#reblogged analysis

[therainscene]

How gay love is going to save the world: Byler Analysis Masterlist

🧟‍♂️ = Character study; 🌈 = Queer themes in ST; 🎲 = Symbolism; ⚔️ = S5 predictions (pre-TFS); ⏰ = S5 predictions (post-TFS)

Will, Henry, and queer villainy

🎲 Vecna as a metaphor for Will’s struggle with homophobia

🎲 Vecna & the Mind Flayer: who is the true Big Bad of ST?

⚔️ Will has superpowers and they’re super gay (⏰or not)

🧟‍♂️ Good vs. evil: Henry and Will as narrative foils

🧟‍♂ Be gay do crime: Will and Henry and breaking the rules

🌈 Crazy together: Byler, Cthulhu, and cosmic horror

🧟‍♂ In defense of queer interpretations of Henry

The Strangest Things were the lessons we learned

🌈 How the mothers of ST raise their queer children

🎲 How ST depicts Mike’s struggle with being in the closet

🌈 Why I stopped being anti-Byler

🌈 But it was the 80s: is Will destined for a bleak ending?

🌈 A cynical gay Millennial's thoughts on queer rep

Be gay do time travel

⚔️ A primer on extra-dimensional travel

⚔️ The origin of the Mind Flayer (& ⏰post-TFS thoughts)

⏰ Will’s time-travelling coming-of-age

⏰ On the potential influence of The Terminator on S5

Miscellaneous other essays

🧟‍♂ Musings on Will’s trust issues

🎲 Rod motifs in Will’s character arc

🌈 Why the themes of ST make Byler endgame inevitable

⚔️ Does Mike think Will is in love with El? (part 1)

⚔️ Does Mike think Will is in love with El? (part 2)

Bite-sized Byler bits

🎲 Very serious grave-digging tool analysis

🎲 How Suzie’s siblings foreshadow the S4 finale

🧟‍♂️ The symmetry of Byler and the van scene

🎲 Edgar Allan Poe analyzes the scrapyard heart-to-heart

⚔️ S4 parallels that foreshadow Will’s importance in S5

⚔️ Will's missing rainbow

⚔️ The pizzeria heart-to-heart as a Byler proof

⚔️ Does Jonathan suspect Mike is queer?

🎲 The Upside Down as a metaphor for Will’s immaturity

🎲 Monsters as a metaphor for 80s attitudes towards sex

[therainscene]

Now come on. You can’t just cherry-pick the examples that best support your argument and ignore the others. We have to be honest with ourselves and admit that Mike was also looking for someone who...

Is a nerd with a fashion sense to match...

...And likes role-playing.

The fact that when Mike was looking for a sub for Hellfire, he was looking for someone that…

He knows,

Who likes physical contact,

Who he has chemistry with,

Who is an artist,

And who likes playing games.

Mike was trying to find Will.

Will is everything Mike wants.

[leftneb]

There is Something Seriously Wrong with this Logo..... Chapter Two

So. Lots of you have seen this post by my dear partner ( @lailau7904 ) in which the Williams F1 design team get absolutely torn to bits. In the case you haven't read it yet I highly recommend you do because a) it's really fucking funny and b) it makes what I'm about to tell you even funnier. Though you don't have to, this post touches on entirely different things still regarding this one goddamn logo.

The original post starts like this:

Innocent enough, we made an assumption in good faith that the logo displayed on the Wikipedia page would be the same one as the official version used by Williams. Buckle the fuck up because I'm about to tell you why that was the worst mistake we could have made.

Please. Please I beg of you keep reading this took YEARS off our lifespans. Like the original post was fun and all but it was merely the top of the iceberg. If this were an hbomberguy video this would be the part where he reveals that the background was a greenscreen the whole time. More below the cut!!! :333

The Truth

Already after only a few hours after hitting "post" on the dissection, people started pointing out to us that we'd missed an absolutely crucial detail on the Wikimedia page we got the logo from, pay careful attention:

See THIS?

Yeah this means that that image is not, and never was, the official logo of Williams. All along it had been the work of a Wikipedia user by the name of Juanchocarbonero. Here you can even see the (admittedly painful) history of the file as provided by Wikimedia, this image was uploaded all the way back in 2016, it even underwent an update when the team changed their colour scheme to a lighter blue without getting fucking fixed.

But to me the absolutely most painful part about this page is the "File Usage" section. Which gives you a quick preview of just how deep the goddamn disease that is this piece of graphic design sin really spreads.

And just to clarify: the official version of the logo used by Williams on merch etc is perfectly fine. It's a nice piece of graphic design. I still quite like it. But the story doesn't end there. Not even close.

Consequences

When you look up "williams logo" on Google the image provided by Wikimedia the very first result that pops up, if you're looking for a high-quality .png of this logo that, logically, is what you'll end up using. And I mean, why wouldn't you? What reason do you have not to use it? As long as you don't look to close (oops) it's a perfectly fine, high-definition, clean and transparent image of the logo! No shit people are going to use it!

