#he HAS to make use of it in alternate dimensions so grows a grudging acceptance for it

[stupidlittlespirit]

I tried drawing reeda because I love her. I have no idea what you had in mind for her design so I just re-read the chapter and went off of what your description was the best that I could. She gives me Painter vibes from pressure

I LOVE THISSSSSSSSSSSSS THANK YOU!!!!!! Ford absolutely has a mini monitor like this in each room so he can see its messages!

Honestly REEDA's main design in my head fits Ford's lab, so it's a very retro cassette-futuristic style like you've illustrated. Think: how did people imagine the future was going to look in 197-something. All Commodores and IBM and thick plastic etc.

Ford's lab in mtb is designed with that exact aesthetic in mind, so terminals and things like this were at the forefront of my mind:

These types of terminals are primarily in the mainframe room that Reader goes through to access the lab. It's all set up with things like the above. Whereas REEDA's central screens in the main body of the lab look more like the ones in The Forbin Project:

Except they're a mix of both of those aesthetics, so they're weirdly long CRT monitors suspended in a similar layout to the above!

Here's another ss from Forbin bc it works along similar lines! And also it's a great movie and you should watch it!

[starrycloak]

I read the substack post last night and <3 it really shook some of the ideas I used to have surrounding the show (maybe zooming out helps to stop focusing on what I couldn't see and instead see the sum of the parts).

disclaimer: what follows is my personal intepretation and conjectures about the post mentioned, and in no shape or form reflect the original author's opinions. My reading comprehension skills might as well be null if I truly missed the point here.

Anyways, I was left hanging on what the author thought Vecna could represent/be a personification of in the 'El=gay love, UD=closet, MF= 80s destructive conservative ideals, policies and practices under R*agan; Meat Flayed= flesh puppets 80s sheep with a sprinkle of Evangelism; government= heteronormative powers and society (+lab=conversion therapy)' puzzle. While I agree with you about v/h/1 possibly being "alternate (aggressive) Will after conversion therapy", I think the fact that, in a way, that there's still dispute on whether the MF controls him or he's in top control of the hivemind, perhaps make him represent internalized/displaced hatred (which yes, includes internalized homphobia, but also guilt, shame, resentment, suicidal ideation, even outward hate and violence ocassionally) or maybe even [Will's/the other queer people in the audience's] repressed and squashed resentment of the world, the establishment and its constrictive nature, as well as his (assumed 'hopeless'; cue anger at even considering it) desire to change it —obviously as a byproduct of the hurt it has caused him and others like him all these years.

"what does this evil want?" "to kill." "to kill you?" "not me; everyone else."

"I couldn't comply [conform and submit]. But then I realized... I didn't have to."

The horror!! (/hj) How could some abused and/or marginalized people think about not turning the other cheek like the good, level-headed ones??? How dare they fantasize, in the privacy of their minds, about a world where the constraints, institutions, systems and people that have hurt, opress and persecute them are defeated?? It's valid to feel like that, obviously, but the key difference is that nobody in this position IRL truly has the powers or means (or level of cold-heartedness) to actually lash out and ennact revenge like Vecna does, tho. Ultimately, all your anger and resentment will mostly poison you (and your loved ones) and kill you slowly, while the ones that hurt you will continue to live blisfully unaware lives, no matter how much you want and try to make them feel the same way you do/once did because of them.

v/h/1 fought El (gay love), but first he wanted her to join him to "reshape the world" (the silly little desire a voice in your defeated mind tells you it's useless, but if you had the power and means to retaliate against your abusers and oppressors like they did, showing them once and for all they're wrong about you and what makes you different, wouldn't you at least entertain the possibility?) El had now witnessed what One was capable of, and wouldn't you know, we have two anger holders by this point: Kali and One. (I'm a bit lost here: I think it was you who said the following in another post, but again, not sure.) El meeting Kali (not exactly Kali's character in itself) represents a healthy acknowledgement and acceptance of anger and resentment as feelings you shouldn't ignore. It's about working on them while not letting them consume you. Using them for good, as healthy motivators, if you will (i.e. closing the s2 gate.) With One, though, it's about weaponizing rage and hurt, which ultimately isn't as powerful as love, as exemplified by 8 year-old El temporarily gaining the upper hand over experienced prodigy Henry... by banishing him to Dimension X. Is DX the closet, like the UD, tho, or somewhere else? Where do you send/hide your anger, bitterness and grudges (so they grow and fester right under your nose)?

Vecna is spiteful; the hurt only allows him to see the worst in others, and he wants others (i.e. his parents) to see themselves as the monsters he had percieved them. Why didn't he make sure to kill Brenner during the '79 massacre, though? Why wasn't he (the government, conversion therapy) his top target the moment he got Soteria (a.k.a the Inhibitor [!!!]) out of his body? Why did he decide to go and "consume" the other lab children [???] who harassed and tried to kill El (queer love)? Why is he powering up from bringing four abused kids' "suffering to an end"??

