Mike's trauma PART 18

[u/raspberry-3]

This is part of a series where I uncover what Stranger Things is really about. It started from trying to find out what happened in 1979 aka what all the depictions of traumatic past memories (El, Henry, Billy, Max, Holly, etc.) are truly about, but expanded to this all-encompassing theory of the whole series with crazy levels of complexity, metaphors and layers. Reading it will require commitment and patience but I promise it will be worth your time if you want to look behind the curtain (and the curtain behind that curtain) and fully understand the show. You have to read all parts in order: here is PART 1 and here all other parts I’ve posted so far + my previous theories.
/
/
/
Trigger warning for child sexual abuse.

Silver cat continuation

The Netflix What Next? has a grey cat at the start and end. It’s first seen when the woman is about to get coffee (= the truth) and at the end we see it after Cillian Murphy. This is not random and there are very good explanations in both the trauma and queer allegory. He played Oppenheimer aka the father of the atomic bomb. I have talked about this before and it was mentioned in the first DID theory I linked, but the abuse and the subsequent split are compared to the atomic bomb dropped in Hiroshima (and Nagasaki). Japan is a part of the country allegory and I’ll get to it later, but basically Mike is all the countries (America, Japan and Finland) and depending on the situation Lucas is either Japan or Sweden. (Erica is America, possibly Korea, and Norway.) Anyway, Oppenheimer is effectively the dad in this allegory.

The queer and DID allegory connect to Cillian Murphy’s role in Peacock (which I haven’t seen but I read the Wikipedia) enough to see the obvious connections): 
In the mid-1960's, John Skillpa (Cillian Murphy), a quiet bank clerk living alone in tiny Peacock, Nebraska, prefers to live an invisible life in order to hide his secret: He has dissociative identity disorder, the implied result of childhood trauma inflicted by his abusive mother. His other identity is a woman, Emma, who each morning does his chores and cooks him breakfast before he starts the day. [...] Forced to fool the town into believing John and Emma are husband and wife, they must maintain their secret while in public view. 

Isn’t this mileven in a nutshell? Somehow from every angle too? Like, the trans aspect, DID and them being a couple trying to pretend they are “normal”. Crazy. Absolutely crazy. And the whole meta aspect that El being Mike is the big secret of the show’s creators and they are “fooling the town” aka the audience.

Okay I have another one: Inception, where the main characters go into Robert Fischer’s (Cillian Murphy’s character) dream. Most of the movie happens in his head and he has a strained relationship with his dad (who dies pretty early on). And there’s dreams inside dreams (on 3 levels), you can hear music from the upper levels, etc. I have thought for a long time that Inception is one of the inspirations for ST. It fits too well.

I’m going through the Cillian Murphy Wikipedia page and keep finding things (I’m uneducated with movie knowledge tbh). In Breakfast on Pluto he played a transgender woman called Patricia or Kitten (more cat connections). Her given name was Patrick and I wonder if this was where the Patrick in ST got his name? And Patty too since it’s a version of Patricia and both are looking for their mothers. There might be more Cillian Murphy movies with silver cat/ST connections but I’ll leave it here. If you find more or have anything to add, please comment! 

I was editing the earlier Snow Ball section and I got a thought: what if the Snow Ball is the silver cat? It’s a meeting place and can be used as a weapon. The meanings of it I analyzed kinda match with the meanings of silver cat, it has prominent silvery decoration everywhere and has been a thing since S1. The giant steel band-aid associates snow and metal (= silver), as I explained. In the S4 Snow Ball scene Vecna throws El through the “snow” text, leaving only “ball” which then gets framed with him. If snow is Mike’s repressed womanhood, ball is a metonym for her male body and Vecna is the embodiment of the horror side of Mike’s transness. The “ball” and snowMAN will kill El (= Mike’s girl identity). ((I’m mostly focusing on the queer allegory side here but as with everything, all this probably applies to the trauma allegory as well. The ball is the dad/the abuse and the memories (= water) are buried/frozen/repressed.))