But this raises a question: Why IS it the most widespread version of the logo? That's fucking weird isn't it? Surely if the actual logo used on ex.: the official Williams F1 website (which, again, is perfectly fucking fine) was available they would've just used that, right?

Now. Small problem. If you want you can go ahead and open whatever search engine you use, if you do that I'm gonna need you to type in "Williams logo" into the search bar, and just try finding a picture that is

of the actual official logo (you can tell the bootleg from the real thing by checking if the middle segment of the W has spiky ends or flat ones. We're looking for flat ones here)

high quality (no pixels or blurring visible to the naked eye)

a transparent png (none of that chequered background bullshit)

NOT a logo with any words (such as: Williams or Racing) visible in it. those don't count.

If you didn't feel like doing any of that, I'll just tell you the answer: you fucking can't. Nothing like that EXISTS. The closest I could get are these two, both of which are mid to ass quality, so they don't count either.

No sensible individual is going to scroll google search results for 5 minutes straight just so they can use a 200x200 image, especially when they think a perfect alternative is right there.

I even found several recoloured versions of the diseased logo, including one as a sticker on Redbubble! Fuck me that's a horrible sight!

The Search

Because I wrote the previous paragrahps after we'd figured out exactly what had happened, you might be under the impression that by this point in trying to answer the question "Why the fuck is that image on Wikipedia instead of, idk, the real fucking thing?" we'd at least established the existence of said "real Williams F1 logo". You'd be wrong, because for somewhere around 24 hours after we'd made the initial, horrifying discovery of just how fucked the Wikipedia version is, we genuinely could not tell if that was the official logo or not.

The ones displayed on their website weren't at all downloadable or even copyable, a non-ass quality of the damn thing just didn't seem to exist anywhere, so we didn't dare draw any conclusions. And we were still foolishly operating on the assumption that Wikipedia wouldn't just lie to us. (this is why your teachers hate it when you use it a source btw. like this is the ONE time it's actually been reasonable)

So, in the hopes of finding the offical Williams Racing logo, the non-scuffed one because clearly it exists, somewhere, we consulted an expert on Intellectual Property: my mother!

What this "consultation" actually roughly looked like was: we went on a walk and I started rambling about the Situation from Last Night before she cut me off and pulled up the website of the World Intellectual Property Organisation, aka the place they store all the Copyright information of like, everything.

BEHOLD:

(pictured; THE ACTUAL FUCKING LOGO I CANNOT BELIEVE IT'S EXISTED THIS WHOLE TIME)

Link to the actual real official legal document because goddamn this rabbithole just kept getting deeper so I like, have that now.

For refence, here is the official copyrighted version and the Wikimedia file overlayed on top of each other. As you can tell, it's disgusting. It's a poor, eyeballed imitation at best.

The copyrighted logo is horrifically low quality because, guess what, that image also isn't downloadable or copyable from the page. I really really cannot blame Juanchocarbonero for uploading his own version to Wikimedia because there legitimately does not exist a version of this logo that is freely available to the public. Like that goddamn abomiation is all we have. It's the effort that counts I guess.

My mother suggested that a possible reason for this could be avoiding the production of knockoff merch, or at least making it recognisable in case it is sold. Think about it, when your logo Doesn't Exist online, no one can use it without a license! It's kind of genius! I'm also about 99% sure they didn't orchestrate it so, it was good luck I guess?

interlude: How the FUCK does Copyright even work

I did immediately think to myself "we should REALLY fix the wikipedia version, like, stat" because I cannot in good conscience have this information available to me and not do anything with it, for the good of the people. However, this poses an issue: was the logo really not scuffed on purpose? Could it be that that version uploaded to Wikipedia isn't a 1:1 of the official logo because of copyrighting issues? To find out I had to look deeper, by comparing the official, website-available logos of various other F1 teams I came to conclusion that: [........................]

Yeah so I wrote that paragraph before actually checking for refences, but even after probably an hour of trying very hard to make sense of the copyright documents and copyright law in general we could not make sense of any of it. According to my mother (again, the closest we have to an expert, like she actually works with copyright in the context of companies but she's not specifically an IP expert. just to clarify) it's actually a lot worse for Wikipedia to have a falsified version of the Williams logo, than it would be to use the copyrighted version. This is because they're spreading misinformation by pretending that's the actual logo. And yet.

According to the Copyright Tag (the one on the top) in the Licensing section of the Wikimedia page for the thing pretending to be the Williams F1 logo, it's fine to use it because just a bunch of shapes. The thing is however, that it says that for pretty much every F1 team's logo, most of which are sourced straight from the official website. So this doesn't really mean anything tbh. According to our local expert (still my mother) it's fucking confusing. So I've decided to leave that at that.

update October 20th: as far as the Wikimedia pages on copyrighting tell me, uploading the official logo could, potentially, get me into serious legal trouble with Williams because of copyright laws. Which is still confusing because as said, every other team's logo is sitting uncontested on their respective Wikipedia pages. So basically we still don't know.

