#anyways this isn't even all the head thumpery but yeah

[willbyersabyss]

The big thump of '83

There's so much talk about head thumping that it feels like there's something bigger going on here. I think El thumped Will's head in 1983 when she opened the gate.

We obviously have Angela who got whacked in the head with a roller skate. Grade 2 concussions usually result in amnesia (memory loss). Hmm.

Steve talks about how he crawled backwards and thumped his head. Crawled backwards... through time? The Upside Down is stuck in the past. He can change. Amnesia... memory loss... personality change. Reminds me of a certain someone who was losing himself and his memories.

Then there's the Phineas Gage references. Phineas Gage, who had a rod go through his head, is compared to Will. But what exactly is the rod for Will? The Mind Flayer?

Mr. Clarke puts an emphasis on it being a rod, not a crowbar. The Mind Flayer's smoke arms look kind of similar to a crowbar, so the rod isn't that. They want us to think it's the MF, but it's a trick, a misconception, just like how Gage's case often gets confused.

The rod that impaled Gage was a tamping rod, something used to contain explosions. I would say that the gates to the UD are quite explosive, but these gates are also contained and precise.

Then both El and Will are indirectly brought up in relation to the earthquake. Rod imagery comes back to haunt Will here. This is linking Will's "rod" with the gates opening, gates that have a magnitude that add up to eleven. El caused this rod.

These gates also meet at the library where Will died and had a rod-like object in his throat.

Coming back to Angela, Argyle said they don't make wheels out of metal because it would hurt more when people get smacked. Metal like an iron rod? Then ice skates are brought up. Ice is cold like the Upside Down. And this ice would have sliced that nose off! Who doesn't have a nose? Vecna. The gate to the Upside Down sliced his nose off.

Even more interesting when you consider that Angela was originally supposed to be hit with a golf club. This would have been yet another instance of rod imagery! But they still subtly snuck it in there by joking about metal wheels and ice skates after.

Oh and the Angela head whack incident gives El flashbacks the 1979 gate. So there's that.

More rod stuff here! The tightrope (and the pen Mr. Clarke uses), the pencil, and the straw are all rod shaped. They represent the Upside Down. The Upside Down is a transition between the real world and Dimension X. It's the side of the tightrope. You would have to walk through it to reach the other dimension.

Brenner compared the UD to a dam, while Owens compared Will's trauma to floodgates. Not just any old floodgates, neurological ones. Upside Down, gates, neurological, heads! Head thump!

The rod for Will is the Upside Down, not just in a metaphorical sense, in a literal sense. It's going through his head. Literally. The Upside Down is Will's mindscape. When El opened the gate in s1, she basically thumped Will's head. That thump linked Will's mindscape to Dimension X, allowing the monsters to roam free. This is why Will's rod trauma is compared to the gates opening. Will's mindscape is a bridge between dimensions.

It would be really nice if we had some sort of reenactment of this event to tie this all together... oh wait, we do!

Lucas accuses El of making them run around like headless chickens. Headless? Already starting with a head injury mention.

The rest of this scene is basically what happened when El opened the gate. Lucas exclaims that they're looking for a monster, the lab was literally making El look for a monster. El flings Lucas across the junkyard and thumps his head. Then she disappears into the woods. After El opened the gate, she ran away from the lab through the woods. This junkyard scene is so spot on that El regains her memories of the 1983 gate mishap because of it.

These uncovered memories reveal that the demogorgon was eating an egg when El touched it. This egg was found outside of Castle Byers in the UD. Maybe when El opened the 1983 gate, her mind travel slipped a bit, accidentally landing on Will who was sitting in Castle Byers. That slip connected the land of the demogorgon and Will's mindscape, creating the Upside Down we see.

In the VR game, Vecna is told that El is reaching out to him when El visited Will in Castle Byers. Interesting that this was the moment they chose instead of, you know, the scene of El opening the gate via the demogorgon. Time shenanigans?

When Will is hiding out in Castle Byers in the UD, he hears the demogorgon walking outside, but then it suddenly screams and gets quiet. This is just like when El killed the demodog in s2 before entering the Byers house. Parallels. That also parallels the latch unlocking before Will disappeared.

Now this is where it gets really crazy. Something breaks through Castle Byers and the scream sounds nearly identical to El's scream when she opens the gate. What the actual hell? Is there crazy time weirdness going on here and we actually see the exact moment she tapped into Will's mindscape? We hear clock ticking sounds before El touches the demogorgon. This was the moment!

And Vecna had to be there too. He took Will to the library after, the place the s4 gates met up. Both gates caused this (in a time loopy paradox way). Vecna broke Castle Byers, but so did El.

There's also white smokey stuff outside of Castle Byers once it's broken. This looks very similar to the smoke El sees in the void when people disappear. She was in his mindscape. She had to be. Was this Vecna/El disappearing after the gate opened?

So yeah. El linked Will's mind to Dimension X and that's the big mysterious head thump they keep hinting at. It caused Will to have memory loss, personality changes, made his mind stuck in time, put a rod through his head to another dimension, and even sliced Vecna's nose off along the way.