#look they cant introduce literal mind control/hallucination shit with time stuff added to it (time loss and how its related to memory) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

wheelercore · 7 months

Text

It's really interesting how we get 3 versions of the creel plotline:

1. The creel trailer, which has alice and henry running up the stairs excitedly together and alice finding the dead rabbit, not in the playground, but what I assume is either the front yard or the backyard. Also henry and alice are noticeably younger, but children grow quickly so I don't know if that was intentional.

2. The show itself, which has the difference in the beginning entry way scene and alice in the playground.

3. The First Shadow, in which alice strikingly missing, despite the fact that the play still takes place when the creels just moved to Hawkins, supposedly. I believe the first promo refers to henry as the new kid in school, emphasizing that henry may be an only child in this play... somehow.

So either something happened to alice before the creels arrived to hawkins (doubtful, this show places a lot of emphasis on hawkins as a setting and I doubt the it would make its central 'cursed town' irrelevant to its plot twist)-

Alice never existed (?? Lol) -

Or something happened to alice after the creels moved to hawkins and what we see in the show is not what it seems.

The third option isn't exactly out of this world. The show, since the beginning, put a lot of emphasis on PTSD, flashbacks, and repressed memories. It's all the more obvious with El recovering memories of Henry and the massacre, but s2 was filled to the brim with allegories and mentions to flashbacks, starting with Phineas "totally not used in the show as an allegory for the psychological effects of trauma" Gage and how will's supernatural experiences were compared to PTSD.

Vecna's curse was intentionally made to be subtle to the victim. None of them knew they were in a hallucination until it was made obvious to them. And... there are just some very interesting word choices going on here:

Hopper corrects Joyce in this scene but the association of flashbacks and nightmares continue. Victor describing his own vecna vision, reminiscent of his own traumatic memories:

Him describing waking up from his later vision, describing both that vision and his "reality" as nightmares:

We don't see Alice dying. Not even in Henry's pov- it's intentionally obfuscated from us.

In the beginning of s4 nightmares are also framed as a sign of the vecna curse, we see specifically Max's nightmare being more so a flashback, or a memory, to Billy's death. Nightmares are also a core symptom of PTSD so it fits the bill with season 2.

Funnily, enough we see Alice also experiences nightmares- which we know what that's associated with:

What exactly were in Alice's nightmares?

In the beginning we also got these very sus lines by Alice of all people, saying how the home looks like a "fairytale" and a "dream", which you know is what people say when they mean something is too good to be true, the opposite of nightmare, used to mean something that is so dreadful its hard to believe.

These lines arent in the creel trailor, which is... interesting.

Also I wonder if there is a hint to this when Henry gains his abilities in the first place. Weirdly enough this is symbolized by Henry forcing a clock to go backwards, metaphorically into the past (and I am obligated to mention this, but the parallel to fred):

Where others saw order, I saw a straitjacket. A cruel, oppressive world dictated by made-up rules. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades. Each life a faded, lesser copy of the one before. Wake up, eat, work, sleep, reproduce, and die. Everyone is just waiting. Waiting for it all to be over. All while performing in a silly, terrible play, day after day. I could not do that. I could not close off my mind and join in the madness. I could not pretend. And I realized I didn't have to. I could make my own rules. I could restore balance to a broken world.

Also makes me so curious about the rainbows on the clock during this monologue/scene... a reference to the rainbow room? Makes sense because it seems like the lab kids were killed in a similar fashion to Alice- their jaws weren't broken unlike virginia and the vecna victims. Why?

It's interesting how directly after this scene it cuts to the rabbit being killed- and with the predator/prey theme often represented by animals and a rabbit is definitely a prey animal- and that rabbits body being left for alice, who would later be killed in a similar way.

Why is Henry forecasting Alice's own death to her? For funsies? We see he repeatedly that he used tactics against his parents to hold the mirror up because they've done "terrible things" (still unknown what Virginia's terrible thing is yet). For vecna victims its slightly different, while fred and max fit that bill, patrick and chrissy don't. Their visions were more along the lines of showing them the darkness in their lives that they hide. So it seems to me that vecna shows not just sources of guilt, but the harsh unbridled truth of their lives. So what business did Henry have with Alice?

I'm not saying that there is possibly some weird fucky altered reality/time loss stuff happening in hawkins but. I am.

#i love f-ed up little weird towns being f-ed up little weird towns #anyways could you feel me shaking trying not to bring up fred miketed benson. i was shaking.#alice creel #henry creel #virginia creel #victor creel #look they cant introduce literal mind control/hallucination shit with time stuff added to it (time loss and how its related to memory)#and not expect me to go oh hawkins is a little fucked up isnt it

17 notes · View notes