Okay. Backtrack. We forgot to ask something very important:

HOW?

HOW does one fuck up a perfectly fine logo THAT BAD.

WHY does one make their own scuffed tracejob and HOW does it end up like THAT. Clearly something must have gone horrifically wrong for it to end up like that.

I have a theory as to what might have happened:

It was either drawn or painted by hand, for a physical paintjob it's actually sort of impressively precise, but still objectively fucked. For a while I outright refused to believe that it could have been done in a digital program with the types of mistakes that were made, but you'll see this theory (partially) disproven later on so I retract it for now.

Operating on the assumption that it wasn't done digitally, a likely theory could be one involving a picture of scan of the paintjob. If the picture was taken at an angle or the logo itself was on a curved surface that COULD potentially explain the weird sort of slide everything has to it.

From then the picture might have been inserted into a digital art program, and the area of the logo might have been automatically selected using the magic wand tool, which could explain the weird growth at the top and that odd rounded off corner.

We also drew the conclusion that the file itself had been "tampered with" (aka cropped manually) by a human, because no computer would generate a resolution of 3356x2543 (you can that this is the original resolution on the Wikimedia page)

WAIT HOLD ON IS THAT IT?

The question of how the Fuck this guy managed to mess up the logo, and even more specifically why some edges were fine and some weren't (ant colony looking thing on the top left) bothered us so much that I at one point started just looking up "WIlliams logo" with the results filtered down to pre-2017 in an attempt to find when exactly the messed up logo was created. As if that would be any help.

Now what I definitely didn't expect to find was THIS

ENHANCE

Yes, you're seeing it right, THAT is the original 'Williams logo with the fucked up arm angles and lenghts'. Which PROVES that, contrary to our previous belief, Juancocarbonero was NOT the origin of the mistakes. Instead it was [checks notes] a DeviantArt user by the name of Nerdkid56?

The original DeviantArt post, which as of 9:47pm CET on the 13th of October 2024 I am about 90% sure is the actual first appearanace of the scuffed logo, is from May of 2015, which lines up well with the original upload date of the fucked up logo onto Wikipedia (November 2016). At the time that DeviantArt post was almost the only source for the logo.

And in the case you needed any convincing that those two logos are the same, here they are overlayed. You may notice that it's one shape (excluding the rounded corner which isn't visible at this resolution.)

This discovery is essential to understanding why the current scuffed version is the way it is. You might remember our confusion about the way some edges are fine while some are attempting to leave the image, the whole thing is a weird Frankensteinian amalgamation of vectors and magic wand mistakes. With this knowledge we can now assume that the mistakes happened in 2 layers:

Nerdkid56: likely just eyeballed the proportions. I'd guess he drew one arm before the other and flipped it around without really checking the angles. Also didn't give a shit about whether the arms lined up with the base or not. Legitimately bad design made in a digital program.

Juancocarbonero: why he used the scuffed W logo instead of the normal ones that were also perfectly accessible by 1 goddamn Google search is a mistery. HOW he even got access to it is another question I do not think we'll have answers to. And I've already explained some of the things we think may be responsible for the uneveness and bumps. Point is he fucked it up even more.

My theory for why Juanchocarbonero used the scuffed version instead of any other available picture goes like this: it was the only png he could find. Practically every other search result for "Williams Logo" that predates 2017 is a jpeg or absolute ass quality (sometimes both for good measure) so, despite it's flaws, Nedkid56's trace of it could have been the best option available at the time (the quality is actually very very good since it's a vector image, and I guess our friend Juanchocarbonero doesn't have an eye for design considering he didn't notice uhm, everything that is wrong with that model.)

Conclusion

The only way to right these wrongs is to go back, to the very beggining of this saga. Wikipedia. Williams I'm so sorry for what you've had to endure. I know what I have to do now. When I eventually make a proper vector image of the official logo and upload it to Wikimedia it'll all be over. And I WILL do it (but not rn this has already robbed me of like 3 whole days of my life. soon)

All of this is, admittedly inconsequental, but also absolutely fucking hilarious. Like imagine. you. one single guy, you make ONE mistake in a silly little "tracing this logo" project because you couldn't be arsed to check the angles of a silly little W. And some other guy, who you likely don't even know, over a whole ass year later, takes your flawed piece of design, makes it even worse somehow and uploads it to a site from which your little tiny innocent mistake becomes the most widespread version of a logo used by an actual real company worth over 700 Million US Dollars. HOW. HOW DID THAT HAPPEN. WHY HAS NO ONE FIXED THIS??? IT'S BEEN 9 YEARS

