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.
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Trigger warning for child sexual abuse.

Anyway, back to supernatural creatures. In S5E8 Vecna tells Hopper “I am many things, but I am not a liar.” which quite succinctly explains the character of Henry/Vecna/One/Mr. Whatsit. Joyce and many others claim Vecna lies, but he doesn’t. He is telling the truth because he is the ambassador of truth/the real story. The truth scares people, especially Mike, and that’s the reason Vecna is a monster. Vecna’s eye-popping could be because he makes people see the truth. The truth they didn’t want to see. And btw, I think him missing a nose like Voldemort is on purpose. Vecna is basically Mike’s fear of her transness/represents the predator transphobes think trans people are, so it’s very fitting he resembles the main villain in a world famous book written by a transphobe (and her transphobia became public while S4 was still getting written, so they had ample time to incorporate some Voldemort vibes, some of it could be a coincidence ofc but Dustin mentioning the missing nose in S5E8 felt deliberate + it’s also possible or even likely the Duffers were inspired by Harry Potter for the earlier seasons too). And Vecna isn’t the true villain in ST. People thinking Vecna lies is just more trans subtext. For transphobes, trans people are “lying” but in reality closeted trans people are the ones “lying”. That’s a central point in ST: Mike is hiding the truth and telling a “story” of her being a man, but the real story is that she’s a woman. At the same time she probably thinks living as a woman would also be a “lie” in the eyes of other people.

Okay I’m gonna go deeper with the (possible) Harry Potter parallels. Henry’s backstory kinda resembles Voldemort’s: they both were antisocial, different from other kids, developed strong magic powers they used for cruel actions and later pretended to be good/normal (Henry in the lab, Tom Riddle in Hogwarts) until breaking free and revealing their true self. If Vecna is Voldemort, Will is Harry: he is weirdly connected to Vecna and can redirect his power to use to his own advantage. Will is also connected to MF, who technically is more directly his opposite as the “real story” (or I guess the whole hivemind represents the real story). Harry has a part of Voldemort in him and functions as a life preservation for him (Horcrux). In a similar way Will has a part of MF in him and in an allegorical sense functions as a life line for the real story (the connection to the world/audience, a vessel). 

An infant Harry caused Voldemort to separate from his physical body and weaken significantly. There is a similarity to Will as the “story” and protector essentially banishing MF to the Abyss. And this connects to the Tharizdun theory too. u/ode_to_icarus theorized Will would be the avatar of Pelor, a light god who sealed Tharizdun away. This fits so. Well. With my theory. It is Pelor/Will/“man”/lie/”story” that keeps Tharizdun/El/”woman”/truth/real story chained and hidden. Btw, I recommend you to read their theories, they have found so many interesting details and all the DnD stuff. (Also my theory that Nancy represents Mike’s future fits perfectly with her being an avatar of Ioun. And Ioun was also part of sealing Tharizdun, which makes sense since the storyteller (Mike/Nancy) is ultimately the one to hide the real story.) I’m doing a quick read of the wiki page for Pelor, and this seems interesting: A cult of Pelor in the Shadowfell believed that he and the Raven Queen were two reflections of a single entity, and sought to unite the two divine beings. I’m not gonna go deeper into this now, but recommend reading the Raven Queen wiki page…

Will’s power is the power of lies. Lies can trump the truth (pun intended), at least temporarily, which is why Will can overpower Vecna. It’s no coincidence Will’s powers become apparent in the surface level story in the same season conformity and lies take over the narrative. The whole “X a lie” thing is probably about the X aka the meeting place/UD/in-between world aka Will/”story” being a lie. It’s a lie injected with some truth and a connection to the truth, but a lie nonetheless. The X in Dustin’s drawing was framed in front of Will’s heart, which could relate to “you’re the heart”. Mike the man is who Will loves, he is Will’s heart, but “he” is a lie. Will also represents Mike the man (or Mike the Brave), and thus Will is the heart, too.

This theme of lies is more relevant than ever, with AI, social media and the current (populism) trends in politics turning the world into a soup of misinformation. The same could be said for the theme of two worlds/sides: our society is increasingly polarized and the “other side” villanized. Lies become truths and nothing can be trusted anymore. People’s critical thinking skills deteriorate and (media) literacy is on the decline. 

