An alternate dimension existing in parallel to the human world. It contains the same locations and infrastructure as the human world, but it is much darker, colder, obscured by an omnipresent fog, and no humans exist there.

• Alien Kudzu: Most of the Upside Down's ruined buildings and trees are covered in disgusting fungal/fleshy "vines" that can even spread out into Hawkins if connected through a Gate (like the one underneath Hawkins National Laboratory and the ones briefly created by the Demogorgon).
• All There in the Manual:
  • invoked The Duffer Brothers apparently have an entire 30-page document that intricately explains the Upside Down and all of its inhabitants. They've stated that they want to give most of the details to the audience through the perspective of the characters as they themselves learn so as to preserve the mystery & horror around the place, but won't give the audience everything so as to keep some stuff as Riddles for the Ages. Furthermore, they've stated that they're quite willing to deviate from their current "rules" for the Upside Down if they deem it necessary for the story as the show goes on.
  • The location's canonical name is "The Nether". However, that name is never used by any of the characters, and has only been utilized in supplementary material.
  • The script for Episode 9 of Season 4 and comments by Chris Trujillo reveal that the realm that One was banished to by Eleven and discovered the Mind Flayer and Demogorgons in is called Dimension X, and is separate from the Upside-Down—which is a pocket dimension combining aspects of Earth and Dimension X that was created when El touched the Demogorgon. This is eventually reaffirmed in the second half of Season 5, where it's revealed that the Upside-Down is actually a wormhole bridging Dimension X (which the characters dub the Abyss) and Earth.
• Alternate Universe: In Season 4, Nancy discovers that the Upside Down only resembles Hawkins exactly as it looked the night Will Byers went missing. But interestingly, flashbacks involving Vecna show that Vecna first travelled through an inhospitable, formless void without any structures, then landed in a desolate world resembling a mountainous desert, populated with demogorgons. Season 5 would reveal that the Upside Down is actually a physical wormhole between Earth and Dimension X, the world Vecna ended up in, and it was created the day Eleven first summoned the Demogorgon. Apparently, the dimension simply made a facsimile of Hawkins' environment as it looked that day, as while everything from cars to personal journals have duplicates here, when the Exotic Matter that holds it together is damaged, the nearby environment begins to melt into white waxy goo.
• Always Night: The sky, let alone the Sun, is never seen in the Upside Down during Season 1, with the region perpetually shrouded in a dense fog and darkness (aside from a few streetlights and the glow from some flickering machines, like those seen in the arcade). While Season 2 does show us more of the sky, it's portrayed as perpetually stormy with only arcs of red lightning and the Mind Flayer visible in the darkness. Season 5 would reveal that there isn't a sky, but rather, above them is the 'underside' to Dimension X, and the Upside Down is merely a wormhole between the two worlds.
• Ambiguously Evil: Season 4 indicates that all of the Upside Down's incursions into Hawkins have more or less been at the prompting of Vecna, a human serial killer that was banished there by Eleven. As far as we know the Upside Down had no interest in Earth or any of its inhabitants until Vecna started to manipulate its creatures, casting some doubt onto just how malicious the proto-Mind Flayer or the Demogorgons were before they became hooked to the Hive Mind of a nihilistic murderer with the psychic powers to force them to follow his will. Stranger Things: The First Shadow adds more to it by revealing the Mind Flayer was the one who manipulated Vecna, not the other way around, indicating that the Mind Flayer itself was always an evil expansionist entity and everything else has always been enslaved by it.
• Atomic Hate: Not a literal case, but the Upside Down has some thematic elements lifted from the common ideas associated with a nuclear holocaust. Notably, the Upside Down generally looks like a blasted atomic wasteland (albeit one covered in fungus and Alien Kudzu), and the constantly drifting spores in the air even looking like falling radioactive ash. Additionally, the place has a higher environmental radiation count than what is normally seen on Earth. Quite appropriate for a series taking place during the height of the Cold War, isn't it?
• Black Site: Becomes home to Dr. Kay's military base in Season 5, where she attempts to restart Brenner's experiments in creating psychic children.
• Dark Is Evil: As befitting a Dark World, of course, with the place being Always Night as just the tip of the iceberg in terms of creepiness. Season 4 further reveals that it is suffused with "shadow particles" (which Vecna used to shape the Mind Flayer presumably at its behest), and overall everything associated with this realm carries gothic themes of depression and decay in opposition to happy memories and brightness.
• Dark World: The Upside Down mimics the geography and infrastructure of the real world, but covered in perpetual darkness and decay, with any buildings severely dilapidated and covered in Meat Moss. The Upside Down specifically mirrors the night Will went missing. Before then it didn't exist, and was formed from exotic matter from Dimension X when Eleven unknowingly linked their worlds.
• Deadly Gas: The Hawkins Lab indicated that the atmosphere of the Upside Down is not meant for humans to breathe nor be exposed to for long periods of time, and Will himself barely seems to have survived when he's saved at the end of Season 1. In later seasons however, Steve, Robin, Eddie, Nancy and Dustin are shown walking through and breathing in the Upside Down without showing any negative effects, and in Season 5 the military have built full-scale active outposts within, indicating that either the aforementioned issues were overblown, retconned out, or prolonged connection to 'our' world has allowed the environment to become more hospitable to humans. In Part 2 of Season 5, Vickie asks if it's safe to breathe in the atmosphere, with Robin replying that that's unclear.
• Death World: In hindsight, it's downright miraculous that Will Byers survived on his own for an entire week when he was stuck here. First off, scientists at Hawkins National Laboratory claim that the Upside Down's atmosphere is toxic and even lethal with prolonged exposure (at least claimed as such early on) and the environment is also generally more radioactive in comparison to that found on Earth. Furthermore, no bodies of liquid water have ever been found there (fresh water or otherwise), the world is covered in a freezing Always Night and shrouded in perpetual fog, and the closest thing to "living" organic matter seen in the Upside Down outside of the Demogorgon (and the rest of its species) is a toxic Meat Moss/Alien Kudzu covering virtually everything. Even worse, that aforementioned Alien Kudzu becomes Combat Tentacles when threatened. And of course, that's not even getting into its new inhabitants all consisting of highly predatory monsters under the command of an actively malevolent Hive Mind.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In Season 1, the scientists at Hawkins National Laboratory note that the Upside Down's atmosphere is lethal to humans, and that anyone is in danger of dying if they remain exposed to the radioactive area for an extended period of time (granted we never saw either Will or Nancy suffering any of these negative effects during their time there). By the time of Season 4 however, several members of the main cast are able to traverse through the Upside Down without any problems with breathing in the air around them. This gets lampshaded in the penultimate episode of the series. After entering the Upside Down, Vickie asks if the air is safe to breathe and Robin nonchalantly says they're still not entirely sure.
• Eldritch Location: It's a very strange dimension seemingly filled with nothing but Eldritch Abominations. Time is frozen to November 6th, 1983, and the sky is covered in a perpetual storm where red lightning flashes at regular intervals.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold: The place is frequently described as "cold and dark," and Weak to Fire seems to be the only consistent weakness shared by the Upside Down's inhabitants.
• Genius Loci: Season 2 all but states that the entire dimension and its inhabitants are linked into the Hive Mind of the Mind Flayer, but who is revealed to be actually Vecna... or rather, it's using Vecna as a host body according to The First Shadow.
• Homage: invoked Word of God has stated that the Upside Down's overall design was heavily inspired by the Xenomorph hives in Alien, the Otherworld of Silent Hill, the results of the Cordyceps fungus from The Last of Us, and the works of FromSoftware / Hidetaka Miyazaki (Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Bloodborne). Season 5 reveals that the Upside-Down is a pocket dimension serving as a bridge between Earth and Dimension X.
• In Name Only: Not the dimension itself, but its inhabitants. They tend to get names related to Dungeons & Dragons, but similarities tend to only be surface level, and based entirely on the characters' attempt to give a name based on what they know.
• Meat Moss: A disgusting fungus-like fleshy substance covers nearly everything in the Upside Down. Season 4 later reveals that this substance is actually part of the Mind Flayer and his hive mind.
• Merged Reality:
  • The finale of Season 4 shows that Vecna's success in opening up the Gate using the deaths of Chrissy, Freddy, Patrick and Max allows him to start merging the Upside Down with the real world, starting with Hawkins.
  • Season 5 reveals that Vecna's ultimate goal is to use the Upside Down (which is revealed to not be an Alternate Dimension but the Pocket Dimension within a wormhole) in order to draw together and merge Earth with the actual alternate reality he lives in, a wasteland they call the Abyss, but is properly referred to as Dimension X.
  • The aforementioned reveal also more-or-less makes it clear that the Upside Down itself is something of a micro version of this; while its a facsimile of Hawkins as it looked the night Eleven summoned the Demogorgon made of exotic matter, the Demogorgons, Alien Kudzu Meat Moss, and the Mind Flayer itself originate from Dimension X.
• Mordor: Season 4 reveals that the Upside Down wasn't always a Death World version of Hawkins, but was actually part of a hellish, mountainous wasteland known as Dimension X, filled with supernatural lightning and floating rocks. Season 5 further makes it clear that actually, the Upside Down didn't exist and wasn't truly formed until Eleven first made contact with the Demogorgon; Dimension X is a separate realm they dub 'the Abyss', which still resembles the yellow-tinged Mordor that Henry/Vecna found himself, and the Upside Down is a separate facimile of Hawkins formed as a wormhole between the two worlds.
• More Predators Than Prey: Every example of Upside Down fauna we have seen appear to be aggressive carnivores. The Mind Flayer is a possible exception, but only because it is so alien in its biology it is difficult to apply such definitions to it. Given the latter, its entirely possible that any prey species have simply been reshaped to its liking.
• No Biochemical Barriers: Zig-zagged. The Demogorgons are native to the Upside Down, yet are capable of traversing the real world as well whenever they're able to get in. Meanwhile, the Mind Flayer is only able to enter our own world by constructing an avatar made of human bodies (though some small portions of its particulates do enter in order to actually do the Flaying needed to make this avatar). For humans, the atmosphere of the Upside Down is supposedly toxic, which is shown with Will being barely alive when Joyce manages to finally rescue him in Season 1, however, this slowly becomes an Informed Attribute as other humans are able to traverse it without suffering any negative consequences, which might simply be a result of how long its been exposed to our world. It's lampshaded in the last season when Vickie, upon first entering it, asks if the air is safe to breathe, to which Robin replies, "we're not sure".
• Nothing Is Scarier: Initially, very little is known about this alternate dimension, and that just makes it all the scarier. invoked The Duffer Brothers have said that they do have details of the area planned out, but are only going to reveal it a little bit at a time. And even then, they're not going to reveal everything.
• Our Wormholes Are Different: In Season 5, Dustin discovers that the Upside Down is actually a wormhole that links Hawkins to a parallel dimension which he calls the Abyss, the actual home of the Demogorgons and the Mind Flayer. Along the perimeter of the Upside Down is a wall of fleshy matter which separates the interior from an interstellar void.
• Prison Dimension: Though not necessarily by design, Eleven is capable of using it to seal away (the man who would later become) Vecna... for a while, anyway.
• Shout-Out: Aside from the above-mentioned Homages, the Upside Down was heavily inspired by the works of the Polish painter Zdzislaw Beksinski, whose works invoked the Duffer Brothers described as often depicting (to them) "...an otherworldly, hellish world, surrounded by a thin layer of something we can't quite make out."
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: The Demogorgons are dangerous, but for the most part are no more malicious than any other predator (and are enslaved by the Mind Flayer's Hive Mind). The Mind Flayer takes things up a notch by displaying a clear sense of malice, wanting to cause destruction for its own sake. Vecna is (in a way) even worse than the Mind Flayer in that he's committed to his villainy on a philosophical level and while the Mind Flayer went straight to murder and torture, Vecna gets inside his victim's heads to make the last moments of their lives a living hell (though it should be noted that the Mind Flayer instilled this personality in him).
• Tentacle Rope: The vines in the tunnel which almost kill Hopper.
• The Virus: Around the Gates linking the Upside Down and Hawkins, the Meat Moss covering most of the former has been shown spreading out into the latter, corrupting and destroying everything it touches. Even worse, the resultant Alien Kudzu can act as Combat Tentacles if threatened.
• Weak to Fire: Fire seems to be the only reliable counter against the creatures of the Upside Down, with it even being used to help stem the spread of The Virus into Hawkins. While it seems to avoid water, it's not a reliable repellant, as the Flayed shower and ice bathe themselves just fine, and Vecna is able to open a submerged gate.

The Shadow Monster, a.k.a. "The Mind Flayer"

^{Click here to see its final form (MASSIVE FINALE SPOILERS)} "Find me."

Debut: "Chapter One: MADMAX" (2x01)

An enormous monster of immense power that serves as the primary will driving every living thing in the Upside Down.