Just to give you a final look on just how widespread this plague is, here are some examples of media the fucked up version of the logo is featured in:

this Mr V's Garage video (the original reason we started this conversation in the first place)

the thumbnails of these two videos by Tommo, this one by FP1Will, and this one by RicksF1Addiction

such an amount of random places. likely fanmerch and fanart, and like, pretty much any place someone wanted to use the logo. it's everywhere. if you've ever had the Williams logo displayed in anything you've made I can guarantee you 99.9% chance you used the fucked version

and late thank you to everyone ( @bumblewyn @mid-nighttiger @vro0m @lemonsgovroom @mikraas @leclerced fucking hell I kept needing to add people to this list because compiling all of this took absurdly long) who pointed out our misconception in the reblogs of the original post and contributed to us actually looking into this further. and sorry to everyone for accidentally spreading misinformation lmao (it's too funny not to have been worth it tho) (ALSO it's not really our fault is it)

and to keep the tradition of ending on a live discord reaction:

[joicecubes]

recently saw this quote again:

"stan has no idea, but he did it. he saved the world. he saved me. you’re our hero, stanley."

and i just. i can’t stop thinking about ford saying “stan has no idea.” because stan getting his mind, his memory, his SELF erased as a sacrifice for the people he loves most in the world is something ford never could have done, and it’s what ultimately makes him admire stan so much more than he ever did. ford, who has always been so obsessed with being a hero and a visionary, could ironically never have been the one to throw away his knowledge of the sacrifice he’s making. his arrogance and craving for validation is exactly WHY he could never have truly been the hero. it had to be stan.

because stan did it for all the right reasons. there was a part of him that always wanted to do something great like ford, who desperately wanted to be more than just a “screw-up,” but when it came down to this moment, he wasn’t sacrificing himself to prove anything. he says “guess i was good for something after all,” as he holds a photo of his niece and nephew, because he does it for them. not for validation. not for fame. not for any sort of reputation. and he wakes up having no clue what he even did. and this, to ford, is the most noble thing he could have ever done. it’s better than any scientific achievement, any of his 12 phds, his decades of research. it’s why he ultimately resigns himself to not be the hero, but to be a “hero’s brother.” and for the first time in his life, he’s perfectly content with stepping off his pedestal.

[cozylittleartblog]

i had a dream i found a whole blog dedicated to blorboposting about val and only val. and that compelled me to draw him

[therainscene]

This season above all will be a redemption arc of the American nuclear family.

This is such a great take.

I've had a hard time figuring out how exactly they're going to handle Mike's arc in S5. He's clearly struggling with something and the show just won't let us into his head -- but hey, what a coincidence, the villain's modus operandi just so happens to involve getting inside people's heads and tormenting them with their own secrets. Mike's getting Vecna'd, right?

I mean... maybe? It makes sense.

But like you say, Byler's dynamic has always been about visibility vs. invisibility, and Mike's invisibility has always kept him safe from the horrors. Even if he does get targeted by Vecna -- S5 Mike is to Will as S4 Nancy is to Max. Mike is simply not going to be a focus for Vecna in the way Will is.

The Satanic Panic plot seems like a more promising avenue for really getting into the nitty-gritty of what Mike's been dealing with, and having Holly and the Wheeler family's struggle with conformity be what ties it all to the supernatural is just the perfect way to give Mike an arc that lets him self-actualize on his own terms instead of being reduced to a prize for Will.

Thoughts on "Escape from Camazotz"

Oppressive Suburbia, Conformity, and Season 5 Themes

I've long thought that a major focus of Season 5 will be the contrast between the families of The Wheelers and The Byers, and exploring how non-traditional family environments can be freeing vs the oppressive structure of the nuclear family.

In a Wrinkle In Time, Camazotz is a planet controlled by the big bad of the book, the "IT", who forces the citizens into a conformity that resembles American suburbia. All of the houses the same, the citizens the same, doing the same things at the same time without individual identity. Without anything different. Different means a lot of things, but with Stranger Things dropping different in reference to Will's identity and the presumable themes of this season, it will heavily codify as queerness and how it threatens the cisheterosexual family model.

Henry was raised in the 1950s, a decade still revered by conservatives for it's traditional family dynamics that supposedly were the peak of culture and happiness for all. That was all a lie, of course, and Henry knew so as he shows to Nancy and Eleven during his monologue. The second most conservative decade aside from the 1950s in American society is widely considered to be the 1980s.

The Creels will serve in parallel to The Wheelers; the worst example of what they could become and the damage that this type of family could do to a child that is different in any way. Notice how Vecna selectively shows Nancy visions of The Wheelers dying, but not anyone else she may consider family or friends (like Jonathan).

That is; unless they change their ways and come together as a healthy functioning family facing their traumas, The Wheelers will be toast.