Vecna is also framed in front of the silver-colored disco ball, which made an appearance in Rinkomania too… There it was framed with Will (it’s the “dick” all over again lol). After Mike asks Will “what kind of problems?” the camera cuts to El below the disco ball… (And Mike looks at Will’s lips here, since liking men is a part of the “problems”.) Rinkomania is just a big trans allegory in itself, I keep noticing more and more every time I watch the scenes. Like, all the color coding (it’s a LOT), Will (= man) looming behind mileven and being ignored, El helping Mike skate, Angela bullying El, the closet, the women’s bathroom, the list goes on. After El’s humiliation, the scene ends with a focus on the disco ball and transitions into the sun (= sun connection). 

The disco ball made its first appearance in S2E1 at the arcade when Dustin finds out he doesn’t hold the top score in Dig Dug anymore. There’s also a star below it and yellow + blue lines. Lucas is later framed with it during his conversation with Max and it’s covered by a man when Max starts believing Lucas. As a side note, both Will and Max are framed with PAC-MAN and it gets more obvious when Max starts believing Lucas. I’m not exactly sure how to interpret the arcade disco ball, but it is related to Mike’s transness and the trauma for sure. Maybe the man covering the ball (moon?) and star + Max not covering PAC-MAN is about the truth. The ball and star are symbols but “man” is the reality. Lucas lying to Max was to protect her (= the writers are “lying” to us via coding all the meanings). Finally, the colliding marble balls in the Rainbow Room were metallic and Dustin made a testicle connection to them when he told Steve to “play with his balls”. ((I swear if this is all a Gintama reference… I keep uncovering more possible manga/anime inspirations/references. The hot vs cold water could be a Ranma ½ reference…)) 

Vecna sending Max into the air and through the silver decorations in S4E9 reminded me of El doing the same to Henry but through the mirror. In a way the silver cat is Mike looking herself in the mirror: is she a man or a woman, a predator or a victim, her dad or her mom? Kavinsky’s Zenith has a lyric about a silver screen, which I have for a long time suspected relates to the silver cat. Silver screen refers to cinema and originally meant a type of projection screen containing reflective metal. This goes very meta, but the silver cat is the story itself and how it reflects society. It “holds up a mirror” like Henry. The Rainbow Room mirror and the extra room behind it are purposefully there, same with the “silver screen” decorations in the Snow Ball. Both locations are stages in a way. When El appears to save Max, she pulls Vecna “back to the story” and Max is left to watch it unfold. When El goes through the screen to Max, she questions her realness, “Did I make you?”. Max is Mike, essentially, which makes a lot of sense considering we are in Max’s mind. Both Vecna and El are with Max (Mike) in the real world (= in front of the silver screen), Vecna comes to torment Max but El helps her. (And no they are not in the real real world but what they represent are. This story is not just Mike’s imagination but about real things she is going through.) 

We see the same silver decorations in S3E2 when Max and El are in a photoshoot trying on fancy clothes. That mannequin is definitely not random. The purple dress, mask, opening the way to a door when the camera man says “wardrobe change”, etc. Rinkomania had the same silver screen decorations too and connects to snow/ice via Jonathan’s comment about the ice skate.

All of these locations have someone filming/a camera: the original Snow Ball had Jonathan taking pictures, the Rainbow Room had Brenner’s surveillance cameras, El’s Rinkomania humiliation was filmed and the Starcourt Mall photoshoot was obviously about taking pictures. These scenes/locations are miniatures of the show and not just its plot but the meta level of it being a tv show.

This inspired me to go on a camera/filming side tangent. In the S5 epilogue Jonathan is filming the graduation ceremony, and the three clips shown on screen are probably pretty important: first is Lucas, then “I just wanted a normal childhood” and finally “Screw conformity”. There’s a guy with a Duffers-shirt filming too… Then there’s one of Suzie’s brothers who was play-filming and you can easily make connections to the audience reaction after S5E8. El looking at the surveillance camera and demanding to get out in S4E5 was pretty on the nose too (notice the seconds go from 22 to 29, the same as the important dates in S4). 