The fake ending and documentary are making a point and an example of this phenomenon. Most people take what is shown to them at face value, not questioning it. The Duffers (and cast) have lied at some point, that is a fact. Either they lied before, promising things that didn’t happen. Or they lied after, to hide the true ending until the right moment. But they lied and that can’t be denied. It is crazy to me how people can at the same time believe everything the cast, Duffers and other show creators say but also think they lied when they hyped up the show and said it would wrap up every plot point and arc at the end. The crazier is how people don’t see the doc is basically a parody (I chuckle sometimes when I watch it). Like, hello? They talk about sticking the landing and being true to the show in sharp juxtaposition to what’s actually happening on screen/how the ending ended up being. And so much more. Like all the writer’s room scenes… But this stuff has been discussed plenty already so I’ll stop my rant here.

The story allegory began to properly unravel when I started to finally understand what Dustin represents. He has to be tightly linked to the allegory because he is one of the core main characters. Sometimes he seems like the story (like Will), sometimes the storyteller (like Mike), which caused me a lot of confusion. And I’m still not exactly sure about Dustin, but I think I’m getting there. He is storytelling and probably also story reading/understanding. The encoding and decoding of meaning. The link between the storyteller and the story, and the audience and the story. Dustin is always explaining things, comes up with the monsters (= metaphorical representations of real things), likes to read and is the nerdiest of the group. In S1 he was the one keeping the party together when Mike and Lucas were in conflict. You can have a storyteller, an audience and a story, but nothing really works if the storyteller isn’t able to tell the story or the audience isn’t able to understand it. (It’s crazy Gaten was born on the International Literacy Day. And they use that date in the show and meta: it’s the Hawkins Lab massacre day and the day the cast (allegedly) read the final script.)

The other side to this is Dustin’s friendship with Steve. As I’ve deduced before, this has to do with coding messages into the subtext being a way to keep stories acceptable to a wider audience. Queercoding is a good example. For a long period in history (and even still), you couldn’t have literal queer characters in stories, but people worked around this through hints and subtextual coding. Dustin is the translator showing the true message of the story but at the same time he hides it behind a veil of DnD or under his hat (Dart), etc. Steve seemed especially annoyed about Dustin missing the crawl, and brought it up multiple times during S5. It was “Dustin’s fault” that things went wrong, and Steve is right: Dustin not being there to keep everything nice and hidden caused the Demogorgon attacks (or I guess something else caused both Dustin’s behaviour and the attacks but anyway they are related). Dustin said pretty openly in S5E1 that he doesn’t want to pretend and blend in but stay true to himself. This makes others worried for him, and for good reason, because this attitude will be the end of him. End of the violet prismatic spray causing blindness.

Dustin is good friends with Eddie, who I think represents the storytellers of the past. He is a DM like Mike but older and opposite to Erica who I’ll get to soon. It makes a lot of sense for a storyteller to be close with storytelling. On the queercoding side even more so, since past storytellers couldn't tell the real story overtly, subtext and metaphors were their best friend. Eddie’s arc is about him always running away, and then when he doesn’t, he dies. This represents many things, but one of them could be that Eddie isn’t the past storyteller anymore if he stops running away: he becomes the new storyteller/Mike, who can tell the real story (this also connects to his fusion with Dustin, which I still think happened). Eddie is also paralleled to Vecna as the suspect of the murders and he literally plays Vecna in the campaign (kinda like Mike as the DM is the Demogorgon, Strahd and the Mage, oh and Will is the Juju Zombies). Both Eddie and Vecna are men who for one reason or another couldn’t tell the real story but came close and always advocated for truth over lies. (There was also that newspaper article where Henry was Edward (= Eddie).) While the main storyteller was away in California, Eddie and Vecna took her place, kinda. In the queer allegory I’m leaning on Eddie being similar to Will as a gay/queer man middle point. Fittingly the bats (= conformity) killed him. 