Karen has been moved up to a main character role this season. Ted's actor says the father starts to show up more for Holly (hold that) and realizes he wants to act differently. Holly has been recast. Finn has said Mike goes on a much more personal journey this season, and steps up as a leader.

Oh, also: the catalyst for all of this is that Holly goes missing. The contrast will help show how the Byers (including El and Hopper here) were able to pull together and help solve Will's disappearance, versus how the Wheelers as a closed off nuclear family grapple with Holly's vanishing.

Each of the Byers is in some kind of a non-1950s conformist relationship, but particularly Will (not in one now but we all know he will be). I think El might represent, after she breaks up with Mike, the fear of the unmarried woman being satisfied without a husband. The above shot really emphasizes my point.

I predict that Will will end up coming out to his family rather early on, and we will see all of them immediately accept him with little surprise or push-back. Will is a visible gay man who comes from an open minded non traditional family (divorced, non-married, adoptive) that is willing to have honest conversations.

But this theme will place the most focus on the Wheelers. Mike is the main character of said family and this will particularly focus on his arc, and his acceptance of his queerness in the midst of suburban conformity.

He is not visible, he comes from a Reagan-supporting family who don't communicate with each other. He is not particularly close with his family like Will is. He pushes his feelings down and tries his damn hardest to be normal despite it all. His trauma hasn't really been addressed at all. He is falling back into his usual habits - the one thing he dared to do different (grow his hair long) has gone back to how it was.

It's not all doom and gloom though. This season above all will be a redemption arc of the American nuclear family, how they choose to escape their conformity and learn to be there for each other, thus overpowering Vecna. Not that the Wheelers are going to end this personally.

"Great, more hysteria. Just what we need". "It's the news, now indistinguishable from the tabloids".

[saudrag]

APPARENTLY SOMEONE POINTED OUT THAT AZIRAPHALE AND CROWLEY ARE KISSING IN ONE OF THE WINDOWS IN THE TITLE SEQUENCE AND I NOW JUST CANNOT BE NORMAL???

Neil said that THERE ARE clues for s3 in the TS AND THIS IS WHAT WE’VE FOUND??

aa you can see, this is totally DIFFERENT KISS. aziraphale is now THE ONE TUGGING CROWLEY IN, GRIPPING THE HEMS OF HIS JACKET????? WHAT IF IT IS THE GET-TOGETHER KISS WE WILL SEE IN S3? also SOMEONE IS PEEPING IN.

[abyssalzones]

hello would. you like to elaborate on. ford pines osdd. ((because I recently got diagnosed and. blorbo moments. but also because I love the idea in general. ford "I feel like I've lived 50 different lives" pines.))

so, first off, I want to apologize for putting this off for so long. I think it's been a couple of weeks at this point but I'm not entirely sure. Anyway, after getting this ask I immediately got really really excited and started outlining what I quickly realized was going to be a monster of an analysis post.

So much so, in fact, that I ended up having to move it all into a google doc. whoops.

As it turns out, this ask ended up being the thing to motivate me to go over a lot of other related thoughts about GF’s writing that I’d had stewing in my brain for ages, so you're getting an essay that you probably didn't sign up for. Again: my bad. I hold the champion's title for being the most long-winded autistic bitch to ever live.

Either way, as you might have guessed, I would love to elaborate on Ford Pines' hypothetical OSDD.

[content warning: I’m going to be talking about both fictional depictions and IRL patterns of interpersonal abuse in here quite a bit. Proceed with caution if you’re easily triggered by these topics, especially if you decide to look further into anything I mention here that isn’t strictly related to, y’know, the cartoon.]

[thunderstomm]

Is “Prime Meridian Love” Forshadowing for “Battle of the Big Wand”?

With the most recent episodes of “Fairly OddParents: A New Wish” airing, everyone, myself included, is buzzing over what’s going to happen in the big season finale, what exactly is going to happen, and what’s the future state of Hazel and Dev’s friendship? There are many theories going around, but I want to pitch my own!

“Prime Meridian Love: Romance Cruise Ultra” is foreshadowing towards Hazel and Dev’s conflict and plot. Obviously, the show has drawn us a parallel here before, Duckworth looks like Dev. But rewatching the episode “Prime Meridian Love”, along with the context from new episodes and the description for the finale has me thinking that we may already know what’s to come.

Read the rest under the cut ! This post includes the episode description for “Battle for the Big Wand”, so if you want to go into that episode blind, don’t read further !

Starting with the most basic- Duckworth and Kennueth are stand-ins for Dev and Hazel. Duckworth is literally designed to look like Dev, and while less obvious, Kennueth seems to share a basic colour palette with Hazel, his skin and amulet being the colours of her shirt. There’s also the fact that Duckworth and Kennueth are described as “rivals”, and Hazel calls Dev her own rival.

This is where the backstory / history between Duckworth and Kennueth becomes relevant. The amulets are the one thing they share, and what’s something magical that Hazel and Dev have in common? Fairies!

