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reikunrei · 3 hours

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I can’t state enough how beneficial it was to work at the sex shop as my first retail job. We were encouraged to practice shutting down inappropriate behavior and it became a well practiced skill set. I had a flat stare, icy tones of disapproval, and a demeanor of untouchable scorn to back it all up. I could get the most hardened of perverts to back off or leave in a matter of sentences if they harassed staff or other customers.

When I moved on to selling mattresses I came prepared to handle pretty much any situation with the unruffled calm of someone who has asked Santa to stop touching himself and leave. To my vast surprise it was a skill I needed on the regular at the mattress store. For whatever reason men thought it was the height of entertainment to sexually harass me because I was young and cheerful.

They would always quickly learn they’d picked the wrong target.

One day a man strolled in, sizing me up as he came. He saw a young, tiny, afab person alone in the store and came to a stop way too close. He used his height to leer down at me and said, “I’m looking for a new headboard. Which ones are the best for sex?”

It was so stupid. He looked down at me with half lidded eyes and the grin of a man who owns an unmarked white van. He probably expected me to laugh uncomfortably or act flustered. He wanted to feel tall and powerful or maybe even sexy.

He was not expecting what he got. My face stretched into what could technically be described as a smile but was more accurately a threat display. The temperature in the room plummeted as I dropped all warmth in my demeanor. He took a half step back, suddenly aware that he was alone in a room with me.

“Well, sir, that depends on what kind of sex you’re having. If you are looking for a headboard that is grippeable, I suggest this model. The metal is rounded and wouldn’t hurt a hand gripping it tightly. However if you want something that you can secure with restraints, I recommend this wooden one as the slats are wide and quite sturdy.”

He looked liked I’d hit him over the head with a board and stared down at me blankly, taken aback by the authoritative way that I discussed the merits of his lackluster sex life. I met his eyes, a veiled threat in mine, and said, “Which one will you be purchasing?”

He tucked his tail between his legs and bought the metal one. I pulled up a thin layer of friendliness as I rang him up but he had the chastened air of a man who just ran straight into an iron pole.

Another time a man crawled up onto a tempurpedic and thrusted into an invisible partner. He gave a cocky look over his shoulder, sure that he was going to discomfit me as he asked, “How are these babies for fucking?”

I gave him a deadpan look and and said, “That depends on if you’re someone who has to rely on the bounce of springs for your thrusts. Memory foam beds are nicer on knees and joints for positions like doggy style but they absorb a lot of kinetic energy.”

He visibly deflated and got down off the bed with a vaguely ashamed air.

He bought a spring mattress.

#I’m in tears…… he bought the spring mattress…….

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reikunrei · 9 hours

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House of Leaves and the Creel Mansion

Since we now know the Creel house second floor was intentionally labyrinthine, I think it's time we discuss something that's been weighing on me for a while.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

For anyone who doesn't already know, House of Leaves is a book about a man who is finds a manuscript about an old house in Virginia, a house which is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. It's told through a couple different plots, past and present, which swap back and forth. When I describe them, I'm going to keep them separated. However, Danielewski does very much swap past with present over and over throughout the book to create this understanding of descent into madness.

The Navidson Record is the seemingly fictional manuscript written by a man named Zampanó about the house and the horrors that reside within it. Some details about Zampanó before we get started: He went blind in the 1950's, and is known by the community as "eccentric" and crazy.

The Navidson Record follows a group of people: Will Navidson: Protagonist, a war veteran Karen Green: Will's partner/wife Chad Navidson: Will's son (older sibling to Daisy) Daisy Navidson: Will's daughter (younger sibling to Chad) Tom Navidson: Will's estranged twin brother Billy Reston: Will's friend, and an engineer brought in to help explain the physics of the house Holloway Roberts: Head of the team that takes on exploring the house (Some familiar names already, but let's leave that aside)

The story begins when the Navidsons return home from a vacation to find that their house has spawned a new room. Will makes the discovery that his house is bigger on the inside than should be physically possible, and calls his brother in to help. The new room keeps expanding into a labyrinth of hallways and doors. Karen tries to keep everyone from exploring, but Will can't resist. They end up bringing in a team of explorers to try and pin down exactly what's going on, at which time Karen discovers that compasses don't work on the property.

The exploration team gets trapped trying to find the bottom of the labyrinth, and Will goes in to save them. This is when things start getting fucky. Not only does reality splinter for Will, but the book starts to splinter too.

Literally.