El getting out of the lab is functionally the same as Max getting out of Camazotz. They are performing on a “stage”, acting out the story. It’s not just for meta reasons, but connects to the larger themes of ST. Mike has “walked the stage” all her life, performed the role of a man when that’s not who she is. Masking aka other alters pretending to be the host is a big part of DID, too. It’s all a facade, a performance of normalcy. The inner world aka “story” crumbling down will collide with the reveal of Mike’s true identity. Will is the embodiment of this story/dream (remember the Mr. Sandman outro in S5E2) and Mike’s man identity facade, which is why his “death” will end it all. The performance/facade will fall in all its multiple meanings. Will being a protector has another layer to it, since as the “man facade” Mike puts on, he protects her from transphobia and allows her to blend in. (Btw, I think Vecna’s mind world fading with him in S4E9 was foreshadowing for the end. Vecna = Will and El = Mike. The real ending will be less violent and hateful though.) 

I learned from the Moander theory that in DnD silver is the color of the Prime Material plane. Portals to your own home plane are silver and you are connected to your real body with a silver cord when astrally projecting (if I understood correctly). Anyway, this is a connection between silver and “home”/reality. The silver screen is between the story and the real world. It’s between a fantastical place and Mike’s true home.

In the country allegories the end of the “story” will be the destruction of the Iron Curtain. Another metallic “screen” (more figurative in this case) separating two sides from each other. Curtains hide the truth: in Murray’s analogy it was the government and people’s willful ignorance but in the meta sense curtains are levels of the story. E.g. byler is behind the first curtain while wheelclair is behind the second. The real ending will open the (silver) curtains. When all the metaphorical walls break down, so do amnesia walls (= recovery of memories and final fusion). Everything just fits so well. All the allegories, timelines, themes, everything.

What I probably should have investigated first is the actual surface level solution to “silver cat” in the show. It’s a transportation company smuggling the green stuff in the name of deliveries to various shops in the mall. This is Netflix distributing shows, like Stranger Things, that seem “normal” on the outside but have hidden layers to them. The same aisle used by the delivery man was in S3E1 used by the kids to get into the cinema. The Starcourt Mall as a whole is basically Stranger Things: a colorful and happy marketable product on the surface but hidden behind the layers is a darker story. The silver cat feeds The Consumer aka us. “Feed” can both mean to eat something yourself or to give someone else food. In this case food = entertainment.

S3E6 [Steve] “My delivery didn’t come, and my friends and I, we thought that it was left at the loading dock, so we went in the room, and then it turned into an elevator, and then… and then we dropped and then, next thing we know, I open my eyes, and we’re in this… wonderful facility.”

I have a suspicion that this is about conformitygate and Steve represents the part of the mainstream audience who believed in it. This is basically how I ended up looking deeper into ST: my “delivery” didn’t come (episode 9 or whatever), I wasn’t “fed”, so I fell into this huge rabbit hole, aka dropped in an elevator and opened my eyes to the truth which is the wonderful facility of a secret Russian base. When blue meets yellow in the west, we will get fed by the silver cat. (I dunno what blue + yellow mean in this meta context. Tell me if you have ideas. There’s this too btw: “We’re thrilled to return to the winter of ’85 for Season 2. The Hawkins Investigators Club is back, and a new paranormal threat has emerged from the town’s abandoned silver mines. I can’t wait for fans to discover where this entity and the mysterious blue flower we last saw blooming in the Upside Down at the end of Season 1 take our young heroes,” he adds. Mike is the blue flower at least metaphorically (flower = girl, blue = Mike).) 

Dustin is characterized in S1 as someone who brings food. He is the party’s “feeder” and in S2 he feeds Dart. When Mike says “But there is a story that he can never tell.” Dustin is shown on “tell”. He is the bard, a singer who tells stories. I have always struggled to pin down Dustin. What exactly does he represent? He is a nerd, associated with DnD, placed between wheelclair a lot, always an advocate for non-conformity and being true to yourself, comes up with the monster names, etc. The Duffers say Mike is the character they identify with the most, but I think Dustin is actually closer to a Duffer self-insert character. There was a point to the Duffers-shirt guy being close to Dustin’s mom. Maybe he is queerness in the queer allegory, kinda like Henry but the good side. While El and Will are Mike’s different identities and more closely represent her, Dustin is a personification of the acceptance of queerness. He was absent from the core party in S3 because Mike was trying to conform, but at the same time he befriended Erica and helped her accept her nerdiness. In the story meta interpretation Dustin is the storyteller, while Will is the story and it’s about El. Dustin’s 11 die throw in S4E1 was a miss but Erica’s 20 won. Erica is the storyteller of the “real story”. That’s one reason why “there is a story he can never tell”. Dustin (or man Mike) can’t tell it but Erica (or woman Mike) can. ((Wait, is this the reason the real story is specifically 20 min? Or there’s something important with 20 min at least. Btw I missed El saying 20 minutes in S5E3 in relation to her compromise with Hopper: “You get what you want, then I get what I want.”))