The story goes that Kennueth and Duckworth were once friends, their friendship cemented by what bound them together. But Duckworth became jealous of Kennueth once he got promoted to captain. Sounds familiar? Hazel and Dev became friends, and shared the secret of having fairy godparents. They fell out over Dev’s jealously of Hazel, and that his dad seemed to care more about her, even if in an unconventional way.

Duckworth retalliates by stealing the magical pearl from the ancient sea temple, hoping for the power to overthrow Kennueth. Which brings me to my theory about the series finale, “Battle of the Big Wand”. Teaming up with Irep, I think Dev’s jealousy of Hazel having his father’s attention, as well as having two fairies while he only has one, will motivate him to steal the titular “Big Wand” during the takeover of Fairy World, hoping that it can grant him unlimited power, in his fleeting pursuit of satisfaction.

While the story of “Prime Meridian Love: Romance Cruise Ultra” goes on to say that this event cements their rivalry, the episode has Hazel and Kennueth stop Dev, and Hazel encourages Kennueth to re-write the story, and make things right with him, which he does !

I think the finale will follow one of these two beats. Hazel, Cosmo, Wanda, possibly Jorgen and Peri, and maybe even the citizens of Fairy World will all help to stop Dev and Irep, and we’ll either see Hazel and Dev’s bond cemented as a rivalry, or we will see Hazel reflect on the situation, and write her own story, and actually TALK to Dev about what has been going on. Personally, I would much prefer the latter. Dev is still a kid, and he’s a product of his environment. He deserves a chance to change and grow, and have good people by his side who actually care about him, to help him do so.

The only thing that I’m still unsure about is how Hazel’s rule free wish will tie into this all, but I do think she will use it like many of her other wishes, and do so selflessly.

What do you all think of this theory? I’m so excited (and nervous) for the big finale next week !!

[therainscene]

It's wild that Will is seen as weak, because he's the toughest motherfucker in the show -- not in spite of being soft and sensitive, but because of it.

Being a sensitive gay boy in 1980's America is playing life on hard mode: he's punished for refusing to conform to traditional masculinity, both in-universe and by the audience, and his response is to doggedly continue refusing to conform. He's crying and throwing up the whole time he's doing it but he just keeps on doing it.

Zombie boy is an apt nickname in that respect: knock him down and he just gets right back up again, zero fucks given if his intestines are hanging out.

But it's funny that Will gets compared to a monster for fighting on despite his setbacks, because when the likes of Rambo or John McClane do the same, they're lauded as inspirational models of peak masculinity. I kind of suspect this is what's being alluded to by Mike's Conan the Barbarian poster -- he admires strong, heroic men and aspires to be like them, but thinks he has to be like the macho straight men society tells him to be like instead of the gentle queer boy who's actually been inspiring him this whole time.

It's going to be so fucking delicious when Relatable Hetero Everyman Protagonist Mike Wheeler stands with Sad Weak Gay Boy Will Byers and says "this is what I want to be :)" and the show rewards them both for it.

It is a little fascinating that there are certain fans who view Will through a strict lens (either as a “weak” crybaby or as a potential villain) which reflects how people of Hawkins percieve Will in show (either as a weak “fairy” or as a predatory “zombie boy”)

[royalarchivist]

Tubbo: Hola!

Spreen: [Completely unprompted] I can't be homophobic, my btch is gay.

Tubbo: PFTTT—?!

Spreen: [Laughs as he jumps off the ledge]

Tubbo: [Continues laughing in confused delight]

[ankle-beez]

saw the clip for the hazbin hotel show. to say that im shocked at how the show turned out would be an understatement

[shigayokagayama]

probably my #hottesttake on confession arc is that i truly do not think that shigeo lashing out at teru was based on pent up resentment for getting strangled or, if it was, it was such a minimal part of it as to be completely overshadowed by the everything else going on in that kid's head during that arc

[therainscene]

WHAT how is this the first time I'm learning about the D.A.D. from TFS?? Goddamnit, I hate not being able to see this play for myself.

This idea that radio can be used as an early warning system against the Mind Flayer is really interesting, because we already have a well-established early warning system against the Mind Flayer:

Is this the mechanism Will has been using all along? He can naturally (or supernaturally) sense electromagnetism?

If so, this might constitute evidence that he has powers, since powers also tend to mess with electronics -- and it might further constitute evidence that the Mind Flayer is the origin of powers.

Um. Uh. The new leaks of the van.

Specifically that the van has the antenna...

I've talked before how the antenna (supposedly the same one) on Steve's car was reminiscent of Bob's D.A.D. (Directional Antenna Device) from TFS, which he, Joyce, and Hopper used to track down the weird radio emissions that happened every time Henry had a Mindflayer attack.

Now that the van has it, I want to talk about the WSQK slogan:

"The Squawk"

What's so special about the squawk? Well.

