#stranger things lore

this was a scene in the documentary. pic creds to @beaulesbian and ty for the inspo.

has anyone done a post on the shadowfell? because i came across this pic of the “abyss” that’s labeled shadowfell and started looking into the dnd lore and wow…lots of resemblance to vecna, mike, the upside down, everything. do keep in mind this is not going to be a full analysis post because i do not have the energy rn and this is all coming from one very thorough reddit post i found. i’m just gonna highlight a few things but i highly encourage you to read that post and if anyone has done a full analysis pls lmk!

first of all in many ways it resembles the upside down or vecna’s mindscape more than the abyss. i found this part especially interesting:

is vecna stuck in his own domain of dread and keeping the party/hawkins trapped with him? forced by the mindflayer to relive his own painful memories and forcing the people of hawkins to do the same? perhaps recycling memories like in tf85? did the party enter through the thick mist at the top of the tower?

then there’s the spire aka the radio tower:

just like everything about this but also these specific things: jet black stone = henry’s stone, spires = will’s barn drawing of the kids in the mindflayer, magical powers drained = the government/lab, no magical surveillance could substantiate the duffers’ ridiculous explanation that vecna couldn’t see them coming.

next we’ve got the raven queen:

i believe el was an elven mage in a dnd campaign? also all the stuff about the queen in tf85? and could this be the mindflayer, whose particles always dissipate and eventually infect something/someone new? or perhaps the “elven queen” is the mindflayer, who merged with the upside down, generating vecna who (except for the one time in the mac-z) only fights people in their heads, his head, or the upside down/abyss rather than in a physical form in the material plane (hawkins). vecna who is obsessed with collecting memories and emotions. and (i forgot to highlight this) maybe vecna tried to perform the same ritual with the children as the mindflayer did to attain “godhood” but failed?

more on the raven queen:

and finally, mike the storyteller?

Okay, so we all know how Stranger Things: The First Shadow ends, right? Patty Newby leaves Hawkins and goes to Las Vegas, Nevada to find her biological mother. When they finally hug, the lights flicker and Patty whispers Henry’s name, showing their connection is still alive.

BUT HOLD ON. WHERE DID HENRY LIVE BEFORE HAWKINS? NEVADA.

Before moving to Indiana, the Creel family lived in Nevada. That is exactly where young Henry explored those desert caves, found the secret military tech, and got possessed by the Mind Flayer / Dimension X entity.

Henry’s journey starts in Nevada, where he is infected by the ultimate evil and loses his humanity. Patty’s journey ends (for now) in Nevada, where she goes to find love and her real mother, completely unaware that she just stepped right into the geographical birthplace of Henry’s darkness.

Nevada is literally the ground zero for Henry's (Vecna) villain origin story, and Patty runs straight back to it.

anyways i haven’t done the whole Reddit deep dive yet so i’m just basing my opinion off what i thought while watching the show and some youtube comments that agree.

first of all, missed opportunities all around, especially with mike. like i genuinely believe it should have been canon for vecna to take him and for a highlight of the season to have been relationship dynamics between him, el, and will. there’s a whole youtube video on this and i strongly support that version of s5. will can still have the whole being connected to vecna thing, holly could have been a trap to “lure” mike, and we still could’ve seen amazing acting and badass moments from both just with more nuance, more plot twists, and more emotional tension all around. plus, with the whole d&d theme going on, it would’ve been really cool to see vecna turn the storyteller of the group into his pawn/vessel and there being a whole extended plotline where vecna’s plans to get back at the party and the party’s reactions could be acted through a mike memory of them playing d&d and a whole imaginary campaign in this head, except it’s happening irl (i saw this on youtube and i think that would have been wayyy cooler plot line than the 12 children which the show didn’t expand on or explain either). plus with this route we can get more interactions with mike and max which would have been another fun dynamic to explore.

