#joycescurse

how old is holly?

in november 1983 she was 3 years old according to lucas. in march 1986 she was 6 according to nancy. which means she's supposed to be 7 in s5, maybe close to 8, as her birthday seems to be somewhere between november and march. BUT dr. kay says that all missing kids were 9-10 years old, and realistically s5 holly doesn't look 7 at all. HUH??

why is she suddenly aged up??? her age stayed consistent in s1-s4, but in s5 it's suddenly off? and it just happens to be the same season we have a scene where karen asks ted "do you even remember how old is holly?". AND it's the same season we have joyce say that will was 11 on the day "it happened". and you want me to believe that it's all a coincidence. sure.

no matter how much i want to accept that it's just bad writing, i can't, it's ridiculous. it's humanly impossible for every writer, every person who monitors continuity mistakes, literally every person who works on the show to go rogue. i feel gaslit and insane and like i'm losing my last shreds of sanity, but i just can't help but think all of these plotholes and mistakes are intentional. the real question is what's the intention.

i have a lot of questions about how much of s5 is real, but now i only want to talk about one of them: is it really 1987? i mean. actually, i don't know what i mean, but bear with me.

when the wsqk station was active we had a discord server where we tracked everything that happened on air and shared theories, and one of our biggest questions was what year was the station set in. nothing matched up, they were talking about the town being closed down, which only happened in 1986, and then they played a starcourt mall ad which burned down in 1985, and then referenced pumpkin disaster from 1984

literally nothing made sense, so i decided to see when the songs they play on the radio came out. we thought that maybe they stopped at 1985, but turned out that they went up to 1989. two songs from 1988 and one from 1989, to be precise. 1988: i hate myself for loving you - joan jett & the blackhearts and devil inside - inxs. 1989: like a prayer - madonna. later on jan 1, after the finale, they added one more song from 1989, here comes your man - pixies.

now that we know that the epilogue is set in 1989, it makes sense that they would play songs from 1988 and 1989, but before we had this information we settled on the idea that the radio isn't set in any particular year and instead exists in the 80s, like, all of them. 1980-1989. i mean, it's still a fictional radio station, for us AND for in-show hawkins. it's literally hosted by vecna and mindflayer

still it was weird to see i hate myself for loving you in rotation before the finale, considering s5 was set in 1987. they played it a lot too. and to think of it, if it was 1989, holly would be 9

also when max explains to holly how she ended up in vecna's mind prison, she tells about a memory from 1959, when tfs events took place, and says that she was "in hawkins, but 30 years ago". idk if she knows what year it is in reality rn, and even if she does most people would say 30 instead of 28, but it falls so perfectly in place that 30 years from 1959 would be 1989, that i literally can't get it out of my head

also, i didn't read a wrinkle in time, but doesn't the name suggest something like a time loop? some space & time shenanigans? that would explain A LOT in s5. which kinda leads me to the next question that plagues my mind

what happened to the spores?

a couple of days before the finale i shared a theory about mike possibly being flayed/cursed/secret third thing on discord, and someone asked me how would he get flayed anyway, and that's a reasonable question

but then i remembered. in the end of s4 hawkins got invaded by particles from the upside down, spores as they call them. in the beginning of s5e1 robin mentions in her morning broadcast that all citizens undergo regular mandatory check-ups because "who knows what could happen after we inhaled those springtime snowflakes". good question, who knows how it affects people?

later in e7 vickie askes robin if it's safe to breathe, bringing up the problem to the audience YET AGAIN. is it? is it safe to breathe? robin says that it's "unclear". it's almost as if they are begging us to notice and start questioning the nature of those goddamn particles

even in the finale steve asked robin to close the window bc she'd let more of "that stuff" in, stressing the importance of these fucking spores again (i'm getting more and more frustrated with them as i go)

in s1 though scientists mentioned that the atmosphere in the ud appears to be toxic, and in s2 when hopper inhaled way too much at the same time, he got sick and threw up something black. possibly, it was because of the density, because it never happened before or after that, and he's hardly the last person to venture in the upside down. still, there have been mentions of atmosphere being toxic, and now it's like everyone forgot, and they go on frequent crawls, have been doing it for 1.5 years now (if it's really 1987)

anyway, my point is. if those are indeed spores, then maybe the whole town is affected, maybe that's how everyone got flayed/cursed/secret third thing, and that's why they've been acting weird, and that's why it all looks staged, because they are in fact acting out their roles, given to them by vecna/mindflayer, without even understanding it

it is further supported by the fact that in the finale when vecna showed a vision to hopper in the ud, the flakes disappeared, and then reappeared as soon as the vision ended. what if the entirety of s5 is a vision? how tf did they get rid of the spores? like ok you sealed the rifts, but how does that solve the giant smoke cloud and spores floating in the air? they didn't close the gates, they just covered them, that doesn't stop upside down from bleeding into hawkins. what are these spores after all, for the love of god

oh also they intentionally drew our attention to the fact that no spores were near the exotic matter. WHY. why put so much emphasis on these motherfucking spores, please release me from this cage

why does it look staged?

when they were saving kids from mac-z, it turned out that the bathroom was situated conveniently above one of the tunnels. someone mentioned that that's unexpectedly lucky for them, and another person answers smth like "finally, we could use some luck".

i mentioned it earlier about s5 looking staged, fake, and i mean it wholeheartedly. characters themselves notice it, i remember at least two cases

then when they were looking for dustin & co near the lab roughly the same dialogue happened

why are they suddenly lucky? why does it look like everything is right where they want it? why does it look so controlled? the further they get the more obvious it becomes. what was that final battle??? it looks straight from a d&d campaign, not real life

i don't even want to elaborate on fakeness, we all saw that