#mike should be like at the top of vecnas kill list

[givehimthemedicine]

Big(ish) Analysis 4 (it's shorter than the rest I promise)

I have a huge question about gravity, mirrors, and El having seen the Upside Down prior to 1x1

you know how we have some fun in S4 playing with reversed gravity when the gang climbs through Chrissy's gate? I was like "haha, how would they have reconciled the gravity situation if the gang came out through one of the other gates in a wall?" and then I realized - none of the s4 gates were in walls.

Chrissy: ceiling. Fred: ground. Patrick: ground. Max: floor.

if Max had died in either of the places Vecna tried unsuccessfully to kill her, she still would've made another ceiling or floor gate.

Vecna only makes vertical gates. while all the gates we've ever seen previously - El's and the laser ones - were made in walls and therefore horizontal.

is that important? I think it's potentially world-endingly important.

there's sooo much mirror imagery associated with Henry, and it's no coincidence that gates act like mirrors.

imagine a mirror hanging on a wall, if you could step into it - you could walk in there just fine, the room would look backwards, but gravity would remain the same.

hang a mirror on the ceiling, though, and the room flips upside down, reversing gravity. ditto a mirror on the floor. exactly how Chrissy's gate and water gate work. I'll come back to this.

we're shown without a doubt that season 4's Upside Down is literally upside down.

but was The Upside Down upside down in 1-3?

we were given a couple of camera-rotating-upside-down shots, like when Hopper and Joyce start walking around in the UD. but there's much stronger evidence the 1-3 UD was not upside down:

when the gang climbs through the Chrissy gate in 4x7, the gravity reverse takes effect before they've even passed all the way through. Once Robin's center mass hits the midway point, she just falls the rest of the way.

compare to 1x4 and 2x2 when they show us lab guys stepping into the (horizontal) mother gate. if it was upside down in there, we should see both start to fall up before the membrane seals around them. one guy is even attached to a wire that should fly up to the top of the hole as soon as he gravity-flips in there. it never does:

we also saw El and Nancy go through demogorgon portals with no gravity reversal, and Will looking through the portal in his living room wall was rightside up.

unless someone can point out evidence that those rotating shots are more than symbolic due to the name, I'm pretty ready to say 1-3 UD was not depicted as literally gravity-reversed.

and if that's true, it leaves me with a humongous question:

if the Upside Down wasn't upside down until 1986, why did El describe it as upside down in 1983?

El wasn't the one who named The Upside Down, as I hear so often in fanon. all El said was "upside down." she wasn't saying it as a name. Mike ran with it as a name.

listen to the context of the boys' conversation before she says it. she's not interjecting "fellows, allow me to inform you that the place you're discussing is called The Upside Down™."

she just says "upside down" while they're listing adjectives Will had said (cold, dark, empty). her vocabulary is very limited and very literal. she's adding to the description of the place, not naming it.

if she knows what it looks like, it means she's seen it.

the only parade-raining-on answer I can think of is if El's remote viewing somehow shows her that stuff in the UD is flipped. but there was no gravity issue shown when she visited Will and Barb in the UD in the void, so I kinda feel like not? and she can't be referring to the '79 gate because she didn't see through it, and doesn't remember that anyway.

either by piggybacking, time fuckery wherein young El saw the future or past, or by the existence of another gate we don't know about... something... this kid has clearly seen more than we know.

maybe the gravity reverse is key to taking over other worlds

Vecna's 4 gates join, making one humongous X shaped gate into this gravity-reversed world. X gate will undoubtedly want to keep spreading like the mother gate did. what happens to two opposite-gravity worlds when the gate connecting them spreads so big that there's not enough separating them? at some point it will all just *CRUNCH*.

sounds like a great way for one dimension to take over another, no? to absorb it, like Henry absorbing his victims?