There's a monster at the bottom of the stairs (a "minotaur"), and it wreaks havoc by creating chaos within the team, which leads to a good deal of friendly-fire damage.

Eventually, Karen gets fed up with her family being in danger, and she decides to take them and leave. This angers the house, which collapses into a void to try and trap the family inside of it. Everyone but Will's twin brother (Tom) escape, and go as far from the house as they can. Tom's death is described as the floor of the house becoming like a treadmill, meaning no matter how fast he ran, he could not escape the imploding structure.

Will, however, decides to remain with the house after his escape...only to find it completely restored. He enters the house, and essentially vanishes off the face of the Earth. That is...until Karen comes looking for him, determined to stay until she finds him. She can hear his voice echoing within the house, but only she can hear him. No cameras pick the sound up. She uses his voice to track him down.

Will, meanwhile, is hopelessly lost in the depths of the labyrinth. He finds that no matter which way he turns, he can only go downward.

Karen does eventually find Will, and he's near death in the darkness, and loses parts of his body to frostbite.

The house itself dissolves once they escape, and they get their happy ending.

That's one of the plots.

Johnny's story is set in the late 1980s to early 1990's, (around 1987 forward), and it follows Johnny Truant, the man who finds Zampanó's manuscript. He tries over and over again to piece it all together and figure out just what happened to this family, and figure out whether or not it's real. Along the way he becomes obsessed, lost in the mystery of the house. He loses track of reality multiple times and decides to try and track down the actual house. Along the way, he supposedly blacks out and kills two people. However, no one's sure that he actually did, since the dates in his journal don't line up properly. They loop and tell very different stories in each version. He encounters hallucinations of inhuman monsters, though we're not actually sure what's real and what isn't by that point. It's a shitshow. The Navidson Record has essentially driven him mad. Johnny returns to us years later, as he finds people studying House of Leaves, complete with his own footnotes about the story.

So...what about the Creels?

The set design/3D model team have confirmed that they've made the second floor of the Creel house into a maze. Alice describes is as something out of a dream or fairytale. Considering that the house's original structure is a fairly straightforward single hallway with a branch on either end:

It stands to reason that in order to create a labyrinth inside it...it must be larger inside than outside.

The design aspect of the Creel house is a direct reference to House of Leaves, which uses a supernatural, physics-defying and time-warping labyrinth within a house as a representation of trauma, shame, the desire to protect one's secrets, the necessity of facing one's trauma, and the need to address the roots of one's shame to overcome it.

This ties into the Brenner's reference to Henry/Vecna/001 "hiding in the darkness", which is much like how both Will Byers in canon and Will Navidson in House of Leaves are lost in/hiding in the darkness, the darkness being one's shame and trauma (see also: "the shame was on the other side). Not only that, but the darkness in House of Leaves is very cold, empty, and desolate, much like the Upside down. Will Navidson, Will Byers, and Vecna are all found in this dark, cold place, either near death or (in Vecna's case) monstrously transformed in pursuit of survival.

Zampanó being both blind and mad, as well as being the writer of The Navidson Record, is almost giving Victor Creel and his retelling of the Creel massacre. Vecna is also blinded in one eye after his fight with El, which involved a retelling of his time in the house, and is arguably off his rocker. Something about unreliable narration and showing the untold parts of a story. This aspect requires more chewing on.

Anyway, the power of love and community support is a massive theme in the ending of The Navidson Record. Karen Green's love for and dedication to Will Navidson is what saves him from the dark depths of the house's labyrinth, similarly to the way Joyce's love and dedication saves Will from the Upside Down in Season 1...and Mike's love forand dedication to Will saves him from the Mindflayer in Season 2. This is, of course, creating a pattern which I wholeheartedly believe will be instrumental in Vecna's defeat in ST5. Love saves, love defeats. The house dissolves when Karen Green saves Will Navidson from its depths. The Creel house in the Right-Side Up is already "dissolved" as a result of the rifts, but it's only half the story of Henry/Vecna/001's trauma. I'd be willing to bet HNL gets consumed near the end of Season 5 as Hawkins finally heals from the whole debacle.

(There's also a reference in Max's death, since while she may be lost in the darkness, she was saved by El's love as a result of the exploded Creel house/Vecna's mind lair dissolving around them.)

(Adjacent, but visually linked: The house imploding as a result of the Navidsons' escape attempt feels similar to the destroyed house in Vecna's mind lair, given that in reality both houses remain in their original state.)