• Achilles' Heel: In the series finale, the Mind Flayer's physical form is a gigantic spider-like kaiju that the party would have no hope of defeating on their own, but it's also bound to Vecna, who is much smaller and still mortal despite it all. Thus most of the party lay down fire on the Mind Flayer itself while Will and El use their psychic powers on Vecna, effectively doubling the damage. When Vecna is killed, the physical Mind Flayer also goes still.
• Aliens Are Bastards: A malevolent extradimensional entity which is attempting a hostile takeover of our realm through horrific means.
• Ambiguous Gender:
  • Will refers to the Mind Flayer as "he", meaning it either identifies as male or this is simply how Will makes sense of its existence and connection with him. It's very likely the latter, as all the other characters (unless talking about it with Will) refer to the creature as "it", it is a hive mind of several entities and is also described as a "virus", which typically lack gender, and the Duffers have stated its true nature is impossible to comprehend.
  • In addition, in the after-show, Beyond Stranger Things, the Mind Flayer is referred to interchangeably as "he" or "it", suggesting either its gender is weirder than we understand, "he" is simply a sort of nickname, or it's up to audience interpretation.
  • Further complicating matters is that in Season 3, the sole time we hear it speak for itself in Eleven's vision, it refers to itself with plural pronouns such as "we" and "us" after beginning its monologue by using "me and "I," singular pronouns. In the early stages of Billy's Flaying, however, Billy hallucinates Heather telling him to "Bring me to him", twisting this into a full circle.
  • Season 5 adds in the twist that the Mind Flayer and Henry Creel mentally combined on some level, implying that both the sporadic gendering as male and the plural pronouns are the result of their fusion.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • In the Season 4 finale, it's presented that the Mind Flayer was nothing more than an amorphous black cloud before One gave it its spider-like shape. At the time it was unclear if One took control of it and the Mind Flayer (and all of the monsters within its Hive Mind) was acting as an extension of his will, or whether the Mind Flayer somehow contacted him from beyond the veil — One as a child drawing it as a spider — and caused his Start of Darkness, thereby making Vecna its Unwitting Pawn. This also called into question whether it had any will or agency of its own, or was just an Almighty Idiot that One imprinted his personality onto, given their similar worldviews. In Season 4, Will Byers and Vecna himself state that Vecna is the Mind Flayer, his mind and malice puppeteering the shadow creature form, but Stranger Things: The First Shadow retcons and shines a bit more light on this—and without almost any ambiguity outright confirms the latter. From the moment Henry disappeared and ended up in Dimension X, he's been under the Mind Flayer's corrupting influence. Not only that, but Brenner knew the whole time and actively nudged Henry into giving in to the darkness, even seeing him kill and torture animals as a proactive way to go about it, knowing full well that it was making him more powerful by the second. Turns out Dustin's theory about Vecna being the Flayer's general was right on the money. That said, its still a little unclear if its current form was given to it by Vecna, or is its true form, though it's worth noting that it took that very same appearance in The First Shadow, indicating that it later revealed said form to Vecna years later when he reached out to it.
  • Whether its colossal body in the Abyss is actually its real body or just its latest construct is not revealed in the show itself. Unlike its avatar in Season 3 it at least has a functional biology, and the resemblance it bears to the Demogorgons suggests it is either its original form or that the construct was made up of the bodies of every other organic lifeform in the Abyss. The showrunners ultimately confirmed that it was indeed the original physical form that the Mind Flayer built for itself a long time ago in order to give birth to all the other monsters, buried within the ground when the Mind Flayer no longer had use for it and returned to its true, shadowy cloud-like form.
  • Related to the above, whether or not it's actually dead by the end of the series is unclear. The death of Vecna left it without a physical body, but the shadow particles that made up the Mind Flayer still exist. They might no longer have sentience now that the Mind Flayer's heart is dead, but this is not confirmed. It may be cut off from Earth following the destruction of the Upside Down, but it doesn't appear to be fully destroyed given Dimension X still exists.
• Ancient Evil: This entity has existed long before any of the main cast. Season 5 implies that it had been trying to gain access to Earth for years beforehand, with a scientist carrying around an artifact that contained some of its particles making it clear that it always was there trying to spread throughout the multiverse.
• Arch-Enemy: To the Party and especially Eleven. At the end of Season 2, it became evidently clear that this creature is the most dangerous and most personal enemy the Party has faced for now, and in Season 3 its entire plan revolves around creating a means to end them itself.
• Assimilation Plot: The entity explains its goal as merging with everyone and destroying everything while possessing Billy.
• Ax-Crazy: A genocidal creature willing to annihilate an entire planet. When Joyce tries to kill it, the Mind Flayer-controlled Will totally loses it and starts to strangle her. When controlling Billy, it goes even crazier and proceeds to viciously brutalize the Party when they try to smoke it out in a sauna, and its last moments in its flesh form consist of a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the Party.
• Bad Boss: The Mind Flayer views its minions as mere extensions of itself, and it responds to any form of disobedience with excessive violence. This is best displayed at the end of the third season, as when Billy holds it back from killing Eleven, the Mind Flayer shifts its focus away from the Party so it can stab and impale Billy as brutally as possible out of sheer anger.
  • In Stranger Things VR, he orders Henry to brutally kill several Demodogs, dismissing them as "weak-minded creatures." He then orders Henry to take control of the survivors by systematically penetrating their minds.
• Bad Liar: It at least manages to trick the Hawkins Lab personnel into a suicidal attack through its control of Will. But the more deeply it takes control, the less it's able to pretend it's human. By the time Mike figures out what's going on, all it can do is shriek that he's lying over and over.
• Berserk Button: Try making things the slightest bit hotter than it prefers, and you won't survive much longer.
• Big Bad: From Season 2 to Season 3 and beyond, the Mind Flayer is the main antagonist of the entire series, as the monstrous overlord of the Upside Down and the Greater-Scope Villain behind the Demogorgon of Season 1. It's first properly introduced in Season 2 controlling Will and the Demodogs as part of an attempt at an Alien Invasion. Season 3 sees it continue in this role as it begins infecting people to become its "Flayed", using their corpses to create an avatar so it can get revenge on the Party (although it has to share the spotlight with the Soviet military operation in Hawkins). It then takes a backseat to Vecna in Season 4 and much of Season 5, letting Vecna be the one actively advancing its plans. The First Shadow further reveals and is fully canonized in Season 5 that it was responsible for corrupting the young Henry Creel into becoming the monstrous Vecna and acting as the Mind Flayer's proxy and "five-star general", solidifying the Mind Flayer's role as the series' true main antagonist.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Season 5's Grand Finale clarifies a great deal about the relationship with Vecna and the Mind Flayer: Henry ultimately chose to ally with the Mind Flayer, referring to it as them "needing" one another. He's the "five-star general" who advances its will, and the two ultimately merge in the finale to fight together and prove an equal final threat. The Mind Flayer remains the true main antagonist of the series, being the one who corrupted Henry into becoming Vecna.
• Big Bad Ensemble: The Mind Flayer remains the greatest threat in Season 3, but a secondary antagonistic faction is revealed in the Soviet forces who are constructing a Gate to the Upside Down.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: It is, near as can be sussed out, a hundreds-of-feet-tall sentient virus cloud that usually takes the rough shape of a five-legged spider (with three-fingered limbs) with a Xenomorph-esque head (somewhat resembling the Female MUTO from Godzilla (2014)). Also, it is connected to all living things in the Upside Down and all parts of it feel pain when one part does. This is to its advantage as it can use its Demogorgons and tentacles to retaliate.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: According to invoked Word of God, its mind is completely alien to that of any human. It doesn't seem to have any problem with Mind Rape and inflicting horrible pain, for one. The only thing that really makes it genuinely angry is heat and pain directed towards it. So, to the extent that it even has any moral agency, it seems that it breaks everything down into two categories — things that help it spread = Good, and things that stop it from spreading = Bad.
• The Chessmaster:
  • It forced Will to say he knows its weakness when it was really a trap to kill the soldiers that hurt it, and then used the lines to lead its Demogorgons back to base. In Season 3 it also nudged the flayed Tom into preventing news about its rat-related schemes from getting to the public, and while it never met the Soviets personally, it still played them like a fiddle by allowing them to keep the Gate open.
  • The Grand Finale confirms that it corrupted Henry Creel as a child, and brainwashed him into forgetting this event and believing he was born with the powers it gave him. After Henry was later banished to the Abyss, it spent the next several years morphing him into Vecna, waiting for an opportunity to connect to Hawkins and use him as its lieutenant. It kept Vecna as a silent partner at first, but later unleashed him fully after its own attempts in Season 2 and 3 had failed. This ended up throwing off the Party for an entire year, as they were convinced Vecna was the true villain of the Upside Down and put all their efforts into finding him, while forgetting about the Mind Flayer, who spent that time forwarding its grander plans.
• Child Hater: It hates just about everyone that does not serve a purpose to it, but it especially hates the younger cast members. Come Season 3, most of its hate is focused on Eleven in particular, becoming hell bent on killing her before taking over the world.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: The Demogorgon was a simple animal that only cared about food and reproduction, while the Mind Flayer is an intelligent and malevolent adversary with a highly sophisticated cross-dimensional invasion plan... which also happened to be in control of the Demogorgon.
• The Corruption: It can possess other beings and its vines cause plants on the surface to decay. Its powers seem to affect non-living objects too, as the scientists at Hawkins Lab discover that even the soil samples taken from the area react to heat exactly like the monster. It had long since existed before, having been discovered by an unnamed scientist who attempted to warn a young Henry Creel about the abomination's corrupting power, but it was too late.
• The Corrupter: Its constant possession and manipulation is the reason Henry Creel turned into the monstrous Misanthrope Supreme that is Vecna.
• Dark Is Evil: A giant, evil extra-dimensional alien out to wreak havoc on our dimension that is black-colored and associated with shadows.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Of the Eldritch Abomination. Yes, the Mind Flayer is an immensely powerful, enormously intelligent being, but because it's so powerful and thus so used to getting what it wants, it essentially has the fortitude of a toddler. It doesn't know how to deal with resistance or setbacks to its plans, only being able to throw tantrums in response. And since it's so unique and self-reliant, it has no idea how to interact with and blend into a social species like humans, to the point where it has to effectively leave its hosts on autopilot most of the time, because when it takes them over directly, it can't act in a way that doesn't immediately clue every human in to what it actually is. Furthermore, since its sheer power makes it used to easy victory, whenever it is significantly harmed, or especially defeated in one of its plans, it will launch into a full blown petty revenge mode from which it will never leave, even when the petty revenge is detrimental to its long-term goals, such as when it blows its cover when possessing Will just to get revenge on some Mooks. In short, while it is powerful and dangerous, it also showcases all the ways that existing as an Eldritch Abomination would limit a person psychologically. It thus relies on Vecna/Henry Creel/One to act as its primary proxy from Season 4 onwards, and it proves a strategic advantage, as Henry's familiarity with humans make him a much more effective tool than trying to personally take charge.
• Demonic Possession:
  • In Season 2, it infects Will with its essence, making the child its unwitting spy. The Mind Flayer also forces Will to carry out its plans, such as tricking the soldiers at Hawkins Lab into walking into a deadly ambush. The only way to expel it from Will's body is to expose him to extreme heat, in a manner very reminiscent of an exorcism. It later does the same thing to Billy, although in this case he is less of a spy and more of a proxy for the Mind Flayer, with his will being directly overridden by the creature itself.
  • The First Shadow reveals that Henry Creel was infected by its essence when he was briefly teleported to Dimension X when he was a young child. The Mind Flayer took root in his mind, attempting to take over his body and force him to kill small animals and eventually other people to grow more powerful. Henry initially tried to resist its corruption, but he eventually succumbed and became the misanthropic sociopath he was when he murdered his family.
• Didn't See That Coming: In the series finale, it sent all its forces to the Upside Down in preparation for the reality merge while Vecna had 12 children to act as psychic boosters in case Eleven, Kali, or Will fought it mind to mind. It was not prepared for the Party to actually travel to the Abyss via a radio tower and attack it and Vecna physically, leaving it without any back-up and extra vulnerable.
• Dimension Lord: It rules over Dimension X (and therefore the Upside Down) with a shadowy fist.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The words of the possessed Will and Billy in regards to the Mind Flayer have been noted to sound eerily similar to those of sexual assault victims, but it defiles its victims in all ways except in the sexual manner.
• Eldritch Abomination: It is a towering, shadowy thing that inflicts extreme Mind Rape, created and controls the Demogorgons as its foot soldiers, and may be responsible for turning the Upside Down into a desolate Eldritch Location. After learning of our world, it's trying to find purchase on Earth and xenoform it to be more hospitable for itself, starting with the town of Hawkins. The protagonists never figure out its motives for all this, but speculate that it sees itself as inherently superior to all other forms of life and thus wants to make everything like itself. In Season 3, it goes on to make itself a body out of rat and human flesh, bones and organs in semifluid form, with an enormous mouth with bone shards for teeth and numerous tentacles. When looked at in the entirety of the show, the Mind Flayer is a bizarre cloud of particles from an alternate dimension that somehow reached into the world where it was discovered by humans, and infected Henry Creel, granting him psychic powers to serve as its proxy on Earth. It has no desire but to spread into another world, and its motive for doing so is never revealed. His actual physical form, dormant in the Abyss or Dimension X (where his actual home is) is a colossal arachnid which barely recalls a much bigger (as bigger as his shadowy form) fleshy avatar it makes from rat and humans in Season 3. It happens that the Mind Flayer's shadowy form was dormant until being found by Henry Creel, who shaped it like his actual physical spider-like form. It is also canonized by The First Shadow and Season 5 that Vecna was never fully in control of it, it was always the one influencing him and allowing him to control its movements with his powers. Until Vecna managed to resurrect his dormant physical body with the 12 children, it resembled a massive tree like structure made of finger bones (actually its legs) that was called the "pain tree".
• Eldritch Transformation: In Season 3, the Mind Flayer begins infecting ordinary people and rats in Hawkins to allow itself a physical presence in our world. When it decides to take a personal hand in hunting down Eleven (the only one it perceives as a threat), it melts down and assimilates its hosts into a single horrific, arachnid-type body.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold: "Deathly" might be an overreach, but the Mind Flayer really does not like heat, and seems to like the cold. It doesn't appear to like water all that much, but an ice bath is acceptable, further lending this theory credence.
• Evil Is Petty:
  • The Mind Flayer's tendrils get damaged by humans. It uses Will to lead a squad of soldiers into an ambush as a result just because the soldiers had damaged one of its tendrils. The end of the season shows that it now wants revenge against the Party, particularly Eleven.
  • At the end of Season 3 Eleven is helpless before it and all it has to do is kill or assimilate her and its biggest threat is eliminated. Instead, it takes the time to slowly kill Billy for physically and mentally defying it, giving Joyce enough time to close the gate and sever its connection to its body. Prior to this it uses a psychic contention with El to do some Evil Gloating, tipping the Party off that it knows where they are and that its Avatar is on its way.
• Evil Learns of Outside Context: It's chilling to watch as the Mind Flayer, an entirely alien entity with initially no understanding of Earth, slowly gains more and more knowledge of human behavior and the larger situation, employing increasingly intelligent tactics as a result. It's especially frightening when the creature figures out that El and The Party are its primary opposition, learning to single them out specifically and make the kids suffer. This is seemingly subverted when the Mind Flayer is apparently revealed to be an avatar of Vecna, a former human psychic who was banished into the Upside-Down by Eleven and thus knew about Earth all along. But this is ultimately Double Subverted with the revelation that Vecna aka Henry was himself brainwashed by the Mind Flayer to begin with after coming into contact with an artifact from the Mind Flayer's dimension at a young age. It is likely that the Mind Flayer became more and more "human" the more it bonded with Henry's mind.
• Evil Overlooker: The poster for Season 2 shows the Mind Flayer looming over the cast of heroes. In the season finale, it does the exact same pose while looming over Hawkins Middle School, showing that the Mind Flayer is watching the Party and plotting its next move.
• Expy: A pretty blatant one of Pennywise, aka IT. Much like the evil clown, the Mind Flayer is a spidery, Lovecraftian creature that bullies children, has its own consciousness, and is extremely sadistic and sociopathic. Similarly, both take control of a bully and their archnemeses are a group of children. The only big difference is that the Mind Flayer has no sense of humor. Additionally, whilst the Mind Flayer embodies the alien and overpowering monstrosity that Pennywise really was behind the forms it took on, Henry/Vecna (who also happens to be the Flayer's favorite host body) embodies the human forms IT took, playing mind games and overall being the personal and emotional nemesis to the kids, taking on multiple forms to emotionally damage them and drive them deeper into despair for his own satisfaction, besides the alien and otherworldly power he is connected to. He even drags Max into a mental recreation of the Snow Ball and has the various party balloons explode into blood to drive the comparisons home. Season 5 completes the similarity, with the Mind Flayer going One-Winged Angel in an even more humongous physical spidery form that dies with its human host in Vecna, much as the Deadlights died with Pennywise.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: How the Mind Flayer creates its human minions. Shown graphically with Billy, and Heather's parents.
• The Faceless: Its Xenomorph-esque head is devoid of any features. When it takes on a flesh form it develops a mouth with two rows of "teeth".
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Dustin speculates that it views itself as superior to all other races, which could play a hand into why exactly it wants to exterminate humanity.
  • Season 3 shows that the Mind Flayer hates humanity in particular, as it expresses its desire to slaughter the entire human race out of spite for the Party defeating it in the past. The series finale reveals that Vecna's misanthropy is a direct result of the Mind Flayer's influence, as the creature bombarded him with visions of his family's darkest secrets in order to make the young Henry Creel hate humans just as much it does.
    Vecna: It showed me the truth. That this world is broken. That man is broken!
• Fatal Flaw: Underestimating humanity. In Season 2, it loses because it underestimated the idea that the person who opened the gate to its world could also close it, and in Season 3 it loses because it underestimated Billy's ability to care for other people, and Eleven's ability bring out the humanity in him.
• Faux Affably Evil: Deconstructed. It tries to act normal friendly when possessing Will and Billy. Unfortunately, it has practically no understanding of humanity's emotions or how they act, meaning that the loved ones of its victims see right through the façade.
• Final Boss: In Seasons 2 and Season 3, as well as the Soviet storyline in Season 4 via its possession of the imprisoned Demogorgons. It serves as one half of it in Season 5, with its ultimate physical form attacking the Party while Eleven fights off Vecna within its core personally.
• Flat Character: Played for Horror. While the Mind Flayer is a highly intelligent being that's shown to be sadistic, misanthropic, and downright petty, its only real goal is to simply spread its influence across as many dimensions as possible, and it only has a handful of lines across the entirety of the series, which makes the few times it shows a personality all the more terrifying.
• Forced to Watch: Makes a point out of glancing at the Party while using Billy to choke Eleven to death, implying that this was its intent.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: The arachnoid shape that it typically has is nothing more than just a form the particles that make up the shadowy cloud arrange themselves in. Seasons 4 and 5 show that it was originally just a formless cloud that was then coalesced into its spidery form, reflecting its main host's obsession with them. It had already decided on that form, showing it to Henry Creel.
  • In Stranger Things VR, he appears to Henry in the form of his murdered family, before settling on Dr. Brenner.
• Giant Spider: It vaguely resembles a colossal arachnid of some kind. That's partly because it was shaped by Henry Creel, who is obsessed with spiders, though the Flayer planted the image of its form in his mind long beforehand. It's final appearance as a flesh-and-blood monster is essentially a spider-kaiju with a head resembling it's shadow form.
• Glamour Failure: The Mind Flayer's outline shows up as a distortion on Bob's video camera.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Of Season 1 — the Demogorgon was basically its attack dog, and hardly the only one of its kind. It also serves as this for Season 4 and most of Season 5 as well as the entire franchise (when it's not acting directly as Big Bad) considering Vecna is essentially its vessel rather than its creator/true form as revealed by The First Shadow and Season 5. It also presumably allowed Brenner's father to escape Dimension X, which is how Brenner himself found out about it and became obsessed with opening a gateway to it.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: It has pretty much a zero tolerance policy for any sort of setback, and seems to become increasingly tenacious and aggressive the more its plans are spoiled, throwing violent and disproportionate tantrums whenever it's hindered in any way.
• He Who Must Not Be Seen: Only glimpses of the creature are ever seen in Season 2, with there being only one prolonged shot of it there. Season 3 doesn't take this route, and instead has it out in the spotlight (or at least, its avatar).
• Hidden Agenda Villain: Initially, it's unclear what exactly the Mind Flayer is or what it plans to do once it gets to Earth, with the closest explanation being Dustin's theory that it wants to spread its influence like a parasite and Take Over the World. Come the end of Season 3, Dustin turns out to be completely correct, and the Mind Flayer itself gleefully explains its goals to slaughter the Party, wipe out humanity, and conquer Earth for itself.
• Hijacked by Ganon: Due to the Ambiguous Situation of the relationship between it and Vecna, it was unclear who was in charge of who the entire time or if they were even separate individuals. The First Shadow reveals that it was the Flayer who turned Henry into what he is today, meaning it is still pulling all the strings in Season 4 onwards, but has seemingly allowed Henry/Vecna to think he's in control. This is fully confirmed to be the case in the series finale.
• Hive Mind:
  • It is connected to every Demogorgon in a hive mind. As well as Will in Season 2, and Eleven in Season 3.
  • Later on it starts possessing townsfolk, which are referred to by the Party as "the Flayed".
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Its corruption/possession of Will turns out to be a double-edged sword. The more it takes over, the more Will forgets, and the less it can use his memories to manipulate the others. By the last two episodes of the second season, the jig is up; it recognizes it has no hope of blending in again. The Mind Flayer gets around this by simply using Will as a tracking beacon for the Party. Fortunately, the humans manage to counteract this by bringing Will to places the Mind Flayer doesn't know the location of. Also in Season 3, Will's former connection to the Mind Flayer allows him to sense its presence and warn the Party.
• Hostile Terraforming: This is something it (or its extensions, rather) is capable of and seems to be a goal; it wants to turn our Earth into a realm like the Upside Down, which is friendlier to it as a lifeform.
• I'm Melting!: Inverted; more like "You're Melting." Season 3 has it showcase the ability to cause those who it has flayed to literally melt into gory masses of flesh, which it can then shape into crude monsters, as well as a tangible body for itself.
• Implacable Man: It is a persistent and ruthless being that will stop at nothing to see its goals through. Will can only try and run from it in his visions in Season 2 for so long before it catches and possesses him.
• In Name Only: Like all inhabitants of the Upside Down, he's named after a D&D enemy and thus rarely have any similarities, but the Mind Flayer is the biggest case of this, being a looming Demonic Abomination with no physical body, instead being a spider-shaped cloud of shadowy particles rather than a human-sized squid-faced humanoid, and the only similarity is its use of a Hive Mind and being a dimension-travelling threat. In Season 3 at least, the way it operates (infecting hosts with Puppeteer Parasite to act as foot soldiers while also having these hosts merge with itself) is somewhat similar to the Elder Brain, the Mind Flayers' "boss", but in practice, the "Flayed" are more akin to the Mind Flayers themselves.
• In-Series Nickname: The boys name it "The Mind Flayer" after one of the monsters that they use in their Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. Prior to that, they dub it "the shadow monster". The creature's real name (if it even has one) has not been revealed, so it's referred to as such for the sake of convenience.
• Ironic Nickname: The nickname of Mind Flayer isn't particularly unfitting, since it does have a lot of traits in common with the Mind Flayers of Dungeons & Dragons, especially the Elder Brains that lead the species. What makes it ironic is that the Stranger Things Mind Flayer seems to be the top dog of the Upside Down, with absolute power over the Demogorgons. In D&D lore, the Demogorgon and Mind Flayers are not connected, and Demogorgon (which is actually his personal name) is far more powerful than any elder brain, being the outright Prince of Demons.
• It Can Think:
  • Unlike the Demogorgons, which seem to be animals, the Mind Flayer is capable of reasoning and deception, and uses Will to lure the scientists that hurt it into its trap.
  • It's intelligent enough to operate and screech into Dustin's walkie-talkie as a warning while it corners his friends at Starcourt, and is capable of fluent speech through a host of its choosing.
  • It's smart enough to manipulate Henry into becoming the misanthropic Vecna and mould him into his pawn and ultimate vessel, despite not being thoroughly aware of our dimension at that point.
  • The creature kept in mind how it’s Meat Flayer form came the closest to killing Eleven, how Eleven barely held it back even with psychic powers, and she only survived that due to others delaying the creature long enough to cut the link between Earth and the Upside Down. Come the series finale, the Mind Flayer reveals that what happened on Earth was not the first time it constructed a body for itself, as it had a much larger one in the Abyss. Unfortunately, the Mind Flayer did not account for Eleven passing on ripping its face apart again in lieu of making a smaller hole inside to face Vecna instead.
• It's All About Me: The Mind Flayer's only concern is to spread its influence across as many dimensions as possible, and it flat-out doesn't care how many sapient beings it has to possess and/or slaughter to achieve this goal. Notably, in the flashback in the series finale, despite all the emphasizing of the hivemind that connects the beings of the upside down, the Mind Flayer's command to the young Henry Creel is "Find me", rather than "us". To the Mind Flayer, the many creatures connected to it through the hivemind are mere disposable slaves or vessels of its will.
• It's Personal: It lures the soldiers that injured it into a trap, where it arranges to have them slaughtered by Demodogs, as retribution for their earlier attacks. Also implied by the final shot of Season 2, which shows the banished Mind Flayer looming over the Snow Ball in the Upside Down, hunched far lower to the ground than normal and generating so much lightning that it's almost like a maelstrom. In Season 3, it even goes so far as to make killing Eleven a higher priority than the invasion of Earth, becoming hellbent on revenge.
• Kaiju: Throughout the series, the Mind Flayer has appeared in various massive forms, but it reaches its peak scale in the finale. While its Season 3 avatar was large enough to fill a mall, its "actual" body in the Abyss is on par with its towering shadow form. In a major Wham Shot, the Party discovers that the gnarled, tree-like structure Vecna used as a lair, the "Pain Tree", is actually the Mind Flayer's dormant physical body. Once the Party draws enough aggro, the "tree" stops being inert, revealing its spires as spider-like legs and its pulsating mass as a giant heart before going on a full-scale rampage.
• Kick the Dog: As shown in Stranger Things VR, it relishes tormenting its Flayed with their past traumatic visions. It mocks Henry for his feelings of inferiority and past being bullied, and it torments Billy by telling him he will never leave his father's abusive influence.
• Kingpin in His Gym: While the heroes work to investigate it in Season 3, it is hard at work building itself a body so it can personally relish in the destruction of Hawkins.
• Knight of Cerebus: Its scenes are among the darkest, most macabre moments of the series. In fact, any scene involving it is pure terror and is remarkably the most dangerous creature to date.
• Kryptonite Factor: Like the Demogorgon, only heat can hurt it. It doesn't appear to like water, either, although it will accept it if it's in the form of an ice bath.
• Lamprey Mouth: When it finally sheds its stationary, tree-like structure to reveal its massive spider form in season 5, it shows off a horrific, circular maw filled with concentric rings of jagged, needle-like teeth.
• Logical Weakness: Its Bizarre Alien Biology is so far removed from any Earth animal that even basic sensations like pain or warmth are completely foreign to it, so it has a lot of trouble processing its unfamiliarity whenever a human connected to its Hive Mind experiences it.
• Leitmotif: Season 3's trailer, as well as its monologue, associate it with Philip Glass' "Satyagraha: Act II (Tagore)".
• Manipulative Bastard: The First Shadow outright confirms that unlike the latter part of Season 4 would have us believe, where Henry/Vecna and Will assert (and everyone in the cast takes for a fact in absence of any other theory) that The Mind Flayer is (depending on interpretation) either an Almighty Idiot extension of Henry's will and Vecna is the dominant force or The Mind Flayer is Vecna in a different form, The Mind Flayer has been subtly influencing Henry for decades all along and is very much the dominant force in their "partnership", actively serving as The Corrupter for Henry. Which, interestingly, makes Dustin's first theory that Vecna was the Mind Flayer's main acolyte while the Demonic Abomination was the real mastermind the truth after all.
• More than Mind Control: Its relationship with Henry ultimately becomes this, with Henry having been persuaded into nihilistic misanthropy by the Mind Flayer's influence and allowing it control over him, which is reciprocated by it also granting him control over its various forms. We see this on fully display in Stranger Things VR, where Henry is constantly arguing with the Mind Flayer and asserting control to further his own agenda whenever the Mind Flayer tries to steer him in a different direction that it would prefer.
• Motive Rant: Its only lines of dialogue can be summed up as a manifesto for it - that it's gotten comfy after being invited into a new world, and doesn't intend to leave... but first, it has some children it needs to turn into sludge.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: This Demonic Abomination has at least four arms and can sprout smaller ones for searching small spaces.
• Multiversal Conqueror: The plot of Season 2 and beyond is its attempts to conquer our reality. Even Eleven sealing the gate at Hawkins Lab for good doesn't stop it from trying to advance its goals.
• Mysterious Watcher: In most of its appearances, the Mind Flayer is a barely-visible shadow looming over the Upside Down's version of Hawkins and watching the main characters. Its exact goals aren't even revealed until the end of Season 3, further adding to the "mysterious" part of the trope.
• Neck Lift: Uses Billy to perform this on Eleven by proxy.
• Non-Action Big Bad: Its spider form showcases no fancy abilities in the series finale, simply charging at the Party, trying to squish Dustin with one of its leg, and chasing Nancy into a canyon while being lit up by gunfire, where it just smashes its head between the canyon opening to reach her. Sure enough, it does nothing to defend itself when the Party begins their attack on it by stabbing its underside with Eddie's spears, throws acetone-filled water balloons at it, incinerates it with Molotovs, a flamethrower and a flare gun, and pumps gunfire into it with a machine gun and a shotgun.
• No Name Given: "The Mind Flayer" is just a nickname The Party gave them. The creature's actual name, if it even has one, is unknown. Even Vecna never reveals if it has a name or a title, and the scientist who was carrying a piece of it with him doesn't have a name for it either.
• Noodle Incident: The Soviets managed to secure a chunk of its particle form. How this was accomplished is never explained.
• Omnicidal Maniac: It makes it perfectly clear in its dialogue that it wants to annihilate everything and everyone. Unless you're useful to it, it will not hesitate to get rid of you.
• One-Winged Angel: In the series finale, the "Pain Tree" that served as Vecna's lair turns out to be the Mind Flayer's ultimate form.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Is responsible for the deaths of Tom, Bruce and Billy, the former two being misogynistic bullies to Nancy and the latter being a sociopathic, racist abuser to Max and her friends. However, the Mind Flayer killed them in order to fulfill its own plans, rather than having any supposed standards towards their jerkass behavior.
• Power of the Storm: Before the Mind Flayer showed up, the Upside Down had pretty calm "weather". Now, the place is chock-a-block with red lightning.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Despite murdering children on a whim and any human who dares to get in its way, the Mind Flayer clearly has a "liking" for Henry, due to the fact that it spared him out of its own accord and even raised him to be its Number Two and possibly letting him think he has all the cards. It's most likely due to Henry's sheer psychic potential rather than any genuine fondness for the boy, even going on to corrupt him into a nihilistic misanthrope with a sizeable kill count of his own.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Type C. Although it's still a dangerous creature cunning enough to manipulate others into somewhat complex schemes, it isn't above throwing manic tantrums and causing mindless destruction when it doesn't get its way.
• Puppeteer Parasite: It takes control of Will after entering his body as a host, leaving him Fighting from the Inside. It's apparently already done this to the entire Upside Down, and now it wants to do this to our world, as well. The First Shadow reveals that the Mind Flayer has been doing this even longer than initially thought: its first human puppet was Vecna.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Its body provides the black, while its storm clouds provide the red. Its physical body, on the other hand, settles for a palette of meaty burgundy.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: In the third season. The moment its fleshy body is fully prepared, it spends the rest of Season 3 doing nothing but attempting to kill the Party. It even puts its goals of Hostile Terraforming on hold because it wants the Party dead that badly.
• The Speechless: It's entirely unable to conduct human speech on its own. The only time it directly speaks to anyone is through people that it has direct control over. Subverted in Season 5. The Grand Finale shows how the Mind Flayer connected with Henry Creel, and in that scene, the Mind Flayer telepathically speaks to Henry in the exact voice that's used by Henry's Vecna form.
• Starfish Aliens: The Mind Flayer is an immense creature with a form and intelligence utterly alien to any of the people dealing with it. The best way in which Dustin can describe it is to compare it to the Mind Flayer species of Dungeons and Dragons.
• Taught by Experience: After failing in seasons 2 and 3 due to its Fatal Flaw of struggling to understand humanity, it deploys its general Vecna in season 4, who Was Once a Man and thus has a much keener insight into the human mind. And it works, as season 4 ends with Vecna beginning the merge.
• Teratoma Monster: In season 3, the Mind Flayer makes itself a physical avatar out of the exploded corpses of various people and rats, which resembles a large monster made out of a mass of flesh and other body parts.
• That's No Moon: The "Pain Tree" seen repeatedly throughout Season 5 is really the Mind Flayer's original physical body in Dimension X. It reveals itself once it starts moving its "branches" that turn out to be its many legs.
• Tranquil Fury: In the finale of Season 2, its seen in the Upside Down looming over the school where the protagonists are celebrating in the normal world, quietly observing them as it expresses its rage over being foiled by generating a massive lightning storm. In Season 3, its voice and actions when acting through Billy are eerily calm, calculated, yet full of barely restrained savagery and menace, in contrast to its meaty avatar, which acts like the feral, insane and furious beast that the Mind Flayer is behind the veneer of calm.
• Undignified Death: Downplayed. What's embarrassing isn't the Mind Flayer's death itself (or at least the death of its physical body), since it's burned alive, shot at and repeatedly stabbed by the Party with spears, a shotgun, a flare gun, a flamethrower, a slingshot full of acetone, and an M16, but the fact it was killed by a bunch of teenagers when it's an all-powerful Eldritch Abomination that attempted to invade Earth and merge it with the Abyss.
• Unstoppable Rage: The Mind Flayer has very little sense of subtlety as is, but when it gets angry, it gets really, really angry. All subtlety is thrown out the window as it goes on a violent rampage against those who have slighted it, shrieking and roaring insanely as it goes.
• Viler New Villain: In the first season, the primary threat from the Upside Down is the Demogorgon. While it kills a fair amount of people, it's ultimately a Non-Malicious Monster driven by hunger. Season 2 introduces the Mind Flayer, a demonic abomination that has a twisted intelligence, and possesses Will Byers, leading to the death of many people, including Bob. It's far more malicious and intelligent then the animalistic Demogorgon (who is revealed to be its minion). It gets even worse in Season 3, where it "flays" multiple people to create a body.
• The Villain Knows Where You Live: The final shot of "The Gate" shows the Mind Flayer is watching the Hawkins Middle School in the Upside Down, where the Party (including Eleven) is currently attending the Snow Ball, showing that it knows who thwarted its invasion and wants revenge. In Season 3, it can also track down El and the Party when she tries to locate his host Billy, eventually rampaging to her and Hopper's cabin to wreck the place.
• Villain Song: The infamously creepy "Every Breath You Take" seems like an odd choice for a slow dance... until we see the Flayer looming over Hawkins Middle in the Upside Down as it plays. Season 3 also gives it a moment with "We'll Meet Again" as it sets its plans into motion.
• Villainous Breakdown: Whenever the Mind Flayer is placed in significant danger, it becomes extremely frantic and temperamental.
  • Whenever the possessed Will is in peril, Will resorts to screaming the same phrase over and over again. The Mind Flayer's also been shown to have not much in the way of pain tolerance. When Eleven is banishing it, its movements become increasingly fast. After the Ball Scene, it can be seen looming over the kids' location while seemingly seething with some form of anger or hate.
  • A minor example, but in Season 3's finale, it seems so infuriated by Billy coming to resist its influence that it kills him with much more force than necessary, distracting it from Eleven long enough for Joyce to pull the keys and close the gate. When the gate is closing, it can do nothing but scream and thrash in one last hateful attempt to cause harm as it's foiled once more.
• The Virus: Probably the only analogue that can contextualize its "motivations" in a way humans can understand; all it wants is to make more of itself, and to do any less is completely offensive to it. While it's actually a form of psychic, shadowy, ...thing, Owens describes it like this, a creature that spreads parasitically and can theoretically be cured. This is shown by how it actually takes a while to completely possess Will, not unlike a disease slowly growing in strength. It has evidently corrupted entire species, like the Demogorgons, with its viral taint.
• Voice of the Legion: Billy's voice gains a guttural and demonic undertone when the Mind Flayer speaks through him to Eleven. Season 5 reveals that Vecna's demonic voice is actually that of the Mind Flayer itself. The moment Henry Creel touched the stone that had some of its particles, his mind connected to the at-the-time formless mass of particles that would become the arachnoid Mind Flayer years later, and the cloud spoke to Henry with the exact voice that Vecna speaks with normally.
• Weaksauce Weakness:
  • After the rather rational aversion to fire, the Mind Flayer's second greatest weakness seems to be that it simply can't handle pain well, reacting to even small portions of its web being burnt with screeching and agony as well as being banished exorcism-style from Will simply by exploiting how heat hurts it. Considering it's otherwise an eldritch and conniving monster, being weak to possibly the most basic of animalistic sensations is quite notable.
  • Although Will refusing to get into the bath after his possession is framed as its aversion to heat, it appears to not like water, either. Bob immediately notes in a throwaway line that none of the tunnels in Will's map cross a single body of water in Hawkins.
• Worthy Opponent: Sees Eleven as this, declaring that it wants to have a showdown with her.
• Would Hurt a Child: It is more than willing to use a child for its macabre plans. In Season 3, it controls and later absorbs several children into its body, and it attempts to outright kill the younger members of the main cast multiple times, either through Billy or its physical body, all out of blind, unadulterated hatred.

