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fumifooms · 3 years ago

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An unpolished review of Stranger Things 4′s Henry Creel and ableism. Eleven vs Henry, the good neurodivergent vs the dangerous mentally ill. Character analysis

Tldr, Stranger Things made some wild (insensitive) choices.

Umm so I watched the ep 7 of Stranger Things S4 and I have... Mixed feelings. I started writing this before volume 2 was out, and I’m finishing it in the end of july. I’ve had plenty of time to let it marinate, think and debate with others on it. It took this long for me to sort out my feelings and build up the courage to make any post in support of Henry Creel’s experiences and humanity, but I’ve gotten there, kind of.

I guess I should mention this too, kinda important, but I’m autistic. I was diagnosed at 18 and got all sorts of messed up and some internalized ableism I’ve worked through. The way I see it, currently in Stranger Things, the characters of Henry Creel, Eleven, Robin and even Will all have significant back-up to support them being autistic. Here what matters most is Henry’s, because his is the most overt and less masked, and Eleven’s due to the topic, but Henry having autism is the only actual diagnosis one I’m determined on defending. Regardless, canonically stated or not, much like being diagnosed or undiagnosed, it isn’t because you don’t have a label for it that you aren’t, and that the symptoms and experiences you have because of your autism don’t exist and don’t manifest. A character can have a mental illness or disorder without authorial intent, because things don’t exist in a vacuum.

A few important things to keep in mind before we start, well summarized by the following posts. I’ll still be reiterating these things as I go though bc people have no chill:

https://nemevex.tumblr.com/post/676815383203840001/mental-illnesses-can-increase-the-chance-of-being

https://psychonarc.tumblr.com/post/664768075380441089/its-interesting-to-watch-neurotypicals-grapple

https://theegosystem.tumblr.com/post/657136958513037312/id-title-of-picture-says-how-can-someone-have-so

Tldr: https://mibasai.tumblr.com/post/669402579694993408/reminder-that-if-your-horror-is-reliant-on note: regardless of how many decent neurodivergent portrayals you have in your show, if one of them is an actively ableist portrayal, your show is still ableist. Being an ally to neurodivergent people isn’t about picking and choosing who is too scary to empathize with and not just “these few misfit kids were good and deserving of acceptance despite being a bit quirky all along”

shortest tldr: https://aeon-of-neon.tumblr.com/post/685452896681230336/also-can-i-just-say-the-autistic-child-is-evil

My tldr: The way Henry Creel was handled is literally autism & aspd fearmongering lol.

It may sound like I’m excusing Henry in this post, and I want to be clear that my goal isn’t to defend Henry’s actions, my goal is to defend Henry’s humanity and complexity as a full human with emotions and thoughts for whose whole identity isn’t the innate want to cause harm and be evil, since everyone is so set on strictly seeing him as such. Perhaps, you could use your empathy, which you condemn him for not having, to not deem him an irredeemable heartless monster whose abuse is justified.

Warnings for spoilers and discussion of heavy themes such as ableism, abuse, animal torture and the targeted ableist killing by the nazi Hans Asperger.

Disclaimer: This is not a clean essay. I was and am hurt and very defensive of these experiences and feelings which I identify and sympathize with, and I am confused. There are ways you can interpret the canon text in good faith, where everything is aligned in a way that lessens the ableist damage, but you have to dig and theorize so much that it doesn’t feel genuine to say that in this one case the narrative wouldn’t be ableist. I find it very hard to contain all my thoughts in one essay, especially since there’s so much analysis to set up before you can even attempt to humanize Henry’s mentality and choices, so I’ve chosen to reduce this as a casual review rather than an essay, and explain Henry Creel’s various ideologies and actions in other, later posts. I might come back to polish this one at some point later though, yet once again. I have written and rewritten the same points as below in so many ways scattered on multiple private platforms. To “polish” this for posting, I’ve spent literally 8 hours nonstop today. God. Anyways, let’s move onto the thing.

Part of this essay was written before volume two and it’ll be apparent in the language and chronological order most times, but I did go back and organize ideas better and add in a few paragraphs so it might jump back and forth a bit.

The whole twist of Creel being One was sooo well executed and interesting and it had me hooked, I LOVED all of the build up to the reveal. I love mysteries that come together like puzzle pieces, and the way a lot of plot points and parts of the intrigue just tied together seamlessly felt so “wow” and satisfying. But then... They made him be evil because of neurodivergence...?

Like, it’s not about giving your villain a complex backstory and grey morals, it’s about the framing. And yes, the framing absolutely was ableist.

The framing

Because, the show is explicitely saying that Creel is evil because he was inherently different since birth. The show suddenly stops highlighting the abuse and stygmatization he has suffered (such as “all the teachers and doctors said I was broken”, the corporal punishment for speaking to El which we were made to sympathize with before the reveal),and starts treating him like he’s some exotic beast, not like us TM, a monster.

And all this while having him say such neurodivergent things to say... It was actually painful for me to hear him say everything, especially the whole spiders thing, because it was so relatable and accurate, and for it to be framed with ominous music in tandem with the narrative and ambiance that we should be repulsed with everything that comes out of his mouth & everything he stands for. It honestly felt like the show was calling me crazy and evil because I was relating as he was talking.

But hey, I guess if they were going for historically accurate story & character tropes then ableism is def a pick. Wow, you’re so creative, the antisocial kid tortures animals and that lack of empathy means he’s a monster! It’s overdone, guys. It’s Split level of ableist horror sensationalization. It’s not that deep. Intention matters, we’re always saying how intention matters, why is Henry defiguring animals the proof of his demonic nature when it was done out of a lack of self-awareness to difference right from wrong, which kids are famous for not having, much like when you burn ants through a magnifier glass? It’s not that big of a jump. People hunt recreatively. People often hunt unethically. Are recreative hunters demonized by society at large? It was done humanely without any ill intention mind you, but was I demonic as a child when I held the corpse of hares my family got in hunting traps and not thinking anything of its death? Henry wanted to practice his skills, and that’s what he did, on living moving targets. It wasn’t done for a pleasure of animal pain, it was done in an objective efficient detached mindset. That doesn’t make it not disturbing or alright, it just means that doesn’t make him a subhuman or something. That kinda was the line when I debated about Henry being deserving of a modicum of sympathy with my mother for her, and it’s wild to see how quickly people are to refuse sympathy to another human because they sympathize with animals more and want to overtly attribute morality to its death. “Yeah Henry was abused in the labs and that sucks I guess, but he did torture those animals” to practice his skills, yeah! Even with Eleven we were shown that killing, and even just pushing someone back, with psychic powers isn’t that simple, straightforward and without other effects, and if Henry could kill quickly without pain and other disfigurations, then better practice would maybe be to disfigure intentionally instead of going straight for death. It seems terrible talking about this, and that’s because it is, but once again I’m explaining thought processes and how they’re not super wild demonic ones that people can’t understand. I had to bust out the “I can tolerate abusive and traumatic human bigotry, but I draw the line at animal abuse” quote and then my mom conceded lol. Y’all need to demistify these sensationalized things and put them down from the pedestral of innate morality you’ve put it on, the show is manipulating you and kids don’t experiment with killing animals because they’re some widow spider demons coming to kill everyone. Empathy doesn’t equal compassion. Kids are kids.

It’s the way Stranger Things wanted Eleven to push him away with disgust and horror with 0 nuance, even if they were the closest thing each other had to friends in such a cold, abusive place for so long. It’s the way all the abuse he endured was no longer treated as such, the way the show now showed that abuse as deserved. It’s the way the pieces of the puzzle all came together for the grand evil villain finale and the explanation for his motivations wasn’t “I am angry at the world/I want justice/they’ve kept us prisoners and mistreated us” but was “I’ve always been different”, and without saying it so obviously wanting the audience to continue that statement with “which makes me want to hurt and kill people”.