Now that El is obviously opposing Vecna and his plans, he's way beyond thinking about her as a potential ally in his revenge: now he only wants her to watch and suffer along the rest. Who needs love at this point? And once it's all over, what will he want, then?

tl;dr: vh1 might represent the closeted, violent homophobe in power who won't hesitate to hurt everybody, even torture other (usually younger) queers, so they suffer the way he did. He didn't get to thrive with love and acceptance, so won't others (it wouldn't be fair now, would it?) But the system is going down too, or so help him. How's he gonna do it, and what really is his ultimate goal, that's on s5 to answer.

Will died...

On November 6, in another version of reality and the show keeps alluding to this fact...

In the episode description of the episode "Vecna's Curse", it plainly states that a dead body brought Hawkins to a halt. Meaning, a dead body caused time to stop. THIS is likely why time stopped in the Upside Down Hawkins on November 6th- Will died that day. This is also likely the event that created everything- including the Upside Down itself. Someone's world literally turned upside down because of Will's death.

Mike likely had a hand in stopping/reversing/altering reality to prevent this from occurring... especially since we are shown a visual clue of time coming to a halt that day from a wheel stopping.

Max refuses to spend "the last day of [her] life" in "Mike Wheeler's basement" which is exactly where Will spent the last day of his life. No throwaway lines.

Mike always feels like he keeps losing Will because, in some reality, he did.

Will's entire move to California is symbolic for death. Will moved west, where the sun sets, to Lenora which is a reference to the "Lost Lenore" trope.

The episodes "Dear Billy" and "The Nina Project" have SO many clues alluding to Will's death.

Max reads her letter to a deceased William with the song "Letter to Willy" playing. We are shown graves of both "William" and "_YERS".

At Pennhurst, Hatch says:

"We found that music has a particularly calming effect on the broken mind. The right song, particularly one which holds some personal meaning, can prove a salient stimulus. But there are those who are... beyond a cure."

While he says this, we are shown these particular songs on the blackboard. Each one of these songs are about dreaming of another reality and reconnecting with a lost love! More on that here.

In "The Nina Project", the song "Letter to Willy" plays again while our characters are digging a grave for a hero. Mike and Will take a break to have a heart-to-heart.

During that heart-to-heart, we are shown a clear reference to the very first episode, the very last moment between Will and Mike prior to Will's disappearance. Mike expresses frustration with himself, thinking he could have prevented El from being taken. It's actually about Will.

The whole Mike is "the heart" while we are given lots of references to hearts being broken, stabbed etc are likely to due Mike's grief. Mike has a hole in his heart.

The story of Nina is important. Nina's lover was killed and she buried the memory... just like Mike. Mike is Nina.

Mike was so traumatized that he buried the memory of Will's death... believing he is still alive this entire time. Waiting for his return. He is stuck in a loop. He lost his mind.

Good news though. While Papa intentionally omits the second part of the play, there is a happy ending for Nina.

Much like Nina, there is a cure to Mike's insanity... his beloved. Which turns out not to be El but...

[polarishq]

Meet NADEZHDA “Nadia” STERANKA. They are SIXTY years old and hail from ODESSA, UKRAINE . Nadia embodies the star, CAYREL’S STAR. They use she/her pronouns. Their faceclaim is STAV STRASHKO.

Cayrel reminds me of messy ponytails, childhood crayon drawings, radio static, scraped knees and dirty feet from running barefoot, glass coke bottles, a lucky pair of socks, smudged eyeliner, a daughter in nothing but title, cracked mirrors (seven years bad luck but who’s to say its your bad luck?), wishing wells, a love of all colors but red, iced coffee as the superior beverage, moral ambiguity, and carefully tended grudges.

BIOGRAPHY

The thing about little girls (even little girls raised in the tail end of communism ; even little girls once mistakenly thought to be little boys) is that they know how to embrace the world as their playground. Nadia was born to a flaky mother and absentee father, but her circumstances were inconsequential. What she lacked in wide open fields, she made up for in creating an imaginary world that stretched as far as her street’s long row of Soviet-era apartments. What she lacked in decent parental figures, she found in the care and acceptance of her maternal grandfather. What their community lacked in wealth, Nadia replaced with an imagination that turned their limited space into her own fairytale world 

It helped that her grandfather (unlike her mother) encouraged her in everything she did, even when communism tried to dictate everything outside of their home. All Nadia need to do was ask, and he’d do whatever was in his power (both figuratively and literally, using magic) to make it happen, up to and including the day Nadia asked that he stop referring to her as his grandson. A few memory charms on the people they interacted with on a regular basis (to simply reintroduce Nadia by her gender identity would’ve been dangerous for the time), and that was that. Looking back on it, Nadia can note the distasteful switch in her mother’s interactions with her after that point, but did that really matter? To her, no. Her family was her grandpa and their neighborhood, and what remained were footnotes to her story.