The Mind Flayer's Avatar

A massive aggregate form the Mind Flayer created from the bodies of its Flayed to seek revenge on Eleven and destroy the world in person.

• Achilles' Heel:
  • Downplayed. Like all things connected to the Upside Down, it does have a weakness towards fire. Fireworks lobbed at it were able to cause it significant pain and temporarily disable it. However, they weren't enough to do any actual meaningful damage.
  • The closet thing the thing has to a real weakness is that its overall senses seem quite rudimentary, relying a lot on sound and vibrations to hunt, and seemingly having a poor sense of sight, due to its struggles to find anyone when attacking the Starcourt mall despite them all being in an enclosed space together and it mistaking a mannequin for an actual person. It's implied this is the reason the Mind Flayer kept Billy as an avatar rather than having him join the weapon, as it needed someone to act as the thing's eyes.
• Attack the Mouth: The Party are able to keep it occupied by lobbing fireworks right into its mouth.
• Bloodier and Gorier: As a contrast to its true form being a mass of darkness in Season 2, the avatar is a beast made of the pulverized corpses of rats and humans in Season 3.
• Body of Bodies: The Mind Flayer builds the avatar by using the fragment of itself that got trapped in the real world to gather and liquefy a bunch of rats, melding the remains together into a crude avatar for it to inhabit and work through. And when it figures out where the Party is located, it melts down and assimilates the bodies of its Flayed to build up its form and deal with the heroes personally. The construction takes place over all of Season 3.
• Combat Tentacles: It's packed with at least seven of these, ideally for Flaying and impaling those who would oppose it. Though given their behavior and seeming response to sensory stimuli, they may actually be akin to heads.
• The Comically Serious: It's mostly played straight as a terrifying threat with zero comical traits, but gets a moment of this when it mistakes a mannequin for one of the kids, grabs it, before realizing the mistake and chucking it away in obvious frustration. It also latter takes a moment to roar into Dustin's walkie-talkie for annoying it.
• Evil Is Visceral: A giant monstrosity made of the melted and reformed corpses of rats and humans.
• Eyeless Face: It has no eyes on its head, making it all the more alien and unnerving.
• Faster Than They Look: Fast enough to keep up with a vehicle going full throttle, despite its size.
• Feed It a Bomb: The downside of giving itself a mouth is that people can now lob projectiles in it, such as all the fireworks Lucas stocks up on.
• Flesh Golem: The Mind Flayer's earthly form is made up of the combined biomass of the Flayed.
• Foreshadowing: The avatar itself seemingly turns out to be foreshadowing that the Mind Flayer itself is a similar crafted form, shaped (or rather, reshaped) into an unnatural state from native materials by the actions of a powerful outside influence to suit its will and intentions in its plans — in the Flayer's case, the powerful psychic Vecna/One shaped it into its current appearance from an amorphous cloud based on his long-standing fascination with spiders. Though after The Reveal in The First Shadow, this may be subverted considering the Mind Flayer has been in control all along and took the same form long before One shaped it himself.
• Fighting a Shadow: Type Four, taken almost literally. Destroying the avatar by disconnecting it from the brain is simply an inconvenience, as the Mind Flayer's real shape of a living shadow is tethered in another dimension.
• Final Boss Preview: It's essentially a smaller, independently nonfunctional version of the Spider monster that resides in the Abyss and is fought in the series finale.
• Giant Spider: It moves around using six massive legs that mimic the arms of the Mind Flayer, giving it a surprising amount of agility and speed. Since Vecna/Henry Creel has an obsession with spiders to the point he literally shaped the Mind Flayer itself into a facsimile of one, this makes sense, though it eventually turns out that the Flayer was and is The Man Behind the Man responsible for his obsession with spiders in the first place.
• Guest Fighter: As a skin for Sylvanus in Smite.
• Healing Factor: It regenerates the tendrils that were cut off during its first encounter with the Party. It only has a finite amount of flesh from the Flayed it absorbed, however, which means it may have melted a few more life-forms off-screen...
• I'm Melting!: It showcases the ability to cause those who it has flayed to literally melt into gory masses of flesh, which it can then shape into crude monsters, as well as a tangible body for itself.
• Implacable Man: Its physical form is never truly wounded during its battle with the Party - only slowed down. Even mentally ripping its face in half and multiple firework bombs fail to kill it. Since it's little more that a literal meat puppet for the Mind Flayer, it doesn't have any actual weak spots to fatally injure it. Indeed, its main purpose seems to be providing a physical threat against Eleven that she has no choice but to use her powers to hold it off despite the strain and the side-effects, whilst also being capable of recovering from any damage she manages to inflict upon it. By the tail end of Season 3, it's still in one piece and a massive threat towards everybody whilst Eleven has apparently burnt out her powers holding it off.
• Lightning Bruiser: Despite its imposing size and mass, it's frighteningly agile and can maneuver its tentacles to strike lightning quick.
• Living Weapon: Explicitly called a weapon, with Steve even commenting on how it's formed from flesh and bone rather than nuts and bolts.
• Mini-Mook: Uses one of its tentacles to bite Eleven and plant a parasite in an attempt to kill her with internal injuries.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: It has a giant mouth in the center of its face with multiple rows of teeth, as well as a tongue that doubles as another flaying tendril for good measure.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: It has six arms (in comparison to its true form's natural five) and can sprout smaller ones for searching small spaces.
• No Ontological Inertia: When the gate to the Upside Down is closed, the avatar's link to the Mind Flayer is cut off, "killing" it. Justified, as the avatar is not anything close to a functional biological entity without the Mind Flayer to control it cell-by-cell.
• Parasitic Horror: The Mind Flayer manages to leave a bit behind when it injures El, which starts wriggling and painfully crawling around under her skin later. Jonathan has to cut her leg open and try to dig it out with his fingers while they're all hiding from the Mind Flayer.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The moment it is fully prepared, it spends the rest of Season 3 doing nothing but attempting to kill the Party, especially Eleven.
• Robot Me: Although it's made of meat instead of metal, it functions as this to the Mind Flayer, being an artificial duplicate of the creature.
• Villainous Breakdown: A minor example, but in Season 3's finale, it seems so infuriated by Billy coming to resist its influence that it kills him with much more force than necessary, distracting it from Eleven long enough for Joyce to pull the keys and close the Gate. When the Gate is closing, it can do nothing but scream and thrash in one last hateful attempt to cause harm as it's foiled once more.
• Villain Override: The Mind Flayer puppeteers the avatar directly, with the avatar effectively acting as a physical body for the fiend.
• Would Hurt a Child: This is the very reason it exists - so the Mind Flayer can personally take revenge on the Party without using proxy forces such as the Demodogs. Also, at least one of its Flayed is a young teenager or preteen.
• Xenomorph Xerox: Mostly because of its elongated head, huge drooling mouth full of teeth and a tentacle coming out of its mouth that reminds of the Xenomorph's mouthed tongue. The comparison is reinforced in one scene where Nancy finds herself with one of its tentacles mere inches from her face, similar to Ripley's confrontation with a Xenomorph in the infirmary in Alien³.

Carnivorous beasts that reside in the Upside Down.

• Achilles' Heel:
  • Of all the things the muggles in the story throw at one, only fire does any significant damage, being the only thing that has caused the Hawkins Demogorgon to retreat back to the Upside Down to lick its wounds. And it even regenerates from that surprisingly fast. Season 4 reveals this weakness is affected by age, when Murray blasts a flamethrower at a pack of Demodogs and the adult Soviet Demogorgon. The Demodogs all die within seconds, but the Demogorgon is left stunned for several seconds, slowed and weakened to the extent Hopper can kill it with just a sword, though it's still a clear threat.
  • Downplayed. Electricity seems to be the closest thing they have to another weakness, as the Soviets were able to keep one full-grown demogorgon trapped thanks to an electric fence and used very powerful cattle prods to keep others in line (with Joyce seemingly managing to kill one demodog with one), however, its implied this is merely painful not lethal to full grown Demogorgons and no where near as debilitating as fire.
• Ambiguously Evil: It is unclear whether they have malevolent desires, or are just animals following their master's commands. Although the hive mind controls them, the Demogorgons have a tendency to relish in the terror of their victims, and the Soviet Demogorgon in particular kills everything it sees indiscriminately, without being commanded. Dart also shows that they can grow affection for certain people (Dustin) if they imprint early enough, implying that they are influenced by nurture as much as nature. It is likely that had the Mind Flayer never existed, the Demogorgons may have been a normal alien race.
• Animalistic Abomination: The Juvenile and Adolescent phases of Demogorgon development resemble that of a tadpole and canid in body structure.
• Ankle Drag: If they aren't simply killing something, they tend to drag their unfortunate victim to their destination by the ankle.
• Attack Its Weak Point: The biggest physical weakness of a Demogorgon besides fire is their more fleshy mouth, lacking much of their otherwise tough skeleton. Lucas makes it a point to try and fire a rock down the Hawkins Demogorgon's throat (though it's never shown how effective this is since Eleven pins it down when he fires), and Hopper takes out the Demodogs with headshots in Season 2 and Season 4, and in the same season both hucks a spear down the mouth of the Soviet Demogorgon (which while it doesn't kill it does more damage than any other strike had up until that point) and later decapitates it.
• Back for the Finale: Largely absent over Season 3, until the epilogue reveals that the Soviets have captured one and feed prisoners to it.
• The Blank: Before the cast figure out what it is, and often when describing it or identifying it with newcomers, it's described as a "faceless man". Its "face" is actually the monster's mouth, which unfolds like a blossoming flower when it's feeding. It does indeed seem to be blind as a result, the Hawkins Demogorgon passes right by Nancy when she's quiet and standing still despite seemingly walking right past her, though Season 5 shows that Will is able to "see" through the Demogorgons.
• Breakout Villain: Far and away the most recognizable and popular monsters in the series. They have maintained a consistent presence throughout most of the show's run and were even chosen to represent the franchise in Dead by Daylight.
• Conditional Powers: Only the Hawkins Demogorgon has shown psychic powers (crossing dimensions, telekinesis etc.). It's unclear whether the Demodogs are simply too young to use such powers, but the Soviet Demogorgon presumably does not have these powers if it can be caged and subdued. It's unclear if this is because it's been conditioned, perhaps from a young age, not to use them, or if the Hawkins Demogorgon was empowered by the psychic Vecna, which the opening scene of Season 5 highly implies to be the case. Come Season 5, more Demogorgons are seen that are capable of at least dimensional travel, but it remains unclear if this is because they're older specimens than the Soviet Demogorgon, or if they're likewise empowered by Vecna or the Mind Flayer. Season 5 also reveals that the Upside Down is confined to Hawkins, meaning the Soviet Demogorgon might be able to cross dimensions, but simply doesn't have anywhere to go.
• Flower Mouth: A Demogorgon's entire head can split open into five petal-like mandibles.
• Guest Fighter: A Demogorgon appears as a playable Killer in Dead by Daylight, as a skin for Bakasura in Smite, and as a skin in Fortnite.
• Humanoid Abomination: An extra-dimensional predator which lives in a Dark World and can teleport between there and here anytime it likes, but when it does manifest, it's a faceless, roughly humanoid monstrosity.
• The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: In season 5 Will, the first victim of the Demogorgons, becomes capable of controlling them through his still extant connection to their Hive Mind. While Vecna at least has some mind to resist Will's abilities, Demogorgons don't stand a chance, and he crushes three of them with ease. After this point, Vecna can only send them out when Will's incapacitated.
• In a Single Bound: As well as being fast and strong, Demogorgons are surprisingly agile and flexible, able to leap through the air to impressive heights and distances with incredible precision and speed, and land gracefully, often pouncing straight on their prey.
• In Name Only: The only real similarity these creatures have with the Dungeons & Dragons Demogorgon (or as the children call him, "the Demogorgon") is that they are relatively dark looking and are monsters.
• Lamprey Mouth: Have this inside in the center of their petal-like mouth flaps.
• Lean and Mean: Tall, scrawny, and absolutely vicious.
• Lightning Bruiser: Sure, Demogorgons are incredibly strong and extremely durable, but they're also very fast and agile despite their size. Capable of ambushing prey in seconds, making incredible leaps through the air, and running faster than people can manage.
• Metamorphosis Monster: The Demogorgons start out as little tadpole like creatures, before growing legs and starting to look sort of salamander-ish, and then develop their signature horrifying Flower Mouth as they grow to sort of resemble a creepy hairless dog. As adults they're tall Monstrous Humanoids.
• Monstrous Humanoid: Too tall (roughly nine feet) and gauntly-muscled to be human, with disturbingly long arms and hands, a mouth like a five-petalled carnivorous flower, and a tendency to stalk and kill any human that cross their path regardless of whether or not they're hungry or have been attacked (at least, judging by how it chased after the kids in the finale despite them neither being wounded nor having previously attacked it).
• More Popular Replacement: While the show gives an affectionate nod to the Demogorgon's D&D-namesake, the overwhelming majority of those who have heard the name think of the Stranger Things-version, not the original.
• More Predators Than Prey: The only ambulatory lifeform seen in the Upside Down, forcing them to invade Earth to hunt. They only started doing so recently when Eleven accidentally attracted it to Hawkins, before which they subsided on the eggs that dot the landscape. Beyond that there's no sign of prey in their presumably native dimension, not even what laid the eggs. Season 2 reveals that there are in fact other entities in the Upside Down, notably the far more powerful Mind Flayer, who may have been controlling the Demogorgons' actions right from the start. Season 4 also presents more Upside Down native lifeforms, including snake and bat-like organisms, but they are under Vecna's control so it's unclear if the Demogorgons eat them.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Its face is basically nothing but teeth.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The boys name the monster "Demogorgon" after one of D&D's most powerful adversaries. A powerful demon prince known as the Prince of Demons, Demogorgon was also named as one of the greatest villains in D&D history. Notably, Will refers to it as Demogorgon on his own, without the rest of the group describing it as such.
• Non-Humans Lack Attributes: Entirely naked and completely hairless and yet they don't appear to have anything resembling sensory organs, visible genitalia, or even an excretory system in the places you'd expect to find them. The way one uses Will as an incubator for a slug-like creature revealed to be its larva implies that they can reproduce, though.
• Non-Malicious Monster:
  • Vicious as they are, Demogorgons are really just hungry animals that happen to work outside our human understanding of physics and biology. They show no sadism or genuine evil unlike the Mind Flayer. They are also implied to be controlled against their will by the genuinely evil Mind Flayer — something confirmed by the Season 4 finale.
  • Nancy and Jonathan essentially treat the first one as a dangerous predator that needs to be put down for the good of everyone else, not a sadistic monster who enjoys killing for fun. The Soviet Demogorgon, however, does not get the same excuse, and willingly feeds upon a prisoner while serving as a sort of pet to the Soviet prison wardens (although its emaciated appearance implies they were deliberately starving it).
• Power at a Price: It's revealed in season 5 that a number of Demogorgons are in a Hive Mind, either created by Vecna or something they have innately. This gives them greater coordination, intelligence, and, in some cases, limited Psychic Powers. It also means they feel the pain the others do: while they're Nigh-Invulnerable, one of them getting hit by a flamethrower results in all of them going down writhing. It also means that they're vulnerable to anyone who can "pull the strings", as shown when Will uses his connection to the Hive Mind to kill three of them.
• Roar Before Beating: Habitually unleash a deafening roar before lunging into an attack, inadvertently alerting the heroes and often giving them a split-second window to dodge or flee.
• Slave Mooks: The true nature of this species, revealed in Season 2.
• Starfish Aliens: Interdimensional creatures with eyeless faces and five-lipped mouths, that sure as hell doesn't look or act like anything from our world.
• Those Were Only Their Scouts: As much of a threat as the first Demogorgon is, it's revealed to be nothing more than a scout and breeder for the Mind Flayer, who has hundreds of baby Demogorgons at his disposal.
• To Serve Man: They'll eat animals and the eggs around the Upside Down, but seem disproportionately focused on humans, either for food or what seems like reproductive purposes.
• Super-Strength: All Demogorgons are incredibly strong to the point of casually throwing grown human adults around, and ripping straight through bricks and metal. Notably, the Kamchatka Demogorgon would have pulled open a machine-operated massive vault door (which a guard described as needing a battering ram to get through) with its bare hands if Hopper hadn't flung his spear into its mouth.
• Super-Toughness: Their bones appear to be incredibly tough - bullets and melee weapons pierce their skin and can cause them pain, but little lasting damage. Even having a spear thrown thrown through the mouth of a Demogorgon isn't shown to kill one, as the Soviet Demogorgon simply breaks off the spear-head and screams in pain and rage. Decapitation will however put one down.
• Xenomorph Xerox: They are a species of eyeless extraterrestrial — or in this case, interdimensional — predatory endoparasites that reproduce by forcing fleshy tubes down a host's throat and inserting larvae into their bodies. They emerge as limbless creatures and metamorphose into towering humanoid monsters with unusual mouthparts. For bonus points, Season 4 reveals they were turned into hive-minded bioweapons by a nihilistic misanthrope desiring humanity's destruction and his own godhood, and was acting on behalf of a malevolent eldritch abomination.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: In Season 5, Demogorgons appear in every episode of the first half of the season as Vecna uses them to kidnap the twelve children for his Evil Plan. In the second half however, only a corpse and a trio of Demo-dogs appear, and the species are conspicuously absent when the Party enters the Abyss and confronts Vecna and the Mind Flayer. According to Word of God, this was due to Vecna and the Mind Flayer not expecting to be attacked in the Abyss thus being caught off-guard.
• Worf Had the Flu: In Season 4, Hopper manages to kill one near full grown Demogorgon simply by shooting it in the head with a pistol (when they usually casually shrug off prolonged machine gun fire). However, the Demogorgon in question was in the middle of being dissected, to the point its chest was cut open and its organs were visible, implying it was solely down to all the damage that had already been inflicted.

The Monster, a.k.a. "The Demogorgon"

Played By: Mark Streger

A nigh-indestructible, superficially humanoid carnivore in a relentless pursuit of any and all victims in sight.