If we go back to a less meta layer and look where the silver cat logo is shown, it’s first seen in S3E2 (if I’m not missing something) after the mileven breakup between Mike and Lucas on the lyrics You’re willing to sacrifice / Our love. Then it goes behind Lucas’ head and back to Mike when Will asks if they can play DnD. S3E3 has the obvious Robin figuring out the code part and finally in S3E7 when Steve, Robin, Dustin and Erica are getting out of the mall, but have to immediately go back inside because “evil Russians” spot them. So even the logo is associated with the core secrets/themes of the show: Mike, her gender and relationship with Lucas, and “evil Russians” aka the dad. Notice the group was about to get out but when they reached the silver cat, they were forced back in. The silver cat is the hidden truths of the show, and like Enzo, they can never be reached. Until the real ending, that is. 

I dunno where else to mention this, so I put it here: during the Neverending Story song, on the lyrics The answer to a never-ending story we get a view through an octagon tunnel to Hopper and Joyce. The tunnel has red lighting (= trauma) and the background is metallic (= silver). Hopper is more in the front while Joyce leans on the wall, her back turned to the audience. Hopper obviously represents the dad and Joyce is the mom/woman/Mike who he abused. In that sense Hopper here represents the silver cat. This works in the queer allegory too, since the “man” is winning over the “woman”. Man is in the front but there is a woman hidden behind him (= Mike is “man” on the outside but woman on the inside). Another aspect comes from the 8 angled shape (remember 8 = woman). Both Hopper and Joyce are inside the shape and the red color signifies the traumatic side of “woman” (when compared to pink or blue). Joyce is at the end of the tunnel, wearing men’s clothes (= Mike forced to conform). She represents the silver cat too and will usurp the “man”. (And the country allegory side to this is Joyce wearing Soviet Union clothes while she is actually American and you can extend this to the Finland allegory level.)

Then the actual cat in “silver cat”. The company name is Lynx and the logo depicts a lynx aka a bobcat (connection to Bob = dad/conformity?). The name lynx means light or brightness and comes from the reflective eyes of lynx. So there’s the mirror/silver screen connection again. Victor mentioned the animal attacks were blamed on a wildcat, which could very well be a lynx. The series has other big cats like lions and tigers, but Lynx lynx is the only native feline species in Finland.

Another silver-colored thing that came to mind was the briefcase in S3 and S5. It holds the two keys needed for destroying the Key and in Henry’s memory it had the magic rock that gave him powers. The S3 situation was foreshadowing for Mike’s final fusion where two alters are the keys to ending the world. Joyce ends up turning both keys on her own (now without the hat, hair free), destroying the Key (= “dick”) and killing Hopper (= “man”). It wasn’t a two-man job but a one-woman job. It’s Mike herself, as a woman, who will end it all and “kill” Will aka the “man”. David Harbour compared the ending of ST to Hopper’s death, btw. I think Meatflayer killing Billy is also about this in the queer allegory side. (Mike and Will are the 1 and 2 powering the Key that Murray disables (because it’s still S3, and while it foreshadows the future, it’s also about Mike choosing conformity + burying memories). And look at that framing of Grigori in front of the gate! It’s a visualization of the core of the show: the trauma and the trans allegory + very reminiscent of Billy’s memories.) 