Brenner explains it pretty plainly (btw how does he already know this?🤨)

you know all those floating rocks in the yellow UD wasteland? gravity's screwy in there, apparently. it reminds me of the debris of one shattered planet orbiting another after a collision.

is the yellow UD a serial dimension-eater, and those rocks are the remains of whatever other other world it most recently absorbed?

what if that mirrored double-horizon red hellscape was something to do with those two worlds in the process of colliding? and then the yellow-floating-rocks wasteland is the result? we aren't given much idea of how much time passed in between.

utterly spitballing here, absolutely not a hill I'm dying on, but:

what if the wasteland/hellscape UD and UD Hawkins are in fact not the same place remodeled, but two (or three?) worlds or dimensions or whatever that both exist concurrently with RU Hawkins (in addition to however many more, theoretically).

if these are all separate places, theoretically that means you could open gates between any or all combinations of them.

what if you could have a gate open between UD and RU Hawkins (mother gate), AND a gate open between yellow UD and RU Hawkins (Rainbow gate), AND a gate open between yellow UD and UD Hawkins (theoretical gate through which the Mind Flayer got from yellow UD to UD Hawkins. I think it could do that; we saw it reach through the gate to try to get El)

and if all three such gates were open at the same time... could dimension 1 sort of reach through dimension 2 and grab dimension 3 and try to pull it through like a crochet hook?

more about gates and gravity

the 4 UD map must have to wrap around like an Escher drawing to connect gates sandwiching the RU into one single "map" - and I know this is fiction and to a certain degree we just have to play along.

but s4 clearly demonstrated that watergate and Chrissygate connected to the same "map," and so, presumably, did the others. if all these gates lead to the same place, does it make sense to have some gravity flip and others not?

here's all known gates, separated by "batches" to posit that once an initial gate is opened, all the other ones that open at the same time seem to obey the gravity established by it.

Rainbow (Sep 8, '79): horizontal (to be fair, I don't know wtf to call the gravity situation in there.) - Mother (Nov 6, '83 - Nov 5, '84): horizontal. demonstrably rightside up. Classroom (Nov 12, '83): horizontal. probably rightside up. Russia (June 28, '84): horizontal. probably rightside up. - Starcourt (June 28-July 4, '85): horizontal. probably rightside up. - Chrissy (Mar 21, '86): vertical. demonstrably upside down. Fred (whatever. you get it): vertical. probably upside down. Patrick: vertical. demonstrably upside down. Max: vertical. probably upside down.

we haven't been shown normal-gravity and reversed-gravity gates open at the same time.

is this evidence that gravity stays consistent with whichever way the initial gate establishes it? or, evidence of 1-3 UD Hawkins not being the same one as 4 at all? I know some of you think this already and I'd love to hear more evidence on that.

a final crackpot idea to wrap this up - help me on with my straitjacket -

pondering the idea of piggybacking, or time/memory fuckery enabling El to have seen an upside down Upside Down somehow before 1x1.

when have we seen an event in the past that, every other time it happened, created a vertical gate?

and we know gates leave scars. and I know this ceiling is all cracked by '86 just for disrepair reasons but.. (this shot conveniently doesn't show us the exact spot where Virginia died, or "died", but you see my idea)

and you know how gravity is also screwy in the mind lair version of the Creel house, looking like it's in the process of exploding? almost like a mind-gate is spreading and destroying it outwards. I wonder what the origin point could be?

anyway the part of this post I'm really interested in is the El part, so please talk to me about that. the end!

#I'm forever shaking El by the shoulders screaming WHAT DO YOU KNOW #and I know there's some doubt about Virginia having actually died but. you see where I'm going #creel house #they went to the trouble of putting a camera in the microfilm reader cabinet just to give us one upside down mirror shot #while Nancy and Robin are reading about the Creel murders. hmmmmm #analysis #mine #givehimthemedicine analysis #big analysis #how the upside down works #the dimension-eating part is the one I'm least interested in tbh so I'm really half assing this to keep the post shorter