• An Arm and a Leg: It appears to sever its own foot to escape being set on fire in a bear trap, although it also seems to have healed by the time it confronts the Party.
• Big Bad Ensemble: With Dr. Brenner in Season 1. Brenner is the one responsible for unleashing the Demogorgon and spends the entire season trying to cover it up while hunting Eleven, while the Demogorgon kidnaps Will Byers and terrorizes the town on its own accord. It completely takes over the role of Big Bad in the finale when it (seemingly) kills Brenner and becomes the Final Boss.
• Bizarre Alien Senses: It can somehow sense blood from across dimensions.
• Conditional Powers: Is extremely attracted to the scent of blood and only attacks actively bleeding victims outside its dimension; in some cases he will transcend the barrier if he gets even the tiniest whiff of blood. One of the reasons it doesn't immediately kill Will is because he's not bleeding.
• The Dragon: To the Mind Flayer, as revealed in Season 2. The Mind Flayer sent it to our dimension as a scout and a method of breeding an army for its takeover. Season 4 would further imply that the Demogorgon was also either working with or for Vecna in regards to capturing and killing Barb, and in pursuing Eleven, which would subsequently be confirmed on screen with the opening scene of Season 5 where we even see it bowing to Vecna when he appears before it.
• Electromagnetic Ghosts: Its appearance makes lights flicker in the real world.
• Empowered Badass Normal: In addition to the characteristic strength and speed of their species, this Demogorgon also has limited telekinetic powers and can temporarily open gates to travel between dimensions.
• Expy: According to invoked Word of God, it was based on the Shark from Jaws 1, being a monster carried more by its presence and impact on the plot rather than its actual screentime. Like the Shark, it mostly appears in brief glimpses until its climactic confrontation in the finale.
• Extra-Dimensional Shortcut: Returning to the Upside Down doesn't reduce the travel time, but it does allow it to bypass anything that could detect or impede it.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: Although it's seen eating its prey, sometimes it cocoons them into a wall. The exact purpose of this is unclear, but seems like a means of reproduction reminiscent of those cocoon-loving rascals from Alien, as both Will and Barb have slug-like creatures emerge from their mouths afterwards. Confirmed in Season 2 when we see the slug that Will coughed up eventually metamorphosize into a juvenile Demogorgon.
• Feel No Pain: Getting pumped full of bullets doesn't even slow it down, and Steve whaling on it with a nail-spiked bat seems to annoy it more than anything else. Getting caught in a bear trap and set on fire, and later, Eleven pinning and disintegrating it, seem to be the only things that cause it to vocalize pain.
• Final Boss: Of the first season. Dr. Brenner and the Demogorgon are in a Big Bad Ensemble for most of the season but it takes his spot as the final antagonist in the last episode, complete with seemingly mauling him to death right before launching itself after Mike, Eleven, and the other kids.
• He Who Must Not Be Seen: Aside from a few blink-and-you'll-miss-it moments, it's rare to see the monster in full prior to the final episode, when it finally appears in force, and even then the flickering lights and jumpy camera angles ensure that you'll never really get a good look at it. All of this works to increase the thing's creepy factor.
• Immune to Bullets: Nancy puts all six rounds from Lonnie's stolen .38 revolver into him at pretty much point blank range and it doesn't seem to be hurt at all. Later on, the Hawkins lab soldiers, who don't know this, try to shoot it with fully-automatic weapons, but they have little more effect than the revolver.
• Implacable Man: Establishing the trend for all its species, this thing takes hails of bullets, a beating with a spiked baseball bat, is caught in a bear trap, and set on fire (and loses a foot). But it still keeps coming.
• In-Series Nickname: The boys name it "The Demogorgon" after one of the monsters that they use in their Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, when Eleven uses its miniature to represent it to the boys. Presumably being kids they didn't realize that Demogorgon is supposed to be the name of a specific being. Suitably in the game Demogorgon infamously has a ridiculously unfair set of powers just as the monster in the show does. The teens and adults briefly refer to it as "the faceless".
• It Can Think: To a degree. It figures out how to open the lock on the Byers house, jumps Nancy and Jonathan from behind the second they stop fighting back-to-back, and quickly identifies Eleven as its most dangerous opponent during the Final Battle. Beyond that, though, it's usually not much more intelligent than an animal, and revelations during Season 4 suggest that several of these moments were Vecna's doing through it.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: The Demogorgon chops off its own foot after being caught in a bear trap and set on fire in Episode 8 in order to escape back into the Upside Down and avoid burning to death.
• Lightning Bruiser: Incredibly fast, monstrously strong, and able to shrug off a hail of gunfire. Getting trapped in a bear trap, set on fire and pummeled with a nail bat barely slows it down. It takes Eleven pinning it to a wall and using her powers to tear it apart on a molecular level to finally kill it.
• Mind Over Matter: Only blatantly shown when it unlocks a door from the other side. This may also contribute to how it can drag a deer with incredible speed, despite not being seen in the immediate area, and its incredible strength despite its lack of musculature. It may also contribute to its dimension-hopping abilities.
• Not So Invincible After All: It's no match for Eleven, who restrains and vaporizes it, implying she atomically disrupted it along with herself, either destroying it, or jamming them in-between the two dimensions.
• Super-Persistent Predator: Zig-Zagged. After being burned by Jonathan, Nancy, and Steve it promptly escapes to recover and hunt different prey. However, it does seem to hunt Eleven in specific in the finale, whereas it was previously happy to eat its prey until bothered. Surrounded by a veritable feast of G-men, the monster follows El and the boys instead of feeding. This could be because it was her psychic abilities that drew it into the earth dimension to begin with, or that the Mind Flayer or Vecna was directing it. Notably, it's implied that Will's kidnapping and being dragged into the Upside Down in the first place was due to the Demogorgon mistaking him for Eleven, due to him being a small child who was in the area after Eleven successfully escaped from the lab. Mike and the others even meet Eleven in the woods for the first time whilst returning to the area to search for clues about Will's disappearance.
• Super-Toughness: Worked over with a spiked baseball bat? Pumped full of ridiculous amounts of lead. How ridiculous? It shrugs off being shot at point-blank range by Nancy multiple times. A whole platoon of highly-trained government agents armed with SMGs don't have much luck either. This thing shrugs it all off without any apparent injury.
• Suspiciously Stealthy Predator: Because it enters the real world only briefly to seize food, no one ever manages to catch clear evidence of its existence (except for one blurry photo by Jonathan).
• Thinking Up Portals: It tears portals between the normal world and Upside Down, apparently whenever and wherever it wants, which usually close in a matter on minutes behind it. It does have a penchant for drywall. However, it's implied that it can only do this as long as the original gate accidentally created by Eleven remains open, as this weakens the barrier between worlds. Season 4 would confirm this is unique to this particular Demogorgon, thanks to El creating a psychic link with it whilst in the void.
• Uncertain Doom: It seems pretty dead considering Eleven disintegrated it onscreen, but come the reveal in Season 4 that this isn't 'disintegration' so much as 'exiling to the Upside Down' when she did the same to One and he survived, it's possible this didn't actually kill it. Though even if it survived, it's still effectively removed as a threat considering it isn't anywhere to be seen in the next three seasons, so the difference to our protagonists is minimal.

D'Artagnan / Dart

A small creature from the Upside Down who is adopted by Dustin, who initially confuses it for an exotic tadpole.

• Alas, Poor Villain: Its death is portrayed in a solemn light — in spite of it eating Dustin's cat, the creature was a loyal pet.
• Androcles' Lion: It allows Dustin to pass when he feeds it Three Musketeers Candy bar due to Dustin taking care of it.
• Body Horror: It got into our dimension by gestating inside Will's body as a parasite.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: Or rather, his hive mind. While Dart still became dangerous after maturing into a Demodog, he seems to remember the kindness that Dustin showed him when he was in the boy's care and behaves like a slightly tamed wild animal when Dustin gives him another Three Musketeers bar. Being enslaved to the Mind Flayer or not, Dart (and presumably the rest of his species) does have some sense of self outside of the Mind Flayer's control, which proved useful when it remembered Dustin enough to not immediately attack him.
• Irony: Dustin names him D'Artagnan, after the label of his Three Musketeers candy bar. However D'Artagnan himself was not one of the titular trio, either in the book, or on the wrapper.^note That was Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.
• Last Episode, New Character: It first appears at the very end of Season 1, being coughed up by Will.
• Line-of-Sight Name: Dustin names it after the first thing he feeds it, a Three Musketeers bar.
• Metamorphosis Monster: He starts out as a leech or flatworm-like creature, which becomes something similar to an eyeless landbound tadpole with arms. Eventually, he grows larger and sprouts legs before growing into a cat-like predator with a Nested Mouth ...all before becoming a larger dog-like creature who will mature into a full-fledged Demogorgon.
• No Ontological Inertia: Dies alongside all the other Demodogs after the gate to the Upside Down is closed.
• Pet Monstrosity: He turns into a juvenile Demogorgon after a few days in Dustin's care.
• Starfish Aliens: It is from the Upside Down after all. It has no eyes, grows very rapidly in size and strength, and is averse to heat.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: After a few episodes of being a cute little creature, it grows up fast and turns out to be a juvenile Demogorgon.

The Demodogs

The adolescent forms of the Demogorgon's species.

• All Animals Are Dogs: They howl like dogs at night. One of them also makes a dog-like whine in season 5.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Hopper and the Hawkins Energy Lab staff don't have much luck with body shots, but when Hopper is defending Eleven from them at the Gate, he's forced to shoot the first one in the face, which takes it out quickly, and he switches to headshots after that.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: In the second season, the Demodogs are less formidable than the Demogorgon from the first season. A single adult demogorgon was a massive threat, but it takes an army of the adolescents to pose even close to the threat the original posed. Justified, since they are juveniles who, presumably, lack the tough hide and massive strength of a fully-grown Demogorgon. They also do collectively end up killing far more people than the one adult did, even if each juvenile goes down easier if isolated. They rarely are isolated, though.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: While not the main antagonists of Season 2, they do create a nice contrast to the Adult Demogorgon. While the adult was a Nigh-Invulnerable Lightning Bruiser capable of taking on entire squads of armed men without a scratch and required nothing short of complete telekinetic disintegration to kill; the Demodogs are much weaker and squishier, requiring only a few well-aimed bullets to put down. They make up the discrepancy with numbers.
• Degraded Boss: The adolescent Demogorgons aren't nearly as tough as the adults are, since they can be killed with normal bullets and being torched with a flamethrower will drop them pretty quickly, while the adults can survive a torching, albeit weakened. However, there are inbuilt justifications for this; they really aren't as fully-developed, and they've not exactly been growing up solidly on home turf and have been subjected to way more sunlight and water than would theoretically be good for them, as a result. Even so, they're still tough enough to shrug off body shots.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Towards the end of Season 1, Eleven saw one of their slug-like larval forms crawling out of Barb's corpse.
• Flower Mouth: The Demodogs have mouths that split open into multiple petal-like mandibles.
• Fragile Speedster: Downplayed Trope. They're not nearly as tough as the adults, although they're still pretty resiliant, but are just as fast.
• Lamprey Mouth: Just like the adult, they've got tons of teeth in the center of their mouth flaps that attach to a victim.
• Metamorphosis Monster: As they feed, they grow from a slug-like larval form to a frog-like instar stage where they grow legs. From this they mature to a cat-like instar form where they develop their Lamprey Mouth, growing into a larger dog-like form before metamorphosing into their humanoid mature form.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Has a ton of alien teeth, just like the adult.
• Primal Stance: Unlike the adult Demogorgon from Season 1, they do not seem to be capable of walking on two legs.
• Spell My Name With An S: Generally referred to as "Demodogs" by the fandom, but spelled "Demo-dogs" in Netflix's subtitles.
• Starfish Aliens: Just as bizarre as any fully grown Demogorgon.
• Stronger Than They Look: Whilst not as strong as their full-blown counterparts, they are still incredibly strong for their size. One ripped through a brick wall, then tunnelled through the earth to escape when it was locked in a storm cellar.
• Would Hit a Girl: Several female scientists are brutally murdered by the Demodogs during their invasion of Hawkins National Laboratory.
• Zerg Rush: Their preferred tactic is to run and attack in groups. It's effective.

The Soviet Demogorgon

A demogorgon that the Soviets were able to capture. They feed it prisoners.

• Arc Villain: The biggest threat in the Russia storyline of Season 4.
• An Arm and a Leg: Hopper slices off one of its arms before finishing it off.
• Brought Down to Badass: This Demogorgon lacks the Conditional Powers the Hawkins Demogorgon had, but is just as deadly a physical combatant - arguably even more so.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Hopper, Dmitri and several other prisoners stand together with some weapons hoping to put up a fight. Within a minute, only Hopper and Dmitri are left alive, and even that is mostly due to them exploiting its weakness to fire to just about hold it off.
• Determinator: Not even its sole weakness is enough to make the Demogorgon back down. Murray sets its whole body on fire and it still continues to try and kill Hopper, even though it's clearly weakened by its torching.
• Dragon Their Feet: The one in the Soviet Union only shows up several months after the Mind Flayer's Avatar has been "killed", though the Mind Flayer itself is still alive in the Upside Down.
• The Dreaded: The Demogorgon's existence is considered something of a myth among the prisoners. A few of them feel confident knowing they can fight it with sheer numbers, but then Hopper tells them that he's dealt with one in the past and describes how dangerous these things really are, which causes everyone to break out in a cold sweat and lose their appetites.
• Evil Is Visceral: In contrast to the Hawkins Demogorgon, this one has an even more emaciated build, to the point where its skin is nearly transparent.
• Fed to the Beast: The Soviets execute their prisoners in this way.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Takes a spear through its throat, courtesy of Hopper, not that it stops the monster.
• Irony: It is known as the "Soviet Demogorgon", and it ends up suffering a Rasputinian Death, as detailed below.
• Lightning Bruiser: Possibly more than the Hawkins Demogorgon was, as it destroys the group of prisoners fed to it in moments.
• Monster Is a Mommy: It's implied the Demodog specimens the Soviets are keeping are the offspring of this particular Demogorgon. While its first massacre could just be written off as a predator fulfilling its natural urges, it becomes downright enraged after finding out what happened to its kin. Then when they're all killed the Demogorgon loses all concern for its own self-preservation and continues attacking Hopper despite being severely weakened.
• Off with His Head!: How Hopper finally finishes it off.
• Rasputinian Death: Takes a spear through its mouth, gets shot at by Soviet guards, set on fire by Murray, gets shot again multiple times by Hopper, loses an arm, and then is finally finished off by Hopper when he chops its head off.
• Roar Before Beating: After being pumped full of bullets by some Soviets, it does this before slaughtering the group when they stop to reload. It attempts to intimidate Hopper by roaring at him before their duel, but Hopper has none of it. Later on, it tries it again mid-fight after Hopper successfully wounds it. Again, it doesn't work, and leaves the Soviet Demogorgon exposed just enough for Hopper to cut its head off and kill it for good.
• Super-Toughness: Arguably the biggest example of its species. This Demogorgon tanks multiple assault rifle rounds fired at once and a spear to the throat, and even after getting immolated and then shot at, the Demogorgon doesn't so much as back down. Hopper has to chop its head off to stop it.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Compared to the Demogorgon in Season 1. While it's potentially even deadlier in combat, it lacks the Demogorgon's limited telekinesis or the ability to open portals.
• Worf Had the Flu: How Hopper manages to kill it in the climax. Whilst being blasted by a flamethrower wasn't enough to outright kill it compared to the younger and weaker Demodogs, it's clear that the damage of being immolated took a severe toll, as the creature was much slower and less precise than it had been when it almost casually slaughtered an entire group of prisoners within a minute. It's likewise implied he wouldn't have been able to chop off its head with a sword if it hadn't already been severely damaged. It still proved a vicious opponent, showing even weakened how tremendously powerful and dangerous opponents Demogorgons really are.

The Flayed

People and animals infected by the Mind Flayer. Largely left to operate on their own, the Mind Flayer can "activate" them to serve its ends.

• And I Must Scream: The Flayed are fully aware of what they're doing under the Mind Flayer's influence and are helpless to stop it, up to and including their own bodies melting down into a raw, contaminated, bloody liquid to make up the main body.
• Body Horror: The Mind Flayer can use its control over the Flayed to melt them into a sludge of raw materials that it can shape into monstrous forms.
• Extreme Omnivore: The Flayed have a craving for random things like fertilizer and cleaning fluids, ammonia appearing to be the common factor, likely to preemptively destroy their organs to give the Mind Flayer more malleable materials to work with.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: How they became Flayed. The proto-body of the Mind Flayer's Avatar shoved something down their throat to infect them and turn them into its slaves.
• Hive Mind: Flayed in close proximity seem to have a connection to each other, this backfires on them as physical damage done to one affects others nearby.
• Made of Iron: Flayed are stronger and more durable than normal humans, Flayed Billy survives and is able to run away after Eleven telekinetically blasts him through a brick wall. They can also eat caustic chemicals with seemingly no adverse effects. Lucas points out just because they appear human they may no longer be human on the inside, so normal physiology may no longer apply to them.
• Our Zombies Are Different: They're not shambling corpses, they don't eat people and their bite isn't contagious. Nevertheless, they're for all intents and purposes undead.
• Removed Achilles' Heel: As part of being Taught by Experience by its first defeat, the Flayer seems to have removed their ability to feel pain to render them immune to being purged of its influence the same way Will was.
• Swarm of Rats: The Mind Flayer isn't just limited to controlling people, as it shows by hijacking the rats of Hawkins.
• Tainted Veins: They display this at times of stress or when the Mind Flayer is taking more direct control.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: Outside of their eating habits, the Flayed show no signs of being under the control of an Eldritch Abomination. Billy, Tom, and Heather all behave inconspicuously under its influence.
• Villain Override: When the Mind Flayer decides that simply influencing its puppets isn't enough, it can take direct control over them.

The Hospital Monster

A creature made from the remains of two humans after they were Flayed.

• Blob Monster: As a mass of liquid meat held together only by the will of the Mind Flayer, it can discorporate back into a blob to ooze under doors and through vents.
• Body of Bodies: The result of two Flayed (Bruce and Tom, to be precise) forming a creature independent of the Mind Flayer.
• Evil Is Visceral: It can be described as an arthropod with (and of) skin.
• Failure Gambit: As implied by Flayed!Billy, the Hospital Monster's other purpose is to test whether or not the Mind Flayer's main avatar (composed of many more bodies) is ready to take on El and the party, meaning it knew full well the Hospital Monster stood little chance against her.
• Final Boss Preview: It's essentially a small sneak peak of the much larger, even scarier looking body the Mind Flayer has built for itself, which is the Final Boss of the season.
• Giant Enemy Crab: It appears to be vaguely crustacean in shape.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Par for the course with any monster from the Upside Down.
• Spikes of Villainy: The surface of its body is occasionally lined with curved spikes.
• Was Once a Man: Made from Bruce and Tom.

Henry Creel / One (001) / Vecna / Mr. Whatsit

^{Click here to see Henry Creel / One} "To your papa, you are nothing more than an animal, a monster, a lab rat to be tamed. The truth is just the opposite. You are better than they are. Superior."

^{Click here to see his final form} "Can you see the children? Do you know why? Why I chose them to reshape the world? It's because they are weak. Weak in body and mind. Easily broken. Easily reshaped. Controlled. The perfect vessels."

Played By: Jamie Campbell Bower, Raphael Luce (teen), Maksim Blatt (child) ^{Foreign voice actors} Paul Borne (European French), Satoshi Hino (Japanese)

Originated By: Louis McCartney (West End & Broadway)

Debut: "Chapter One: The Hellfire Club" (4x01)

The bitter, cruel, and deeply misanthropic son of Victor Creel. When Henry discovered his psychic powers, he used them to torment and murder his family. He was soon discovered by Dr Brenner and became the first in a series of psychic children gathered by Hawkins National Lab, being designated 001. Decades later, Henry/One massacred nearly everyone at the lab before being overpowered and banished to the Upside Down by Eleven. As a result, his body was hideously disfigured and mutated thereby turning him into the creature ultimately dubbed "Vecna" by the Party. Now, years after his banishment to the Upside Down, Vecna has begun killing teenagers seemingly at random, with Max being his latest target.