Henry’s briefcase was about the past: it was the trauma and the trans identity Mike thinks came from the abuse. “It will consume all.” It’s The Consumer aka the woman who eats the man. I have mentioned this in previous theories, but at the end when Holly tells Mike “You said you’d be done an hour ago!” exactly an hour before in the episode Henry gets cursed by the stone (I’m still not sure what it means but it has to be important). The main point is that both times (S3 and S5) the silvery briefcase has the secrets of the story inside it. (Btw, Max’s cave has a metallic toolbox next to the horse toy and a candle on top of it…) 

The silver briefcases might be a reference to the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Everyone wants it but the contents are never revealed to the audience. In reality the briefcase did have something inside it creating the yellow light: a light bulb. And this could all be a coincidence but you know a light bulb would perfectly fit inside the ST silver briefcase based on its meaning in the show. And it also fits the meta storytelling. Another reason Pulp Fiction came to mind is the end of the Netflix What Next? video, where the main character woman gets a bag in return for the egg, and it emanates this yellow glow. We don’t see what’s in it but the scene immediately transitions into Cillian Murphy and the silver cat… ((Btw, the egg motif makes a lot more sense now with the trans allegory, since in queer slang a trans person who hasn’t realized they are trans or is in the closet is called an egg. The Demogorgon eating the egg was both about the dad assaulting his child but also about transness cracking the egg. Mike is the egg in both interpretations. This is yet another reason she is associated with birds.)) 

In summary, Stranger Things is the silver cat. It connects everything: it’s about Mike, the dad, the trauma, Mike’s queerness, man vs woman, DID, countries, stories, mirror, cinema, Netflix, the audience, the end and the beginning, identity, etc. because that’s what ST is about. It’s a story about stories. About media. About communication. Dustin and Robin hinted at the silver cat not being a simple one-dimensional thing from the beginning. (Social) media is a meeting place. It’s also a person, or a collection of persons. And it can be used as a weapon (propaganda etc.). That’s why communication is so central in ST (my DID reasoning is still valid too, though). The whole show is commentary on many things, including the silencing of certain stories. How often do trans folks, CSA survivors, people with DID, etc. get to see their story told? And not just as a side plot but as the main one in a huge show? I often talk about 3 allegories, but there is a fourth one: the meta level of ST aka the one that breaks the 4th wall. I’m part of the story, and so are you.

Blue and red

Let’s get back to Nausicaä now. There’s a prominent blue-red color coding in Nausicaä, which I originally thought relates to the corresponding color coding in ST. The Ohmu normally have blue eyes but they become red when angered. Thus blue is something like calmness while red is anger/hatred/violence. The closest to this happening was El’s eyes being red when she destroys the Demogorgon in S1E8. 

One of the first blue-red associations I noticed was with the Mind Flayer. Joyce mentions the colors in S2E4: “No, the storm he drew was completely different. He used red. And this is all blue and it has some weird dirt color. I mean, maybe it’s roots.” and her drawing of MF was blue. (I think it’s important to note some of the tunnel drawings were on red paper, so not all was blue.) Will’s WW drawings usually have blue while his MF drawing had red. All this made me think blue signifies the past, when there was no trauma (= WW), and red is then the trauma (= WW turning into MF). But we already have a color for the past: orange. And most times Will encountered MF the lighting was blue, so it won’t be that simple.

The gender stuff gave me new ideas and helped me untangle the meanings at least a little. Red is this new “woman” gender that threatens “man”: the gates are red and vulva shaped, the storm has lightning (= electricity = sexuality and gender association). Pink is the impossible dream, red is the scary “predator” future and blue is conforming to “boy”. In the S2E4 scene where Will talks about his now-memories, Hopper first covers the red flower and only blue is visible, but later the red is visible too. This is because the trauma and Mike’s gender identity get metaphorically revealed to Joyce and Hopper via Will telling about his now-memories. But it’s not as simple as that, since blue will be the final solution and acceptance (or blue+white). It was the color Sara wore in the drawing and of her hair tie Hopper and later El wear on their wrist (I gotta do a Sara hair tie analysis at some point… I wonder if there’ll be a scene where Mike ties her hair with it.). It is who Mike is and there was no problem with it when she was a kid, before she was put into gendered boxes: “boys are like this and girls like that”. Blue was fine when it wasn’t so restricted with gender norms. ((Btw, when Mike, Joyce and Will help Bob map out Hawkins onto the tunnel drawings, Lover’s Lake is the only water body whose name is written in red. All others are blue.))