Nadia never had to learn of the existence of magic — it was all around her from day one, so most of her formative years were spent awaiting her own star mark. When it finally appeared though, in the crook of her elbow at age twelve, no one could really tell her what it meant. Which sucked, but at least it meant Nadia had powers, and that was something, right? The entire story of how she discovered her magic is rather simple. She’d been walking down her apartment hallways, idly thinking about a pair of earrings she’d seen on a model in a magazine, when she stopped to look in the hall mirror. When she saw herself exactly as she was, except wearing the same earrings she’d been imaging, she had to reach out to make sure she was really looking in a mirror. Her hand passed clear through the glass, and then back towards her with the earrings folded in her fist.

You shouldn’t give a twelve year old that kind of power, much less a twelve year old growing up in that environment. She knew enough not to go overboard after trying a few more times to make sure it wasn’t a fluke, but she did abuse it more than she cares to admit. A nice new hat for her grandfather, a slice of honey cake from her favorite bakery when she couldn't make the trip, a very specific looking collar for her cat — small things, but enough for Nadia to know that she had it made.

As she grew older (and, as her grandfather grew older), Nadia learned to use her abilities for... not necessarily good, but for good intentions. All she had to do was imagine a high price item and it would be hers with just a pluck. Her building was full of people willing to help her sell her new goods, no questions asked. And her grandfather, thinking the world of her, rarely questioned here Nadia came up with money to help support them. No one was getting hurt. That’s what she told herself... until her grandfather unexpectedly came home while Nadia was hands deep in another dimension. She’d not told him about her powers, so to be discovered caused her to panic. What followed was her waking up on her bedroom floor, looking up at her grandfather and the living breathing person she’d dragged through the mirror, now stranded.

Everything after that seemed to crumble. Her grandfather refused to accept anything she gave him without proof of where it had come from, so she couldn’t help provide for the household like she once her. Her feelings for her flake of a mother became twisted, resulting in endless screaming matches on the rare occasion they were in the same room. Her new roommate/foster sibling/dimension buddy was... a complicated matter, we’ll leave it at that. It wasn’t until the fall of the USSR in 1991 that there was a shift, and their little cohort immigrated to the States a few years later.

What they don’t tell you about being a little girl with an active imagination is what you grow into an adult with much the same. And when simply imagining something is enough to create a new dimension for your picking, it’s hard to resist temptation. Nadia’s grandfather passed away in the last decade, and although it broke her heart, she has since started to slip back into old habits. Moving to Polaris Village was a business move, really, even if most of her time should be focused on school. The people at Polaris rarely care where you get something from, so long as they can get it.

Nadia is something of a walking black market nowadays — if you need something hard to find, just give her a description and she’ll pluck it from another world. And in return, she gets paid. She had her limits, of course — nothing fang will cause another person harm, no illicit materials, and nothing living (not again). Her grandfather would be disappointed, she knows this. But, as always, Nadia justifies. The more practice she gets, the closer she can get to dimension hopping. And that means she’s one step closer to sending her person back home. So in the long run, she’s doing a good thing. Pocketing the money is just an added bonus.

INCLINATION

As one of the oldest known stars in the universe, Cayrel’s Star knows that there are endless other universes to be seen. The witch or wizard is capable of accessing alternative realities via mirrors, and in a manner of speaking, can control which multiverse they’re peering into. The witch or wizard looks into a mirror while craving an apple fritter? Their reflection becomes the alternate universe version of themselves that just so happens to be eating an apply fritter at that exact moment. Then, it’s simply a matter of reaching through the mirror and bringing the object from Universe B into Universe A. Some sponsees have even been able to move through dimensions, though this is highly prohibited. The bigger an object, the more energy is needed to bring it into this world.

CONNECTIONS

Half-Sibling: Nadia’s mother was largely absent from her life, so she really knows nothing about the woman who gave birth to her. One thing she is clueless about is that her mother had another child (either older or younger, I’m not fussed!) that she gave up and let be raised either as an orphan or to be adopted out. Whether they somehow know about Nadia is entirely up to you, but they would at least know their birth mother’s name. Do they want to know more? Does it not matter to them? Will they and Nadia ever meet? YOU TELL ME.

Mirror Mirror: The tricky thing about interdimensional exchanges is that you have to be very careful about what you grab. Nadia learned this lesson when she accidentally dragged someone rather than something into this universe. Having no idea how to either reimagine their universe or to return them, the only solution was for them to stay with her. They can have become close friends or maybe they deeply resent Nadia for displacing them. Maybe they’re close friends while also resent her. Who knows!! (Since this person is from a completely different dimension, there’s a lot of leeway in their magic. They may even be an alternate dimension version or the alternative sponsee for another character, but make sure to get permission first)

Frequent Buyer: Someone (or multiple someones) who enjoy hard-to-find items, otherwise known as Nadia’s specialty. They pay her on time and have established a good enough rapport that, who knows, maybe she’ll soon be willing to break some of her own rules regarding what she brings back.

Penned by Jeanne ★