It’s the way the show suddenly did an 180 from before and after telling his backstory and wanting him to become entirely unsympathetic. God I hope I’m wrong and the second part of the season spins that on its head. It’s not the fact that Henry is ND [NeuroDivergent], I think with his story that’s interesting and compelling, but it’s the way the show wants us to shake in horror at the Big Bad ND. Henry is a traumatized abuse survivor, he needs support and guidance, not to be killed on sight, like the vibes are supporting in ep 7. Henry massacred everyone in the labs after he’s been forcefully kept under its control for years and mistreated there by everyone, after a lifetime of trauma and the strong self-preservation survival instincts it caused, and the person he risked himself so much to help, who has gone through so much so similarly to him, that he feels a connection with, just immediately turns on him murderously after seeing what he’s done, no attempt to talk, no confusion, no heartbroken words, just “oh yeah I guess you know who I really am now, I’mma have to kill you too ig” and “I can’t believe you were so evil all along :(( I hate you & I have to kill you now”. Why so black and white? Like I almost feel gaslighted, I can’t be the only one to think that a step was missed here, how did we go from extremely abusive living conditions to fully dehumanizing the marginalized victim with 0 recognition that at least part of his resentment and agressive lashing back is justified?? It would have been so much more compelling and heartbreaking of a scene like it seemed they wanted it to be if they had Henry attempt to comfort/explain it to Eleven more on her level, like how he’s doing it for them or how they hurt them and all. He did, in a way, but even that felt through the lenses that Henry is only capable of manipulation. I still believe by his massacre Henry thought he was doing the right thing/what he needed to do. They wanted to get out and leave the life behind, Henry wanted to make sure it’d never come back for them, or hell, never continue and bring more people into the misery, with maybe that “purging evil from the world” stance yeah since it seems like the show is going for a Thanos situation. The point isn’t that that motivation makes it ok, the point is that Henry isn’t depicted as some one dimensional monster born and raised villain. The way he cares for Eleven’s wellbeing is so obvious, how did it end like that? Surely if he felt like himself and Eleven were really so similar, he would have tried reasoning with her when he saw she wasn’t on board with what he had done?

The problem isn’t that Eleven, another traumatized abused child, reacted intensely and violently to the very personal and upsetting events, it’s that the show, the narrative, the atmosphere and everything, takes her side on her reaction of killing him without any second guessing was just and right without nuance. The show giving any hint at all that Henry might have been deserving of sympathy or a chance was in the last episode, executed very dismissively.

The good neurodivergent vs the bad neurodivergent, and the lack of nuance

God, the parallels between One and Eleven through the season now are nauseating, because it’s the trope of the “good misfit everyone should actually love” vs the “misfit that everyone is right to reject bc they deserve it and are inherently bad”. What???? What?????? How does that not destroy every meaningful lesson and theme you’ve ever attempted to build? It’s the model minority schema, guys.

Do you know why Asperger’s is a very outdated term for “high-functioning” autism? Because it doesn’t exist, and was rooted in ableism. Asperger’s is a subjective assessment of an autistic person to evaluate if they’re smart despite being autistic and if they can function to the treshold they wish for, despite being autistic. Asperger’s was the difference between the “exceptional autistic genius that’s surhuman” trope and being labelled “mentally handiccaped”. You know what’s the difference between Asperger’s and autism? Masking. Masking, the act of suppressing your neurodivergence and mimicking neurotypical behavior which is detrimental to your mental health and exhausting to the point of often causing chronic fatigue. Masking, which is a defense mechanism and oftentime, a trauma response. The only way for them not to be rejected by society growing up, even through a lifetime of feeling like you don’t belong and not knowing what’s wrong with you, why you’re broken and why no one can fix you. Autism is a spectrum, it’s in the diagnosis’ name, and what that means is that everyone has different levels of symptoms, different limits and different tresholds. There is no “high-functioning” and “low-functioning”, it’s “how visible are your quirks, how easy is it for you to hide your problems in this society which was not made for people like you, how long and consistently can you keep it up, how much are you willing to damage yourself to fit in?”

Hans Asperger’s studies, in the era of world war 2, which resulted in the diagnosis and its different classification from autism, was literally, without going into gritty details, him gauging which autistic people seemed “smart” enough, functioning enough to be useful to the rest of society, which were exceptional enough to be worth studying and learning from, and differenciating those autistic people from the autistic people who should be sent to die.

I’ll be quoting this article for the next bit: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-truth-about-hans-aspergers-nazi-collusion/

Sheffer reveals how the Nazi aim of engineering a society they deemed ‘pure’, by killing people they saw as unworthy of life, led directly to the Holocaust.

With insight and careful historical research, Sheffer uncovers how, under Hitler’s regime, psychiatry—previously based on compassion and empathy—became part of an effort to classify the population of Germany, Austria and beyond as ‘genetically’ fit or unfit. In the context of the ‘euthanasia’ killing programmes, psychiatrists and other physicians had to determine who would live and who would be murdered. It is in this context that diagnostic labels such as ‘autistic psychopathy’ (coined by Asperger) were created.

Sheffer lays out the evidence, from sources such as medical records and referral letters, showing that Asperger was complicit in this Nazi killing machine. He protected children he deemed intelligent. But he also referred several children to Vienna’s Am Spiegelgrund clinic, which he undoubtedly knew was a centre of ‘child euthanasia’, part of what was later called Aktion T4.

This was where the children whom Nazi practitioners labelled ‘genetically inferior’ were murdered, because they were seen as incapable of social conformity, or had physical or psychological conditions judged undesirable. Some were starved, others given lethal injections. Their deaths were recorded as due to factors such as pneumonia.

Sheffer argues that Asperger supported the Nazi goal of eliminating children who could not fit in with the Volk: the fascist ideal of a homogeneous Aryan people.

This is incredibly serious for an Henry Creel tumblr essay, I am aware, and I am crying copy pasting this, and that is why this is important. Important for people to think about when they deem Henry Creel as a born monster. Why this is important to me. Do keep on telling me how Henry Creel was only ever good to imprison in a lab and experiment on, go on.

Because yes, Henry has explicitely neurodivergent experiences and displays over neurodivergent mannerism. Him not fitting in, having doctors trying to fix him as a person, and the whole feeling different (literally said by Henry as "I’ve always been different"). The whole relating to stygmatized animals is literally a very, very common experience in neurodivergent people with that sort of disorder. Even if it wasn’t intentional, it is so obvious that it cannot be ignored, and if the authors decided to ignore it anyways then that’s still ableism, you simply don’t want to admit your horror is rooted in ableism. But I do think it was intentional, because like I said they went out of their way this season to make Robin autistic. But especially because they did so many parallels with Henry and Eleven; they kept talking a about how "we’re the same you and me, we’re different" only being confirmed/reinforced by Henry being neurodivergent and saying neurodivergent experiences 24/7 and aaaaall the times people said like, "Oh Eleven is different. She doesn’t fit in" like so many times through the season and all the stuff in the labs and ugh. And yeah, the Eleven vs Henry parallels capitalize on ableist horror, the horror of the "good neurodivergent vs scary dangerous neurodivergent" trope, where one argues that one is fine and good while the other deserves no human rights. Because someone you don’t understand nor control having the power to snap under your abuse, just like any neurotypical, is a scary concept to many. It’s the unpredictable animal. You don’t trust that there is good in what you don’t know nor understand. And that goes both ways, you see no good in Henry, and Henry sees no good in humanity in kind, and with his experiences, it’s in part literally justified.