• Accidental Hero: When Eddie is about to be caught by Jason and Patrick, he kills the latter, not to save Eddie but simply to get another victim.
• The Ace: All but stated to have been this among the children under Dr. Brenner's tutelage. Henry taught himself how to control his powers and is apparently the most powerful psychic, with the possible exception of Eleven. While Eleven is Unskilled, but Strong, Henry has perfect control of his powers. This means that when she catches him off guard, she is able to overpower him (which she has done twice), but in a direct fight, his greater precision allows him to easily dominate Eleven. Henry is also extremely manipulative, and was intelligent and resourceful enough to survive in the Upside Down in its primordial state. It's telling that Dr. Brenner has to make an electronic chip to suppress his abilities, and relegate him to being an orderly within Hawkins Laboratory just to keep the man under his control.
• Achilles' Heel: Nancy and Robin discover that Vecna's deadly psychic grip on his targets can be broken by playing the target's favorite song thus activating their mind's positive emotions and returning them to reality. It is also revealed that Vecna's physical form, during this phase, is in an idle position leaving him vulnerable to attacks.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Despite everything that he did he was still an innocent child who never asked for these powers, nor did he ever want to become a monster.
• Alien Blood:
  • According to Brenner in The First Shadow, Henry's exposure to Dimension X as a child gave him an entirely unique blood type.
  • In his monstrous body, when his leg is torn by Will late in Season 5 and then in the Finale his arm gets torn off and then he's impaled through on a spike and followed by being decapitated, all the "blood" out of Vecna looks like black sludge, same that all the Demos bleed.
• Allegorical Character: Vecna embodies the deepest traumas and regrets of his victims, reminding them of their guilt and shame while embellishing on the details as he hunts them down. Max and Eleven are the only one who have escaped his clutches, as the sound of Kate Bush, the memories of happier times with their friends and Mike's declaration of love gave them the strength to break free and escape the Upside Down.
• All There in the Manual: Billing information calls him "Peter Ballard", despite that name never being used in the show. This was done likely to avoid spoilers. In an interview, Jamie Campbell Bower even stated that he had no idea where the name "Peter Ballard" came from.
• All Your Powers Combined: He demonstrates a mix of both Eleven and Kali's abilities including Eleven's telekinesis, ability to contact people across dimensions, and ability to create portals as well as Kali's power to induce hallucinations.
• Alpha Strike: He's on the receiving end after Nancy, Steve, and Robin track his physical body down. Robin and Steve ignite him with two Molotov cocktails followed by Nancy shooting him in the torso with a sawed-off shotgun no less than five times before the final shot blows him out the attic window of the Creel house in the Upside Down. Despite this, he manages to survive by either barely living and escaping on foot, or by dissipating his body to reform somewhere else as there is nothing left behind in front of the house save for a smoldering impact mark. Either way, Will confirms in the season finale that Vecna is still very much alive and now has a massive gate into Hawkins prepped for his armies to use.
• Ambiguously Human: Following his gradual transformation as a result of his time in the Upside Down, it's obvious that he's no longer fully human, at least externally, but the extent to which his biology reflects this is a different matter. It's unclear, for example, what effects his transformation has had on his natural lifespan, the arrangement and function of his organs, his diet (or lack thereof), and various other factors.
• Ambiguous Situation: The full nature of the relationship between the Mind Flayer and Vecna/One. One is shown discovering the Mind Flayer as an amorphous cloud in the upside down and then forming it into the spider-shaped being seen in earlier seasons, establishing that One controls it and implying that it, along with all the other monsters from the Upside Down, are ultimately One's minions and even extensions of himself. However, Henry was shown drawing the Mind Flayer in its "spider" form as a child, implying that it has much more of a presence than the discovery scene alone would indicate. This leaves quite a few questions remaining, though. Does the Mind Flayer have any awareness or will of its own? Why did One act through it in earlier seasons, but then seem to cast it aside in Season 4? What role did it play in completing One's transformation from human to monster, as when he first finds it, he is still shown in to be in the sort of half-human state that he was when he first arrived in the Upside Down? While in Season 4, Will Byers and Vecna himself state that the Mind Flayer was part of Vecna all along, The First Shadow retcons this and confirms the Mind Flayer manipulated Vecna into becoming what he is now, rather than the other way around as was assumed. The series finale then depicts this directly, with the Mind Flayer infecting the young Henry during a traumatic moment and commanding him to find it, beginning his descent into becoming Vecna. However, even when this manipulation is pointed out by Will, Henry claims he willingly assisted in the Mind Flayer's plans and insists, perhaps to himself more than anyone, that it's an equal partnership.
• ...And That Little Girl Was Me: The end of Volume 1 in Season 4 leans heavily into this trope. Henry tells Eleven about the child designated 001 that Brenner has kept secret, only to reveal that he himself was that child. After killing everyone else, he tells El about the ill-fated Creel family, revealing himself to be the son of Victor. And just in case it wasn't clear by the end of the episode, the last shot reveals that he became Vecna upon his banishment to the Upside Down.
• Animal Motif: Spiders. Henry developed an obsession with spiders as a child, believing them to be natural predators who prey on the weak, finding a kinship in them.
  • He utilizes spiders in the visions he casts into people's minds as one of his more general, less personal acts of fear, and the way he's raised up by the tendrils of his lair when hunting and killing is reminiscent of a spider at the center of its web. When someone enters his mental space, they even find the husks of his past victims stuck in a cocoon of vines, similar to how a spider will leave its past prey. Ironically his active hunting style is quite different from that of the spiders he makes appears, who make webs and wait for prey to come to them, unless one considers all of Hawkins his 'web.'
  • As Vecna later revealed to Eleven, he seemingly shaped the Mind Flayer himself. Given that it is a spider-like monster that — much like Vecna — is a vindictive misanthrope that seeks to destroy humanity, it makes sense in hindsight — though this was revealed by The First Shadow to have been the Flayer's machinations all along.
• Arch-Enemy:
  • To Eleven. While the rest of the cast oppose him to protect Hawkins, the enmity between him and Eleven is much more personal. He's not only her Evil Counterpart, but also shares a violent history with her. He initially befriends her at Hawkins Lab in order to corrupt her, which fails and results in Eleven using her powers to banish him to the Upside Down, in turn transforming him into a Humanoid Abomination. From then on, he's pretty much equally invested in tormenting Eleven and the people she cares about as he is in his grander scheme to destroy Hawkins and the world. This is actually why the Upside Down’s creatures seem to target Eleven specifically in earlier seasons; through the Hive Mind they have inherited Vecna’s hatred for her.
  • Especially to Will. Upon returning to Hawkins, Will immediately senses Vecna's presence, fearfully revealing to Mike the villain's apocalyptic designs. However, once Will discovers how to hijack the Hive Mind through their shared bond, the dynamic shifts. Driven by wounded pride, Vecna becomes obsessed with breaking Will's spirit and reclaiming him as a vessel. Then there's the revelation that Vecna himself was once a child infected by the Mind Flayer, which heavily implies that Vecna wants to inflict on Will what he himself once suffered.
  • To Dr. Brenner. Having endured so much torture at Brenner's hands, and being forced to work for him as an orderly for the Hawkins Lab for decades, Henry hates Brenner even more than Eleven does. One of his goals post-Vecna transformation was to specifically terrorize him out of revenge for what the man has done to him. In turn, Brenner considers Henry to be to be his greatest failure after losing all his test subjects at his hands, and wants nothing more than to find him in the Upside Down and kill him.
  • To a lesser extent, he also serves as this to Nancy as of the climax of Season 4. In Episode 7, he chooses to communicate with her specifically, and reveals that he was the one responsible for murdering Barbara back in Season 1. Furthermore, he takes particular pleasure in taunting her when he has her, Robin, and Steve at his mercy in the Upside Down. Nancy returns the sentiments after their talk, decides that Vecna needs to die brutally, and is the leader of the Hawkins front to do just that.
  • To the rest of the Party in general, as he has done something to negatively affect all of them. He torments Max all throughout Season 4 with horrible visions, culminating in him briefly murdering her in the finale. Lucas undoubtedly hates him, because of trying to kill Max, and the fact that she died painfully in his arms begging not to die. Dustin despises him because in the finale his Demobat legion fatally wounded Eddie who was his hero. Mike also hates his guts considering all of the pain and suffering that he's caused his friends, and it becomes far more apparent in Season 5 when Vecna sends a Demogorgon that kidnaps his little sister Holly and nearly kills his parents.
• Arc Symbol: Grandfather clocks. His victims always see one right when he's decided to kill them. This is because there was one in his house back when he was a human boy in Hawkins (and is present in the Upside Down mirror version), and he creates a mind-link with his victims when he attacks them. They're either seeing them because of his memory of the one he owned, or because of the one in his home in the Upside Down. His obsession with that particular clock stems from it being the first time he consciously used his psychic powers to affect the world around him, winding the clock's hands backwards as a symbolic defiance of the 'unnatural' laws that mankind force upon the world around them, as his 'Orderly' self explains to the younger Eleven that he considers units of measurement for time as one of the biggest examples of said laws that were 'restraining' his true self. The ritual he enacts to tear open a massive gate between Hawkins and the Upside Down and begin merging both worlds together seems to incorporate the clock in some respect, as its chiming is what signals the activation of the gate after Max temporarily dies.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: According to Jamie Campbell Bower, Vecna's last words as he's gurgling blood while impaled on a spike before Joyce decapitates him were going to be, "Please, don't!" Given he and the Mind Flayer formed a symbiosis, the Mind Flayer was probably the one begging and was only using him as a mouthpiece.
• Asshole Victim: While there's some sympathy to be had for Vecna due to his traumatic origins, his outright refusal to resist the Mind Flayer's influence and willingness to destroy humanity (not to mention him causing so much harm to families by causing the deaths of Barb, Bob, Eddie, Chrissy, and others) proves that he's Beyond Redemption. The entire main cast feels nothing but satisfaction as they watch Joyce finally chop his head off, remembering all of the horrible things Vecna did to them over the course of the show.
• Ax-Crazy: An incredibly brutal and bloodthirsty misanthrope with a level of sadism that matches the Mind Flayer, which is appropriate considering that he is the chief vessel for the Mind Flayer. Vecna's proclivity for torture and murder has not faded over the years since he was sent to the Upside Down, as he spent it planning the eradication of humanity when not committing gruesome murders in Hawkins for fun.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: As Mr. Whatsit, Henry wears a fancy brown suit with a red tie, as well as a fedora. Downplayed, however, in that he doesn't fight in the suit and only wears it to make himself look more ordinary and approachable to the children he kidnaps.
• The Bad Guy Wins: He gets what he wants by the end of Season 4. He successfully killed all four of his targets (Max was dead just long enough for it to "count"), causing the largest gate to the Upside Down to open, devastating Hawkins and killing dozens. And despite the thrashing he received from El, Nancy, Robin, and Steve, he is still alive as the Upside Down is beginning to leak into our world.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: A flashback to his younger self shows him torturing a rabbit with his Psychic Powers.
• Bald of Evil: Once he assumes his final form as Vecna, Henry's vibrant blonde hair eventually falls out, leaving his new monstrous form completely bald.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: Ken doll variant; although he presumably was anatomically whole when he was still human, his banishment to the Upside Down and subsequent transformation into Vecna seems to have eliminated his genitalia.
• The Beastmaster: When trapped in the Upside Down, Henry manages to assume control over the lifeforms that exist there, and direct them into being hostile against humans. He is also responsible for creating new creatures to inhabit the Upside Down due to aligning himself with the Mind Flayer.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: Despite him hating Dr. Brenner and everything the man did and stood for, Henry ends up doing a lot of the same things he did in Season 5: namely kidnapping a certain certain number of children for him to exploit for his own dark designs; albeit to a much worse extent then Brenner ever did.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: One wished to unburden the world of its unnatural order. Eleven banished him to the Upside Down, a parallel world where order is non-existent. He's horribly disfigured within moments. Though he spends quite a bit of time in agonizing pain as he's struck by supernatural lightning and falls for a very long time, Henry doesn't really seem to mind this fate in the present day.
• Believing Their Own Lies: It's implied that he's genuinely deluded himself into believing that the Mind Flayer serves him instead of the other way around, even if he knows better on a subconscious level. Tellingly, when confronted with a memory of his first encounter with the Flayer in the Nevada cave, he's terrified and refuses to go near it, implicitly due to unconscious fear of either the traumatic experience or the Mind Flayer itself, or of having his self-delusions of power shattered. Even more notably, when he is forced to confront the memory in the series finale, which reduces him to tears, he still rejects Will's claim that the Mind Flayer is controlling him and he can resist it, by insisting their relationship is on equal footing and they need each other.
• Berserk Button: Vecna really hates the idea of being vulnerable and weak, or any insinuation he has less control over his life and situation.
  • When the scientist in the cave shoots young Henry in his hand and the boy sees the wound, Henry’s concern vanishes as he goes out of his way to not just stop him, but kill him. And this was before Henry even touches the suitcase and is psychically possessed by the Mind Flayer.
  • When Eleven tries to sympathize with Vecna for what Dr. Brenner did, Vecna is appalled at the idea of blaming Brenner for Eleven or his own actions.
  • When Will similarly empathizes with a sobbing adult Henry for being just as much a pawn of the Mind Flayer as Will was, Henry’s tears quickly become replaced with Tranquil Fury, as he insists this was his choice.
• Beyond Redemption: His backstory is incredibly tragic, as he didn’t ask to be corrupted by the Mind Flayer while being granted psychic powers by it. However, Henry made no effort to resist the Mind Flayer’s influence, and has no qualms or remorse about what he’s doing. It’s made very clear that at a certain point, he became a willing agent of the Mind Flayer rather than a puppet of it.
• Big Bad: From Season 4 onwards, Vecna is positioned as this, being the supposed true master of the Upside Down and The Man Behind the Man for the Mind Flayer. In Season 4, he orchestrates a series of murders to bridge the planes, intending to open a rift between the rest of the world and the Upside Down. Season 5 sees him continue in the role by abducting children to use as vessels to boost his power so he can merge Earth and Dimension X (The Abyss) and rule over the result (although he has to share the spotlight with the US Military Police Corps occupation in Hawkins). It is revealed in the Grand Finale that Vecna is just a puppet for the real Big Bad, the Mind Flayer. After coming into contact with a mysterious stone, the Mind Flayer corrupted him with its influence and psychic powers. This ultimately lead to Henry to becoming Vecna, the "five-star general" of the Mind Flayer in its bid to destroy humanity and conquer the world via the Upside-Down.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Season 5's Grand Finale clarifies a great deal about the relationship with Vecna and the Mind Flayer: Henry ultimately chose to ally with the Mind Flayer, referring to it as them "needing" one another. He's the "frontline general" who advances its will, and the two ultimately merge in the finale to fight together and prove an equal final threat. The Mind Flayer still functions as the true Big Bad, being the one who corrupted Henry into becoming his "five-star general" known as Vecna while telepathically influencing him to shape its iconic spider form. However, Vecna was granted control over the Mind Flayer avatar we see in Seasons 2 and 3, and was responsible for abducting/possessing Will on the Flayer's behalf. It’s likely that in the same way the Mind Flayer influenced Henry into becoming a nihilistic misanthrope, Henry offered the Mind Flayer a human perspective while directly causing events on its behalf. Even with the revelation that the Mind Flayer corrupted Henry in the first place, it’s still clear that Vecna played an influential role in designing and executing the various schemes in invading Earth via Hawkins and the Upside Down beyond being a mere puppet.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Though Vecna remains the main threat in Season 5, a secondary antagonistic faction is revealed in the forces of the US military branch led by Major General Dr. Kay who has set up base in both Hawkins and the Upside Down, aiming to create more children with superpowers for the military to weaponize.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Zig-Zagged Trope. Vecna clearly sees himself as an enlightened Misanthrope Supreme, but his reasoning for this is Insane Troll Logic at best: his grand plan involves murdering traumatised teenagers who are helpless against him, and he's ultimately the way he is because of the Mind Flayer's slow corruption of his mind all while seemingly believing that he is the one in control when the truth is that he's more of a perfected vessel. At the same time, he's also easily the most effective of the Upside Down's inhabitants, considering he succeeded in his goals by the end of Season 4 once he got more personally involved despite the setbacks he suffered. At the end of Season 5, Henry reveals that he is fully aware that he does not control the demonic abomination, though he doesn't see it as controlling him either: Vecna believes that they are now one and the same, with both of them needing the help of the other via symbiosis.
• Biomanipulation: In Season 5, he is able to manipulate the flesh of the Upside Down creatures, healing all of the Demogorgons of their wounds.
• Bishōnen Line: Not only is he the latest villain introduced, but from a visual aesthetic, Vecna — compared to the other residents of the Upside Down that are vaguely monsters with sectioned flower mouths and the Mind Flayer being a multi-limbed, colossal monstrosity that only communicates coherently through a host — looks like a skeletal-faced, humanoid corpse with Icy Blue Eyes that is able to converse with its victims fluently and his methods of hunting are much more refined — focusing on Mind Rape and demoralizing speeches. Justified as he used to be human -- specifically a former test subject like Eleven, called One.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Appears to Holly in his human form as a kindly protector who only wants what's best for her family, trapping her in a Lotus-Eater Machine where all her childhood dreams come true. He does this while concealing the fact that he's every bit as monstrous as the Demogorgon that hunted her in the real world.
• Body Horror:
  • His clash with Eleven drove him into the Upside Down, where his flesh was ruined by being pelted by lightning bolts as he was flung through the formless void the Upside Down used to be. Curiously, he survived with heavy scarring, but a still noticeably human appearance in the aftermath, and over the years in the alien environment seems to have mutated into a partial Meat Moss construct, with his body now apparently being partially constructed from the fleshy vines that cover the Upside Down Hawkins, and his left hand elongating into an animalistic claw. Though his appearance is horrific, it's shown his new body is much more durable than his formerly human one, to the point of being able to survive being set on fire and blasted with shotgun rounds until he falls out a window.
  • This also describes the way he executes his victims: burning the eyeballs to blind them, snapping their limbs into obscene shapes, and detaching the jaw from the skull before caving it in. And the victim can feel everything.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Probably the biggest fan of this out of any antagonist in the show.
  • Instead of using his powers to snap Max like a twig as she runs through his mindscape, he uses them to throw boulders at her - while she's running in a perfectly straight line.
  • In Max's memories, Henry chases her to the cave, but stops at the entrance and refuses to enter it. While it would be justified in that he can't enter the cave because of his trauma, he has telekinesis and can turn his hands into tentacles that he can use to grab people from twenty feet away. But he doesn't do either of those, instead standing there and crying at the cave entrance.
  • After killing the military at the MAC-Z, he just chucks Joyce aside and knocks her out instead of killing her on the spot with his tendrils or powers, and rather than kill Will when he's done talking to him, he lets him live and walks back into the Upside Down. This lets Will live long enough to unlock his powers and kill the Demogorgons, which saves Robin, Murray, Mike and Lucas, and he later manages to use said powers to snap his leg while hijacking his mind to stop him from killing Max and Holly.
  • He probes Will's mind to check Max's location (because he apparently never thought to check a hospital) and makes him bleed from his eyes, but he apparently doesn't see Will having powers similar to himself as a problem - and lets him go so El can save him.
  • He doesn't bother opening a portal in Max's hospital room so his demodogs can rip her to shreds, and they instead show up out of nowhere to run to her location. This gives Lucas enough time to take Max's unconscious body downstairs, and the demodogs are killed by Karen without a problem before Max wakes back up. Vecna then stops chasing her.
  • After finally getting over his cave-related trauma, he catches up to Holly and beats the shit out of her, but stops when he sees the memory of when he got shot in the hand and possessed by the Mind Flayer. Holly gets away while he's distracted.
  • For absolutely no reason at all, he only uses an illusion to make it look like Hopper shot El in the tank, causing him to break the glass and remove her from it to forcibly rip her, Kali and Max out of Henry's mind. If this actually happened, El would really be dead and Henry would save himself a lot of trouble.
• Boomerang Bigot: He vehemently hates humanity despite the fact that — although he has psychic powers — he himself is still a human.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Season 4 presents Henry Creel as having been a misanthropic serial killer even as a child, as well as the one who created the Mind Flayer as an ideal form of his and was "controlling" it in Season 2 and 3. Stranger Things: The First Shadow either retcons or adds more context to this by revealing that Henry was infected by the Mind Flayer's essence as a young child and was slowly corrupted by it until he gave in to its influence and killed his family.
• Break Them by Talking: Part of his M.O. is to appear as someone his victims know and bring up traumatic experiences, twisting things like they are the victim's fault. When appearing to Max as Billy Hargrove, he hits her with an especially cruel monologue after she reads her letter, even insinuating that a small part of her wanted Billy to die.
• Broken Tears: Being forced to confront the memory of how the Mind Flayer possessed him drives him to cry while remembering it.
• Calling Parents by Their Name: Vecna refers to his father as "old, blind, dumb Victor" while revealing himself to Nancy.
• Came Back Strong: After his non-fatal immolation at the end of Season 4, he's visibly still healing and weakened in Season 5, but also improving on his body as he does to make it stronger, such that he can shrug off gunshots of the kind that hurt him the first time.
• The Chain of Harm: Implied. It's hard not to notice that the Mind Flayer's corruption of him in The First Shadow is very similar to how Vecna/Henry himself treats others after his transformation, particularly Eleven and the other chosen "vessels". His Bitch in Sheep's Clothing interactions with children as "Mr. Whatsit" are also akin to how Dr. Brenner operated with him and the other child experiments in Hawkins Lab.
• Child Hater: In Season 5, Vecna reveals to Will that while he hates humanity in general, he has a special amount of loathing for children in particular, seeing them as weak and easy to break. He even mocks Will by claiming that he showed him just how weak he was when his Demogorgon kidnapped him way back in the first season.
• Cold Ham: As Vecna, he speaks in a low, raspy voice, even while giving nihilistic speeches, telling his victims all about how he's going to "end their suffering", and showing Nancy his apocalyptic plans for Hawkins.
• Combat Tentacles: Vecna can control the biomass of the Upside Down to project vine-like tentacles he uses these to restrain his quarry. Apparently, they can't be resisted through raw strength, as any individual that's been restrained has required a rush of positive emotions to be able to break free. He can also extend his fingers and the growths on his arms into spiked tentacles he uses to impale opponents.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Unlike the animalistic Demogorgon or the intelligent but deeply alien Mind Flayer, Vecna is human-like in both appearance and mindset, and his understanding of the human mind is a key part of how he attacks. This is because, unlike previous villains, he isn't a native inhabitant of the Upside Down.
• The Corruption: Season 4 has Will Byers state that all the evil within the Upside Down, right down to the dimension's appearance as a reflection of Hawkins and the Mind Flayer's spider form, comes from Henry's psychic powers and his sheer hatred for humanity. However, Stranger Things: The First Shadow retcons this, revealing Henry to be a victim of the Mind Flayer's corrupting infuence. This is confirmed in season 5, which shows a flashback of a young Henry Creel getting infected by the Mind Flayer.
• Creepy Blue Eyes: Henry has naturally-blue eyes that look much more unsettling after they go bloodshot from his massacre of Hawkins' Lab. He retains them even as the monstrous Vecna, which stand out against his horrific visage.
• Creepy High-Pitched Voice: One has a non-threatening voice that Eleven initially trusts. However, once he engages in the Hawkins Lab massacre and has his monologue, it goes from sounding reassuring to unsettling due to One revealing his true darkness to her. In Season 5, he uses the same voice as Mr. Whatsit, and fluctuates between it and his new demonic voice whenever he finds it necessary.
• Creepy Long Fingers: Has long talons which can be seen best during his showdown with Max.
• Cruel Mercy:
  • Henry didn't kill his father like he did to his mother and sister, and instead let him live, knowing he'll be broken both from the emotional shock and for being implicated in those crimes. It was probably the worst fate among all his victims. After Nancy spoke with Victor, Vecna casually mentioned that he's been planning to inflict even more torment on his father.
  • It's implied he intended a similar fate for his other father figure Dr. Brenner, as he noticeably spared him alone out of all the other psychics and staff members in the Hawkins lab despite having him at his mercy, and seems genuinely displeased at the news of his passing. That said, he still refers him with derogatory contempt and implies he intended to let him live only long enough to see everything he'd been hoping to achieve with his experiments come to naught.
  • After meeting Eleven since his banishment, Vecna decides to restrain her... only to tell her he wants her to watch him killing Max and the carnage he unleashes on the world as punishment for rejecting his offer several years back.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: After El flings him around his lair and Will rips off his arm, Vecna finds himself impaled on a large spike. He is left there, choking and gurgling on his own blood, until Joyce finally beheads him. This in itself is drawn-out, as it takes several swings for Joyce to fully chop through his neck and sever Vecna's head.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: At the MAC-Z base, he single-handedly takes on the entire military after his minions are defeated, and he effortlessly destroys them with his telekinesis and tentacles while taking no damage because their bullets just bounce off of him.
• The Dandy: As Mr. Whatsit, Henry wears an impeccable 50s-style suit, complete with glasses and a nice fedora, in order to make himself more approachable to the children of Hawkins.
• Dark and Troubled Past:
  • Downplayed. He claims he was rejected by other children, and the fact that he understands sadness implies that something bad happened to him, but we're given few details. While being a prisoner of Dr. Brenner that bonds with Eleven and is later revealed to be Victor's son all seem like they'd provide a sympathetic backstory, it soon becomes clear they had nothing to do with his turn to villainy, as One had a loving family and his acts of cruelty were done simply because he hates humanity and enjoys carnage, regardless of his rather flimsy justifications.
  • Played straight in the Stranger Things: The First Shadow theatrical play, which retcons or adds much-needed context to the show's revelation that One created and was controlling the Mind Flayer's shadow form by revealing that Henry Creel was teleported to "Dimension X" as a young child and infected by the Mind Flayer's essence, which attempted to take over his body and slowly corrupted him into the nihilistic misanthrope he was by the time of show.
• Dark Lord on Life Support: The tendrils that fuse into him make it look like he is dependent on a life support system. As the Party and their allies deduce, this is actually Vecna entering a trance state every time he ensnares a victim, which makes him a sitting duck during such a period.
• Deadpan Snarker: Vecna has a very dry, monotone, sarcastic sense of humor, such as when he mockingly referred to his father as "old, blind, dumb Victor" when he's taunting Nancy. He also snarks at Max when she enters his mindscape, going so far as to smile malevolently at her.
• Death by Irony: Given his contempt for humanity and arrogant belief in his own superiority, it's more than a little ironic that he ends up being finished off by Joyce Byers, a completely ordinary human.
• Defiant to the End: It's understated but it's still there. His only response to Joyce preparing to cut off his head with an axe is to snarl at her in impotent rage after choking on his own blood and seemingly about to beg for his life.
• Demon of Human Origin: Vecna was once a man known as Henry Creel, who was institutionalized after Dr. Brenner discovered his psychic powers and wanted to keep him under his control. After being banished to Dimension X by Eleven, Henry is blasted by lightning and forced to survive in a dimension that clearly was not meant for humans to explore, where he gradually devolved into being a burnt, inhuman creature who further increases his powers tenfold by taking control of and/or creating new life forms while in there due to fusing with the dimension's ruler. Bonus points in that Dimension X literally looks like Hell when Henry is sent there.
• Demonic Possession: Not only is he capable of connecting to and controlling those who have been infected by the Mind Flayer, he himself was first infected by it as a child, and it corrupted his mind until he became the monster we see.
• Dented Iron: While he definitely Came Back Strong, he's clearly still recovering from Season 4. His body has mutated further, exposing his skeletal structure, his feet are clearly deformed from being immolated, and his limbs becoming even more encased in tentacles.
• Destination Defenestration: He's blasted out of a boarded-up attic window of the Upside Down Creel house by Nancy with a shotgun while on fire, though he survives.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Directed at his father. Victor did accidentally kill innocents in wartime, but it was a complete accident that haunted him for decades. Henry's response comes off as massive overkill at best: he uses the memory to Mind Rape him while additionally killing his mother and sister simply because he had the power and the strength to, all before framing Victor for their deaths. It's heavily implied that Henry was simply looking for a justification to indulge in his sadistic cruelty against his family.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Henry's interactions with El can bring to mind sexual grooming, as his modus operandi involves speaking to her in a gentle tone of voice while taking advantage of her for his own benefit. He all but states that he wanted El to be his queen in their new world order. When he becomes Vecna, he convinces his prey they are unloved and that what he's about to do is for their own good. He even developed a habit of getting uncomfortably close to his victims.
  • Season 5 adds to the grooming subtext, with him staking out playgrounds, forming bonds with children, and then kidnapping them to be used in his plans, all while under the guise of a kindly human man. It also reveals that he was personally responsible for Will's infection, he stroked Will's face while saying they are going to make "beautiful things" together right before infecting him, and in the present admits that he targets children because Will showed him how easy they were to break. The subtext is furthered by how the Mind Flayer did the same thing to Henry when he was a boy, reflecting how some victims of grooming continue the chain of hurt when they grow older.
  • Vecna relies on preying on his victims' previous traumas to target them before inducing dread and anxiety, which manifest initially as intrusive thoughts. As his stalking progresses, the victims also experience physical pain such as headaches and psychological difficulty such as nightmares among other symptoms of depression. When he finally closes in on his victims, they re-experience deeply traumatic life events. From the outside looking in, Vecna's victims appear to be experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, making him an allegory for it and the worst possible result: suicide. This is reinforced by Vecna claiming he is ending the suffering of his victims, and the way the Party carefully watches over Max after her ordeal with Vecna, similar to how someone's loved ones may act around them after a suicide attempt.
• Dragged Off to Hell: His banishment to Dimension X plays out this way. He is sent tumbling through the hellish dimension while red lightning destroys his body, transforming him into a visceral monster. Of course, he seems to have accepted it as his home over the years.
• The Dragon: This is Dustin's theory of what Vecna's role is in the Upside Down, being the Mind Flayer's "five star general". The fact that he is opening multiple gates to the Upside Down implies that he is at least helping the Mind Flayer advance its plans. Will Byers seemingly disproves Dustin's theory and that Vecna is the Mind Flayer, subverting the trope altogether, but The First Shadow retcons this by revealing that the Mind Flayer infected Henry when he was a child and corrupted him into the nihilistic misanthrope and serial killer he was by the time he murdered his family. The actual truth is somewhere in between. While Mind Flayer is a malevolent Eldritch Abomination hive mind, it doesn’t have a strong understanding of human intelligence as Henry does. When Henry came into contact with the Mind Flayer, it infected his mind with a hatred of humanity and gave him powers that he could use to enact its will, but Vecna was the one who gave the hive mind a form of intelligence, emotion, and human willpower. Thus, all of the events of the show and the actions of the Upside Down were due to Vecna playing a major role in actions such as controlling the Demogorgon, the various Mind Flayer avatars, the possession of Will Byers and Billy Hargrove, and of course, the events of season 4 and 5 when he makes a direct appearance. However, he was serving the Mind Flayer’s will in these many acts, and it was due to the Mind Flayer’s psychic influence that he was infected with this hatred of humanity and life.
• Dragon-in-Chief: Played with - Henry is the one who controls the movements and actions of the Mind Flayer forms that we see in Seasons 2 and 3, but it is ultimately revealed that the Mind Flayer was influencing his mind the whole time as it needed his powers to enact its agenda. In the finale, Henry confirms that neither he nor the Mind Flayer completely controls one another, and have instead bonded in a symbiotic relationship. This is why Henry has the Mind Flayer's voice in his Vecna form.
• The Dreaded: There isn't a single person that has encountered Vecna that isn't terrified of him, not just because of the brutal murders he commits in Season 4 and his menacing appearance, but also because of every horrific tragedy that was previously unknown to be the result of his actions. This includes the Creel family massacre, and there are strong hints that Will and Barb's kidnappings were through him directing the Demogorgon. After Vecna nearly burns him and slaughters all of his troops, even Colonel Sullivan is scared shitless of him.
• Electromagnetic Ghosts: Same as with the Demogorgon, flickering lights herald his presence in the real world.
• Emerging from the Shadows: He likes to make his entrances like this, making his first appearance in Chrissy's nightmare by emerging from the shadows.
• Enabled Delusion: Vecna claims to be the mastermind behind the events of the series and the true source of the Mind Flayer's omnicidal goals. While he indeed orchestrated Will's kidnapping, was directly linked to the Mind Flayer's actions through the hive mind, and proved himself to be one of the show's most dangerous villains in the final two seasons, The First Shadow and Season 5 reveal that he's actually an Unwitting Pawn to the Mind Flayer, who is feeding into Vecna's delusions of grandeur so he'll help carry out its own, entirely self-serving goal of wiping out humanity.