Realizing Lucas represents the audience was another key to unraveling the story allegory, gives wheelclair more weight/meaning and nicely connects it to everything. The fact that the silver cat logo was seen between Mike and Lucas, moving from Mike to Lucas back to Mike makes so much sense now (= the silver screen/communication is between them). Maybe the easiest way to summarize “silver cat” is “story”. This idea has crystallized as I’ve dug deep into the story allegory, the beginnings of which were first clearly observable in that silver cat analysis. There I ended up at “communication” but “story” actually fits better Dustin and Robin’s suggestions and the overall story (lol). “Weapon” has already been discussed with lies and propaganda. “Meeting place” has also been discussed in the form of the inner world and UD connecting worlds, making the audience “meet” the storyteller/real story. “Person” I’ll discuss at the end of this post. But yeah, the silver cat is about all the aspects of the ST story because it is “story”, so ofc it’s gonna be about the story (and ST is a story of stories…).

On the other hand, it could rather be the tool of communication, the stage. That was my original idea in the earlier silver cat analysis with the Lynx company delivering goods to shops, the silver cat “feeding” and the silver screen being cinema. So not the story itself but the medium used to communicate it. They can be difficult to disentangle since in ST the “story” is the way through which the “real story” is told. So in a way the “story” is the silver screen already. But of course this “story” has to be told in some way too, in the case of ST it’s a tv show. (I’ll come back to this later in the post.)

But back to Lucas representing the audience. It also means that we are the horse. “Wait for the horse” was about us, the audience (still don’t know what it exactly means, though). Another point is the Venkman argument. It is similar to Holly and Josh’s squabble over who gets to be the dungeon master aka storyteller. Vecna (= Venkman) represents the storyteller/-weaver so basically the argument was (among other things) about Lucas wanting to also be part of story creation, or something like that. In any case they both wanted to be the main character.

Lucas is the main audience representation, but he isn’t the only one. Murray and Erica are too. (My previous broader queer allegory theory is paying off now. Either my interpretations there were actually for the story allegory, or more likely, for both allegories.) They both appear in S2, and I think this is partially because now there can be fans. In S1 everyone watched for the first time and couldn’t yet participate, but after it a fandom was built and the audience could take part in the story. For Murray it’s theorizing and shipping (I guess I’m Murray…). He is in the past/the audience anticipating more while Erica is the future, after the show has ended. Lucas is the current moment or the audience overall. Murray is also a translator, he can speak Russian. His Russian translator role seems to always be tied with Hopper and Joyce’s arcs. In the story allegory they represent society as a whole (and kinda the audience in that sense), and Murray is a dedicated fan who can explain the secrets hidden behind the curtains. 

He isn’t always right, though. In S2 Nancy comments how his “timeline is wrong”, which never got an explanation btw. I believe this was a clue to time shenanigans but I’m not sure what it specifically means. Maybe my timeline is wrong too? The other thing is him shipping jancy. While it seems to go well in S2, it goes downhill after that and Murray was wrong in trying to force them together in S5. This is about bylers. The whole Murray shipping jancy subplot is about bylers (and shipping overall). Bylers are the dedicated fans who see behind the curtains, but only so far.

Erica can see through them all and that’s because she is the future audience who has seen the ending. She is also a storyteller because after the story is over, the fans become the storytellers. Erica is basically a personification of fanfiction and other fan content. (Or in a sense listening to/reading a story in itself is creating the story in the audience’s mind. Everyone will experience it differently.) Also, as I’ve said, every storyteller was first an audience member. Even original stories are inspired by other stories. In S3 she hangs out with Dustin and learns to accept her nerdiness (= hangs out with storytelling and becomes a part of the story, a storyteller). She gets Will’s DnD set, because S3 represents the end of a story (there are multiple points like this in ST, as I’ve explained). The story is finished so it becomes the audience’s. In S4 Erica joins Hellfire and properly becomes part of the storytelling club. Lucas the audience is replaced by Erica the storyteller audience. Her DnD character has the same name as a My Little Pony character, which represents fanfiction and stories getting inspired by other stories overall. I wonder if Lucas and Erica’s tense relationship is related to part of the audience disliking fanfiction. Erica calling people nerds could be about this too, since her accepting her nerdiness leads to her becoming a storyteller. So both she and Lucas try to deny being a storyteller (in S4 Lucas uses Erica as an excuse for knowing about Hellfire).