The thing with the Eleven vs Henry parallels though is that Henry was engineered to be “What if the villain was just like Eleven, but chose evil?”. That’s why in ep 8 the guys are like “Vecna is just like Eleven! How do we fight that?” That’s why the season kept having characters say how alike they are, having Henry say it, have other characters say how Eleven doesn’t fit in, all of it! They wanted dark!Eleven for the aesthetics, but didn’t bother making deeper themes, didn’t bother making it a true parallel because they wanted to dehumanize Henry as the epitome of categoric evil. It doesn’t work or register to the audience much, because they failed to treat him as they would have Eleven. Literally, they did the "Eleven thought she did it but actually it was Henry" while continually pointing out how "similar" the two are. Henry is literally a narrative of dark!Eleven, except they don’t offer him the sympathy that they would have offered her had their roles truly been reversed. Oh hurray!! Eleven didn’t actually kill all these people, she’s too good for that! She could never, in fact she’d rather kill the meanie who did it in righteous anger! No need for an identity crisis! No need to feel such guilt! Yes, the good girl could never deal with such a morally ambiguous revelation of something terrible she has done, there is no hidden evil sides to El like you might have thought with her assaulting her bully, she’s clean! A murderer is born, not made! <3 Because there are ways to respond to trauma that make you innately evil, of course.

We had fricking Billy hargrove. Billy Hargrove. Billy "tries to run over kids and torments everyone personally" Hargrove. They had Billy Hargrove get more depth, sympathy and respect than Henry "I’m Eleven but if she had snapped" Creel. I’m sorry but if Billy gets to almost run over kids to make a point and gets largely forgiven by the fandom then why can’t Henry who’s been intensely abused for a decade in the place he’s breaking free from and lashing out, like, the line to end all lines. You want to tell me emotionally stunted abused boy violently lashing out in a breakdown at his agressive cellmates and captors of 10 years is marginally worse than Eleven wanting to use her powers on Angela and impulsively hitting her head with an object for verbal bullying of like, some months? Yeah Eleven kinda regretted it, kinda, and the injury wasn’t super serious, but the initial intent was there, the impulse was there, if you lose control and give into the impulse, are you forgiven because the action failed to be as grave as you wished, or hadn’t thought through the possibility of serious/fatal damage? No, that makes you a Billy Hargrove who was willing to bet on kids’ lives that his sister would give into him before his car ran them over. Henry is dark!Eleven, indeed. Tell me, which of the two is the high-functioning autistic? We can talk all day about how they’re different, who is irredeemable and if that matters, but can’t we all just recognize the nuance? The shades of grey? It doesn’t have to be either "you’re an evil monster who can never change" or "misunderstood cinnamon roll who deserves all the good faith in the world", it can just be "you’re an ugly, hurting human being, and you suck, but I see you, and I recognize your pain and humanity. Your pain explains your actions, but doesn’t excuse them." A show shouldn’t bend the line of who has good in them and who doesn’t because one is your problematic fave while the other is supposed to be your big villain so you make him neurodivergent and different, forgetting that he, too, experienced the tragedy of his tragic backstory.

Framing is important. Stories create bias and hold bias, writing is biased and we as the audience are biased.

Let me ask you, when we kept getting told that Eleven killed a whole room of kid cellmates, what were your theories? No matter how much or little you thought about it, your instinct probably told you that in a moment of overwhelming emotions El had a violent burst of powers that she couldn’t/wouldn’t control. Did you think her lesser for it? Were you going to turn your back to her? What makes me so mad is the unwillingness of anyone to give similar good faith to Henry. This guy developed a “it’s me alone against the world that shunned me” mentality from a young age due to being ostracized by everyone in his life including his family, then handled traumatic truths about his family’s past misdeeds through superpowers and gained delusions of grandeur ideologies as a mechanism to give meaning to his life and otherizarion, was hospitalized against his will into the care of a doctor who groomed him for his purposes and unethically tested on him & then kept him a prisoner for roughly a decade (my guess). Is it really so hard to believe that his reaction to finally becoming free, getting back the power and agency they stole from him, and having to flee the place while workers of the establishment that abused him try to chain you back, you’d overly react? You wouldn’t have an emotional breakdown, an episode, a violent and vengeful burst? Who’s to say if your survival mode didn’t make you go on autopilot? That is an abused, mentally ill psychologically vulnerable young man who has never been treated with understanding or love nor therapy. He has spent more years in the lab than Eleven, and we all know how much it messed her up. In this same season 4 we saw how Eleven’s reaction to emotional distress is violence, when she tried to use her powers against her bully, and later with the rollerskate assault. We literally saw how the kids in the lab were pitched against each other and would torment each other, and use excessive force in experiment matches. They were literally raised to respond to conflict by being the stronger one in a fight. They want to survive and thrive, have learned survival of the fittest, and so prioritize themselves, it’s simple. ASPD is born from trauma. ASPD forms as a defense & coping mechanism. You would have forgiven Eleven for doing the same thing. Why is Henry Creel irredeemable even in the best world? Framing, is when.

Conclusions

You can’t just... Divorce things from their irl parallels or effects. You can’t have Henry Creel having explicitely neurodivergent experiences and encourage inherently fearing him for it. You absolutely CANNOT have the whole “these animals are misunderstood and perceived as scary by most, just like me” and DOUBLE DOWN on that by making that animal a scary symbolic thing for the main villain that is supposed to make your skin crawl and personify evil and has caused every horror that has happened in the show. It’s... It’s just so cruel. I don’t get it? I don’t understand. How can you have a speech on something just wanting to live its life unbothered and being stigmatized by everyone for no reason and going “yeah that’s 100% justified and you shouldn’t sympathize with them at all actually. If you do sympathize then that means there’s also something wrong with you”

And it’s such??? A wild take. It feels like the text is at war with itself, with what it sets up and states and what it does the next second. I can’t process that anything else but a sympathizing scene will happen in the climax with all the subtext of trauma and the contradictions that exists with the season as it currently is, but also I can’t see how they would handle a redemption or anything of the like, all while the episode/show is really going the “oh look at the scary mentally ill person!!” route so??? Wtf is going on. It’s such a wild 180, the before reveal and post-reveal season 4 characterisations, plotlines and themes feel so disjointed. What is up with the writing They literally went "I am so rejected by my peers that I latch onto this misunderstood, feared spider because I relate to its ostracization and struggle." And then the show goes "Yeah, you should fear him and those spiders. The spiders will come at you in horrific hallucinations, and Henry was born a murderous murder whose only way to cure is to be killed" that’s just so cruel of a narrative wow ok bruh

No, you can’t have the “omg this character is not normal, so scary” trap for your neurotypical audience and then at the last ep go “actually we were woke all along :)”. You didn’t frame this as some tragic character, you framed it as a monster who finally got unleashed, someone who tricked El into helping him commit atrocities despite it not being his intentions, attitude nor goal. It’s scary how quickly people are to believe the “Henry was manipulating Eleven all along” despite him never lying, pushing Eleven to do things, or even attempting to control her. Even at his most unstable and unfavorable to Eleven, during their confrontation, Eleven was the first to strike, and Henry didn’t say anything about forcing her to join him, just tried to convince her he is the righteous one and she should help him in his mission, tbh it kinda seems as if it hadn’t occured to him she might want to not join him at all. I’m not saying the threat at that point wasn’t there, I’m saying that to say everything Henry’s done was in the goal to manipulate and groom her with ill intentions is delusional, but that’s not a random conclusion, nor your fault. The show wants you to think that, with how his character’s demeanor shift, because he has stopped masking his more off-putting posture and tone, how the reveal of him being the big bad since season 1 comes into place at the same time, wow, he’s a mastermind! No, he’s an overpowered, lost, abused young guy who just digged himself deeper in his self-destructive coping mechanism. All the Vecna stuff comes in much, much later, and all he did before that was trying to show Eleven that she’s being abused and breaking her free of that abuse, then accepting her help when she offers to free him despite his reluctance. Was Henry wrong to tell her that Papa lies, to give her the chance to flee? Should he not have done that? And you might go “wait wait wait, you mean that facial expression and demeanor in the labs, besides a breakdown or mental illness episode, could also just be how Henry behaves when he’s not trying to appear neurotypical, when he’s not masking?” Yes. “Wow, it truly is so creepy, you can’t tell me anyone that isn’t a murderous freak would have body language like that! No wonder people wanted doctors to fix him and to forcibly internalize him into abusive psych wards, and keep him restrained!” Wow, you have so many ableist conceptions to work through and get rid off, no wonder Henry wanted you dead <3

People would have been pissed if Henry was treated just as the abused sad boy who did a bad thing for a good reason, but it’s still necessary to acknowledge that abuse and how it further shaped the abuser they have become, and I’m pissed that he’s treated just as some emotionless monster who is incapable of good or nuance ever. It’s not about changing the story, it’s about giving the right amount of accountability while not making the character one note. Stranger Things having a one note evil monster human villain would have been fine, IF they didn’t make the character & their backstory so explicitely neurodivergent coded. How even do you screw up this bad. This was intentionally done, writing & framing doesn’t just happen. Why? The choice was either to capitalize on ableist demonization horror, or have it be subversed later on, but no matter what, it’s still a wildly ableist choice. You wrote Henry Creel as a complex human, why aren’t you treating him as one?

