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thewrongmoon · 2 years

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One/Vecna: What is he, and how does he survive?

CW: Dead Bodies and Gore (but it's just stuff that's shown in the show)

So I've had a big question for awhile that I've see pretty much no one ask before: How is One alive? Is he alive? Does he exist in a limbo? What the fuck is his deal exactly?

I think answering this may also provide some clues as to how Will was able to survive in the upside down. Because I do see people ask that one, which, again confuses me because we don't even know the answer to how One isn't dead.

How did One end up in the upside down?

So we see El send him to the shadowrealm basically. His body dematerializes into small particles as he's sent into an alternate dimension.

As he was falling through this dimension he was burned to a crisp by multiple lightning strikes. Being struck by lighting even once could cause cardiac arrest, and it also damages nerve cells, can cause temporary paralysis and can cause vessels in the brain to burst. I don't think I need to say that being struck as many times as One was would 100% kill a normal person, but this alternate dimension isn't the same as our reality. It does have some similarities, because we do see his skin is burned pretty badly.

What did he do once he was in there, exactly?

We see him create the mind flayer with the particles in the air. And then things basically end there. I kinda gotta shrug and say I don't know for this question.

We see El make contact with a Demogorgon in season 1. This contact causes a portal to the upside down to open in Hawkins lab.

Back to the original topic: how is One even alive (?)

According to basic science, all forms of life need some source of energy to be considered alive. For animals, this is food, water and oxygen. For plants it's sunlight and water. For fungi it can be a variety of things.

The upside down isn't 1 to 1 accurate with real life. But there are living things in the upside down. At least there is in the later version of it.

In the original version, it's basically just sand and rocks. Inanimate objects. There is lightning, which implies the existence of air. Not a living thing, but a thing that living organisms do need. The Demogorgons or creatures similar to them are already there, which would imply creatures of this realm do not need or have another source for energy.

Honestly gonna need to wait for the Duffer bros to expand on this because, i have. NO fucking clue how One is alive for those three years. The only possible explanation could be that maybe time has a different effect on your body in the upside down? idk man

After El opens the portal

Now this is where things get more explain-able. So we know that at this point, the upside down is a hive-mind and the demogorgon, mindflayer, etc are all connected to Vecna. There are also phsycial vines along the floor of the upside down which connect back to him.

Because they are all connected, we can infer that what the creatures digest is also put into the source (Vecna.)

The demogorgon is attracted to blood, as pointed out by Nancy. When she and Jonathan first encounter one, they see what they think is it eating a deer.

We are familiar, with eating, as humans. That was a dumb fucking sentence, okay, what I mean is, we usually apply our egocentric thinking as a way to rationalize other things. Animals eat, humans eat, so obviously, demogorgons must eat, right? Wrong, actually!

We never really see the bodies of any of these things killed by creatures of the upside down get eaten and digested. We see them biting them, but no actual eating is done. The dead deer, Mews, Barb, Bob... all dead bodies, but they remain mostly in tact.

Mews is dead, but no substantial amount flesh has been consumed.

Behind the scenes shot of Barb's (fake) corpse. We see that she is split open, but all of her....uhhh... stuff? is still there.

Multiple demodogs going at Bob, but there's not really much flesh being torn off him.

The closest we get is Dart eating a three musketeers. And, also, I think meat Dustin leaves out for him? But that's it.

Barb is notable because she is literally brought to the upside down, but when El finds her she is just a decaying corpse. Why wouldn't the demogorgon consume her entirely?

Mushrooms.

So I mentioned before that there are crucial things every living organism needs. For humans and animals, it's water, oxygen and food. For plants it's water, oxygen and sunlight.

The upside down doesn't have water or sunlight. This eliminates the existence of plants in the upside down completely. Same thing with animals or humans. In fact, every living organism needs water to survive.

Which leaves us with... Fungi.

Now fungi also needs water. But fungi can absorb water, like other nutrients it needs, through it's environment.

