware but unable to act without possessing and manipulating a physical vessel. Unfortunately for humanity, it is very, very intelligent, very, very manipulative, and very, very adept at psychically communing with intelligent lifeforms.

In 1942, during World War II, American scientists were working on a way to turn US military vessels invisible to aid in the war effort. They created a device and tested it aboard the USS Eldridge, a US Navy ship. Rather than becoming truly "invisible", the unstable device slipped the ship sideways through a "barrier" in reality.

Essentially, humanity, accidentally breaches a boundary and releases something that should have remained sealed. The mndflayer is not a random alien predator that came hunting; it is a force disturbed by mankind's fumble. Fucking around and finding out in a terrifying way. Though the USS Eldridge's contact with "Dimension X" was brief, the entire crew were killed, with only Captain Brenner as the sole survivor. He returned, but he did not return whole. True to its nature and an opportunistic predator, the mindflayer embedded a piece of itself in Captain Brenner, who carried it back through to the human dimension. It is unclear whether his contact with the entity caused his condition or whether unprotected exposure to unstable, dimension-ripping technology was to blame, but Captain Brenner was rendered largely catatonic upon his return to the human dimension.

Captain Brenner, however, had a son. Young Martin Brenner, and through exposure to his fathers bizarre "illness", he developed an obsession with the accident that caused it. Martin Brenner went on to become a scientist, working closely with the US government. Needless to say, Dr Brenner's work with the government was never purely scientific curiosity. He spent years trying to recreate the Eldridge incident, not to undo it, but to understand what had come through, what had afflicted his father all those years ago.

I have drastically altered the canon dealing with Henry's initial contact with the mindflayer because I always found the weird, mysterious stone thing they inserted in season 5 to be a very boring way to approach it, and once again, I'm not trying to make my content "general audience" friendly; I'm writing a cosmic horror shit show here.

Instead, in my canon, Henry is infected through a nightmarish encounter with one of the mindflayer's "second-generation" victims, a young nurse who had once worked as a caretaker to Captain Brenner. The woman went missing without a trace years ago, and by the time eight-year-old Henry encounters her in 1952, she's no longer a person so much as a she is a vector.

The lead-up to the event remains similar. Henry is eight years old and a proactive member of the Cub Scouts in Nevada. One day, he is with two other young boys collecting kindling for a fire. Henry, in my canon, was mildly clairvoyant, which made him highly susceptible to the mindflayer's psychic interference. His sensitivity made him a beacon for it, and while he was playing and collecting sticks with his two friends during a camp out, it lured him with apparitions and voices toward a cave. Believing he had seen someone go inside and heard a scream, Henry went inside to help someone he thought had been injured.

He was quickly faced with something that hadn't been a human for some time and was violently attacked by it as he attempted to flee. Henry does not remember anything about the event. He was found days later, hiding in the shade under a bush, dazed, scraped and bruised but otherwise physically fine. (This is something I'm in the process of writing a one shot about)

Psychologically, however, it is another matter. Understandably, Henry is very much traumatized by the horrifying event and wasn't able to be the same boy he was before. It is the 1950s, and Henry is quickly pathologized. Post-infection, Henry's symptoms are misdiagnosed because they look psychiatric: insomnia, decreased/lack of appetite, hallucinations (visual and auditory), emotional dysregulation, and violent outbursts. Eventually, he was said to be suffering from "childhood schizophrenia."

Dead animals also became a peculiarity and constant occurrence in Henry's neighbourhood. Eventually, after a violent outburst that wounded a boy at Henry's old school, Henry's mother couldn't stand the social shame and decided to move the family away to Hawkins for a "fresh start". The dead animals followed, and Virginia knew Henry was to "blame" somehow.

Henry is, in fact, "to blame", but this wasn't a result of psychotic cruelty. This was a manifestation of the mindflayer's psionic hunger,  though Henry, a young, troubled boy as he was, did not understand it as such, either.

Dr Brenner, however, recognized it immediately and quickly made contact with Henry's mother. Virginia, more than happy to hand Henry over to someone who claimed he could "fix him", or at the very least "take him away" so she didn't have to deal with the "burden" of him, had planned to do just that.

The breaking point comes in the Creel house one night. Henry and Patty, two abused and neglected children who found solace and comfort in one another, had planned to run away together. Patty to escape her abusive, controlling father and Henry to escape his abusive, hateful mother, who Henry was aware planned to institutionalize him.