It’s very similar to Azula from atla, really. Child with traumatic childhood and misbehavior grows up somewhat and gets pictured as a mentally disturbed beacon of evil with no other motivation than inflicting pain ever. The show clearly shows aspects that would have you sympathize or understand to a degree, but has a strange obsession with playing ominous music every time they are on screen and manipulates the viewer to interpret every single of their actions as having ill intent. Azula was an abused child soldier who still tried to help her estranged brother despite getting nothing from it. Henry wanted to help El escape from the lab where she obviously should leave asap and asked nothing of her, the plan only changed because she, unprompted, took the initiative to help him in turn despite getting no encouragement before or after from him about it. The show & fandom in both cases are obsessed about all of their actions being manipulative, unwilling to consider that maybe yes, Azula didn’t want to have her brother killed and yes, maybe Henry just wanted to have the abused kid & kindred spirit he felt a connection with be free from the hell they lived in. If you don’t believe me about Azula, there are plenty of objective Azula scene & character analysis on Tumblr. This post is also interesting for the conversation at hand. I honestly could link so many things that support my other general claims and explain why things are wrong but man this could get so huge. This is such a prominent issue in pop culture and everyone is so ready to jump to the defense of ableist depictions of villains, ironically.

Is this why they made Robin autistic all of a sudden, because they knew their main villain storyline was ableist af... 🤭🤭 Anyways yeah Henry joins my pile of ND antagonists that were done dirty by canon

Henry Creel could have been written so well. The crumbs are all there, I could do a psychology analysis of him with his childhood and thought processes and have him still be exactly as he is on screen while being a complex, three dimensional villain. But nooo we get autism & ASPD fearmongering, alright.

There would have been soooo many ways to dehumanize Henry, to make him some heartless creepy monster, without making his whole aesthetic being neurodivergent = evil. They literally just had to not make his experiences be a copy of a neurodivergent kid growing up in an era very hostile and unaccommodating for people different like him. Like we see Eddie being treated, and even then Henry prob had it worse at least in some ways. They literally just had to not put his character through abuse and ostracization and then there would have been no reason to sympathize at all. A child who has enough issues to murder his family through fire is a child that has issues and needs help, not to be further demonized and cement their "me versus the world" mentality. They just had to not do these things, not even to do something else, just to take those out. Henry would have still been demonized by mannerism that is often shared with autistic people, amongst others, and would have still done all the horrible shit he did, but at least then the parallels would be much less worse, it wouldn’t be so overtly ableist and neurodivergent people wouldn’t feel hurt watching it.

Before this ends I do want to say that no, obviously, I don’t support Henry killing anyone, nor any of his bad actions. I don’t want to excuse it, and him getting some level of punishment is deserved, though rehabilitation is really more my jam, and if the punishment only reinforces the thought processes he gained as a defense mechanism... You know what I’m saying? It’s frankly immature to look at such an obviously morally complex story and characters and just, treat it the way they have? It’s disgusting. I guess I really shouldn’t be surprised about this from the show who depicts anything russian... That way though, lol... This was pretty emotional and unpolished, aka repetitive and ungraceful, but yeah I just hope I won’t cause a fandom war or get shit on or smth. It’s all just :( The stench of ableism is just undeniable and I’m both mad and disappointed, I just hope the latter end of the season will amend it somewhat. Was the episode low on time or something? Did the whole “actually yeah your heart is supposed to wrench in sympathy for him and the show frames it as super tragic and sad for him to have been pushed to become this way” and by “this way” I mean irredeemable in their eyes just go over my head or something? Must be my autism <3 I’mma still watch the show, and I cast no moral judgements for other fans, especially since a lof of this is the framing of the show manipulating the audience, but if you love the whole Henry backstory and how it was executed, at least understand/aknowledge how deeply problematic it was handled.

Part two (yep, those were all part one thoughts)

UPDATE - season 4 part 2

Wow it really got better! Sike it only got worse. I had hope during many moments in ep 8 to be honest. I really thought Eleven was processing the trauma of Henry turning out to be evil and having mixed feelings and all, like with the scene where she watched Max & co talk about him and how to take him down. The fact that “Henry’s just like Eleven, a supernatural gifted kid & kinda doesn’t fit in” and “So, how do we take Henry, the monster, down?” were said so closely next to each other and so casually, coupled with Eleven’s upset expression, really had me thinking that Eleven was upset to see Henry, an ex-friend and kindred spirit, as this monster they had to put down, and to be likened to him so much. I even expected that maybe the next thing one would say would be “Well, what are Eleven’s weaknesses we could exploit to kill Henry?” which would have been horrifying for her for sure, to have that parallel so easily not only be drawn but exploited for the murder of one.

The neurodivergent lines and parallels about Eleven are also still ongoing, so that solidifies that Henry is intentionally neurodivergent coded as well.

Papa’s death

I have my beef with Papa’s death and how it was handled.

Particularly, it’s really sad how all the other kids in the labs don’t matter beyond adding trauma flavor to Eleven. When she’s having cryptic flashback at first, she’s horrified at what she thinks she did, but not that much because of who they were. Afterward, she’s sad about it, but again, more in an horrified empathetic way rather than truly mourning them, it’s about her trauma, not them. Father is... Well it’s kind of left up to the audience to interpret how he reacted to Eleven, if like Henry said Papa only got more scared of her because of it, if he got intrigued by this new power and urges he thought she got, if he understood immediately that she freed 001 like implied, or if he was disapproving of Eleven for making him lose all his other experiments, or even sad at losing all these children. In the end, even if it’s very obvious to the audience that those kids were just traumatized children trying to get by in an abusive environment, how the show treats them is kinda dehumanizing, as mere plot devices. Eleven cried at the show of evil, because of guilt and maybe suppressed mourning, and Father pretty much dismisses their loss after the event. So that’s how their deaths were handled and shown, but how is the aftermath of it treated? Well it just isn’t mentioned. Not by any character, not beyond a “how could you let Henry be in proximity with these kids he ended up murdering!” which is about villifying Henry and questioning Father’s, an unquestionable figure of authority and all-knowing well-meaning caretaker put on a pedestral choices up to that point, and not really about the kids. Or a “all these deaths!” which isn’t about the kids, but about the virtue signalling. It’s not about them, it’s about Henry and the conflict between Eleven and Father, the arcs that the two are going through, of questioning that authority figure who’s always had a grip on her life, and of falling down his pedestral with others as well as with his own convictions. It’s not about them.

The episode is about Eleven, and Father and Henry. The arc shown about Father getting what he deserves isn’t about all the horrible things Father has done, getting confronted with them, attempting to atone or repress their memories or anything, it’s about Eleven rejecting him and everything he has taught. Let me repeat this. The episode where Father gets called out is about his treatment of Eleven, and Eleven first and foremost, if not ONLY. The level to which they acknowledge Father abused everyone else just as much as Eleven is very weak.