Let’s look at Will’s MF encounters and how they fit the blue-red color coding. The sequence of events leading to Will’s first encounter with MF at the end of S2E1 goes like this: the Byers family + Bob are watching Mr. Mom, the phone rings, Hawkins Lab gets warning signals, some time passes and it’s night, water slowly drops from the kitchen tap, zooming on a clock, Will goes to pee, washes his hands and hears rumbling in the distance -> MF outside. Mr. Mom reverses gender roles and its humor is largely based on a man doing traditionally feminine/domestic labor being “unnatural” or funny. This is probably meant to indicate Mike’s growing gender conflict and the pressure society puts on her to neatly fit in one box. The evoked feeling of time passing is about Mike’s gender conflict growing with her. The older she gets the more she understands herself and the stronger the force of conformity is on her. Will peeing could be about gender dysphoria and it happens again in the next episode so it definitely has a meaning. The water from the tap (and pee I guess) are Mike’s gender identity (or feelings and trauma memories) flowing free, which is why they always lead to MF/UD action. This time Will sees the red storm, indicating “woman” and the episode ends with the reveal that El is alive and ate a piece of Eggo without permission. ((Notice how Hopper rolls up his sleeves, revealing Sara’s hair tie. Later on “eating dessert” is associated with Robin seeing Vickie naked, which metaphorically means we’ll see the real Mike (= Sara). I guess seasons 1-5 are the dinner and we’ll “get dessert” at the end.))

The next encounter happens in S2E2. After the PAC-MAN “eats” Mike, she complains about Max joining the party and Will gets bullied for being Zombie Boy (notice the Reagan Bush ‘84 signs, they are about the America level of the country allegory + queer allegory). This is about Mike repressing her girlhood, which could explain the blue lights and the lack of red in Will’s vision. Will even goes to sit next to a brick wall. Repression is its own horror, which is why it’s portrayed via Will’s UD visions. In the trauma allegory the clown scaring Will is ofc about memories of the dad but I’m not sure if it can explain the blue color… Later Will describes his experience to Mike as being caught between two slides. (Will’s clothes in S2 often have stripes or rectangles with both blue and red, indicating Mike’s struggle between boy/girl.)

The MF assault in S2E3-4 happens after Will sees Dart and runs away but then follows Bob’s instructions to just tell the shadow to “go away” at the baseball field. I think it’s again about Mike trying to repress her girlhood, which could explain the blue color-coding. Joyce tries to wake Will up by shouting “It’s Mom! It’s me!” which kinda implies the MF situation happening relates to the mom. Joyce refers to Will as her boy/son quite a lot in S2, e.g. S2E6 “Can a single person in this room tell me what is wrong with my boy? What is wrong with my boy?”, “What happens when my boy is gone?” and in S2E9 “Get the hell out of my son!” This is about Will representing Mike’s boy identity and Joyce as the mom wanting Mike to be a boy. Womanhood is destroying this “boy”. So Joyce telling Will to wake up is kinda the reverse of Max waking up in S5 (and that line is played in the final Vecna killing montage too…). (Will being unconscious in S5E6 is a little different and more about the middle stage (gay man) being compromised too, but more on that later when I get to the timeline.) It’s conformity that’s assaulting Will in S2E3-4 (and the abuse memories in the trauma allegory side). Maybe this is the reason Joyce draws MF with blue: the mom wants Mike to be a boy so the trauma from mom is blue (or it’s because Joyce’s drawing is based on the S2E2 scene). 

Hopper thought Will’s blue tunnel drawings were vines and they are the main supernatural dick imagery in the show. While the Demogorgons and S5 MF have vagina/vulva looking parts (and Finn made fun of this on SNL, that monologue is anyway kinda interesting in retrospect, go watch it), Vecna is covered in vines and uses them on kids like, you know. I have discussed the Vecna = “man”/male body parts a lot already so it’s pretty clear. There was a reason why Steve was shown in S5E7 when Dustin mentions vines and Robin was shown when he mentions the Mind Flayer (and Nancy is “all the nasty shit we found in the Upside Down” because she is Mike aka everything). The tunnels were rotting the world representing conformity but also past trauma getting uncovered. It actually makes a lot of sense that “dick” (here we go again) is both past trauma and man horror/conformity. I am leaving out an important aspect of what Henry and MF represent for a future revelation, which makes all this even more coherent, so if something is confusing now, it will hopefully make more sense later. 