• Enfante Terrible: Henry began torturing small animals as a child before tormenting his family with disturbing hallucinations. He eventually murdered his mother and sister while framing his father for the crime.
• Engineered Heroics: How he gets the children on his side in Season 5. He sends Demogorgons to kidnap and terrify them, then "saves" them from the Demogorgons and tells them he needs their help to fight the monsters. It works so well that the kids won't believe he's the mastermind and attack anyone who disagrees until El and Kali trick him into revealing both his deception and his Red Right Hand.
• Everyone Went to School Together: Stranger Things: The First Shadow and Season 5 reveal he attended high school with Joyce, Hopper, Bob (and Bob's sister Patty), Karen, Ted, Steve's father Danny, and Eddie's father Alan. Maybe Brenner decided to let him out of the lab for a few years.
• Evil All Along: "The Orderly" is first introduced as an ally to Eleven who mentors her and tries to help her escape. Not only is he revealed to be the real killer of the lab children, it's also revealed that he's been terrorizing Hawkins in the past few years.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: The only emotions he knows how to channel into his psionics are sadness and anger; he knows nothing about love. Even though Eleven had only one very brief and faint memory of love, that was enough to empower her to defeat him. Similarly, the tentacles he binds and crushes his victims with cannot be physically overpowered no matter how hard they struggle, but when both Max and Eleven are reminded of more positive emotions and use those to fight back against Vecna, the tentacles weaken and fall off them, as Vecna is literally binding them with their more negative doubts and emotions. He has no defenses against emotions he cannot comprehend, nor the power they give others, leading to him getting physically attacked twice when he seems to have won.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • He is essentially what Eleven could've been if she had zero moral boundaries: an unstoppable, superpowered killer driven only by pure rage. Like Eleven, One was born with telekinetic abilities that were sharpened through Brenner's experiments. However, unlike Eleven who has killed only in self-defense or to defend her friends, Vecna kills because he likes it. Their tattoos even contrast each other's; El's is 011 while Henry's is 001 (when the two are shown side by side, their arms are positioned so that the ones correspond with the other's zeros.
  • The First Shadow confirms he's also one to Will Byers as a young, weird but harmless kid who was possessed by the Mind Flayer. While Will resisted it and was eventually able to drive it out with the aid of his family and friends, Henry eventually gave into its influence and became its general, and refuses to turn back when Will offers it.
• Evil Is Hammy: He's generally a Cold Ham, but he occasionally dips into outright over-the-top territory. His Motive Rant is the perfect example:
  "Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades! Each life a faded, lesser copy of the one before! WAKE UP, EAT, WORK, SLEEP, REPRODUCE, AND DIE!"
• Evil Is Not a Toy: He's the foulest, most wicked character in the whole series (alongside the Mind Flayer) and Doctor Brenner seriously believed that — not only could he control him — but he could restrain him and use him to train more psychics. This backfired massively.
• Evil Is Visceral: He's as gory as the Mind Flayer's avatar.
• Evil Luddite: His motive rant has shades of this, seeing civilisation and social routines as unnatural. His wonder at how the Upside Down was "unspoiled by humanity" and worship of spiders implies he's pro-nature to some degree, and essentially a superpowered eco-fascist considering his Social Darwinist tendencies and the fact he's aligning himself with a malevolent Eldritch Abomination hell-bent on asserting its dominion over Earth. He's not above killing animals like rabbits and rats in the process; after all, Nature Is Not Nice.
• Evil Makes You Monstrous: He was already evil as a human, and twenty years after he murdered his mother and sister he was still as human as ever, albeit with special powers like Eleven. It wasn't until Eleven banished him into the Upside Down, after he killed all the other gifted children at the Hawkins Lab, that he became a Humanoid Abomination. In short, twenty years of being a murderer didn't make him nearly as monstrous as seven years trapped in the Upside Down.
• Evil Mentor: Although he clearly benefitted by manipulating her to remove his Restraining Bolt, he seems to have had a genuine interest in tutoring Eleven. Given who Brenner is, it's hard to blame her for trusting his advice.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Befitting of his demonic appearance, he speaks with a chillingly deep voice. This contrasts his higher, more soft-spoken tone as Henry.
• Expy:
  • Vecna's gory flesh, long talon on his left hand, obsession with murdering teens, and paranormal abilities involving putting his victims inside nightmares bring to mind Freddy Krueger. His voice sounds similar to the 2010 version of Freddy, he Was Once a Man, and one of his main enemies is a girl named Nancy. His father is even played by Robert Englund.
  • He's also one to the Cenobites from Hellraiser, specifically the chief Cenobite Pinhead. He's a former human turned into a demonic envoy who lures people by toying with their minds. Jamie Campbell Bower even cited Doug Bradley's performance, especially his voice, as a basis for Vecna.
  • Vecna also shares a lot of DNA with Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter. Both start as alienated prodigies who transform into disfigured demons obsessed with reshaping the world to their vision. Each has a creepy Animal Motif (snakes for Voldemort, spiders for Vecna), a knack for invading minds, and a habit of turning their own isolation into justification for mass domination. They also happen to share a psychic link with one of their victims by accident, with Voldemort sharing a part of his soul with Harry Potter and Will Byers having the ability to sense Vecna's presense.
  • He also bears similarities to Radu Molasar from The Keep: an intelligent, sadistic demonic entity with a similar skinless appearance, possessing enormous powers but also manipulative and able to convince people to trust him, and trapped for a very long time in an enclosed space. Both are also seen slaughtering dozens of soldiers (Nazis in the 1983 film).
• Face Death with Despair: Downplayed. While he's choking on his own blood too heavily to make it out clearly, Jamie Campbell Bower confirmed that his last words when he realized Joyce was going to kill him were "Please, don't!" That said, once he realizes that she's going to cut his head off and there's no way out, he manages one last angry snarl.
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: Prior to transforming into Vecna, Henry had the boyishly handsome face of Jamie Campbell Bower, disguising the misanthropic psychopath lurking beneath.
• Failed a Spot Check: Max was in his mind for a year and a half after he broke her bones and blinded her, which he was fully aware of, as seen in her flashbacks. However, he apparently never once thought or bothered to check a hospital for her physical body, instead deciding to torture Will to figure out where she was and only then deciding to send monsters to kill her. Almost two years after killing her.
• Faking the Dead: As far as his father knew, he slipped into a coma and died a week later after the attack on his family. In truth, he was captured by Dr. Brenner who sought to harness his powers.
• Faux Affably Evil: Soft-spoken, polite, and friendly to Eleven. Even while slaughtering his way through the lab, he maintained a level of calm and politeness in his tone. As Vecna, he keeps up this facade by speaking to his prey in a soft and reassuring voice, almost as if he's comforting them before they die. As Mr. Whatsit, he's very friendly and soft-spoken with the kids he kidnaps, including Holly and Derek, such as telling them to avoid going into the woods because there are monsters in there, letting them do as they please in the Camazotz copy of the Creel House, telling them that they will be heroes for helping him achieve his goals, and even giving Holly a music tape as a gift, all to get them to lower their guards and make them more susceptible to his manipulation.
• Forgot About His Powers: Where to even begin?
  • While Max is escaping Vecna's mindscape by hearing her favorite song, he doesn't use telekinesis to snap her neck or make her float in the air, or his tentacles to stab her in the back. Instead, he simply throws boulders at her while she's running in a straight line, and sure enough, she escapes and his plans are foiled.
  • Max's flashback to her almost escaping the mindscape show that Vecna can simply teleport there and catch his victims easier, but instead of teleporting through the cave to catch Max and Holly in all of one second, he just stands there and is too afraid to walk into the cave because of his trauma. Nor does he use telekinesis to get them out of the cave either while Max is calling him a coward, or to catch the fleeing children after Eleven, Kali and Max free them from his control, and he's reduced to limping toward them with a broken ankle. Almost like he doesn't have powers in his own mind, except he does, as when he finds Max and Holly in Holly's memories, he takes on his Vecna form and strangles the former with his tentacles before Will breaks his leg.
  • In the finale, he uses an illusion to make Hopper think he shot El in the tank, making him freak out and shatter the tank to save her, which also removes her, Max and Kali from his mind. However, when Will takes him over and breaks his leg in episode 5 to save Max and Holly, Henry shows he can forcibly eject people from his mind, so unless a sensory deprivation tank full of water somehow messes with that ability, he had no reason to trick Hopper into shooting at the tank.
• Final Boss: In Seasons 4 and 5 alongside the Mind Flayer.
  • Season 4 has Vecna being faced in his mind realm by Eleven while Nancy, Steve, and Robin attack his physical form. At the same time, the Mind Flayer possesses the Demogorgons at the Soviet base in an attempt to kill Hopper, Joyce, and Murray.
  • Season 5 has Eleven duel him directly in the core of the Mind Flayer's physical form while the rest of the Party hold off the Mind Flayer's body.
• Foreshadowing:
  • When One tells Eleven and Nancy about his childhood, he mentions being put in hospital and having several tubes hooked up to him. Just like the tendrils that fuse into Vecna. As more details come out about his backstory, so does his interest in spiders, which are also frequently seen in the visions of his victims. Which hints towards his role in literally shaping the Mind Flayer (or so he thought).
  • When he teaches Eleven how to use her emotions to empower her psionic gifts, he specifically tells her to channel her sadness and anger, foreshadowing that those are the only emotions he feels and/or understands.
  • Vecna's name alone actually gives away much of his backstory (see Meaningful Name). It also hints, ironically, at his role and position in the "pantheon" of the Upside Down, as Vecna in D&D is a much bigger threat than a Mind Flayer. Subverted regarding his relationship with the Mind Flayer, who has been using him as the ideal vessel this entire time.
  • Before his attacks begin, we're treated to a flashback to a traumatic moment in Eleven's childhood where the staff and the children were brutally murdered, something we see a few times after. Blink-and-you-miss-it, but the method of their deaths appear to be similar to how Vecna's kills look, with broken bones, snapped necks, lots of blood, and missing eyes.
  • Dustin and Steve debate how Vecna could have been linked to Victor Creel and his family's murder given that contact to the Upside Down didn't happen until the experiments on Eleven, and thus those murders couldn't have anything to do with the Upside Down. Turns out they're right, because Vecna himself wouldn't be cast into the Upside Down until Eleven started opening portals to it, the first being used to trap him.
  • His "base" in the Upside Down is the old, abandoned house of Victor Creel which was Vecna's childhood home back when he was Henry Creel. It was first assumed to be due to Victor's assumption that there was a demon hiding within the shadows, but the fact that Henry was never shown being tormented by any hallucinations turned out to be a major hint that the real terror was hiding in plain sight.
  • Really, the way Vecna tortures and kills is quite different from anything else seen in the Upside Down. In fact, it more closely resembles the powers of Eleven/Jane and Eight/Kali.
  • Victor Creel, in both the news-clips as well as his interview with both Nancy and Robin, specifically stated that it was caused by a demon inhabiting the house who tortured them with visions. Eight's powers is a small-scale version of what the "demon" was letting them see, as well as cluing it's actually a new member of the family currently inhabiting the house who did everything. Victor Creel will also unintentionally foreshadow his son eventually becoming the demonic Vecna.
  • When Creel starts talking about the curse in his family, he first makes note of the fact he kept finding mutilated animals on or near his property. Killing and torturing animals is one of the most well-known early traits of a budding serial killer, which is more-or-less what Vecna started as. Related, during his exposition, he notably doesn't put much detail into describing his son, other than to say he was "sensitive", and thus doesn't give away the fact his son was clearly demonstrating early signs of psychopathy.
  • Also, when Creel describes how his wife and daughter were murdered, he states that Henry fell into a coma and died a week later. It doesn't make sense that the "demon" responsible for the murders would attack Henry in a different manner than the other two, or with less force - in reality, Henry had passed out from overusing his psychic powers to murder his mother and sister, just like how Eleven had sometimes passed out from overusing her powers.
  • His humanoid appearance, when nothing else in the Upside Down has a humanoid appearance, foreshadows the reveal that he Was Once a Man.
  • Vecna's gruesome flesh complete with tendrils looks similar to the Mind Flayer's avatar. He was the one who shaped the original Mind Flayer, though it wasn't the creature's first time using that form and Vecna wasn't actually controlling it like he thought he was.
• Forgotten First Meeting: Despite The First Shadow establishing that Henry had been classmates with Joyce, Hopper and Karen in high school, none of them seem to remember him at all by the time of the main series, nor does Henry acknowledge who they are as Vecna.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: While his flesh and blood appearance in the Upside Down is a sneering, skeletal man with claws and writhing tentacles that barely resembles a human anymore, he can change his mental image at will. He appears to Holly and the other children of Hawkins as Henry, his original human form, to gain their trust.
• For the Evulz: He ultimately had no real reason to do the awful things he's done outside of blind misanthropy, though The First Shadow reveals that his twisted personality was at least partly due to the Mind Flayer's Demonic Possession.
• Four Is Death: Vecna's clocks all chime four times. His plan to bring about the end of the world also involves opening four gateways in Hawkins by murdering four people and he makes his first appearance in Season 4, the 4th episode of which dives into his origins as a human and his first murders with his psychic powers (though this isn't actually clarified until episode 7, due to his traumatized father's lack of understanding of psychic abilities).
• Freudian Excuse Denial: Eleven tries to reason with him, saying that Brenner made him into what he is. But Vecna himself doesn't really agree, instead doubling down on having been above humanity always. Again in the finale, when Will pities Henry for what the Mind Flayer did to him as a child, tries to say that he and the Mind Flayer were equals and that he was never manipulated.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Henry was already an irredeemable terror, but at the very least he was subdued by Dr Brenner. After Eleven set him free, he went on a murderous rampage that was never completely sated. Stranger Things 4 ends with Hawkins being torn open so that the Upside Down can leak through and Will states that One is still alive, so he's ultimately claimed victory despite everything. Oh, and it's revealed Vecna shaped (if not a direct ally of) the Mind Flayer (though it wasn't the first time it appeared like that) and is either responsible or culpable in every single tragedy in the show since Season 1.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Justified. Henry's prolonged exposure to the Upside Down destroys his once-vibrant lab jumpsuit and leaves it in tatters. His gradual transformation into Vecna causes those tatters to wear away until he becomes the completely naked monster as seen in the present. It probably helps that he has nothing to cover up anyway.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Ultimately played with.
  • He was the first evil to target Hawkins, having committed his first murders here in the 50s. It’s not an exaggeration to say everything in the show began with him. It was his existence that led to Martin Brenner starting the Hawkins Lab experiments in order to recreate his psychic powers of which Eleven was one such experiment. Eleven banishing him to the Upside Down led to Martin Brenner becoming obsessed with finding him again, and when she did via the Demogorgon, this is what eventually led to Eleven accidentally opening the gate to Hawkins. Eventually, Vecna reveals to Eleven that he also gave the Mind Flayer a proper form based on a drawing of his, making him indirectly responsible for every paranormal terror that's been unleashed in Hawkins.
  • Vecna was personally behind both the kidnapping of Will and murder of Barb in Season 1, considering whatever did both those things had psychic powers, which the Demogorgons don't have. This is confirmed in Season 5, which flashes back to him directing the Demogorgon to bring him Will.
  • Even with the reveal that the Mind Flayer possessed Henry as a child, Vecna was the mastermind behind all of Seasons 1-3. The kidnapping of Will Byers was the start of his plan for world domination and his first action open Eleven opening the gate to Hawkins; the Demogorgon essentially served as a scout for him. The avatars of the Mind Flayer in Seasons 2 and 3 were likely directly controlled or at the least influenced by Henry, which we know as whenever the Mind Flayer appears Will states that he is here; and Will later confirms that Vecna was the one possessing him to Mike. Billy’s mannerisms and behaviour while flayed are also INCREDIBLY like Henry’s before he was banished to the Upside Down. Even if the Mind Flayer was the real master of the Hive Mind, the human intelligence and planning that went into all of these events was directly Vecna.
  • This ultimately is played with however, as The First Shadow confirms that Henry's own powers have their origin with the Mind Flayer, and that he was ultimately serving its goals. None of this is to say Vecna was an Unwitting Pawn though; the Mind Flayer likely kept him around and kept a very loose leash on him because he didn’t even bother resisting its influence.
• Hannibal Lecture:
  • Throughout the flashbacks in Season 4, Henry has been pretty quiet only while telling Eleven exactly what she needs to know and no more. This changes in the climactic scene, where he talks, and talks, and talks, spelling out his life story and moral philosophy long after the audience has already put it together on their own.
  • And when One reunites with Eleven, he tells her what he's been up to in the years since they last fought.
• Hated by All: Everybody either hates or fears Vecna because nearly everything bad and tragic that has happened in the series can be traced right back to him. Even when he showed promise as a psychic back in his days as Henry, Brenner decided on keeping him monitored and restrained, aware that he was too dangerous to be given free rein. That said, the feeling is mutual for Vecna and he makes it clear that he will repay that in kind.
• Healing Factor: Zig-Zagged. When Max rips off one of his neck vines to distract him long enough to escape his mindspace, he's shown to regrow it easily to repair the damage in seconds, but that is his mental avatar, and not his actual body, thus it's unclear if, despite his altered and inhuman fleshy appearance, Vecna's physical body possesses the same regenerative powers. When Nancy, Robin and Steve attack him in the Upside Down and set him aflame, he's apparently tough enough to seemingly ignore being immolated at first, pretending their efforts are for naught as he pulls an Unflinching Walk towards them, but their follow-up attacks successfully stagger him and eventually blow him out the attic window. Whilst he survives and flees before they can finish him off, it's left unshown if their attacks did any lasting damage to his body, leaving it uncertain if his Meat Moss body can recover as easily as he could in the mental world.
• The Heavy: Season 4 focuses on his attempts to claim enough victims in order to merge the Upside Down with the rest of the world by causing a gigantic gateway to form. The Mind Flayer, by comparison, only shows up for the final two episodes in person (using a fragment of itself in the present day and showing itself in full during One's backstory). He retains this position in Season 5, with the Mind Flayer only appearing in the final episode.
• Hero Killer: Being the one in control of the Upside Down Hive Mind, he's responsible for every major character death in the series, including Barbara Holland, Bob Newby, Billy Hargrove, Eddie Munson, Max Mayfield (temporarily), and Jason Carver, along with minor characters like Chrissy and Patrick. Alexei is the only character who didn't die as a direct result of his influence, and even then, the circumstances of his death are indirectly related to the Upside-Down and the Russians' desire to manipulate it. After burning Sullivan nearly to death during his Curb-Stomp Battle of the military forces at the MAC-Z, he also kills Sergeant Ramirez, the Token Good Teammate of the military stationed in Hawkins.
• Hidden Depths: He seems bitter when telling Eleven he didn't fit in with other kids, which implies that he did want to have friends once. This is something that's explored further in The First Shadow.
• Hive Mind: One is connected to all forms of life in the Upside Down either through tendrils or the Mind Flayer's particles. This turns out to be a weakness to him, as he was connected to the Demogorgon in Russia which Hopper was fighting. Once Murray torches it and Hopper chops its head off, Vecna experiences all the pain the Demogorgon would have felt if it had survived, freeing the teens he'd captured and later leaving him wide open for a further assault from Nancy.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Downplayed. Teaching Eleven how to use her emotions to fuel her psychic powers for greater effect and control ultimately becomes his downfall, but he was actually winning initially in their duel because he was vastly more experienced in channeling sadness and rage into his powers than she was. It was only the faint memory of the brief moment of parental love Eleven experienced as a baby that gave her the strength to defeat him, a power that it's all but outright stated Henry cannot comprehend or defend himself against.
• Horrifying the Horror: Max notes there's something about the cave inside his Mental Prison, and the memories within, that he's terrified of.
• Humanizing Tears: Sheds Broken Tears in the finale as he remembers how he was possessed by the Mind Flayer as a child.
• Humanoid Abomination: Vecna is a tall being made of horrifically burnt flesh with alien-like vines that can move around and connect to the Upside Down's Hive Mind. That said, he's much more humanoid than the Demogorgons or the Mind Flayer, in spite of his horrific appearance and powers. It turns out there's a reason for that.
• Humans Are Bastards:
  • His Start of Darkness began with his disdain for humanity's need to create order out of chaos rather than embracing it like he did. Not to mention that he himself is human, and he's one of the most evil creatures in the Upside Down, with only the Mind Flayer surpassing him.
  • Vecna himself actually sees this as too much praise for humanity. He believes Dr Brenner was nothing more than a mediocre man who kept people like One and Eleven because he envied their power.
• Hypocrite:
  • He claims that his motivation is disgust at how humans have corrupted the natural order of the world. Yet when he gets to the Upside Down, he immediately sets about corrupting its natural order for his own ends, exactly like all the other humans he claims to be above.
  • His Start of Darkness was when he looked into his father's mind and saw that he accidentally killed a baby during World War II, which Henry took as a sign that Humans Are Bastards. Henry then proceeded to murder his sister, who was still a child, before brutally slaughtering nine other children at Hawkins Lab years later, as well as murdering several children to power the Mind Flayer's construct.
• Iconic Sequel Character: He's one of, if not the most important and dangerous of the Upside Down inhabitants, and the Big Bad of the entire series (until The First Shadow revealed that the Mind Flayer turned him into what he is today), but his existence is not even mentioned in the first three seasons.
• I Fell for Hours: After being sent to the Upside Down by Eleven, Henry spends much of his time falling through the formless void the realm initially was, having his body horrifically scarred and burnt in the process. He does eventually land on the rocky, barren surface, which eventually results in him meeting the Mind Flayer.
• I Have Many Names: He has multiple identities over the course of the series, and a big part of Season 4 is figuring out how many of them from various scenes in different times are the same person. Henry Creel, One, the Orderly, Vecna, Mr. Whatsit... he even gets an extra meta example in "Peter Ballard," the name used to refer to him leading up to the series in order to hide his true nature and role in the plot. Once Nancy relays Vecna's true identity to the other teens, they're briefly confused over which name they should be using from now on, even floating around the idea of calling him Henry-slash-Vecna-slash-One. The jury remains out afterwards with characters calling him whatever name feels the most applicable at the time: Vecna is used most of the time to describe him as an antagonistic force, but Will and Eleven will sometimes use Henry to humanize him.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: Downplayed, as its far from his primary motivation and a very twisted example, but it seems from Vecna's interactions with El, he is on some level genuinely lonely and wanted to have her stand beside him as he brought about his resharpening of the world. Notably, a major part of his plans involves converting children into avatars like himself to create more "friends" for himself, and his generally lonely nature is hinted to be a one of many things the Mind Flayer exploits to control him.
• Immune to Bullets: His second form is armored and capable of waltzing through military gunfire without even flinching.
• In Name Only: Downplayed compared to the other Upside Down threats, as "Vecna" in the show is actually not that unlike "Vecna" from D&D, albeit the latter uses necromancy and spellcasting whereas the show's Vecna utilises Psychic Powers and weaponising the Upside Down's Bizarre Alien Biology. In both cases though, they're corpse-looking beings with powerful abilities who were previously defeated, but is now a looming threat. Additionally, they have a Red Right Hand and one blind eye, mirroring the Hand and Eye of Vecna (powerful items within D&D lore). His second form looks more skeletal and bony, furthering the resemblence.
• Insane Troll Logic: The original reason for his misanthropy is this. After finding out that his father accidentally killed a baby in World War II (and was racked with guilt for years afterwards), Henry jumps to the conclusion that humans are parasites and deserve to be wiped out. It's all but stated that this justification for his actions was little more than a paper-thin excuse for him to indulge in sadistic cruelty with his abilities because he wanted to.
• In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves: Vecna/Henry Creel believe that humans are a unique type of pest who multiply and poisoning the world with pollution who ruin and destroy the equilibrium of the ecosystems for renforce their un-natural structure.
• I Reject Your Reality: In the series finale, Henry is forced to relive his first encounter with the Mind Flayer and confront the fact that the monster has been manipulating him the whole time. When Will tries to spell this out to him and give him a chance to resist the Flayer's influence, Henry instead chooses to continue reveling in his misanthropic delusions, insisting that the Mind Flayer never controlled him despite all evidence to the contrary.
• It's Personal: By the final stretch of Season 4, Vecna has become a personal foe for just about every one of the main characters;
  • Eleven hates him for causing her unnecessary trauma and guilt ever since her childhood, and for trying to destroy everyone she holds dear. It's only fitting that with his mutual hatred of her that she's considered his Arch-Enemy.
  • Vecna becomes a horrific force in Eddie's life, due to his brutal murder of Chrissy and framing him for it, resulting in Eddie spending the rest of his life on the run from a group of jocks attempting to inflict Vigilante Justice to him. His death at the hands of the Demobats also makes Vecna a personal enemy of Dustin's, as Eddie was his best friend.
  • Max has a very deep resentfulness of Vecna, as he was responsible for Billy's death through the Mind Flayer, and for mentally (and eventually physically) trying to torture her to death by holding her guilt of his death over her. By extension, he earns Lucas's hatred for traumatizing and nearly killing the girl he loves, and indirectly causing a witch hunt that implicated his sister and closest friends.
  • Even Dr. Brenner, despite trying to rescue him out of guilt, holds him in contempt for manipulating Eleven and massacring his test subjects.
  • Season 5 adds Will to the count with The Reveal that Vecna was personally responsible for his initial abduction and infection, and Will's ability to hijack his powers makes Vecna particularly angry at him.
  • He has also become one for Holly, especially after she learned about his true nature, moreso as he’d kidnapped her classmates, and for nearly killing her mother. Her own kidnapping by him also made him this to Karen Wheeler, for both nearly killing her and kidnapping her daughter.
  • All of this contributes to Mike being against Vecna, as while he isn’t as personally affected by him, it’s moreso for his actions against his friends and how badly it affected them, most notably with Eleven, for causing her nothing but torment and chaos in her life; Will, as he was kidnapped by Vecna and nearly died in the Upside Down; and Holly, as he kidnapped her and her classmates.
  • And everyone else hates Vecna for the deeds he committed through the Demogorgons and the Mind Flayer. For his part, his Motive Rant to Eleven makes it clear that he Hates Everyone Equally, and considers them all beneath him.
• I Want Them Alive!:
  • Downplayed, but it's hinted that despite holding him in utter contempt, as well as resenting him for attempting to control him and keeping him imprisoned and experimented on scene he was a child, Henry doesn't actually want Dr. Brenner dead. He had him unconscious and at his mercy during his rampage through the Hawkins lab, but instead merely killed the test subject in the room with him and spared Brenner himself. Brenner's perplexing survival from being attacked by the Demogorgon in a frenzy could be explained by Henry using the Hive Mind to direct the beast away from Brenner and after Eleven, and Vecna himself actually pauses when preparing to finish off Max when Eleven tells him that Brenner's dead, apparently genuinely displeased by the news. Rather than any care or such towards him however, it's hinted to be more so Henry could force Brenner to observe his life's work with controlling psychics come to naught as a means of taunting or 'punishing' him, akin to how Henry also spared his biological father figure, but left him tormented and trapped in a mental institution.
  • Relatedly, he also has a similar focus on Eleven, due to their contrasting yet similar natures, as well as her being the person who 'freed' him from his restraints in two ways: firstly by removing his soteria implant that Brenner placed inside Henry, and secondly by trapping him in the Upside Down, which mutated him into his monstrous appearance. When Vecna defeats her in a psychic duel inside Max's mindscape, he pointedly restrains her instead of killing her, and softly tells her that as punishment for her refusing his offer of We Can Rule Together, Vecna wants to make sure she watches what he's about to do to both Max and Eleven's friends in Hawkins, before killing her. This is all said with icy hatred.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Prior to transforming into Vecna, Henry Creel was a conventionally handsome young man. Being banished into a hellish dimension and getting several lightning bolts to the face along the journey is not good for one's complexion.
• Karmic Death: Vecna's death is caused by Eleven, Will and Joyce: the three people he has personally harmed the most out of everyone in the cast. Will breaks his arm, Eleven impales him on a spike, and Joyce outright beheads the bastard in a cold fury.
• Kinslaying Is a Special Kind of Evil: The murders Victor got in an asylum for? Those were Henry's doing, killing Virginia due to calling Martin Brenner, and killing Alice just because. He would have killed Victor too, until his Power-Strain Blackout kicked in, and settled for framing his father for his crimes.
• Knight of Cerebus: The show was already grim before, but Chrissy's brutal murder at his hands during the Season 4 premiere not only cements him as the most horrifying villain, but also marks the beginning of what is arguably the darkest entry of the story so far.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: He arrogantly believes that he can take on any possible foe, be it a regular human or a psychic like himself—and for the most part, he seems to be proven right. However, when Nancy, Steve, and Robin (three regular human adolescents with no supernatural powers or abilities) attack his physical body and beat him essentially to within an inch of his life, he doesn't hesitate to flee the scene in the interest of self-preservation.
• Lack of Empathy: Interdimensional creature aside, when Eleven tries to reach to Vecna's human self by telling him how Brenner is dead and he doesn't need to do this, Vecna makes it clear he does and that he has always been this way, even before he became Vecna (at least, as far as he himself believes), which fits considering Henry's lack of understanding or care of humanity and seeing them as pathetic.
• Leaking Can of Evil: Both attempts to curb One have been failures.
  • Dr Brenner tried suppressing his powers with an implant, so One befriended Eleven and she relieved him of it.
  • Eleven used her powers to banish One to the Upside Down. By that point, his mental restraints had been removed so he was able to continue his killing spree even outside his native dimension.
• Light Is Not Good: Back when he was an orderly at the lab, One was a fair-looking young man with blonde hair, blue eyes and a white suit, who gives off a creepy vibe and slaughters people for next to no reason once his restraints were removed Likewise, his Mr. Whatsit persona wears a nice brown suit and hat, and is associated with light colors overall, but it doesn't change he's a manipulative serial killer who wants to use children to help destroy the world at large.
• Lightning Can Do Anything: Especially if it's supernatural lightning. While trapped in the Upside Down, Henry is blasted with several bolts of the stuff to the point where his clothes have been destroyed and his skin is all deformed, which ultimately is where his transformation into Vecna begins.
• Logical Weakness:
  • Vecna being at the center of a Hive Mind connecting the creatures of the Upside Down. While this means he can control or at least direct all of them, at the same time anyone who manages to hurt them also hurts Vecna, even if it is a faded echo of the pain. Conversely, hurting Vecna himself will ripple through other creatures. Managing to attack on both fronts at the same time will lead to a cycle of weakening all of them.
  • Vecna's consciousness can't be in two places at once. If he's psychically projecting himself elsewhere, his real body is left stationary and vulnerable to attack.
• Made of Iron:
  • Vecna manages to walk away from being hit with several molotovs and three shotgun blasts to the chest.
  • When Eleven banished him to the Upside Down, he tanked multiple lightning strikes and fell hundreds of feet for what appears to be a very long time.
• The Man in Front of the Man: Zig-Zagged Trope. Vecna appeared to be a servant of the Mind Flayer, but was then shown to be the one who shaped the Mind Flayer as an extension of himself and by extension turned the Demogorgons into his own personal army. It's also possible that he shaped the Upside Down itself, as its appearance when he was first cast into it is pretty different from how it looks "now". Quite appropriate, as Vecna is named after the invokedNeutral Evil god of hidden knowledge and destructive secrets in Dungeons & Dragons. However, The First Shadow and the Grand Finale confirm that the Mind Flayer is really The Man Behind the Man.
• Manipulative Bastard: One exploited Eleven's vulnerability and loneliness for his own ends by coming to her aid and showing kindness only to use her in his plan to murder everyone in the lab.
• Man on Fire: Nancy, Steve and Robin track down Vecna's physical body while he's in a trance and pelt him with molotov cocktails. When Vecna awakens and goes on the offensive, apparently ignoring the flames outright, Nancy keeps him at bay by shooting him repeatedly, but the fires do apparently distract him enough he cannot utilise his psychic abilities to kill them with a thought, despite his immense power otherwise.
• Meaningful Name: In multiple ways;
  • "Vecna" is just the name Dustin gave him due to being a "dark wizard", but also because Eddie had used Vecna as the Big Bad of their recent D&D campaign (much like how the Demogorgon had been named). However it's a surprisingly fitting name beyond that. Vecna, in D&D lore, was an evil lich, an undead spellcaster, who was previously a dark wizard that became the Neutral Evil god of hidden knowledge and destructive secrets, which is more or less exactly what this Vecna is. He's "undead" in the sense he was cast out of reality into the Upside Down when Eleven banished him, during which he was horribly scarred and became a corpse-looking being. Before this, he was another powerful psychic, like Eleven, which is certainly wizard-like. Liches are also almost by definition necromancers, one of the most commonly-attributed necromantic powers is to siphon the souls of those the necromancer has slain to increase their power, and One claims that each time he kills, he gets more powerful as he absorbs some of the essence of his victims.invoked
  • Additionally, much like the arch-lich that is his namesake, they both have odd left hands; the D&D character is missing his (which he usually replaces with a permanent Mage Hand spell), while this Vecna's left hand ends in long, razor-sharp talons that he uses to channel his killing power into his victims. This also comes into play in the Season 4 finale as, due to his hive mind abilities, should other creatures like the Demogorgons take damage, he takes it in turn, weakening him and leaving him vulnerable.