next, will seemed to be selectively connected to the hive mind? i think it’s really cool that will realizes he can use his powers because he’s connected to the hive, but it made no sense that he miraculously disconnected during the final fight and survived until the very end. i love will’s character, but plot wise, it didn’t make sense if he was connected and mysteriously disconnected. maybe he does survive by some miracle or el does something, but i truly did want the scene where joyce is hacking away at vecna’s head to be a moment of intense pain for will because he was still connected to vecna. and it would have been an intense, raw emotional moment for joyce to finish the job, fighting the pleas of her son to kill her most hated enemy. again, saw this on youtube too but was exactly my thoughts when watching the show.

and not to mention, the science is just like HUH??? like they didn’t even try to bullshit some physics that could maybe make sense theoretically. they literally get a high school physics teacher in on the team, but he contributes nothing beyond agreeing the abyss is a realm of total evil and that it’s a whole wormhole deal. like with the whole “worlds colliding” thing, their theory being “correct” seemed pretty lucky to me given that steve was just guessing and had no physics fact checkers on his “theory.” horrible missed opportunity to actually make something make sense.

and vecna’s backstory and eventual hiding place in the abyss was kind of lackluster. vecna’s backstory was giving muzan from demon slayer… could’ve developed it more. and dropped more lore about everything. also the abyss not even looking cold to me was strange if they thrived in freezing environments…? and what happened to the mind flayer basically being like an omnipotent cthulhu-like eldritch horror who had far greater powers? why was it so easy to end all the evil 💀

tbh watching that fight lowkey gave me flashbacks to GOT final season fight against the whitewalkers.

lastly, having el kill vecna makes no sense to me. i think will was the one being set up to do it and that it should have been him. or at least, have had a major part in it before collapsing and joyce attempting to finish the job, but having to deal with realizing that will was still “connected” to the hive. it would’ve been an incredibly cinematic moment to have vecna attempt to get at the party one last time by showing joyce her worst fears, causing her to hesitate before she ultimately overcomes him and kills him.

Imo, the mindflayer should've been something that was at best theorised post s2, hell thats all they did in s2 and it was perfect, it being something the party can only guess at was amazing, interesting in a way that they didnt manage to replicate at any other point, and they killed all its mystery in s3. Also, it only being properly known by Will had so much potential.

To add to that, I think the supernatural plot of s3 and s4 should've been switched (and s3s supernatural plot redone a little).

To go from the plot of s2 with "holy shit this is all a hivemind and the flayer plays some kind of role in it", to the plot of s4 where now the cast thinks they've got all the answers, "vecna possessed will, vecna controls the hivemind, it was all him, 001, Henry, Vecna, he's the ultimate monster, the one we couldn't kill" and THEN to the supernatural plot of s3, where now after failing to kill vecna, people are being flayed, possessed like will was in s2, and this time they rationalise it to "we didnt kill him, all this is him".

And the best part of it is that when theyre finally facing off against the s3 body of the flayer, they would be confused. I mean, what sense does that make? to them, facing off against Henry would've been the expectation, not this giant meaty thing that only seems to spark recognition in Will.

And I think that with its "defeat", that would've led into a completely redone and rewritten s5 perfectly.

To end s4 (with s3s plot) with all these hanging threads, that in this case would've been perfectly plotted, would've been so much better because this time the writers wouldn't be that backed into a corner, vecna can stay impossibly strong after being given a whole season to rethink and plot, meanwhile, the mindflayer ends up the big bad they NEEDED it to be.

With THIS set up, the characters finding out they were wrong about EVERYTHING brings the intended doom and dread i think the suffer brothers thought they achieved.

The abyss slowly descending has been really bugging me, and it's difficult as heck to fix it for my fix it fic. The only thing I've been able to come up is that the UD - if it needs to be a wormhole - is a wormhole that leads back to 1983 the day that Will was taken, then it would make sense that everything looks like 1983.

And I know that Sci-Fi is really just throwing the word wormhole around and stuff but - there was no need to introduce the abyss. There was no need to have the real mind flayer only to defeat him in 2s. Why couldn't they just have focused on Vecna??? Or on banishing the particles. I am frustrated.

a little tribute to the very show that i’ve now spent a full year analyzing :)