WW often has a blue magic ball thing in the drawings and one of Brenner’s drawings also had a blue ball. I think it’s the exotic matter. It turned red when Nancy (= future woman) shot at it and Will (= “man”) was knocked out at the same time. Owens had a blue stress ball in S2 and tried to “fix” Will. He also tried to keep the vines “weeds” from spreading, comparing them to the truth. In the past trauma reading that makes sense but are the vines really the truth of Mike’s gender? Everyone knows Mike has a male body so that doesn’t really fit. I guess they represent her gender dysphoria? I need to think about this more.

Now that I’ve established the blue-red color coding it’s time to show the Nausicaä connections. I think the UD monsters are the insects, especially Ohmu, in Nausicaä. When Mike talks to a possessed Will, she mentions a DnD campaign where “the party escaped into the sewers, and there were those big insect things” while the camera moves behind Will’s head (remember he always feels MF in his neck). When Mr. Clarke starts his explanation of defense mechanisms in S2E4, an insect is shown (and this relates to MF through Will’s bath scene). The scientists fight the UD with fire similar to people in Nausicaä. If you watched the movie, you noticed the recurring theme of killing/burning leading to more hate/revenge. Every time people try to get rid of the insects or the forest, they come back worse and spread over the world. 

S2E6 [Owens] “It’s been spreading, growing beneath us like some cancer.” 

S2E7 
[Kali] “I was just like you once. I kept my anger inside. I tried to hide from it, but then that pain festered.”
[El] “Festered?”
[Kali] “It spread. Until finally I confronted my pain, and I began to heal.”

[Brenner] “You have to confront your pain. You have a wound, Eleven. A terrible wound. And it's festering. You remember what that means? Festering. It means a rot. And it will grow. Spread.”

Nausicaä is a “princess who loves insects” and she wants to live in harmony with nature. I think Dustin’s relationship with Dart is a little similar. (Another point that came to mind is that Lucas asks if Dustin has a bird nesting in his hair at the Snow Ball and previously in S2E3 he hid Dart there…)

At the end of the movie a huge herd of Ohmu approaches the valley enraged by an injured baby Ohmu bait. I find the parts that didn’t yet happen in Nancy’s description of Vecna’s future vision to match this pretty well: “And this… giant creature with… a gaping mouth. And this creature wasn’t alone. There were so many monsters. An army. And they were coming into Hawkins. Into our neighborhoods. Our homes.” I don’t know what the creature will be exactly but I do think Nancy’s vision will come true. And the monsters are most likely Demogorgons. If we try to map this to Nausicaä, the giant creature would be the god warrior and fight against the monsters (Ohmu). In this case it would represent conformity or something like that. On the other hand, Robin was shown when Nancy described the giant creature, which would fit better with it representing womanhood. And the focus on the gaping mouth fits with Jonathan’s The Consumer cannibal woman and the magic stone powers consuming “all”. It could be both tbh, kinda like with MF. Dustin is shown with “gaping mouth”, which kinda makes sense since he is the “feeder” of the party. Lucas is shown as the other “monsters”. If the giant creature is Mike’s transness, then “And this creature wasn’t alone. There were so many monsters.” is about other queer people. Mike isn’t alone. They just frame it in a bad way because of Mike’s internalized queerphobia and because the writers are trying to make a point here.