Please, let’s acknowledge how messed up, truly nauseatingly fucking MESSED UP it is that Papa gets told (paraphrasing bc I watched the ep in french) “You kept Henry imprisoned at the labs for so long... With all of us!” I was so positively stunned when Eleven said the first part with such resentful rage. Yes, Henry was abused, too! Papa kept all of you prisoners! He is why Henry got reaffirmed in his belief that humanity are a selfish and spineless disease to wipe out! He traumatized you all, traumatized him even further! But no. The reproach isn’t that Henry shouldn’t have been treated as some subhuman scientific experiment, it’s that he allowed monster murderous Henry to share their vicinity. That of course Papa should have known, if Henry was living with them for such a prolonged time, he was bound to eventually kill them! Can Henry just never have human contact ever again then?? How is anyone surprised Henry never got better when this is how everyone treats him. You don’t want Henry to get better, you want ease of mind from his existence, and killing him erases the problem just fine so why bother? Did you know, that a lot of professional therapists and programs deny cases that are “too severe”, even if the individual seeks help and self-improvement? A lot of people turn away patients with cluster b disorders just because the disorders, their perceived symptoms and perceived unstability scares them, even if the individual is harmless. Everyone tells pedos (regardless of criminal record if any) to seek help with a sneer, for example, but no one wants to be the person to offer that help, no even those whose literal job it is, and that’s why this question is one that is asked to anyone looking to become a psychologist. “Would you be willing/strong enough to accept to work with [insert type of patient]?”. Most of people’s answers are no. You don’t want them to get better, you want them to rot in prison away from the world until they die. I take no pleasure in saying this, but it is a real issue, and one that most people refuse to acknowledge. You don’t want Henry to get better, because you don’t trust his capacity nor worthiness of getting better, and that’s an issue, and that is ableist, but the blame is shared with the show because it encourages you to think that way, and the arguments it gives in support of this stance are ableist and insidious.

It really is truly horrifyingly dehumanizing to see how they categorically refuse to see Henry as a victim of abuse and trauma in any capacity, how they deny his complexity and capacity for non-evil so much. Eleven implies that yeah, it’s okay if Henry is locked up, in fact, he should never be allowed near anyone! He should have been killed as a baby! Because death was the only solution and getting him the earlier the better! It’s sad that Eleven doesn’t have even a shred of sympathy for him, considering how indeed similar they were and how they connected, how he was her only ally for such a harsh prolonged period of her life. She doesn’t even mourn the person she thought he was, couldn’t show the same sympathy for the victim of a same abuser the same way she has to the ones who injured and bullied her instead of helping her, albeit in a misguided way. The “You’re the monster” at Papa almost feels like an admittance that Henry isn’t fully to blame for his trauma? But mind the almost, the show still said Papa’s mistake was allowing the dangerous child he’s been abusing to be with other unstable kids. Yeah I’m sure it really helped how Papa encouraged violence (pitting the kids against each other in unfriendly fights, without punishing excessive use of strenght to hurt, and even rewarding shows of excessive violence by being impressed, beyond the obvious extra play time. Truly encouraging the survival of the fittest rule where the strong deserve to torment the weak) all while fueling his cynical hatred of humanity. I’m sure Henry would have grown to become Vecna no matter what happened to him, that the same would have happened if he got a shred of a healthy support system for once, if he hadn’t put into the hands of a system that wants him either assimilated or dead.

It doesn’t hurt because we needed speeches on the nature of abuse, it hurts because Stranger things is pushing ableist, anti-rehabilitation, anti-recovery narratives. Henry was born the devil, fated to become the dangerous monster he now is, and death is the only mercy for them all. It could be such an interesting complex take on Eleven’s character as well, of refusing all of Henry’s existing complexity and genuine interactions the two ever had because of the trauma the reveal caused, on how she needs to stop thinking so black and white, that she is not a monster for choosing fight in fight or flight, but still having an arc of deconstructing how she was taught to respond to conflict and distress by violence, because it is wrong. But no, we have milktoast pure evil vs born good and empathetic humans that must hatch it out and “no actually I’m not a monster I just needed to break free from your hold, Papa. But that guy? Yeah there was never any hope y’know some people are just born like that and can’t be fixed”

BUT on the other hand! I got really scared when Father started talking about how all he did was selfless & for Eleven, BUT Eleven didn’t validate or reassure him at all in the end even not as a dying wish, which I really really liked. Like yeah, she can be conflicted and heartbroken and sad over his death, of course, she can hold his hand or whatever, but I’m really super glad she (and the writers) didn’t cross that line of giving him unearned peace and validation by lying about how all the horrible selfish abuse he did was done caringly in some twisted way, and I’m so glad that narrative wasn’t truly pushed. He’s a delusional man who did horrible things and died desperately trying to justify them, and that is fitting.

In conclusion, I continue to be hurt. The gaslighting of the show only makes me more upset. I question the validity of my interpretation and experiences, and wonder if I have the right to be hurt. It tests my sense of self and moral convictions. But logic prevails all and here I am like, 5k later still holding strong. It’s not about defending murder man, it’s about aknowledging the facts of the literal show that Henry was in fact a victim of abuse, how that shouldn’t be brushed off as something that didn’t influence him at all and that, worse, he deserved, and also the basic human compassion principle that everyone is capable of good if given the right environment.

2nd conclusion

Y’all love the “I am the righteous hand of god” tiktoks about the kids fighting back their abusive parent with weapons so much, but when it’s the fictional literal dehumanized kid that’s different and has been told he needs to be fixed all his life showing visions to his parents of their worst actions out of some misguided sense of justice, then lashes out and fights back against his family after they try to get him forcibly hospitalized (into the system that got him abusively imprisoned and groomed for a decade, might I add. Justified fear to have, let’s just say), then goes on some murderous crusade of the ones who hurt him and his bestie after a decade of imprisonment and relentless abuse and are still trying to drag him back into chains, and suddenly you can’t understand it at all? Suddenly violence and confrontation isn’t a response to abuse, a fight or flight survival mechanism, that you can stomach? Where’s the empowering framing and catharsis now?

Like idk how to get you to understand, it’s literally maladaptive abuse responses because you maladaptively develop when you live in abusive environments and get exposed to trauma. It’s literally the “but is it justice or justified to bully the bully” age-old dilemma. What’s not clicking?? That doesn’t make it right it just means Henry isn’t a demonic shell of a human being and you’re not only demonizing this fictional character but also everyone who went through a similar struggle a similar way. It’s not a hard thesis to grasp.

Just to be clear for the umpteenth time, none of Henry’s actions are acceptable. I personally don’t see any of his interactions with Eleven as intentionally manipulative or insidious, I genuinely think he was trying to help selflessly and genuinely connecting with no underlying or evil intentions. I personally see Henry’s response to being set free in the labs of going after everyone who hurt him and could continue the horrible legacy of the labs, people who could search for him and drag him back like we see Papa do with Eleven through the seasons, in some emotional rageful trauma response to be justified. Justified, not acceptable.

