I think I might have figured out what the Mind Flayer really is.
This theory has been percolating in my brain for a while now; it hasn't really finished baking yet but I wanted to get the gist of it down before The First Shadow debuts.
Let’s begin at the Hawkins National Lab, 6th November 1983. For the second time in her young life, El faces terrifying and deeply traumatic circumstances which cause her powers to lash out and rip a gash in the fabric of reality.
Meanwhile, across town, Will is doing what every queer 12 year-old has done and finds an excuse to spend an extra moment alone with his crush.
His little gay heart is as aflutter as the garage lights.
(Strange, that. The lights, I mean -- considering that he's on the other side of town from the lab. Do you suppose the Demogorgon trekked all the way to Mike's house and quietly followed him home again?)
Will heads home, lost in thought as he cycles past the lab. Is he thinking about how sweet his new X-Men #134 is gonna be? Or is he thinking about something even sweeter? The lights flutter again.
And something in front of him notices.
Will has always been noticeable: his clothes, his mannerisms, his interests -- they've always attracted the attentions of bullies. Now something new -- or maybe something that was always there and is only now making itself known -- has attracted the attentions of a monster.
He runs home, he calls for help, but he's alone, there's no escape. He races to the shed and loads a gun like his father taught him -- but it's not in his nature to be violent. He freezes, petrified.
The lights surge as his terror wrestles control of his powers and uses them to puncture an escape route in the fabric of reality.
Why were we so quick to believe that the Demogorgon -- a minion of the guy whose whole thing is his inability to open gates -- was able to open its own temporary portals in S1 and then never again?
Will could plausibly have been responsible for every temporary portal in S1: he’s at the Byers house when the Demogorgon pushes through its walls; he's on the run to Castle Byers when Nancy stumbles across that portal in the woods; and he's plugged in to one of Vecna's vines during the finale -- something we see Vecna plug himself into when he remotely opens gates in S4.
There’s one exception though.
Barb likely slipped through a gate in Steve's pool, but how could Will have opened that one when he was in his bedroom at the time, talking to his mother through the lights?
Let me ask you this: isn't it interesting that of all the injuries Barb could have obtained in her passage to the Upside Down, she got a nosebleed?
I think powers are more common than we’ve been led to believe, and gates are a last-ditch self-defense mechanism for anyone with powers.
This is why the four curse victims’ deaths opened a gate: Vecna pushed them to their breaking point to artificially trigger the self-defense response. Those headaches and nosebleeds weren't caused by Vecna directly, but by their own powers acting up as they inched towards oblivion.
[Shoutout to @givehimthemedicine's underrated powers and blood theory for the idea of Vecna's Curse being the overcharging of his victims' own powers.]
It was already pretty obvious that Vecna's Curse is a metaphor for suicide, and this theory reinforces it: every kid who gets targeted by the horrors of Hawkins for being "different" tries to find some way to escape.
Willel's misfortune is that their powers are considerably more easily manifested than the average person's. Byler tells the story of visible vs invisible queerness, but that's just a reflection of the larger theme at play in the show: the visible and invisible ways kids are othered and abused.
Max's trauma was a quiet thing that came from within and festered until it was almost too late to save her... but Willel's trauma manifests as a giant monster that openly hunts them down.
And I'm being literal when I say the Mind Flayer is a manifestation of their trauma.
We know that Vecna fashioned the Mind Flayer from a cloud of black particles he found in the Upside Down, but where did that cloud come from? The Upside Down is a mysterious enough place that it's easy to assume the Shadow is native to that realm... but what if it isn't?
The Mind Flayer is heavily associated with repression -- Will gradually lost his memories while he was possessed, and El lost her powers when the sliver of Flesh Flayer wormed its way into her leg.
But Will has mysteriously been without powers ever since leaving the Upside Down, and we've seen El lose memories too: her memories of surviving the lab massacre, in which she didn't simply escape by opening up a gate, but by disintegrating her attacker into black particles.
The Mind Flayer doesn't cause repression -- it is repression.
There must have been countless generations worth of traumatized children who took the extra step El did and sent their abusers -- or at least their memories of abuse -- into that hidden realm beyond the gate.
(There's also the possibility that Mr. Time-is-Just-a-Social-Construct is stuck in a time loop of some sort -- maybe the massacre has repeated hundreds of times, and Dimension X is a timeless graveyard of El's attempts to repress her trauma. This would explain why Henry seems to have both disintegrated and survived: we were watching at least two different iterations of the massacre all along.)
Whichever way you slice it, it's a perfect fit: the tool Vecna uses to perpetuate the cycle of abuse isn't some bizarro alien from an alternate dimension, but a direct consequence of the cycle itself.
The Mind Flayer tells us that escape alone doesn't work as a long-term solution: it might help you survive the initial abuse, but if you don't address the effect it had on you...
...it will come back to wreck havok.
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