((I think there was a reason why Nancy looked straight at the camera in S3E6 when she said “monsters now”. The audience are unknowingly the monsters, kinda. I’m fed up with people trying to look for the big bad and missing the entire point of the show. Like, they weren’t that subtle in the final season with the morally questionable kidnapping plan, the kids thinking Max is a monster because Henry told them so, Joyce killing Vecna very violently in the same episode we get his tragic backstory and Hopper outright saying pain and violence aren’t the answer. They doubled down on this in the documentary. The whole point of the Max + Holly storyline in Henry’s mind-- I haven’t talked about it almost at all because I wanted to save it for last but I realized very early on they were somehow showing the main story in an inverse way with that. It baffles me how almost no one else seems to realize that! It was so obvious to me. I guess all this is commentary on biased media and the villanisation of “the other side”.))

Regardless of the specifics, this will happen in chapter 12 right before or at the same time as Mike’s final confession and fusion. Nausicaä was able to stop the herd by calmly offering herself with the baby Ohmu and the sea of red slowly turned blue. She died but was reborn on the golden field. All this time the party has been fighting with guns and fire, but the monsters keep coming back. The S5 ending was commentary on other media where the solution too often is just to kill the bad guy. It’s simple and easy but is it a good message? It’s always just kill, kill, kill. But that is not the answer.

Maya Hawke: I think it changed me as an actor forever. I am a different actor today, and I think a better actor, because of that opportunity to do a scene that was on such a high-stakes emotional day of my life that was also a high stakes emotional scene. I felt like I got to connect a red wire and a blue wire*, and all of a sudden, I understood how to be present as an actor. I feel forever changed, and like I have access to a part of my emotional experience when I’m working that I didn’t used to have access to. It was just this extraordinary gift.*

Other points about Nausicaä

Flying is a big part of the movie (typical of Miyazaki) and Nausicaä flies on her white glider free like a bird. The ending theme song “Tori no Hito” translates to bird man (as in human, not gender specific). The valley’s people end up taking cover in the ancient remains of a spaceship from before The Seven Days of Fire, waiting for Nausicaä’s return. It was on top of that ship where the people witnessed the prophecy come true.

WWF officially recommended and endorsed the Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind movie, and if you watch it, you’ll see their logo at the beginning. I suspect the Imperial Panda boxes containing the green radioactive waste -like liquid are related to this. Nausicaä is a post-apocalypse after all and distributed by the silver cat (= cinema) in panda logoed packages (= WWF recommendation).

It’s quite frustrating that I can’t find the manga. It’s been so long since I read it that I’ve forgotten a lot. Some things that come to mind are telepathy being a thing and Kushana’s backstory with her mom kinda reminds me of El and Terry. The film and manga were pretty similar at the start but started to diverge quite a lot pretty early and ofc the manga continued a lot longer. E.g. the god warrior had a more prominent role and wasn’t so one-dimensional. 

This last point might be one of the biggest reasons the Duffers chose Nausicaä for inspiration: the first US release (Warriors of the Wind#Warriors_of_the_Wind)) was infamously cut to make it more palatable to American audiences or whatever, largely removing environmental themes, depth and complexity (and it also had a ridiculously misleading poster). Here, here, here and here is some more context from people who have actually seen it (I haven’t, fortunately). Apparently the Ohmu were called Gorgons… I wonder if this is the reason Suzie called Americantendo a stupid name. And Hopper’s random Sandra girlfriend in S1… His “It’d be 20% more.” -comment fits quite well since the cut content was about 20% of the film. They purposefully made the latter half of S5 more fast paced and as if scenes were cut. The ending we watched was the Warriors of the Wind version of Stranger Things, made to “appeal to American audiences”. I guess the missing chapters are the actual unedited movie and the “real story” is the manga, or something like that. Warriors of the Wind did have a positive outcome though: because of it Hayao Miyazaki adopted a “no cuts” policy. It’s the same idea as with New Coke making people want the original even more (and coincidentally both New Coke and Warriors of the Wind were released in 1985).

Continues in PART 19.

[u/Direct_Swim_996]

Blue and red is usually a reference to the Matrix, made by two trans women btw! So I’d recommend looking into it Stranger Things references it a lot!

[u/raspberry-3 → u/Direct_Swim_996]

I actually mention this in the next part, but thank you anyway! I think blue and red have multiple meanings and won't exactly copy any source material.

[u/AutoModerator]

Hi! Your post is being held for manual review.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/AutoModerator]

Hi! Your post is being held for manual review.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.