First: The Definition

The main protest we see is in ST3, when a guy named Henry is leading a protest against the construction of Starcourt (a cover for the Russians trying to open a gate to the UD, which would activate the Mindflayer ...interesting connection, that). It also has other ties to protesting and Starcourt, like Murray's code name being Bald Eagle and him/Nancy "squawking" about Barb's death re: HNL and the UD. You could even say Terry "squawked" about Brenner, and we all know she has an absolutely insane number of ties to both in-show Henry and TFS Henry. There's also the fact that it's vomiting rainbows vs Will vomiting up slugs vs the ties between the slugs, the Mindflayer, and Brenner/HNL.

So right off the bat the slogan is a tie to Henry, Brenner/HNL, the Mindflayer, and fighting The Man.

Second: Squawk Codes

I'm not sure how many of y'all are military/aircraft loons, but "squawk codes" were invented during WW2 as radio-transmitted codes to distinguish between Allies and Axis to avoid friendly fire as part of the IFF system "Parrot". They range from 0000 to 7777, and each one has a meaning.

This, of course, immediately had me thinking of this:

In Squawk, 3700 becomes:

What's an AEW aircraft?

Airborn Early Warning. AEW aircrafts patrol to keep on the lookout for incoming aerial and/or maritime attacks.

They're even used to track UFOs

So, given that these were implemented in WW2, we can all see the ties to Victor, yes? And how this creates a nice web of connections between all this:

And Henry/TFS? Nifty.

One last thing: IFF "Parrot"

Are we 100% sure the bird on the van is an eagle? Because while it does resemble an eagle, it also resembles a parrot.

Given that it has a short lower beak and ruffled feathers (it also happens to be colorful), whereas a screeching eagle is sleek and has an elongated lower beak:

I talked about it with Em, and we both agree that it looks like a weird eagle-parrot hybrid, which may be an intentional stylization to cover both the eagle symbolization and the IFF references (parroting having ties to mind control and the Mindflayer, as well as the threads of word repetition in ST as a whole).

In summary: If the antenna and the radio station are being used the same way Bob's D.A.D. was in TFS, then it essentially functions as a radio-based early warning system against the Mindflayer, which is supported by the design and slogan of the WSQK van.

[skrunksthatwunk]

thinking about how eiji's a pole vaulter and how ash talks about eiji "flying" and how eiji's associated with bird imagery and how eiji's free (unlike ash) and how eiji comes in on a plane and leaves on a plane and how ash cannot fly, ash cannot be free, how nyc is ash's prison, and how ash is the leopard who dies climbing the mountain, unable to live at such elevation, how he was trying to reach the sky and be free but was always stuck to the earth, how he chose to die instead of climbing back down, how he chose to die where he could see the sky and hope and freedom almost like a bird with eiji's letter right in front of him rather than letting everything go wrong and ruin it once again, how eiji's a failed pole vaulter anyway, how a bad fall ruined his career and grounded him (physically and emotionally), how it took flying to america and meeting ash and needing to save him and skip for him to try flying again, how he landed hard and harsh and still the thought of that escape compelled ash to protect eiji at all costs because if he could fly that means something to him, even if he doesn't think he can fly, how eiji is the manifestation of his hope and how when he breaks and asks eiji to stay with him a while he folds himself over his legs and weighs him down and traps him and grounds him, how ash fights like hell to keep eiji alive not because he thinks he can be like him (hopeful, flying, innocent), but because he makes him forget the gravity of his situation, and so he can see eiji fly again. how he wants to see him escape. how eiji is a bird and ash is a wildcat and how ash never once saw eiji as prey. how eiji never saw ash as a predator. how it is eiji's naivete that first endears ash to him, how it is his freedom and flight and removal from darkness and his ability to leave that darkness that really roots eiji in ash's blood as something essential to him keeping on living in this hell of nyc. how it is that distance from the violence and that hope for the future that ash chooses to surround himself in as he dies. how ash dies in a dream because he feels more than anything that he can't fly like eiji, that he can never leave. how his violence is a part of him and will be forever, how it weighs him down. how he wants to enjoy the view from the mountainside rather than looking up from the ground below. as if they can both fly. as if he is with him up there and not grounded. eye-to-eye with what he can't have, seeing eiji's homeland: the sky. how he dies trying to reach the top because he couldn't take retreating and trying again. how ash, tired and tired and tired and convinced it will go on forever if he crawls back down the mountain, chooses to close his life deluged in eiji, in eiji's insistence that they can fly together, in eiji's hope for him and for them, in eiji's beautiful dream. how ash dies without trying to realize that dream. how ash, in dying, destroys it.

[originalaccountname]

I made some funny comics a little while ago about the potential effects of Fukuzawa's ability on Chuuya's, and how it perhaps could make it revert to a pre-Arahabaki state.