Why would Henry kill everyone, including the kids? 1) We’re shown that the staff wants to chain him back and are very fine trying to use violence to do so. First and foremost, Henry fighting back is self-defense because he wants to get out and stay free. It’s pretty much life or death for him at that point, even if they only want to chain him again, it’s not much better than life, is it. That can easily spiral into killing everyone he comes across, because even if they run away they might be getting help or weapons, and at some point there’s no time to gauge a reaction. Then that can veryyy easily devolve into... 2) he’s having some sort of breakdown. After a decade stuck in a prison, he’s finally, finally free but the fight has just begun and as he has to defend himself against everyone coping & defense mechanisms activate and he’s put on autopilot, wether it makes him numb or with some twisted glee of satisfaction, both would sadly be responses of trauma that are valid to be seen as such. 3) The staff is trying to get him back. What if, even if he runs away, the labs would try to track him down and drag him back? That’s is a very sound hypothesis, and one confirmed since we see what happens with Eleven. The only true escape is to kill anyone that could come for him. Kill absolutely everyone involved in the labs. Also, since we see that Henry wanted to get Eleven out, him erasing everything of the labs could be a way to ensure others aren’t dragged into the experiments, for the legacy of the labs to be unable to live on. Though I don’t believe that Henry had so much foresight into the future at that stressful moment to have a reasoning like “I can’t let other superpowered kids alive or they might end up fighting against me”, and it’d feel disjointed from the rest and the tone as a main motivation. 5) Revenge. Those people imprisoned him and Eleven, bullied Eleven. He will kill them all for the way they hurt him and the one person he cares about. In his eyes, either they’re unworthy of life, or it’s really just to deal punishment and gain satisfaction from it. In this category I’d also put his life mission of exterminating humans, might as well start fulfilling it right away.

Why would he kill everyone but El? The show is very explicit about it. Henry sees himself in Eleven, a talented yet quiet and recluse misfit outcast, and feels some connection with her for it. Tbh it’s kind of canonicaly explicitely the neurodivergent spidey senses lmao. Anyways, and Henry got attached to her in that way, and wanted her free out of the labs. He didn’t want harm to come to her, she’s special, the exception, and if the opportunity arises he’d love to have her beside him as he does his genocide thing. He wouldn’t hurt El unprovoked, he even tried to talk/"reason" her into seeing things his way with his speech about his life and human nature. I think he sees himself as her guardian, in a way, a big reason for why he wanted her to wait safely in the closet.

The “visions of past guilt” he inflicted on his family is obviously a terrible, non-justifiable thing to do, but as a kid we’re taught very firmly that justice should be dealt and bad actions should be adressed, and to me it isn’t so wild that upon finding out the terrible horrible shit his family has done, would respond to that trauma by making them confront it alongside him who learned about it all, judging that they haven’t atoned for it enough since he, their son, never knew about it and never saw them sorry for it. It only solidified his unflattering view of humans as callous, immoral selfish creatures, and by then yeah I think that was set in stone enough for him to be ok with murder. But I do think killing his family was... Handled in the show in a weird way that makes it hard for me to suspend my disbelief and not just see the obvious attempt to dehumanize him fully? Like it was really cold, said matter of factly like “Yes, just as I’d planned they all died then and I wasn’t blamed for it. I never cared for them and I felt nothing but satisfaction at a plan well executed. I have never thought about them since, and continued my path into ridding the world of the human leeches”, and? Ok dude, go off I guess. Personally, so as for it not to totally break my interpretation of him as someone who isn’t a one dimensional personification of bloodlust, I see it as him overtly lashing out in the moment, and at the very grave results try to distance himself emotionally from it and act as if it doesn’t matter and he’d have done it anyways. An emotional lash out, response to fear and abuse and distress and a need to protect himself, like when he was free from the chip and the lab wanted to chain him back, like when Eleven got bullied to the point of meltdown.

And if I can give good faith to Eleven for not only being sad at the deaths of her cellmates out of guilt, and that she’s maybe suppressing all the positive she once associated with Henry and didn’t just do a one-dimensional emotionally detached 180 on her stance about him, then I can give good faith to a traumatized, abused Henry who’s never had a good support system and so latched onto spiders because he was just that lonely and otherized for making himself believe that his murder of his family was entirely planned and meaningful, because not being emotionally detached about it and realizing it was a senseless spill of blood would be too painful. I can give good faith that he doesn’t just have some black hole of bloodlust inside, and that if he does that’s born of a coping mechanism, but fundamentally it’s just flawed ideologies based on the need to give his difference and ostracization from other, normal humans, a deeper meaning than just “I have suffered so much because humans are flawed, and that suffering was senseless. But that’s okay, and I need to work through that and let things go, despite that in my era there are no ressources or common compassion for people like me”. Because “we all have good. They say that I’m evil and broken, but I think they’re the ones who are flawed, evil, and should be fixed. But I understand that that course of action is flawed, and none of us are evil and should be purged from the world. There is no need to continue the cycle of abuse and treat them like they have treated me. Coexisting won’t be easy, but I have to be the bigger person and try to make the world a better place in a way that doesn’t involve what they would do to me if they could. Murder is bad and shouldn’t be done, but they do bad things to me that shouldn’t be done and that’s deemed okay, but that doesn’t make murdering them okay because doing bad things don’t make them irredeemably bad people” isn’t the kind of lesson a literal child will usually work through and come to on his own, not when he’s hurting so much and trying to give meaning to his life, hence his “I must purge the world from humanity” mission. I think this might be my best way of phrasing this yet. Do you see? Do you see how cruel and senseless it is?

I want to continue watching Stranger Things, I liked the season so much before they pulled this, but it really hurts when they make me feel the urge to type out multiple essays attempting to defend an abuse victim’s humanity to the majority who is willingfully convinced that he doesn’t deserve basic compassion. I hate how even without looking at how people on tumblr talk about him, the ambiance and text of the show invalidate him so much and make me feel the need to add a paragraph on here about how “no, I haven’t had these experiences, I can just understand Henry’s way of thinking through logical hypothetics because as an autistic who’s only autistic I have learned to put myself in others’ shoes to mask better. No I haven’t killed animals willingly and no I never have violent meltdowns” because, while true, I know it’s because I’m so scared that people will look at this post and go “Look! If she can sympathize to these experiences, she’s dangerous and crazy, too!”, because that is the atmosphere Stranger Things season 4 has built up, and because I know from experience that some people will react like this, because I will be judged and my words and experiences will be devalued for it.

I am desperately afraid of people knowing I don’t hate Henry Creel with every fiber of my being, that I like spiders too, and Harry Potter’s demonization of snakes only inspire me to preach how great they are, that I headcanon my faves to have ASPD and NPD and while it adds to their struggle it’s not treated as something to be fixed, that empathizing with morally ambiguous characters who prioritize themselves is healing to me, and that all of these help me cope with life and how rough and meaningless it is. But you know what? I know that, I aknowledge that. But I want, I choose to, stand by these things. I am against demonizing people for neurodivergence and mental health struggles when they should be getting help and compassion, and you should too. Henry Creel’s framing is actively damaging, to both stigmatized neurodivergent and/or mentally ill people who need help instead of judgement, and to the greater public who gets taught that neurodivergent people are beasts to be seen as threats to evaluate and contain. It reinforces wider ableism, as well as internalized ableism.

Episode 9

It took... Almost a month for me to do any sort of retrospective on this episode. My biggest wish was fulfilled. The show explicitely recognized that Henry was abused at the hands of Papa, too. And... It was very underwhelming. Pretty disappointing. But I got it! I can’t complain, right? Well I will anyways bc I will not be restrained.

The whole speech of “you were abused too, and you can become better it isn’t too late” by Eleven felt very tacked on, very out of nowhere, unearned and not genuine. You’re telling me that you tried to kill him like 3 times before trying to have a single convo of any kind, and in the end Vecna needed to pin you to the wall and threaten everything you hold dear for you to extend to him the barest shred of recognition of humanity and compassion and not quite believe your words even as you’re saying them? Yeah... Sure. To be honest, it felt a lot like virtue signalling Eleven being good and the better person more than really to make the characters or the audience entertain the thought that Vecna might have some good and capacity for growth in him somewhere. Once again, a scene about Henry’s trauma is more about Eleven than it truly is about him. But? As for acknowledging that Henry Creel is a victim of abuse and has gone through though shit, that’s good enough for me. But I debated a long time on if this essay should still be posted then, and I do think it should be. A small, half-hearted half-assed concession that his humanity existed at some point does not erase the framing and all the damage it has done.