  • His (and the other characters') belief of his relationship with the Mind Flayer as either its master or its original identity is also evidenced by the monikers the party gave to them; Mind Flayers, while powerful psionic monsters with frightening intelligence, are an entire species of creatures that are killable by a determined adventurer. Vecna, on the other hand, is an arch-lich with reality-bending magical abilities and functional immortality due to his undead nature that often serves as the Final Boss of many D&D campaigns (as he was at the start of the season). Thus, the show's Vecna being the Greater-Scope Villain behind the actions of every monster and nightmare that came from the Upside Down becomes much more understandable. However, The First Shadow retcons this and reveals that the Mind Flayer infected Henry when he was just a child and slowly corrupted him like it did Will, eventually turning him into a misanthropic sociopath.
  • Both the D&D and Stranger Things Vecnas suffered fatal defeats at the hands of one they had trusted. As Lampshaded by the Hellfire Club, Vecna was slain by his lieutenant Kas, which Foreshadows The Reveal of One's defeat at the hands of Eleven, who he had allied with.
• The Mentor: Taught Eleven how to unlock the true extent of her abilities by channeling her emotions.
• Mercy Kill: Perversely, this is how he frames all his murders (though his victims would certainly beg to differ). After days of mental torment, Vecna brutally murders his victims to "end their suffering," even mock-comforting them at many times. He hates humanity so much that he seems to think he's doing his victims a favour by removing them from the board. As Vecna is a metaphorical personification of suicidal depression, this quality of his might reflect the temptation and "peace" of death, the rationalization that there's no other choice but release.
  "Don't cry, Chrissy. It's time for your suffering to end..."
• A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read: The awakening of Henry's telepathic powers led him to discover terrible things about his parents, such as the fact that his father had accidentally killed a baby while fighting in World War II. While he preyed on the darkest secrets of his peers, he convinced himself that Humans Are the Real Monsters and they deserved to be punished in his own special way.
• Mind Rape: His MO. He attacks people with taunting visions, often forcing them to re-experience traumas in order to torture them before he kills them. If he used the Mind Flayer's powers to possess Will and force him to incubate and release demodogs, he could also be considered a literal rapist by proxy.
• Mirror Character: To Kali / Eight. Both of them were formerly institutionalized at Hawkins Laboratory under Dr. Brenner's care and resented the experiments done on them, to the point where they instigated their own escape from the lab. They also both are ruthless leaders of their own gangs who hate having to conform to the standards and laws set by humanity, use their Master of Illusion abilities to torment those in their way and attempt to use Eleven in their path for vengeance against people who they believe deserve it. With that said, Kali's resentment and fear of humanity is utterly dwarfed by Vecna's Misanthrope Supreme and Omnicidal Maniac qualities.
• Misanthrope Supreme: Henry started on his path to evil because he saw humans as parasites who ruin and destroy everything they touch, therefore he sees no problem in killing them. The only human he ever showed any kind of empathy towards is Eleven and even then he was willing to kill her for showing defiance. Ironically, his misanthropy started when he himself was still a human.
• Moral Myopia: One considers society to be a counterproductive construct that upsets the natural order. He himself has used the Mind Flayer's powers to turn humans and the creatures of the Upside Down into his puppets, suppressing their own nature solely for his ambitions. By the end of the season, he's successfully unleashed the Upside Down into Hawkins, which not only endangers plenty of locals but causes something akin to a nuclear winter that kills off a field of wildflowers, showing that his master plan is no better.
• Motive Rant: He delivers one:
  "You see, humans... are a unique type of pest; multiplying and poisoning our world, all while enforcing a structure of their own. A deeply unnatural structure. Where others saw order, I saw a straitjacket. A cruel, oppressive world dictated by made-up rules. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades! Each life a faded, lesser copy of the one before! WAKE UP, EAT, WORK, SLEEP, REPRODUCE, AND DIE! Everyone... is just waiting... waiting... for it all to be over, all while performing in a silly, terrible play, day after day. I could not do that. I could not close off my mind and join in the madness; I could not... pretend. And then I realized... I didn't have to."
• Mouth of Sauron: The Party speculates he is the Mind Flayer's "five-star general," serving as the avatar and enforcer of its will. Vecna vehemently denies this assessment, stridently insisting the hierarchy is reversed. However, the Party is very much correct: Vecna is ultimately in denial that he is just as much a slave to the Mind Flayer as the Demogorgons. In fact, this trope is taken to a literal degree in that the Grand Finale reveals that the Mind Flayer's voice is the same one that Henry speaks with in his Vecna form.
• Nature Is Not Nice: He regards himself as - in many ways - a champion of nature at it's most powerful and untouched by humanity, which he sees as parasite and destructive. He is also most definitely not nice, and indeed in many ways embraces the more brutal aspects of nature. He shows a particular affinity for predatory animals like spiders.
• Never Found the Body: In the season four finale, despite having his underlings slain and losing power, and subsequently taking multiple molotov cocktails and shotgun blasts before falling out of an attic, Vecna manages to muster the strength to run off and hide. Will outright confirms that he's still alive.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!:
  • Him teaching Eleven to use her emotions to channel her powers backfires on him in his two defeats by her hands.
  • Season 5 reveals that, by maintaining his mental link with Will in order to torment him, he's inadvertently caused him to develop powers similar to Vecna's own. Will demonstrates this by telekinetically killing several attacking Demogorgons in the same brutal fashion that Vecna himself used to dispatch his human victims.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Is obsessed with spiders and considers them misunderstood just like himself, and even relates to them personally.
• The Noseless: He lost his nose at some point in the Upside Down.
• Not Brainwashed: Played with. In the series finale, Will realizes that Henry used to be a regular kid who was infected by the Mind Flayer during a traumatic incident, and tries to convince him to resist the entity's influence. Henry's response is that he could have resisted it… but he doesn't want to, as he has fully embraced the Mind Flayer's virulent hatred of humanity and sees himself as its willing symbiotic right-hand rather than a brainwashed pawn. Of course, this is right after it's revealed that the Mind Flayer suppressed his memory of their first contact, strongly implying that he's just fooling himself into believing he has more agency than he does. Stranger Things VR backs up that at the very least, he believes himself to hold his own level of control over the Mind Flayer, and is able to keep his own personal agenda of revenge separated from the Mind Flayer's desires.
• Not So Invincible After All: Throughout Season 4 he's depicted as a terrifying and unstoppable force that his victims can only submit towards without any way to meaningfully avert their fate, and Dr. Brenner outright says to Eleven that she's not ready to face him in a psychic duel despite her strength and having recovered her powers, which he proved handily when she faces him anyway. However, Vecna's abilities are rooted in and fueled by the negative emotions of rage and sadness, and thus he is powerless against actions fueled by positive emotions. Max is able to physically attack him when her restraints weaken as she embraces the positive emotions brought about by her favorite song and realising the Party want her to live, ripping out one of Vecna's neck-vines to distract him enough to escape, and Eleven overpowers him twice when she's reminded of the love she has with those who care for her. When Nancy, Steve and Robin face Vecna's physical body in the Upside Down and set him ablaze whilst he's distracted and open, he attempts to shrug off the flames and pull and Unflinching Walk straight at them, only to stagger when their follow-up molotov and shotgun blasts further weaken him, with his inability to use his psychic abilities implying that he simply wasn't used to being hurt at all, and unable to comprehend it.
• Not So Stoic: Vecna is generally a cold, emotionless antagonist who doesn't react much to the main characters' actions. However, cracks of greater emotion can occasionally be seen.
  • When Nancy, Steve, and Robin attack him with shotguns and molotov cocktails in the Season 4 finale, Vecna is shown to have a massive Oh, Crap! expression on his face, and is shown writhing in visible pain as he tries to escape.
  • While chasing Max in his mind in Season 5, Henry is shown smirking as she runs out of places to run to...except when she finds the cave in Nevada, in which he becomes visibly terrified and refuses to follow her any further, something Max herself makes note of.
  • While it's hard to hear, given he's choking on his own blood and impaled on a spike, Henry's final moments when faced with Joyce are to beg for mercy, showing that he does fear death in some regards...or, given that he's dying already, death in a more violent, undignified form.
• Not Quite Dead: Eleven thought she'd destroyed One in their first confrontation and given he was shown disintegrating into a bright light it seemed like she had, but it turns out he was just banished to another dimension. And then not only does One turn out to be Vecna, but he manages to survive the latest battle and bring about Armageddon. Will tells Mike that he can sense Vecna's still out there, due to having once been possessed by the Mind Flayer.
• Number Two: His true position in the power hierarchy of the Upside Down, as revealed in The First Shadow. While he's certainly quite powerful, having control over a vast number of the Upside Down monsters, he is (perhaps unknowingly) The Dragon to the Mind Flayer who finds him quite useful in its plans to conquer Earth, unlike the other humans it interacted with or even Will or Billy, the humans it outright possessed being thrown away once their use was over.
• Off with His Head!: How he finally meets his end - impaled on a spike by El, Henry is helpless and dying as Joyce hacks his head off with an axe.
• Older Than They Look: Henry in 1979 looked much younger than a 32-year-old man would have looked in that decade.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Vecna plans to destroy Hawkins by merging his world with theirs, and wants to kill off all of humanity, viewing them as unworthy of life.
• One-Winged Angel: After spending much of Season 5 weakened and healing from the damage he sustained previously, he strengthens his body to create an even more monstrous, armored form. Now on top of his psychic powers, he also has absurd physical strength and durability he previously lacked.
• Only Friend: Henry was the only one in the lab who treated Eleven with anything even remotely resembling kindness and respect, and never bullied or experimented on her. Then Eleven discovered the kind of monster he was.
• OOC Is Serious Business: Throughout Season 4, every time Vecna appears to torment Max in the mental realm when he mind-links with her, he's full of calm, detached and smug confidence. This gets enhanced further when Season 5 reveals Max's temporary death left her trapped within his Mental World, now detached from her body and with no way for the rest of the party to "piggyback" into Vecna's attempt to finish her off, letting him maintain a slow Ominous Walk after her as she flees through his memories. But when he corners her in a dead-end cave at last, Vecna freezes and cannot proceed any further after Max, with a look of actual fear on his face (made more evident by his mental avatar being in his Orderly form), allowing Max to survive for an extended period even in an environment where Henry has the Home Field Advantage. The cave is revealed in The First Shadow to be the place where a young Henry has his first traumatic encounter with Dimension X and the Mind Flayer, being slowly corrupted by it even as it awakened his psychic abilities, and despite his claims of being the Big Bad of the show, Vecna's inability to confront his childhood trauma even to finish Max off underscored how the relationship between him and the Mind Flayer is the opposite how how he portrayed events to his enemies, something that Henry is hinted to be subconsciously aware of, but in denial about.
• Orderlies are Creeps: Henry Creel was forced to be the Orderly of Hawkins Laboratory, where he essentially is forced to take care of the children (Eleven in particular) while being kept under Brenner's watchful eye. While he seems like a pretty friendly guy to Eleven at first, he immediately turns murderous and visionary the second his chip is removed by her, resulting in Eleven banishing him to the Upside Down.
• Pay Evil unto Evil:
  • Among his victims is Two, a test subject who was nothing short of an arrogant, mean-spirited bully towards Eleven.
  • By getting a new gate to the Upside Down open, he indirectly kills Jason, a violent Jerk Jock who swore revenge upon the innocent Eddie, whom Jason wrongly held responsible for Chrissy's death. Although slightly downplayed, as Vecna directly contributed to Jason's Sanity Slippage leading to his above-mentioned crimes.
  • Was on the receiving end from Dr. Brenner in an earlier episode, who electrocuted him for stepping out of line.
• Perpetual Frowner: In his current form, Vecna pretty much only frowns or expresses anger. The only time he breaks from this is during his first attempt to claim Max as his victim, where he briefly flashes a coy smile after restraining her. As Mr. Whatsit, Henry is capable of smiling and being friendly overall, but when his plans go awry, he's quick to go back to murderously scowling at anyone or anything in his path.
• Pitiful Worms:
  • Refers to humanity as a "pest".
  • He also views Dr. Brenner as a "mediocre man" who collects and manipulates psychic children so he can feel powerful. He's not wrong.
• Power Echoes: He has a subtle vibrato to his deep, stentorian voice whenever he speaks. He's also powerful enough that he can track people, psychologically torment them, and then turn them into an eyeless, twisted mass of limbs and meat from the Upside Down.
• Power Floats: Inverted. He makes his victims levitate before killing them.
• Power Parasite:
  • According to Dr. Brenner, Henry doesn't just kill a person, but absorbs their essence into himself, thus growing increasingly powerful with each murder he commits.
  • Vecna reveals this was the purpose of the Mind Flayer's construct biting Eleven at the end of Season 3: to steal a portion of her power to open portals between Earth and the Upside Down.
• Powers Do the Fighting: He relies mostly on his telekinesis to ensnare his victims. When one of them escapes, he doesn't even bother engaging in a pursuit, instead dropping rocks from the sky.
• Power-Upgrading Deformation: The horrific mutations inflicted by his banishment to the Upside Down and subsequent formation of his bond with the Mind Flayer seems to have greatly augmented Henry's Psychic Powers. He can conjure extremely lifelike illusions (while 008 only appeared able to add to an already existing environment) and project his telekinesis hundreds of miles away.
• Prophet Eyes: His eyes completely cloud over when he possesses a victim.
• Psychological Horror: Tortures his victims by confronting them with their worst fears or traumatic experiences before killing them.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Inflicts this onto the heroes. While he is defeated, he's still able to accomplish his goal of opening the last gate in Hawkins, leading to the erosion of the barriers between Hawkins and the Upside Down and beginning to transform the former into the latter.
• The Quiet One: As a child, he was this, not really interacting with his family. Foreshadowing his nature as The Sociopath.
• Rasputinian Death: Gets his left arm torn off by Will, impaled on a spike by Eleven, and then decapitated by Joyce.
• Redemption Rejection: In the series finale, upon witnessing Henry's memory of when he was first possessed by the Mind Flayer, Will encourages him to fight back against its corruption. However, Henry shoots that idea down almost immediately, telling Will that he was not corrupted by the Mind Flayer, but in a symbiotic relationship with it, and he continues his attempts to destroy the world with as much enthusiasm as ever. When it appears he will receive a moment of sympathy as he lies dying, we instead see flashbacks of all the pain he has caused the heroes before Joyce beheads him, emphasizing that for as tragic as his backstory may have been, he was a willing participant in his evil deeds and was truly Beyond Redemption.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: When Henry massacres the other experiments his eyes are left bloodshot, which contrasts strongly against his pale skin and blue eyes. It proves to be an effective foreshadowing of his eventual fate.
• Red Right Hand: Or Massive Left Hand with claws, used for his kills, bigger than their faces. His second form sees it gain the ability to sprout Combat Tentacles powerful enough to instantly impale people from a distance. This is enhanced in Season 5 with his mental appearance, which looks completely human except for his left hand.
• Remember the New Guy?: He was a very important person in Eleven's past, but he was never in Eleven's flashbacks until Dr. Brenner forced her to remember him. Justified, as it's heavily implied that she repressed those memories, and invoked Matt Duffer implies here that the coma she fell into after sending him to the Upside Down messed with her ability to remember.
• Restraining Bolt: Dr. Brenner put a chip in his neck to keep him under control. It turns out to be the only thing stopping him from slaughtering nearly everyone in Hawkins Lab...which he does after he manipulates Eleven into destroying the said chip.
• Revenge Before Reason: Throughout Season 4, Vecna pursues Max as one of his potential victims pretty persistently. It's implied that he aimed to target her from the get-go, due to her connection to both Billy and The Party. However, when she manages to escape his curse the first time around, Vecna is pissed. He seems to intentionally avoid claiming a different fourth victim for almost half the season, opting instead to wait for Max to become vulnerable to him again. He's so determined to get her that he deliberately walks into a trap set by Max and The Party to kill him in order to get the job done. While he does succeed in killing Max (at least temporarily) and accomplish most of his goals in the season finale, he does so at great damage to his physical health and strength, when Steve, Nancy and Robin get the drop on him and nearly manage to kill him in his lair. This focus on retribution when he's been slighted or thwarted is something that Vecna shares in common with the Mind Flayer, hinting at the reveal in the finale that it was the shadowy entity that manipulated him and has been subconsciously guiding his actions to achieve its goals, rather than the other way around, as Henry has convinced himself.
• Sadist: God yes. Vecna doesn’t just kill his victims; he clearly enjoys terrifying them and psychologically breaking them down:
  • Even as a child he enjoyed tormenting his family with their greatest fears and insecurities, taunting his father with the traumatic image of a burning baby from a house he mistakenly shelled.
  • His mode of killing is excruciatingly painful, snapping victims’ bones one by one like twigs, dislocating their jaw, and squeezing out their eyes so they feel every moment of agony, before he finally caves their skull in and ends their suffering.
  • He reaches into his victims’ minds and projects images of their greatest traumas into them, mocking their suffering. Even though he could immediately kill his victims, he chooses to torment them for seven days with headaches, horrifying visions and clock chimes reminding them of their death.
• Satanic Archetype: Vecna is an entity known by multiple aliases, began as a conventionally attractive and intellectually gifted figure, often clad in white. Possessing supernatural gifts, he showed open opposition to authority, staging a rebellion that resulted in many deaths before he was ultimately banished to an infernal dimension. As a child, Henry tormented his family, eventually culminating in the gruesome murder of both his mother and sister, all the while condemning his father to a fate worse than death, an act the tormented father blamed entirely on the Devil. ​When he got older, Henry skillfully manipulated Eleven with fake kindness and tempting promises. Afterward, Henry became Vecna, a hideously scarred monstrosity representing pure evil. For years, he used his underlings to inflict harm on the people of Hawkins, plotting his return to their world to usher in a Hell on Earth that he intends to rule.
• Scars Are Forever: Vecna's whole body was deformed and mutated upon his arrival into the Upside Down. The only part of him that wasn't changed was a patch of skin on his wrist that bears that tattoo 001.
• Sealed Evil in Another World: After Eleven banished him to the Upside Down, he wasted no time in twisting it into his own image, his big end-goal being that he wants to escape into Hawkins and start his campaign of destruction on humanity.
• Self-Made Orphan: He killed his mother and as good as killed his father by framing him for the murder.
• Serial Killer: Described as a serial killer by Robin and fits the profile: Stalking, a specific type of victim (those with deep, repressed trauma), and the same style of murder each time.
• Shadow Archetype:
  • The massacre at the start of the season that everyone assumed was Eleven's doing? Turns out he did it with his own telekinetic powers.
  • When he targets Max, he assumes the form of Billy and plays up his worst traits. As he's Eleven's "brother", the similarities were clearly foreshadowing.
• Shapeshifter Guilt Trip: He loves shapeshifting into his victim's deceased loved ones to torment them, appearing as Chrissy's mother, Fred's father, and Max's stepbrother Billy as well as Lucas.
• A Sinister Clue: His monstrous talon is his left hand; his right one is relatively normal.
• Smug Super: He considers humans to be basically vermin, including his own family. The only person he treats with respect is Eleven, because she is the only psychic powerful enough to compare to him.
• The Social Darwinist: Invisions himself as a "predator" culling the weak. He in fact reveres spiders, which to him embody the concept of the strong purging the inferior.
• The Sociopath: One checks all the boxes. He has absolutely zero empathy for anyone, is extremely manipulative to the point of being able to feign emotions, and is dangerously violent and sadistic. He seemingly has a fondness for Eleven, but that doesn't stop him from trying to kill her when she defies him. 'The First Shadow'' reveals it was the Mind Flayer's manipulation and possession that turned Henry into one. Revealingly, when he first discovered his powers, he started out by torturing small animals to death before moving onto his family. Killing animals is an early warning sign for psychopathy in children.
• Spikes of Villainy: By Episode 4 of Season 5, grotesque bone-like spikes protrude from his shoulders, suggesting his transformation is accelerating and making his silhouette even more monstrous and inhuman.
• Squishy Wizard: Downplayed. A powerful psychic with the ability to manipulate others via the mind, but his flesh remains vulnerable. It's why his lair is guarded by Demobats constantly, and once Nancy's team breaches it, he takes massive damage from a few simple molotov cocktails and a good ol' fashioned shotgun. However, while the injuries do cause him to retreat, they don't kill him, and they definitely would have been fatal to an ordinary human. In Season 5, he's evidently learned from their last encounter, seemingly deliberately mutating his body further into a more armoured and combat-capable appearance that enables him to shrug off direct machine-gun fire from the military like a Demogorgon, whilst using his psychic powers to counter any flame-based weaponry they bring to bear against him.
• Straw Nihilist: Henry says that he is "freeing" his victims by killing them. His Motive Rant towards Eleven before being cast into the Upside Down reveals that he believes the society humanity has created makes life utterly pointless, so in his twisted mind, he is "freeing" everyone he kills from their meaningless existence.
• Strong and Skilled: Henry and Eleven are easily the two most powerful psychics in the series, with Henry easily massacring the other psychics at Hawkins Lab and absorbing their potential. However, while it's implied that Eleven has greater power and potential, Henry is a self-taught prodigy with far more experience and finesse than Eleven.
• Super Supremacist: He assumes that he has the right to control the world simply because he's more powerful than anyone else. He also expressed care for Eleven for this reason, believing she would readily join his goals due to having immense psychic potential, and is enraged when she rejects his offer.
• Survival Mantra: He had one of these as a kid, drilled into him by his mother in response to anything strange that might happen due to his powers, which crosses over into a Madness Mantra as his mental state crumbles:
  Henry: It's not real... I'm normal... I'm Henry Creel.
• Sympathetic Villain, Despicable Villain: 
  • He's the Despicable to Jason's (who's the prominent antagonist behind Vecna) Sympathetic in Season 4. He's a misanthropic Omnicidal Maniac who shows immense sadism in murdering his victims and even is the cause of Jason's downfall in the first place.
  • Heavily {Downplayed in season 5 where he is ultimately something of a Tragic Villain compared to the Mind Flayer, which is just an embodiment of pure evil. However, Vecna is, despite his tragic past, still a complete and irredeemable bastard who made this choice to be this way.
• Take Over the World: He wants to create a world that abides by his own rules, instead of humanity's.
• Taught by Experience: In Season 4, The Party tear down his facade of being an untouchable monster beyond their ability to fight by taking advantage of his vulnerable condition whilst trancing and a coordinated assault from various groups (including the unwitting aid of Hopper and the adults over in Russia), setting him ablaze with molotov cocktails and blasting him out of the Creel House's attic with multiple shotgun rounds, with him in apparent disbelief and denial that they're hurting him at all, let alone coming close to killing him outright. Despite, or perhaps because of, his narcissistic self-image of being "superior" to mere children, Vecna evidently put in the effort to counter any similar tactics when he re-appears in Season 5, sporting a more mutated appearance that covers him in an armoured caprice tough enough to shrug off assault round fire from the military, and attacking personally rather than launching a psychic attack from the Upside Down. It's enough that he Curb Stomps what's left of the military base by himself effortlessly.
• Tentacle Rope: He ties Max to a pillar with his tentacles while she's mentally trapped in his realm. He also does this particular move to Nancy (twice), Steve, Robin and Eleven.
• Thin Chin of Sin: Henry has had a sharp jawline ever since he was a child.
• Took a Level in Badass: In the Season 4 finale, Vecna was heavily damages by Nancy, Steve and Robin's shotguns and molotov cocktails, forcing him to flee the scene to lick his wounds. By the midway point of Season 5, Vecna's new form is so heavily armored, that the entire U.S military can't even so much as scratch him as he ruthlessly slaughters all the soldiers present in Hawkins.
• Tom the Dark Lord: An interesting case, as the kids call him "Vecna" after the infamous Dungeons & Dragons tyrant, lich, and god. But Vecna himself doesn't ever seem to use or care about the name and only refers to himself by his regular name Henry and as Mr. Whatsit while approaching the grade school children of Hawkins. He doesn't have much affection for being called "One" either, as that was a designation forced upon him by Dr. Brenner.
• Touched by Vorlons: In the series finale, it's revealed that Henry's powers come from being infected by Mind Flayer particles as a child, which seeped into his body through a gunshot wound.
• Tragic Monster: First Shadow depicts his transformation from a harmless if weird kid to the deranged, nihilistic monster he is now, being gradually driven insane with ideals of superiority and misanthropy by the Mind Flayer's corrupting influence.
• Tragic Villain: It’s little wonder he became the monster he ultimately did. He started off as an innocent child only to be shot, corrupted and tormented by an Eldritch Abomination, and was then experimented on for decades.
• Traitor Shot: When Eleven removes the chip from his neck. The ominous line he delivers marks his transition from the Friendly Orderly to One.
  One: Who knew something so small could cause so much trouble.
• Trauma Button: Max manages to hide from Vecna within a memory of the Nevada cave—the place where he first encountered the Mind Flayer. Vecna is terrified of this specific memory, actively seeking to repress it. It's eventually revealed to be the memory of when he was corrupted by the Mind Flayer, which the Mind Flayer suppressed to keep Henry unaware of his true nature as an Unwitting Pawn.
• Two Aliases, One Character: Three—or even four, if you include the name "Peter Ballard" that was only used in promotional material. In-universe, he began as Henry Creel, the kid supposedly murdered by his father Victor. Later, he was a nameless (to Eleven at any rate) orderly at Hawkins National Laboratory who occasionally gave Eleven pointers on how to hone her powers. He later revealed himself as 001, Eleven's older "sibling" in the lab, with extensive powers of his own. And finally, he is Vecna, the villain haunting Hawkins in the present day. The teens lampshade the fact that Vecna has three names, and can't decide on what to call him now. He picks up a new alias in Season 5, Mr. Whatsit, while targeting the kids.
  Robin: We were wrong about Vecna... Henry... One. Sorry, what are we calling him now?
  Dustin: One.
  Erica: Vecna.
  Lucas: One!
  Nancy: Henry.
  Robin: Right. We've learned something new about Henry/Vecna/One.
• Underestimating Badassery: Thanks in part to how gigantic his ego is, Vecna has a tendency to underestimate the people around him.
  • As Henry, he correctly identifies Eleven as the strongest of the psychic children, but also assumes that he can easily keep her under control should it come to that. In "The Massacre at Hawkins Lab", once she rejects his offer, he tries to kill her and is then shocked when she manages to beat him in a psychic battle.
  • In "Sorcerer", he leaves Will alive and unharmed after taunting him about how easy he was to break, fully believing the boy is a weakling who can't affect his plans in any meaningful way. As soon as he's gone back through the gate, Will finally gains the confidence to pull on their bond himself, and kills three Demogorgons by turning Vecna's powers against them.
• Undignified Death: Powerful psychic he may be, once he gets impaled on a spike by Eleven, he has the dishonor of getting his head chopped off by the non-superpowered Joyce.
• Unreliable Narrator: The First Shadow throws many of Vecna's flashbacks and viewpoint into some serious doubts. Vecna describes himself as always being above humanity, but the play shows him to have been a good kid before. He tells Eleven he created (or became) the Mind Flayer, but the play shows the Flayer manipulated him to take the path of evil after Patty's death. It's quite uncertain if Henry was lying to Nancy and Eleven during their confrontations, or he truly believes he committed those atrocities out of his own free will, or if the Flayer manipulated his memories to mould him into his pawn. He later tells Will he wasn’t controlled by the Mind Flayer at all even the former can see otherwise.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Played with, in that his goal was most certainly to instigate doom, but making Eleven mad and scared enough to cast him into the Upside Down creates the first portal there. This certainly wasn't part of his plans, but it allowed other evil creatures to make their way into the human world and wreak havoc.
• Unwitting Pawn: "The First Shadow" and Season 5 confirm that Vecna's claims of being the Dragon-in-Chief to the Mind Flayer are just delusions. The Mind Flayer has been grooming him into its avatar since he was a young child, and his misanthropic personality is the result of its influence, all while letting him think that he's the one in control by allowing him to control its movements with his powers. It's implied that Vecna knows this deep down but refuses to face it: he has a memory of the moment the Mind Flayer possessed him which he's locked away and refuses to enter, and when he finally is forced to instead willingly accepts being "one" with the Mind Flayer than admit the truth.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: The First Shadow reveals that Henry was originally a kindhearted child not dissimilar from Will Byers, and what we see in the show of a pre-corrupted Henry was that he was a boy scout who found an injured man and just wanted to help him, but tragically clearly hated killing him in self-defense after the man got belligerent and paranoid thinking Henry was sent to hunt him down. Being infected by the Mind Flayer slowly corrupted him into the nihilistic misanthrope he was when he murdered his family.
• The Usurper: Possibly. When Henry arrived in Dimension X, it was a formless, chaotic Eldritch Location ruled by a shadowy Hive Mind. Henry then used his powers to shape the Mind Flayer as his ideal form, taking over the rest of the Upside Down in the process and turning it into a twisted version of Hawkins. However, it's still unclear if Henry is fully in control or if the Mind Flayer still has agency of its own. The First Shadow reveals it's the latter and the Mind Flayer manipulated him, although the series finale muddles this by revealing that Henry has been giving the Mind Flayer control of his own free will.
• Villain Has a Point:
  • He is correct that his father did something that deserved punishment, and the first visions could be explained as Karma Houdini Warranty. The rest, however, is pure Disproportionate Retribution, and despite his excuses it's clear he did it all out of sadism more than anything.
  • His assessment of Brenner as a "mediocre man" who collects psychic children to feel special likely isn't far off.
  • Max admits that Vecna was right when he taunted her as Vecna!Billy about her being secretly relieved about Billy's death and her shame as a result of that.
• Villain No Longer Idle: After the Mind Flayer fails to carry out its will in the first three seasons, Vecna finally makes his debut in Season 4 to carry out his Evil Plan himself, though he's not the one in control between the Flayer and himself.
• Villainous Cheekbones: His human appearance before being cast to the Upside Down has notably high cheekbones. Being deformed upon his banishment made them extra prominent.
• Villainous Rescue: He inadvertently saves Eddie's butt by murdering one of the basketball players, Patrick, just as they're about to catch him, but only so he can get another victim.
• Villain Protagonist: Before his descent into becoming Vecna, a young Henry is the main protagonist of Stranger Things: The First Shadow, which expands upon his origin story and Start of Darkness.
• Villain Respect: Before the massacre at the Lab, he seems to like Eleven more than the rest of Brenner's test children. After he kills the other test children, he doesn't immediately kill Eleven when she witnesses him and asks her to join him to take over the world as he sees her as being superior to the other lab children. When he tries to kill her after she refuses to align with him, he even expresses regret:
  001: It wasn't supposed to end like this.
• Villains Never Lie: Zig-zagged. While he describes his crimes as well as his origin in its complete gory detail and the characters whom he speaks to take it at face value, The First Shadow implies Henry might not be telling the truth at all, either deliberately and unknowingly, as several events of Henry's past don't match with what he tells them.
• Vocal Evolution: Henry's time spent in the Upside Down causes him to lose his creepy, but nonetheless regular nasally voice in favor of a deeper, more monstrous one. Season 5 demonstrates that he can shift in and out between his two voices, using his natural voice when speaking with children, and using his demonic voice when talking to people he recognizes such as Max, Will and Eleven.
• Walking Spoiler: One's mere existence and identity spoils the entire mystery behind Vecna (and the show itself). In fact, when new characters were revealed for the season, the orderly that befriends Eleven is called "Peter Ballard", a name never once spoken (or written) in the actual show.
• Was Once a Man: His true identity is the son of Victor Creel, later known as One. His time spent in the Upside Down gradually transformed him into a burnt, writhing mass of flesh and tentacles with a very humanlike shape.
• We Can Rule Together: One gives this pitch to Eleven after he massacres the other test subjects. Needless to say, she rejects his offer, leading to his current status. Years later, he muses over the fact that he once considered allowing Eleven a place at his side, but instead decides that she should watch him destroy everything she's grown to care about.
• White Shirt of Death: His white orderly uniform gets splattered with blood after he massacres the children.
• Would Hurt a Child: He ruthlessly murdered all of Brenner's child subjects, as well as killing his own sister during his Bloodbath Villain Origin.
• Yandere: During "The First Shadow", as the Mind Flayer starts to exert more and more control over him, he becomes increasingly possessive over Patty, his only friend and love interest, to the point of outright crippling her father when he tries to separate them. His Rage Breaking Point against Brenner comes when he thinks he's going to try and hurt her.
• You Are What You Hate: One wishes to exterminate humanity for imposing a flawed order upon the world. He himself is a human that tried to manipulate Eleven into being his pawn. And then he nearly destroys Hawkins along with its encompassing environment, not to say about hijacking the mostly-benign Upside Down when he arrived in 1979, transforming it into the hellish landscape and the inhabitants into berserkers attacking any human they can lay their hands on, thus corrupting its own natural order for selfish purposes. Then The First Shadow reveals the Flayer literally turned him into someone he would hate as a child.
• Younger Than He Looks: His undead, skeletal visage creates the impression that he's an ageless, ancient evil much like the Evil Sorcerer he's named for. In fact, he's barely 40; his original human form also had very delicate, boyish features.
• Zerg Rush: He is capable of doing this by becoming part of the Mind Flayer's Hive Mind, which in turn allows him to order the Demobats (and implied to be the Demogorgons as well) to kill anyone just with sheer numbers. He kills Eddie in this fashion.