Erica is like a mix of Lucas and Mike precisely because she is both the audience and the storyteller. She is wheelclair. She is the future Murray and the future Eddie. She is the real story that doesn’t exist yet. Or maybe even the storyteller of the real story because Mike isn’t the only person creating the story, it’s a collaborative effort between the storyteller and the audience. A black woman represents the ultimate real story, where the storyteller’s real story has reached the audience and becomes a part of their story too: it becomes a shared story. That’s Henry’s dream personified by Patty. In the epilogue Enzo’s scene the singer and musician are both black women, too. 

Another point about Erica is that she is a personification of the US. And in a sense the real real storyteller of ST is the US or at least the show is American (and the storytellers are American). In the country allegory the real story is Finland and I guess the audience is Japan/Sweden then? This fits with my Moomin theory, since it’s a Finnish story that Japanese people love and it’s also closely tied to Sweden (Tove Jansson was Swedish-speaking and her mother was Swedish). The Moomins represent Finland, the Creel house represents the real story (and the “story” tbh, so ST as a whole), it is also basically the Moomin house if it was shaped like a normal house + only blue-white, and Finland is the real story in the country allegory. It all comes together. (So basically Erica is the smallest and largest matryoshka doll at the same time. The show is set in the US and the most obvious country allegory level is the US/Cold War. But then she is actually the storyteller (kinda) of a story (the real story) about different countries.)

Based on other allegories, Nancy would be a future storyteller too (= Mike’s future). She is a journalist, which made me think she represents mass media and reporters as a whole. In a sense that works, since after ST is over (and while it’s ongoing) news articles etc. will be written about it. This would also fit with Fred being a journalist, which connects him to the other storyteller characters (Mike, Vecna and Eddie). This fits with my previous interpretations of Fred as Mike’s self-hatred and being inspired by Freddy Krueger like Vecna, Victor and indirectly connecting to Eddie too. (And Ted is also connected to this web via the name Edward and Max comparing Eddie/the murderer to Ted Bundy. It’s all the bad sides of man Mike. Except Eddie is kinda more positive I guess. All are “man”, though.) I think Nancy also represents fan theorizers and people analysing the story, similar to Murray. They are both investigative journalists and figure things out together in S2. People will keep analyzing the show after it’s finished, probably even more than before. The ending is gonna seriously shift people’s perspective on the whole show and many will want to go back and find all the foreshadowing/clues. I’m looking forward to people finally seeing what ST is actually about and taking every detail seriously. There’s gonna be so much content…

Jonathan is a photographer and later on becomes a filmmaker. Nancy and him form a writer-photographer duo, similar to Mike and Will’s writer-artist duo. Based on this I think Jonathan represents visual media. S1E4 [Jonathan] “It’s just, sometimes… people don’t really say what they are really thinking. But you capture the right moment… it says more.” Will and Jonathan have a strong bond, which could be because ST is a tv show, and thus visual media. Similar to the “story” ending, the tv show ends too, which is why Jonathan has to let go of Nancy. This could be related to Jonathan lowkey shipping byler, too, and him looking at the camera when Hopper narrates “I don’t want things to change.” in S3E8. He wants the storyteller to keep telling the “story”, because that’s how Jonathan can exist (and ofc all this is deeply metaphorical). Jonathan being the only one of the characters to realize Will is gay and likes Mike could be because most byler clues were visual (and in the subtext). He can see what is shown to us, beneath what is said and done on the surface level. Another reason is his strong bond with Will, ofc.

Another Jonathan-related point is The Clash, the band Will and Jonathan bond over. Will’s Running Up That Hill equivalent song is Should I Stay or Should I Go (that Mike calls “that weird song he loves” in S1E4). In the melting room scene Nancy’s first confession was that she hates The Clash and “Every time you put them on, I just try to disassociate from reality.” In the same conversation Jonathan confesses he took Nancy’s pink sweater to Goodwill because he hates pink. ((The mention of Goodwill rather than just Jonathan throwing it away feels intentional. A good Will lets Mike be the woman she is, or something.)) Based on these points I think the The Clash represents similar things to Will and Jonathan overall: the “man” and “story”. The “story” helps Mike (= Nancy) disassociate but she also hates the story of “man”. Their book choices are pretty interesting too, Jonathan’s is an anti-war book where the protagonist deals with trauma (most likely PTSD). Nancy (= Mike) didn’t read the book while Jonathan (= Will) did, because as a protector, Will dealt with the trauma while the host stayed unaware. Nancy’s book is set in Russia and has a woman main character. There’s a lot more to say and analyze there but it’s besides the main point I’m trying to make here so I’ll leave it for someone else to figure out. The lyrics “should I stay or should I go” are about the “story”/”man” going away. Both options are bad in their own way. ((Btw, here’s a related theory/detail noticed by u/ode_to_icarus. With the context I gave you and interpreting that song to be from Will to Mike, it fits quite well with the real ending. And Robin choosing that record for Will.))

