(Mostly) harmless

And the colors in this poster of Tales of 85' (Red and Yellow like their raincoats) are the exact same for Max and El (and kinda matching with Will's)

There's also a teddy bear next to the tiger poster, and bears are related to both Will and El as we all know from season 3 (though the exact meaning is lost to me)

If you mix both these colors, Red and Yellow, you get Orange

And both Max and El have been associated with ghosts,

almost like... they are the same person? The ghost of Sara Hopper?

👻

Or so it's subtextually implied when Eleven scares Hopper when she disguises herself for Halloween.

And when Lucas, who remember, is a Ranger in DnD, clocks that Max is "Like a ghost"

In DnD, Rangers have this unique ability named "Primeval Awareness" that allows them to detect the supernatural enemy, including spirits/undead.

And why Sara Hopper? Because she died from Agent Orange

And Max, she is a personification of Agent Orange, what killed Sarah, not just because her hair is literally orange, but because:

In her Vecna vision of the Snow Ball the room momentarily turns orange before it turns blue and dead like the Upside Down.

This orange tint is a representation of the sickness, (the "supernatural cancer" as was described in the Montauk Pilot) that invaded Sara.

We get a shot of some dead flowers and ashes in the air that parallel the ashes and dead flowers that Eleven picks up in the final scene of Season 4's finale (As well as the red electric storm).

So how does Tharizdun play into this? For starters, as Max's introductory song would hint to you, she is a "Hurricane" 🌪

Which in Chaos Theory is an example of what results of a butterfly's flapping of its wings 🦋 A slight alteration in time turned into a big catastrophic event.

And a Hurricane is represented as a spiral 🌀, Tharizdun's symbol.

And what does the spiral 🌀 look like? 69

Lay 69 on its side and it's: ♋, the symbol for the Zodiac Sign of Cancer, Agent Orange.

And the other symbol for Cancer? A crab 🦀 which Max has in her brooch in her Camazotz outfit

Now I don't believe Lucas is under Tharizdun's influence, I think that if he is 'the traitor' that he's doing it out of genuine love and devotion to Max. He is her prince/knight after all (as they parallel Sleeping Beauty)

Sara's name means Princess and Max is "Princess Daphne" from the Dragon's Lair game.

As Max would be the part of Sara that was infected with Agent Orange, so maybe if the timeline is 'fixed', she would fuse with El and disappear?

That would give him a strong reason to become 'the traitor'