I realized later that some of you lack the context for where that came from, and that I might be creating confusion, so this is a (hopefully) comprehensive walkthrough of things we learned in Storm Bringer that lead to this conclusion.

tldr; The lab created "Arahabaki" by manipulating an ability into a destructive force. That ability existed before the lab, and the nature of that ability is heavily implied to be the power to enhance other abilities through touch.

Explanation and sources below (so you can judge yourself) ⬇

- spoiler warning for Storm Bringer, hopefully written in a way that you'd understand even if you haven't read it yet -

In Storm Bringer, Chuuya meets the scientist that was responsible for Project Arahabaki, Professor N.

Project Arahabaki, N explains, was the Japanese government's secret project to create an ability singularity they could have control over and freely use as a weapon.

What are singularities? Singularities are what happens when abilities clash in specific ways and create a new, unforeseen reaction. The easiest way to create a singularity is to pit two contradictory abilities against each other to create a paradox; examples included the ability to always deceive and the ability to always perceive the truth, and to have two ability users who can see into the future (*coughs* Oda and Gide) try to one-up each other. The result is usually much more powerful than the original abilities on their own.

Some singularities are said to have been explained as god-like interventions, because of their often destructive nature. This is what inspired the name "Arahabaki", after the mythical being (here's a post of the subject and I'll it link at the end too) These events are described as very rare.

Like mentioned in that passage, there is another way to create a singularity: to have a single ability user use their ability in a way that contradicts itself. This is what the lab was trying to do.

For that explanation, Professor N gives an example. He first shows a video of a child, whose face is hidden from the camera, holding a coin (described as having a certain melancoly to it), with a moon and a fox engraved on it. The video is from one of the lab's tests. The child is made to recite some activation lines, which are directly taken from one of Nakahara Chuuya's poems, Upon the Tainted Sorrow (which does mentions a fox, as a fun fact).

The coin then starts glowing, the glow turns into a black mass, and from there the experimentation goes bad: the coin starts attracting things and absorbing them, the space gets distorted, the child's vitals flatline, panic spreads and someone calls for an emergency stop, we hear a scream. The video ends.

N explains that the child in the video had the ability to enhance the ability of others. That child then used that ability on themselves, effectively enhancing the enhancement which enhanced the enhancing, in an infinite loop. That loop created a lot of energy; the surplus of energy was so intense its mass deformed space (physics!) and it created a black hole.

Here's where it gets tricky: N claims that child died during that accident, that the child was absorbed by the black hole created by their ability. We never actually learn their identity.

But N is a lying liar who lies; he said about one and a half truths the entire book. The only reason he was telling them any of this was that he thought he'd get rid of all of them within the next few minutes. His objective was always to regain control over Chuuya, his pet project.

Plus, during the epilogue, we learn that Chuuya was assumed to have died during the war. That's what his parents think. That's what is officially recorded.

Furthermore.

Project Arahabaki was based off French research papers; someone else had done this kind of experimentation before, and their result was Verlaine.

-

Verlaine's gravity-manipulation is a singularity. Better yet: Verlaine also has a Corruption state, named Brutalization. Their abilities are the same, because the lab copied the techniques that were used to create Verlaine when they worked on Chuuya.

Here's a passage of Dazai nullifying Corruption, at the very end of SB:

"The self-contradicting skill, which was supporting the energy of a singularity". This passage confirms that the source of Chuuya's ability is, in fact, like the child's and Verlaine's, if any doubts remained. "[...] weakening the singularity's output. It wasn't long before it returned to its normal state, and the Gate closed." The Gate refers to releasing Arahabaki, it's basically a limiter, just like the passage above when talking about Brutalization. When Dazai nullifies Corruption, he gives that limiter the opportunity to come back and seal Chuuya's power away again, but does not stop the singularity, only allows it to go back to its stable state.

From all that, we can say that Chuuya's ability wasn't always gravity manipulation, but that it was another, unconfirmed ability that was exploited in such a way that it became a permanent, stable singularity that allowed him to have control over gravity.

-

Bullet point recap:

Chuuya's gravity manipulation comes from a singularity, like Verlaine, like that child;

You need a self-referencing/self-contradicting ability to create that singularity;

Such an event is rare;

There is a substantial amount of time spent describing a "random" child that was experimented on during the war;

That child created a black hole through their singularity;

That singularity was activated using a passage from Nakahara Chuuya's poems, while holding a coin that references it;

That child supposedly died;

Chuuya's parents think he died during the war;

N is a pathological liar with an agenda.

So no, there is no "confirmation" that Chuuya's ability was ability enhancement before the lab took him. But an author writes a story with an intent, so I am asking what Asagiri's intent was when writing all this, and if perhaps we weren't indirectly given the answer already.

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What is Arahabaki (Fifteen and Storm Bringer lore, with too many citations)

My own perceived timeline of the true events behind Storm Bringer (was originally gonna be part of this part, also with too many citations)