#kate trefry...between this and the Badlands name-drop...we are speaking the same language!!!

[henrysglock]

When Kate floated the idea of TFS and the theater being within the grasp of the Mindflayer, it immediately reminded me of these parts of the VR game:

You're playing as Vecna/doing the Mindflayer's bidding, and psychic connections with the kids are portrayed as this dissociation-like "watching life like an audience watching a show". The forest at the drive-in, Dustin's couch (not pictured: Will in Castle Byers viewing through a portal and Mike's version being real life playing out on a crytal ball)...they're all equivalent to the Phoenix Theater. They're within the grasp of the Mindflayer, like they're watching the world play out over the Mindflayer's shoulder.

It also reminded me of the instances in the VR where Henry is set apart from his own supposed memories by the Mindflayer—memories that don't fit with anything we see in TFS or filmed canon:

Like NINA, it's a memory—an inaccurate one, for whatever reason and to whatever end.

And all that ties me into a point I've made before:

Things the Mindflayer does in the VR (fake worlds, edited memories, etc.) are likened to NINA are likened to Vecna visions are likened to Henry's experiences in TFS.

It's all the same. Vecna visions, NINA, TFS, the VR game...it's all on the same beat of "enveloped by the Mindflayer".

This is something I've been saying for a very long time, though I only really laid it out in Chapters 3, 4, and 8 of my TFS analysis:

Equating the VR to NINA and linking it to TFS equates the Phoenix Theater AV setup to the security cameras in NINA...especially so in shots like the following.

Either:

a) beside the camera, much like the audience in the Phoenix Theater is beside the projector/"source"

or b) from a sidelong POV that doesn't line up with any corporeal characters, much like the audience viewing the entirety of the play sidelong in much the same way

Combine that with both NINA and TFS having instances of dialogue between actors and their audiences (on top of the earlier pic of Henry staring directly at the viewer):

We can see that it's exactly as I've been saying: TFS is like NINA is like the VR game. If/when TFS is filmed and brought to streaming, it will be fully equatable to NINA.

Anyway, as I've been saying: NINA is the theater is the Mindflayer's psychic maze—with varying degrees/modes of audience involvement, from the audience being separated by a screen like Brenner with NINA to being included yet separate like the audience of a play, or like the kids in the VR stationed alongside Vecna/the Mindflayer, watching things play out, involved by proximity, to being the actual player in the maze à la Chapter 5 of the VR/Shadow-NINA. You're outside the situation entirely, you're alongside the Mindflayer, or you're on equal footing with Henry. Taking it just one step further, Louis McCartney would, technically, be equivalent to a player of the VR game, would be nearly equivalent to El in NINA. (<- Which is what has always made it so interesting to me that there are TWO arcs of NINA in the VR game, one specifically being from El's POV and the other being from Henry's...and both of them being drastically different from each other)

In short: They're all the same thing—or rather, slight variations on the same thing. You're just in different roles depending on which media you consume.

That is what I took from Kate floating the concept of a Mindflayer-enveloped setting re: TFS. She's not saying anything new. This is all stuff that's deducible from the media that's been released.