Fungi is the one confirmed thing that can live in the upside down. The script labels what has originally thought to be ash falling from the sky as spores.

Fungi is kind of a biological mystery in a lot of ways. Scientists still don't actually fully understand fungi.

What we do know is that fungi thrives in dark, damp environments and that it feeds on decay.

This brings me back to the things killed by creatures of the upside down- I think that their end goal is not to eat them, but to kill them and let the fungus from the upside down envelope them. This is where they get their energy from.

Vines? Roots?

So the hivemind is connected via these. And the characters do label them as such. But roots and vines are things for plants. What I think the things in the upside down actually are would probably be labelled better as Mycelium (basically, mushroom roots.)

Mycelium can cover huge amounts of area. The worlds largest organism is actually a fungus with mycelium- it takes up about 10 square kilometers (thats 6.2 miles for my fellow americans out there.)

Pesticides

So in my research I was able to answer a question that I wasn't even actually aiming to answer. But if you remember, in season 3, we see Mrs. Driscoll and and the rats consuming both soil and chemicals. This seemed really fucking weird at the time, and I'm pretty sure it was literally never fucking brought up again. But I actually figured it out bc I'm a genius and totally not because I just randomly stumbled upon this information.

(Bag of fertilizer lists Chloride and Ammonium Phosphate as ingredients, both are toxic to ingest.)

Fungus can absorb pesticides. When fungus absorbs these pesticides, it absorbs the toxic qualities of them.

So when Vecna was having the members of his hivemind ingest chemicals, it wasn't just for a laugh, he was likely doing it to weaponize himself. Why exactly, I'm not 100% sure, but this makes it clear that he has the ability to absorb these toxic qualities, like mushrooms do.

So what does this mean

Vecna is still alive, somehow... But he has taken on mushroom-like-qualities rather than animal ones. Fucking WILD, I know. But how how else can you really explain it? He absorbs nutrients from his tentacle-like appendages, similar to a plant or fungus. But he seemingly doesn't eat them, instead killing them and letting them rot. He then extracts nutrients from their rotting corpses (gross), in a way... using them as part of his life cycle. This could be what he means when he says he wants his victims to "join him"-- he doesn't want them to physically join them, but rather, he's like "heyyy let me slurp up the supplements from your cadaver (i tried to word it differently, it's still gross I'm sorry) and use them to continue my work here"

What about Will?

So I think everyone can agree that Vecna does not want Will dead, by any stretch of the imagination.

We see that by the end of season one, Vecna has actually connected Will to the hivemind via a tentacle. This could serve two purposes:

He wanted to implant the baby-demodogs inside him (gross.)

He was trying to keep Will alive with the nutrients he was absorbing though the hivemind.

Honestly it was probably both! Will is clinically dead when Hopper and Joyce find him, no breath or heartbeat. But... does Vecna have a breath or heartbeat? I don't know. And Vecna isn't dead, so... Maybe Vecna was trying to Vecnify Will. Vecnafication, if you will (you wont.)

We don't know exactly how long Vecna had Will on life support in the upside down, probably at least an hour? But maybe borrowing some life from Vecna is what is causing their connection.

Hopper and Joyce don't get attacked in the upside down like the men Brenner sends down do. I think that Vecna probably wanted Hopper and Joyce to find and rescue Will, so that he could use Will both to spy and to use him to incubate...? The pollywogs?

Conclusion

Vecna has become a sentient fungus lifeform. I realize sound kind of insane for saying that but Stranger Things is a sci-fi show made for entertainment purposes so maybe it's not that far-fetched.

There's still a lot of unanswered questions. But I feel like this answers a couple of questions I originally had. Excited to see how close I got with this!

Will is mushroom-shaped, if u really think about it..... (i'm jk)

#byler #stranger things #vecna #henry creel #one #will byers #analysis #long post #dubbing this one mushroomgate

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