A recurring thing I hate with how they did Henry is the aftermath with Eleven. Like, Henry was kind of her only ally in the place that abused her for so long? She was friends with him? They shared secrets, and some trust bond that didn’t seem wholy one-sided from Henry? And you’re just going to throw that all away and think the audience will believe there’s no remaining feelings about it? The show seems to go down the route that the reveal traumatized her a lot, so from then on she responded to Henry with immediate violence and intense hostility. If she sees him as a one-dimensional villain who manipulated her and can do no good, then she can’t be conflicted about the nice moments she shared with him, the good she thought she saw there, and the pain of losing the closest thing she had ever had to a friend. So she suppresses thinking deeper about Henry and respond to confrontation of him or the topic of him by being very hostile towards anything him. But then the last scene?? Doesn’t really work because she hasn’t undone that at all. She doesn’t sound sincere when she says it. Her back is to a literal and figurative wall, Vecna is going to kill all her friends, and now, now after trying to kill him many times over without even attempting to talk, now you’re going to appeal to his humanity? It doesn’t feel like a change of perspective, it feels like a desperate, last ditch attempt to win the war and get out alive. Which is why it feels fake af

It’s really ironic how Stranger Things season 4 really just reinforces Vecna’s beliefs. Humans are vermins who go by the survival of the fittest rule. Everyone treated Henry like shit at every stage of his life. Papa made the kids fight each other for basic needs rewards. He could flee the facility if he wanted because he was the strongest, but he wasn’t so Eleven won. Eleven was going to crush him mercilessly, but he had her by the throat, and suddenly she’s willing to allow the thought of him having a crumb of humanity.

Oh and I forgot to mention it but they used the psycho word derogatorily on Jason which... Just pretty much confirms that they don’t care about being insensitive and explicitely ableist. Jason doesn’t even truly fit most of the criterias, get it right. Jason alongside Henry is prob going to be one of the most hated Stranger Things character ever, and the writers knew that, which is why the choice of word as Lucas delivers a beating and he dies in the unleashment of the apocalypse without a spare glance all the more telling. Like, I do really hate Jason as much as the next person, but can we appreciate that the show explicitely showed us that he was grieving intensely, and how the way society behaved around Jason and people like him had a huge part in why he turned out the way he did? Get this, Jason is portrayed to have more emotional depth than Henry Creel! The bar is so low lol...

Final thoughts on the season

Ok hot take but not really, but I was lowkey pissed at how the season just, doesn’t talk about Lucas and sports at all? The show kinda implies that he joined the basketball team and everything just for the status, to be accepted and all, but does Lucas just not care about the sport at all?? Does he not like basketball?? Is he naturally gifted to have landed that winning score or did he spend many hours desperately training to have a chance of popular kids accepting him? We don’t know!! Why don’t we know when that’s like, such an obvious loose thread! I always kinda just thought that he, y’know, wanted to do basketball on the basketball team but the way it’s all done and how Lucas says smth like "I should never have joined the team bc they suck and i have u guys" in the last ep and I was like?? So was the basketball just a secondary thing to making the team or? To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with that narrative, it’s actually really compelling. But the thing is that the show doesn’t address it at all, it kinda implies it but doesn’t state anything or does anything with it so it kinda just dies a no closure death and feels off and ruins the potential when all the right cards for it were already laid out. Actually that last criticism is a common flaw i’ve found throughout the season tbh. Putting all the crumbs necessary for cool pay-off or plot twists, then just doing nothing with it or worse, dismissing them and contradicting them. Sooo are we just going to ignore Henry was abused for like, a decade and his parents wanted a doctor to fix him and apparently they’ve done terrible shit like possibly set fire on a baby or smth??? Ok yeah ig we’re just not going to address that at all until like the last 10 minutes half-heartedly maybe, also u get no deeper answers, and was Henry an abuse victim truly? Up for debate, apparently, which it shouldn’t bc it’s pretty explicity but the show likes to gaslight ig Ronance? Eddissy? Shit, we the writers def noticed the glaring chemistry but it’s too late to make changes to the script now so let’s just keep everything the same & have it both ways and never address the obvious sparks flying. Oh and let’s not ever have the main cast talk much about Chrissy or have Eddie like, grieve or talk about her at all besides self-pity and trauma? Was the whole Jason plotline really the biggest reason for Chrissy to be important? When you examine it deeper it, kinda just feels sour and stale. And I’ve got other examples but I’ll stop here, I kinda sound way too nitpicky. But point is, this season just had so many subplots that went nowhere with no closure, narratively or thematically.

The thing is! The show keeps wanting to act as if Henry is this unreasonable guy always scheming and manipulating but! He’s just a traumatized dude with murderous convictions! Convictions can be changed! The guy latched onto spiders as a kid, he’s never formed a meaningful relationship with anyone ever, never had someone to fully support him or help him through things, and the one kid he did form a connection with ends up stabbing him in the back without a second thought? How is that supposed to make him deescalate or deradicalize? How is that supposed to change his mind on being a loner and humans being beneath him? I’m not saying it was imperative for El to accept him or whatever, it makes a lotta sense she doesn’t, but I’m saying it’s no wonder how it further cements him in his way. Even in the aftermath of her killing him, he can’t let go of the one bond he’s made fully. Eleven becomes his one true rival. She’s still special. He still cares, in a weird twisted way.

So the show wants us to see the reveal and be all "omg he was manipulating her all along!!" Um, no? If you think back on it at all, you’ll see that not really. Henry gives Eleven advice to survive in the labs and try to thrive as they can. "Papa always lies", yeah? That’s true? He gives her genuine advice that works. In a way, he’s also pushing her onto becoming the top kid, and using anger and power to do so, but again, he was taught that way too I don’t think we can fault him for that, especially not if it works. That place is built on that, if agression is the response that’s rewarded in those abusive living conditions, can we fault them for playing by the rules instead of getting crushed under the others’ boots? In a way, the other kids who bully El also represent the "it’s me against the world" mentality Henry has, it’s not just El’s bullies, it’s also Henry’s childhood bullies and everyone else trying to keep him down. It’s the ones who don’t understand him, who fear him, the neurotypical bullies. Okok yeah so- Henry wants to get Eleven out. He truly, genuinely wants to. He can run away himself, but if he can help her get out, her who he sees himself in, why wouldn’t he? He was never going to mention his chip. Eleven turned around at the last moment, so close to freedom, and was like, "Wait, I want you to come with :(". Henry shows her his chip, resigned, and doesn’t suggest anything about it. Eleven thinks of the way to help him and volunteers and insists. Henry doesn’t hurry about it, doesn’t cheer, doesn’t do anything. She frees him, and he’s grateful for it, and then after carving his way out of the labs with corpses they’ll run away together and idk find life goals outside in the world. Where?? Where was the manipulation?? Bc he gave her true advice?? Because he let her free him the way she thought up of?? He never suggested anything about it! Esp since like, Henry wasn’t even truly allowed to talk to them in the labs or anything. As soon as the reveal happens, El is in a "kill as soon as possible without mercy" mode. As soon as the reveal happens, the only right way to deal with Henry Creel is to kill him, and someone should have killed him as a baby so he couldn’t have hurt anyone and become the monster he was bound to become :) OKAY

Henry is, like implied earlier, in many ways like Billy. Hurt people hurt people. The cycle of abuse. To become stronger than his dad, able to survive in his household and then stand up to him, he had to toughen himself up and put himself in his dad’s shoes of what his dad values to be able to fight against it. He had to become strong, so he became twisted. And it worked. He’s alive, top of the school and household when his dad isn’t there. To become stronger than the monster he became a bigger one. It’s survival. With Henry, it’s more to prevent further pain and abuse, but it’s kind of the same thing. "I’m broken? I’m prophecized to become the dark lord and you’re terrified of me? You want to take away my power and autonomy because you’re scared of what I might do when you mistreat me? Well, if this is to be my destiny, I’ll give it to you, and then nothing will be able to chain me back"

And you see this is what I mean by the season being weird! Because like, the shows reinforces that that’s the correct way to see him! That he is a ticking bomb and heartless monster and Eleven and the guys, our moral heroes, should try to kill him without a thought. Well, except for that 1 throwaway speech in the last ep ig lol. Again: "I relate to this spider bc people hate and fear us but we just wanna be" = the show portraying him as the epitome of evil with no possibility for good or growth and everyone ever in the show thinks that about him. Again. This is always what I keep going back to. The spider. He wants to be like the spiders. He want to live carefreely and mind his business in lonesome peace. This kid is so broken, but the thing is that when I say that, I don’t mean that he was born this way. People never gave him or the spiders a chance to be something else. They broke him.