• Airborne Mook: They are flying creatures from the Upside Down who are linked to Vecna's hive-mind.
• All There in the Manual: Stranger Things VR reveals that the Demobats were responsible for Billy's car crashing in Season 3, which directly led to him getting flayed.
• Bat Out of Hell: Bats are the closest animal they resemble and they inhabit an Eldritch Location.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: They don't appear in Season 5.
• Fragile Speedster: They're fast enough to keep pace with a bike, but alone they aren't much of a threat, as Steve rips one apart with his bare hands (and teeth), though he was likely hopped up on adrenaline from them trying to eat him at the time. Up that number to two or three however and they can become significantly more effective.
• Hero Killer: They fatally wound Eddie in the Season 4 finale.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Up close, they appear to be a combination of bats and spiders. Their wings aren't typical bat wings, but eight spiky legs connected by webbing, which they also use to crawl.
• Nested Mouths: Demobats have extra rows of teeth, which makes it appear like they've got one mouth inside the other.
• Non-Indicative Name: Despite their name, they don't appear to be members of the Demogorgon's species.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: While they are one of the smaller residents of the Upside Down, they are absolutely lethal creatures who are stronger than they look.
• Zerg Rush: Demobats are almost never alone. They attack in numbers to overwhelm their victims, even two or three are enough to overwhelm an unarmed human. Eddie experiences this the hard way.

• Crapsaccharine World: On the outside, the place where the kidnapped kids are taken looks like an idealized, pristine version of the Creel house circa 1959, where it's always a beautiful summer's day and the kidnapped children are showered with gifts and tables full of dessert. In reality though, they're all actually trapped in fleshy cocoons and attached to the Mind Flayer via tentacles in their mouths.
• Dream Land: Effectively what Camazotz is. It's a world made from Vecna's mind and memories, which weave together almost like a labyrinth and which Max spends days or even weeks travelling through. While visitors of this dimension can visit their own memories, they can also visit Vecna's.
• Mind Prison: Camazotz is repeatedly compared to a prison, as it's a place where Vecna keeps the minds of the kidnapped children.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: "Camazotz" is a name only given by Holly Wheeler, who named it after the planet of the same name from A Wrinkle in Time.