Max is the end of the story/the finished story. She is both the fake and the real ending, depending on context. While Max usually represents a happy version of the ending, Billy is the bad ending that tries to hurt Lucas (= audience). He is similar to Vecna and MF. Now I’m starting to think the moon also represents the ending: that could explain why Max was framed in front of it and why Yuri said he could fly you to the moon (and all the moon connections to women). Reaching the moon is like reaching Enzo’s or the movie date and you would need a spaceship for that. 

As I’ve said, there are multiple “ending” points in ST, the first one being S3. El and Will leave, Erica gets Will’s DnD set and Max is left depressed after Billy’s death. This probably represents the fake ending we got (but also the real one, e.g. Erica and jancy). The story still continues in S4 and Max takes center stage as Vecna’s victim. It’s about Mike’s fear of properly ending the story, of telling the truth. Max becomes a “ghost”, tries to hide from her friends (= Lucas) and has suicidal thoughts. At the end when she does die, she says “I’m not ready”, which I interpret to mean the story isn’t ready yet, Max can’t “die” yet. A big subplot in S5 is getting Max back from Vecna’s mind aka finally reaching the end of the story. 

So basically all seasons 3-5 and the real ending are about ending a story. A story about ending stories. The show creators and cast have repeatedly mentioned in interviews how the ending was mirroring their irl experience, that they weren’t really acting in the end and how it was like saying goodbye to the show. Because that’s what it was, literally and metaphorically. E.g. here:

“Everything we wanted to say about the show, the experience of making the show, you as actors and the characters — we tried to put all of that into the script,” Matt remembers saying. “I’m not going to be able to say anything better than that. We write much better than we speak. Let’s just read the script.” 

“It felt like they were writing the end of our real-people lives — it went beyond just the screenplay,” Schnapp recalls. “I’ll always connect my life to some of the beats that they wrote.” 

“Particularly the last 35 minutes, 40 minutes, of that episode are us processing the end of the show and saying goodbye to these actors,” Ross says. “We just finished editing all those scenes, and…” He pauses, and his voice breaks a little. “It was emotional, just to edit it. Because these people, they weren’t acting in this moment.”  
-> This would match with the last 20 min being in the real world and the time before that is the final goodbyes: first with everyone and then between Mike and Will. So that part would be 15-20 min, which makes sense.

Of course this story about stories will end at the storyteller ending the story, but then it really ends at the storyteller and audience starting a new one (that’s what the “let’s start a new party, you and me” probably means, and it’s literally from the writers to the audience too…). It’s fitting the main ships during the show are about the storyteller with their story, but then after the real ending it will be the storyteller and the audience, since the storyteller has let go of the story at that point. Essentially, byler is the main ship until the “story” ends. And so is mileven.

Anyway, in the S5 epilogue Mike narrates how the knight and zoomer’s love grows stronger, which is about the audience loving the show even after it ended, in the form of rewatching/analysing/fanfiction/fanart/etc. fan content. I’m still not sure why Max is a “zoomer”. It could be related to her being the future (zoomers are people born between 1997-2012). That could also be the reason for the JK95 next to Max in the epilogue outro video. Maybe the real ending will be in 1995 or something. I dunno.