Virginia, however, thwarts Henry's escape plan and under emotional stress, the mindflayer seizes control, causing Henry to kill her and his sister. Brenner sees the opportunity to kidnap Henry, fake his death, and frame Victor Creel as the murderer of his family.

Henry is held captive in Hawkins' lab, where Brenner sells him as a weapon to the government. Here, Henry's humanity is systematically dismantled. Brenner isolates, starves, and experiments on him, learning that Henry does not need food — he can sustain himself by feeding on minds, emotions, and suffering. Forced into repeated acts of violence, Henry begins to understand what he is: not just a psychic, but a predator housing something far worse. (More details in this post)

Over time, the line between Henry and the entity blurs. Brenner encourages this fragmentation, making him easier to control, while Henry clings desperately to the idea that he can use his condition for good — a "necessary evil" of sorts. This is where Henry's "predator, but for good" concept came from, also mentioned in the previous post.

After a failed escape attempt in his late teens, which ended in death, destruction, and his recapture, Henry is declared too dangerous to exist but too valuable to destroy. He is restrained, sedated, and fitted with the Soteria chip, suppressing both him and the entity. He is reduced to a living resource — his blood used to create new "controllable" subjects, his body treated as property, his identity further stripped away. For years, he has existed in this state: controlled, humiliated, and trapped between hatred and a child's lingering attachment to Brenner, the man who proclaimed himself as his "father" and whom Henry once believed in as such.

When the chip is eventually removed, everything that has been building — the trauma, the violation, the humiliation, the entity itself, is unleashed at once, causing the 1979 lab massacre and tragically, this eclipsed Henry's attempt to save a child like himself, Eleven. He was "killed" by her in the resulting struggle after she rejected him.  

Up until that moment, the entity existed as a disembodied, formless psychic mass — a vast, parasitic consciousness with no true body. But through Henry's mind — his memories, his trauma, his understanding of the world — it suddenly had a template.

Henry's transformation into Vecna could be viewed as an ascension as much as a resurrection. Henry's form arrived in the Abyss ruined, and as Vecna, he is held together not by life, but by foreign biomatter and the will of the entity within him. He is, quite literally, a walking corpse animated by something that refuses to let him die. (also more on that here)

The Demogorgon's origins remain a mystery. Whether they were once independent lifeforms who suffered a horrific fate, or have always been the mindflayer's living, mobile organs, becomes almost irrelevant, but what they are now is clear: extensions of the mindflayer, dependent on its consciousness to exist, biologically modelled for hunting, spreading, and feeding. They are not creatures that can truly be likened to animals, rather they are organisms closer to fungi or vegetation.

The mindflayer does not coexist with life; it repurposes it. Henry is not exempt from that rule, either. He is simply the most useful example of it and perhaps the most horrifying, because despite everything, he still retains a unique human consciousness. Henry refused to allow the mindflayer to absorb him entirely, he fought against it until eventually they pressed each other into a terrifying symbiosis.

The Upside Down begins to take shape after Brenner forces Eleven to use her powers to relocate Henry. When Eleven touched the Demogorgon, one of the mindflayer's organs, she accidentally gave it a psychic bridge into the human world, which allowed the barrier to falter and the mindflayer to impress itself upon the human dimension.

The Upside Down is then "formed" via the mindflayer's link with multiple conduits, especially William Byers.

As the Gate stabilizes, the mindflayer begins cycling through hosts: Will Byers: partial integration. The parasitic fragment was expelled before proper integration, though it left him able to sense and tap into the "hive mind". Billy Hargrove: high-functioning host, terminated upon resistance in a display of alarmingly human temper, this was a silver of Henry's consciousness surfacing and functioning within the hive mind. The Flayed: mass assimilation, reduced to biomass.

Each case demonstrates the same principle: The individual is irrelevant. The function is everything. The entity uses bodies as tools, nutrients, and building material, and when they are no longer useful, they are reclaimed and merged into the collective.

The Upside Down is where reality has begun to be digested but has not yet fully broken down. Hawkins is not being copied; it is being absorbed. In many ways, the Upside Down is what happens when something that's body is too vast to be perceived by any human understanding, or perhaps was just something that was never supposed to have a body in the first place… Grows itself one over a reality it isn't supposed to be in.