A kid doesn’t tap into his parents’ deepest regrets and make them relieve them in some twisted sense of justice for no reason? Are we not going to talk about the kid having to see his adult parents’, who are supposed to represent safety and morality to a kid, worst misdeeds and guilt? The trauma that that would cause? That craddle on fire. If the parents had to grow emotionally detached to their misdeeds to keep the guilt from drowning them, can we blame Henry from growing detached to whatever attachment he might have had with his family? Can we blame his nihilism, him not reflecting about his actions and the damage they cause? No one ever bothered to ask what hurt him. Are we never gonna address that his parents have always wanted to fix him? And by the show’s portrayal, they’re taking the route that "Yes, Henry has something broken in him that should be fixed, but he can’t so instead let’s just imprison & kill him that’s the best and only thing you can do" I can’t express how incredibly ableist this is. Do you see why I’m so fricking mad that they used explicitely neurodivergent narratives in his origin story?? Do you see why the Henry vs Eleven parallels is, yeah, kinda cool, but narratively wise is a "dangerous scary neurodivergent vs good and useful neurodivergent, learn to differenciate them only one is valid" and how that, like, literally parallels society’s wider ableist stigmatization and the way nazis categorized autistic people into categories of who deserved to live because they were smart enough and who to kill? I was watching the origin story of Henry, feeling for the kid relating to spiders and so lonely and miserable, and as I related the show played ominous music and all about the framing was designed to make us recoil in horror at every word, so what does it mean if I’m relating when I should be intrinsically repulsed?

Damaging ableism

Killing animals and other shit he went through are things that some real, irl kids go through, and they shouldn’t be put on a kill list for it, they can grow, they’re kids. It’s called conduct disorder, and it can be helped and redirected with therapists. Conduct disorder and other maladaptive behaviors most often form from trauma and abusive living conditions. A kid’s animal abuse shouldn’t be the line you draw to judge their innate value and goodness.

These below are very real things people with stigmatized disorders and mental illnesses face in real life, and things which Stranger Things supports with Henry Creel: - Forced hospitalization and being involuntarily restrained are more common and more widely accepted. - Having their diagnosis brought up in court to devalue their testimony and stances, to support a bias against them. - All of their actions ever are analyzed under the scope that their goal is to manipulate and/or done with ill intentions. Often tied with point above. - Similarly to above, having their feelings and experiences invalidated. Having their experiences gaslighted. Being seen as abusers immediately despite whatever they’ve done if anything, and unwillingness of being seen as abuse victim themselves, despite it being one of the biggest causes of some disorders. - Having their fight or flight and trauma responses judged as an action committed with full intents and capacities and as a way to assess their innate morality. - Can’t be trusted to make any choice ever, including what is good for them and their healing process. - Denied help by professionals due to being too much of a “tough/serious case”. Denied support by most for their diagnosis alone. - Not being able to open up about their issues to anyone because they will be judged and abandoned.

Other things Stranger Things encourages in dealing with neurodivergent people who make you uncomfortable with their symptoms: - Fearing and denying support for a neurodivergent child with or without conduct disorder, both if it’s your child or a patient. - The overall, extreme dehumanization of anyone who feels or seems creepy to you. Wether it be because of behavior, diagnosis or vibe, or whatever else.

I’ve debated with many of my friends on Henry Creel’s emotional turmor and humanity. My thesis every time: that Henry Creel was a victim of abuse and deserving of a sympathetic framing through it. Every time the other started hostile to the idea, very reluctant to the idea of him having emotional depth and issues that are born from pain and hurt. Every time, they ended up conceding that the show made things out to be much more black and white than they were. My point is that when doing these debates, a large portion of their points on how Henry never deserved sympathy were either ableist or easily explained by “yeah but that was largely caused by abuse, which is what I’m asking you to acknowledge”. Henry Creel’s portrayal actively drives people to be ableist and ungenerous to him, his experiences and his pain. Stranger Things said that Henry should have been forcibly hospitalized from a young age and never trusted in the presence of anyone, he should have been controlled as soon as possible and monitored carefully and closely. Stranger Things said Henry Creel isn’t capable of growing as a person, while never extending a genuine hand of help. Invalidated, evil and wrong on every point, abused for the majority of his life, Henry should have been able to grow and become better on his own without help because he doesn’t deserve help, and even with that growth who knows if he’s “truly” good now and if he deserves to be forgiven. When Henry Creel opened up about his perspective and life to the one person he had ever trusted and liked, that person immediately recoiled and violently lashed out at them. People keep using the ways Henry reacted to trauma as ammunition of how murderous and evil he is without attempting to seeing his point of view. People dismiss the idea of Henry having any positive intentions, thoughts, hobbies or feelings ever because he “has no empathy” and “insert other ableist reasoning”. The hatred of Henry Creel is one that is first and foremost built upon the denial of compassion.

Hope?

Yeah, if there’s one thing we can always hope for, it’s better for the next season. There are a lot of spots amiss. Will Stranger Things 5 come back and explain how his mother realized he was causing the visions? Will we learn more about the guilty horrific visions of their past horrible deeds? Is there any sort of redemption or de-escalation arc that’s on the table at all?

This from the staff does give me hope. In the remaining time, Henry Creel’s character does a lot more harm to the neurodivergent community than good.

In the end, so far, the show tried as best as it could to fit Henry Creel in small square boxes. The same boxes that caused his core issues, and the same boxes that neurodivergent people don’t often fit into.

Man. Wtf were they thinking. So much cool psychology themes potential but you make Vecna one note wtf. There is so much ground for interesting themes and you choose ableism wtf wtf. Why BLACK WIDOWS?? Why with that explanation??? If you wanted to make Henry a evil emotionless dude you should have chosen scorpions dude. Like? That tale of the scorpion that sunk itself and its ally after lying with the end punch of "Why did you sting me? Because I’m a scorpion." Would have been perfect and not ask for a deeper reading. But nooo it was "black widows are misunderstood and feared when they are just amoral beings that want to live and do nothing wrong” and for some reason they truly are born monsters according to the show.

I am sorry but the narrative of "I am so alienated from humanity that I will cling onto these ugly hated bugs living in my house that were just chilling to get any sense of belonging, we’re both so alike. We’re both miserable but have the power to not be helpless anymore. To have our turn being the ones in control of who has a right to live. And I’ll channel all that bitterness and hurt into making the world free of what has brought me pain and leave it objectively better for it" is just too raw and full of hurt that I will never not have empathy for him, and I will repeat this as many times as I have to.

Okay. This is as done as I’ll get it to be I think. Jesus. If people want to debate that’s fine but tbh I don’t think I’ll respond, I’ve debated and written so much already. Yeah some of this could be worded better but like, if you need me to be Shakespear to grant compassion I’m sorry to say that your compassion doesn’t mean much... To me, now, anyways.

Like I said it’s fine if u liked the way it was executed or whatever, you do you, as long as you acknowledge the problematic, deliberate choices I’ve done my job I think. If you don’t care about the ableist treatment though we’re gonna have beef, but pleaseee I’m anti-harassment just leave me alone and we’ll be fine.

Extra, lowkey relevant video to watch if you want, to grow perspective and empathy for those you deem too far gone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azRl1dI-Cts&ab_channel=TEDxTalks

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