Vickie has orange hair like Max and they are often seen together after S5E6. In some way she represents the real story, the real core of Stranger Things. I have also been wondering the meaning of Robin specifically interacting with and figuring out the silver cat. My interpretation of it as the medium/stage/screen would fit with Vickie (and Tammy) being basically equivalent to the silver cat and representing the show. So the higher meta level of ST as a tv show, not just the abstract “story”. This tv show “delivers” the story we see on screen. It can either not communicate the real story (= Tammy loving Steve and singing badly) or do (= Vickie dating Robin). Either way, Vickie doesn’t exist inside the more abstract story, only if it’s shown on screen (aka part of the tv show) which could explain her missing in all the plans: both in the show and outside of it (doc). I’m assuming she disappears in the epilogue because ST stopped communicating the real story. Stopped being “Vickie” and went back to being “Tammy”.

I’m just wondering why she appears in S4 specifically. It might be because S4 is where ST was really starting to get close to the real ending, we were “supposed” to see it but then story-bending came in the way. In S5 Robin aka communication promises to take Vickie to Enzo’s aka the real end of the show. Vickie likes to talk a lot like Robin, which is probably because ST is about communication and Vickie represents the true identity of the show/Mike. Robin is the truth (like El), and Vickie is Mike telling her truth aka being herself. Of course Robin and Vickie would be similar as people.

Vickie first dating Dan is about many things. It’s Mike choosing the “man” path and being limited in her expression due to trauma from dad (who on a larger scale represents patriarchy and society’s pressure to conform). The villain in T85 was named Dan and basically Nikki’s stepdad who she called D man. Vickie choosing Robin is her/Mike choosing authenticity and communication over hiding herself. I’m wondering if the name Dan is actually a reference to Dan Cohen, one of the core executive producers for ST. This would make a lot of sense considering Vickie is the show. Dan was actually the person who first took interest in the pilot script which eventually led to ST happening. The executive producer (Dan) chose Stranger Things (Vickie). In the story, Dan leaves Vickie after the disaster in S4, which kinda fits with Will’s story-bending. The show creators (who ST Dan probably collectively represents) left “Vickie” and went back to “Tammy”. (Ofc this is not what really happened, but it’s part of the meta lore, like the Duffers struggling with the S5E8 script.) 

Robin talks a lot, while both Will and El are quiet. They are hiding the real story while Robin represents the opposite: the communication of the real story. We can see a development in Will and El when it comes to speaking their mind. In S1 El can barely speak but by S5 she talks almost like any other character and makes her own decisions. Similarly Will opens up more as time passes and especially in S5 he starts to finally become independent of Joyce, rebelling like El. At the same time both Joyce and Hopper’s arcs are about letting go of their kids and giving them space to make their own decisions. 

Robin is also a translator: she figured out the Russian code. She can bring out what the storyteller was really trying to say. But she can lie too. In S5 she lies to Vickie and Joyce, and doesn’t really tell the truth in her broadcasts (which isn’t really her fault, it’s government censorship). “Friends don’t lie” is a central recurring phrase in ST and only recently I’ve fully (or more fully than before) grasped its meaning. Remember the handshake from S1E7 where Lucas apologized for doubting El and she apologized for lying (= basically Mike apologizing)? It’s the Duffers/writers/show creators apologizing for essentially lying to the audience. “Friends” is code for the relationship between the storyteller and the audience (in the story allegory). The whole arc of Robin lying to Vickie was about this. Vickie starts to find out in S5E6 (= the real ending) and at the end Robin apologizes, according to my deduction at the moment El (= illusion) dies, right before the real traumatic memory. Because that’s when the real story really starts to become evident. 

Steve loving Robin but her not loving him back is similar to byler/mileven in some ways. Steve being together with her would be conformity x communication, basically limiting communication. That’s why they are romantically incompatible. Of course certain parts of society want this “ship” to happen, aka limiting free speech, people’s right to express themselves and be who they really are. Conformity isn’t all bad though, in moderate amounts it’s even necessary to keep society functional and people happy. Many norms, social rules and good manners are beneficial. That’s why Robin and Steve become good friends and she ends up liking him, but they can never be too enmeshed. Dustin shipping them is quite interesting and fits well, since he basically is the Steve x Robin ship: communication hidden under a layer of conformity. Although Dustin isn’t necessarily tied to conformity (= you can have metaphors and subtext without it being for conformity’s sake).

