How Bad Do Things Have to Get Before the People of Hawkins Join Me and My Ragtag Group of Friends in Fighting the Upside Down?
Things are looking pretty bleak for Hawkins. Vecna’s abducting students in broad daylight. The U.S. Army is here to “restore order” and capture Eleven. The Upside Down has overrun us in more directions than we can clock, with huge, fiery chasms running up every road, hill, and building.
Maybe I could understand the indifference when one kid went missing, and even when another one went missing, and then again for a third time. But by the time the Mind Flayer had massacred and absorbed almost three dozen residents into a humongous biomass, I found myself exhausted from reminding people that the Upside Down is hell-bent on permanently consolidating its control over the collective Hive Mind.
When will the citizens of Hawkins stop and realize that the Mind Flayer and his network of Demogorgons, creeping vines, and tyrannical sadists like Vecna have been planning their coup for decades and that it might take more than a group of traumatized high schoolers to stop this?
“Things like this always happen,” grown-ups say. Every few years, a new evil inflicts pain upon our town and in that way, things balance out. Lots of them even seem to welcome the chaos, like this is what they voted for.
But don’t they get that this isn’t just your run-of-the-mill curse-casting demon that will eventually give up terrorizing everyday Americans and instead go on a comic convention tour? That once the Upside Down engulfs our town completely, there’s no going back? Hawkins as we once knew it will be unrecognizable beneath the drifting ash, swarms of Demobats, and the blood-colored sky hanging over us ominously like a giant red TRUMP 2028 hat.
My friends and I have always seen the Upside Down for what it is—an existential threat to Hawkins, our way of life, and our lives themselves—not unlike, say, a corrupt, authoritarian demagogue in the White House. But the residents of Hawkins seem unwilling to accept a supernatural explanation for all of the Demodoguery. Sure, many think the town is cursed or that “the devil lives here in Hawkins.” Most, however, seem to think it’s hyperbolic to say that when, oh, a few kids go missing or Starcourt Mall gets blown up, that it’s anything more than “business as usual.” As if we have some kind of Hellfire Derangement Syndrome.
There have been times when fighting feels pointless—but maybe Hawkins will still be okay, I’ve tried to rationalize.
Yeah. Sure.
And maybe the Mind Flayer is actually some kind of very stable genius that has our best interests at heart. Maybe behind that crazy makeup, Vecna has a really great plan for the economy, and that with all the people he’s rounding up off the streets, property prices in Hawkins will finally be affordable. Maybe the toxic air of the Upside Down’s atmosphere really will make us manlier. Maybe food will be less expensive because the Demogorgons will be eating so many people so there’s more supply and less demand. And in any event, if our investment portfolios grow, maybe we won’t care anyway.
I wish I knew this all wrapped up in eight tidy episodes. That in short order, Hawkins would go back to being a normal, boring, all-American town–but that’s not how the real world works. Besides, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from D&D—and Lucas’s badass little sister—it’s to never give up, even when your hit points are running out. ‘Cause if we don’t, eventually we’ll all end up on the floor of a trailer, our limbs mangled and eyes gouged out while the culprit redecorates the Creel House.
Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be in the Hawkins High gym handing out pamphlets about resisting the pull of interdimensional portals while the mayor holds another press conference insisting that it’s safe to go to the homecoming dance.
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Kate Chrisman is an American writer in Berlin, Germany. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Belladonna, and Points in Case. She’s been called a “millennial snowflake.” You can find her online at www.katerchrisman.com
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Alice Phillips is a Reductress headline contributor with short humor in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Points in Case, and elsewhere. She lives in South Carolina.