It seems to me that Season 4, especially with the movement between past and present plot lines, is overall a direct reference to House of Leaves.

Much like Johnny's story and The Navidson Record, we too are flipping back and forth in time with overlaps of present and past that are near incomprehensible at times. As such, even the format of the work is the same. We as the viewer experience the 1980's cast trying to piece together exactly what went on in the Creel house as told secondhand by largely unreliable outside sources. The reader experiences Johnny trying to piece together what happened in the Navidson house as told secondhand by largely unreliable sources. This is why we have no omniscient narrator, or even clear, singular main character. Both are ensemble stories told through the lens of a film/manuscript in the form of a puzzle.

As such, we're left to contend with incomplete memories, unreliable narration, and assumptions that characters take as fact (which we, then, have been tasked with recognizing as non-factual). The Duffers have explicitly stated that Stranger Things is a puzzle which we are meant to solve. We are the reader experiencing Johnny Truant's experience of the house.

The Duffers, I feel, are employing this type of story format in ST4 specifically for us to reach the conclusion that as of the end of E9, we don't know what happened, what's happening, or what will happen. Especially in The NINA Project, it's being used to tell us that perhaps we've lost touch with reality, though perhaps less in the form of psychosis and more literally in the form of multiple realities.

A touch of speculation, as usual:

Given the above mess, The Navidson Record definitely seems to run in parallel to the pieced-together timeline of the Creels' backstory, even more so should timeline theory pan out.

The biggest speculative parallel for me, here, is in Johnny's story. He supposedly commits two murders in a violent blackout, but the strange time-looping in his journal makes it hard to say whether he actually did or not. This is very much giving The NINA Project, not only in El's "did she, didn't she" about the massacre, but in Henry's "did he, didn't he" about both the 1979 HNL massacre and the 1959 Creel massacre. We can't tell, because the story changes every time you find a new detail. There very well could be a version of reality where El did it, where Henry/Edward did it, or something else entirely did it (staring at the smeared blood that looks like it came from a Demogorgon attack rather than Henry/Edward's relatively bloodless killing style).

Another one comes from backtracking the Navidson twins story to Henry and Edward. Like Will and Tom Navidson in the house, Henry and Edward experience the darkness first as a result of HNL. Tom, the twin brother, succumbs to the darkness as a result of the house. Edward, the timeline twin, succumbs to the darkness as a result of HNL. However, the other twin (Will, Henry) escapes the darkness, only to plunge back into it in search of truth, wholeness, and freedom..which leads to that twin becoming lost in the darkness.

There's also Tom's death in the house as compared to Eddie Munson's death in the Upside Down, which may come back to haunt us in regard to Edward Creel, who is most likely an alternate timeline twin to Henry. Both Tom and Edward are the first to succumb to the darkness. Granted, Tom doesn't have supernatural healing abilities like Edward. So, a physical death may translate to a death of the self in response to prolonged trauma, as Vecna has become one with the darkness of the Upside Down. He hasn't faced his problems and healed, but instead remains trapped and decays into a self-acknowledged monster (all while refusing to take responsibility for his behavior, shifting the blame for his current state onto El). In fighting his trauma, he has succumbed to it, much the same as Tom running on the treadmill floor of the house.

This twin pattern may or may not repeat for Will and this alternate version of himself which seems to appear multiple times throughout Seasons 1 and 2 (brown-eyed Will vs green-eyed Will, Will found in HNL vs Will found in a cabin in the woods, Nancy telling Murray his timeline is wrong, etc) and El and her alternate (the NINA bloodstain madness, brown-eyed El vs green-eyed El, the different Brenners, etc.) I don't know, but I'd be willing to bet that one set of Willel are twins, and the other El is Mike's cousin via the Creels. There may be a repeating pattern here, since we never see brown-eyed Will outside Season 1, or green-eyed El outside of Season 1 or the NINA Project. Truly, I could not tell you if this pattern repeats with them. The Navidson Record may pertain solely to the Creels, I don't know.

As a final parting tidbit, I would also recommend this album to any Creel enthusiasts:

It's a House of Leaves-centric concept album which acts as a counterpart to the novel. (Fun fact: Danielewski is Poe's brother! THey're Annie and Marke Danielewski) The album centers around love, childhood trauma, and mental illness.

It's so incredibly good, and so incredibly Creel/HNL 1979 coded.

I've got a collection of my fave sets of lyrics below the cut (beware...there are many, and it's all in picture format)