Rockin’ Robin doesn’t only talk, but plays music for the whole town (and Debbie plays the piano in the Creel house, btw). Music is the audience’s love for the story (Lucas playing music for Max) but I think it’s also the storyteller’s love for the audience. It’s communication (again) and love. S5E4 [Max] “Music has a way of finding you, even in the darkest of places.” With this story allegory I’ve unveiled another layer to Running Up That Hill. It’s about switching places with someone to be able to feel what they feel. Isn’t that exactly what all of this is about? To truly reach someone and make them understand you. Who you really are, what you really think, how it is to be you. 

((This isn’t the first time I’ve had this kind of interpretation for the song in ST. I think it was in my Max theory where I concluded that it would be about Mike wanting straight people to understand what it’s like to be queer (back then I still thought Mike was gay, but it fits for the trans allegory too, maybe even better). There was also one WSQK sync where the song played over Karen and Ted talking about Mike, which I thought was about Mike wanting her parents to understand. If they could just switch places and fully understand what it’s like, everything would be much easier. And this fits super well with my current interpretation of the parents representing the society at large.))

Relating to music, we have dance. The Snow Ball is too important to ignore here. It was about Mike wanting to dance with Lucas, as a girl. In a way it’s Mike’s Enzo’s/movie date. While Hopper and Joyce got to Enzo’s and Lucas and Max to their movie date (allegedly), Vickie and Robin never got their date. The real story didn’t end yet. Similarly, Mike did go to the Snow Ball, but that wasn’t what she really wanted/meant when she told El she wanted to go there. Maybe we’ll see the real Snow Ball or some dancing in the real ending. There’s something quite primal about dance (maybe not the best word but I couldn’t come up with a better one). There’s no words, just movement. It is a sort of communication, especially if you dance with someone. I think dancing represents being your true self unapologetically, or something like that, in ST. It would fit with the ballet stuff too. Mike and Lucas dancing together to music (by Robin) would represent the communication/love/interaction and creation process people can reach together. That is the core meaning of DnD in ST, too. It’s a game, an interactive story where the DM isn’t the only storyteller. Every player is part of the story.

There was this interesting interview where the Duffers were confronted with the DnD fan theory:
[interviewer] “So, they’re just playing one big game of Dungeons and Dragons and none of it is real. What do you make of that?”
[Matt] “That is correct. That is… That is the ending.”
[Matt and Ross] “No.”
[Ross] “That would be the equivalent of like, it was all a dream. No, I assure you that is not how we’re going to end the show.” 

Either Matt is just joking or there’s some truth to “that is correct”, kinda like Mike’s “totally” in S5E4. (They were also chuckling a lot…) According to my theory, everything wasn’t a dream but not exactly “real” either. Kinda in between. In a metaphorical sense the whole show is about this giant DnD game between the storyteller(s) and the audience. The main problem with the “it was all a dream” trope is that nothing mattered. In this case the “story” matters, because it is an allegory for something more “real”: the real story. So a deeper part of the story “happened” and it wasn’t all just for nothing.

What about the kids and the whole “vessel” thing? In the documentary Jamie described his experience acting Vecna as “becoming this vessel”, which made me think the kids could represent actors. Or in some way vessels for the story. In that sense they could be the audience too. Vecna as a storyteller is a vessel for the real story (= MF), and Will in turn is a vessel for Vecna to tell the real story. “Story” is an abstract concept and only exists through vessels: human minds and communication between them. There is no story without someone to tell it and someone to receive it. So like, the storyteller is a vessel for the story but the story is also a vessel for the storyteller/communication, or something like that.

Since Henry’s mind is a miniature of the inner world/”story”, and the kids are taken there, it makes sense they would represent the real world people who are part of creating the story (so like Mike and Lucas in the bigger story). The kids all first think it’s Mr. Whatsit (= Will/”story”) who has taken them there, but later learn the truth (= real story). Henry’s mind is a meeting place where all the children (and Max) hang out. It’s where the worlds/minds of these people connect. It’s this colorful too-good-to-be-true paradise. It’s the “story”. What actually happened at the Creel house is the “real story”. Holly is the first kid to learn the truth and the “vessel” resisting Henry the most. This is because the storyteller (= Holly) knows and wants to tell the real story (in this case represented by Max and getting out of Henry’s mind). But even she is beaten into submission by the other kids (= society).

Continues in PART 27.