stranger things ruined me so I'm back here again

I have read Suspicious Minds about Brenner, Terry, and Terry’s cohorts probably 6 times since the finale. That is literally required reading for anything going forward I swear it.

It was the first ST novel EVER, it came out in early 2019. It came out before Season 3!

Let that sink in…

They released a book about Brenner’s work with drugs, ALTERING PEOPLE’S MEMORIES, altering people’s emotional connections to their memories (literally says this is a reason he does this, because it makes them easier to control), and the cohorts from even earlier also see and experience the Upside Down! They don’t GO there but they SEE it.

It might not all be ‘right’, but they literally laid the groundwork for how Seasons 3-5 are going to go. He took her ‘source’ memory of her best AND her worst memories (something they focus HEAVILY on in the show), and makes her repeat them over and over and over until she feels nothing. Terry also comes and goes from the lab, she isn’t there all the time.

Like PLEASE. Please read this book!!

I’m willing to bet soooooooooo much that there is no ACTUAL time travel, time loops, or alternate realities. There are competing narratives at play, there are competing stories.

History is written by the victors. Whoever controls the past controls the present, whoever controls the present controls the future. Brenner is not trying to ACTUALLY go back in time and rewrite events that already happened, he is alternating the narratives that the characters have for themselves & their own histories, as well as the history and story of Hawkins/Hawkins National Lab.

The source material that we’re getting IS good. We declassified 11 files of the lab, we’re getting declassified source tapes. We will have to retrace how we all got here.

I'm not kidding. We all remember Mike jumping down that cliff at the quarry in S1, but at the beginning of S5 we saw Will literally doing the same thing. Climbing that tree to escape the Demo and then jumping off as he's been followed. The dates are confirmed in the show, very obviously. Can't believe we've been sleeping on that.

If you play it side by side they do everything in sync. The jump, suddenly stopping mid fall, moving again... only that Will actually fell and Mike started defying gravity.

We know Will actually died that day (yeah he came back to life ofc), but what about Mike? Max taught us you have to follow your memories back to your death to escape the maze of memories. Something that worked for Will already, since S5 started with his death... Mhh.

I fear there's no proving Byler without investigating Mike's 'death' first. And everything leads me back to this day.

But hey, just watch it yourself:

Don't ask what wrong with Troy's voice, it abstracted every single try saving the file.

If you only wanna watch the actual sequence jump to ~ 01:30, but then you'll miss Mike and Troy answering to Will's singing and El paralleling Vecna :3 Oh and El heard a ticking noise.

Mike thought the Demos and the Upside Down were a gentle introduction, but mentioning a girlfriend was too unbelievable??

"This thing with will... I want you to feel like you don't have to hide anything from me."

He can't say it... he can't even write it.

Except for two instances...

When he turns to look in Will's direction. If you re-watch this scene, he first looks forward towards Nancy/Jonathan then turns his head to the left... exactly where Will is standing... while he says "I can't lose her again".

When Will pushed him to do so while standing behind him and featured in the camera shot.

Each time he cannot say or write it, El is present but Will is missing. But every time he can say it, Will is right there beside him.

This isn't some re-used plot point that doesn't properly resolve. This is a major aspect of the story as a whole... that's why it keeps re-occurring.

His feelings and his heart is integral to the story as a whole. Without heart, it all falls apart.

Above is one of my favourite scenes through a metaphoric lens. Will feels "crazy" "nervous" and "the sky spins" for him; these are feelings of being in love and he's struggling with it. Lucas says he gets nervous too but "the sky doesn't spin" for him. He then asks Mike "it ever spin for you?" And, of course, Mike avoids directly answering the question. Unwilling to explicitly reveal his heart. However, he does immediately turn his complete attention towards Will.

But his feelings remain a mystery. He cannot say "I love you" ever again since ST4. He creates the motto "friends don't lie" while he continues to lie to his friends and himself. He builds a bomb that he truly never symbolically drops. He never becomes "Mike the Brave".

Curse my facial recognition skills, but I saw these pictures of the kids in the rainbow room, and almost instantly, this particular face stood out to me:

Firstly - I don't remember seeing this kid in the season 4 rainbow room scenes.

Secondly - I almost immediately recognised that this actor was Luke Kokotek, the actor that played Young Will in the first flashback scene of season 5:

As you can see - same face shape, slope of eyebrows, eye shape, and eyelid fold.

To double check I wasn't actually going insane, I sense checked against another picture of the actor:

The resolution of the photo I took of the book is really low, but you can see at least two moles on the neck of both the actor and the picture in the book. Aside from that, the shape of their ears match up too - the left one is rounder and the right one is slightly pointier, in both pictures.

The funny thing is - it's clearly a younger version of Luke Kokotek playing a test subject in the Rainbow Room. However, on IMDb, he only has season 5 credits on his profile and his name is not mentioned in any of the season 4 credits, so he clearly doesn't feature in the show - so why include a still of him in the official book?

Either they cut all of his scenes in season 4 for some reason (but released BTS footage of him to the author of this book?)... Or...

Disclaimer: I've rewritten this post a bunch of times and I'm still not happy with the result. It's a sensitive topic that's very personal to me, so it was hard to find the right words. Sorry about that.

The other day, I was rewatching s5 out of habit, and omfg... El’s story arc is just pure, utter hopelessness 😭 (Do I need to add a trigger warning? Didn't we all watch s5e8 anyway?)