The spores, the vines, the slow decay of anything it touches, they are not alien decoration or some creepy, pointless aesthetic; these are biological processes on a cosmic scale. Everything within the Upside Down is part of a larger system. Demogorgons are mobile predatory organs/a living immune system; vines are connective tissue/nervous systems, also functioning as biomass for the mind flayer to act physically, allowing it to grapple with victims, and the spores are atmospheric contamination/propagation, but each of these things exists to spread, consume, and integrate.

Every organism the minflayer infects is not just controlled, but absorbed, their thoughts and memories are folded into the greater whole. Henry is precisely as he was described in season 4: The mindflayer's five-star general. He is its chosen herald, an intermediary of terrifying purpose. When the "gate" was sewn shut again in season 3, the mindflayer used Henry as a battery, an amplifier, using his powers to reach through from the Upside Down and dismantle the barrier completely.

Henry does not see what he is doing as destruction but rather as correction, because, from his perspective and tragic lived experience he has, humanity is fragmented, cruel, and hypocritical. Individuals suffer alone, isolated and misunderstood. Humanity centres and enforces defective, miserable unnatural constructs and systems that devastate society as a whole. The mindflayer views consciousness itself as trapped in flawed, fragile bodies. To it, bodies are either vessels or raw material, and in its endless hunger it offers a solution to what it views as a senseless, finite, shallow existence — a world where no one is alone ever again, a total convergence: a singular, eternal existence where every thought is shared, every memory preserved, and all pain is understood and alleviated through a collective.

In this annihilation, there is also unification, and Henry, as figure that has managed to not only retain a form of independent consciousness but has been able to harness the incredible power of the cosmic entity itself, can manipulate that into creation.

Henry is not evil, he is.......... Misunderstood and certainly misguided. The mindflayer itself is also not evil. It does not hate. It does not judge. It simply grows, consumes, and incorporates, like any parasite, like any god, and humanity, in its arrogance, did not summon it or create it…They simply let it notice them, and that invited it in.

By the time we reach Season 5, as season 4 originally established, Hawkins isn't presently "under threat" of being assimilated or "annihilated"; it's already in the process. The "gates" were opened, and the "Upside Down" is no longer held back by a taring, previously patched dimensional barrier; it has been torn through and destroyed. The entities' internals and conciseness now have full access; Hawkins is now within the belly of the beast, literally. The mindflayer is not trying to take the town; it is already digesting it and assimilating everything in it.

Moreover, this doesn't end with Hawkins, Hawkins is simply the first successful merge point. Henry's goal has never been to just destroy Hawkins; it is to trigger a chain reaction: Towns -> Cities -> Planet. A total collapse of separate consciousness into one unified existence.

The tragedy and the conflict here isn't just the world ending threat, its that Henry might not be entirely wrong. If every consciousness exists within the collective… And if Henry can manipulate that collective… Then yes, theoretically, he could construct an idealistic, paradisaical reality. A utopia built on psychic assimilation. A beauitful, eternal dream where no one ever wakes up.

Season 5 should have been focused entirely on figuring out what the fuck Henry's deal was, disconnecting him from the mindflayer, particularly through an appeal to his obvious humanity, and re-erecting a psychic barrier to prevent the entity from assimilating everything.

The party wouldn't just be fighting a big, giant, stupid spider monster, in some dumb-ass disappointing marvel movie cgi ass fight, they're fighting a philosophy and a deeply twisted version of salvation because Henry was never trying to "destroy the world", he's trying "make it better", to repair a world that is objectively, flawed and harmful and beneath the rot and the ruin and the screaming collective mass… He truly believes that.

But yes, he would be and HAS to be stopped, because even if he can make this idealized psychic world, horrifically murdering everyone to get to it isn't really a thing anyone should be chill with, and the way out of society's issues probably shouldn't be to become one with a colossal cosmic god-mind, but given Henry's undead, deeply traumatized, and unbelievably PISSED OFF with everything that was done to him, he's not really thinking the best and clearest thoughts, despite his tragically "noble" intentions. Anyways. As soon as I get 500 million dollars I'll make the real Stranger Things season 5 and a final delivers everything it promised. But until then, we stay mourning the Duffer's greed and laziness.