In the world of Stranger Things, Vecna may well be one of the most compelling villains to ever emerge from the Upside Down, and some of the tensest moments in Season 4 came when a character would hear the sinister chimes that heralded is presence. One such moment occurred in the cliffhanger episode that ended Vol.1, where Nancy fell under Vecna’s spell.
Nancy’s encounter with Vecna definitely starts out similarly to the others, with him taking her back to the source of her guilt and shame: the death of Barb in Season 1. But he doesn’t go in for the kill, instead choosing to share his master plan with her. While this is something of a supervillain trope, it doesn’t exactly make sense for him to reveal his intentions on a plot level. YouTuber and psychotherapist Georgia Dow, however, believes there’s a sound psychological reason for this.
“When someone changes their pattern there’s always a reason for it, and Vecna’s interaction with Nancy is very different,” she says. “Vecna seems to be actually intrigued by Nancy being able to figure him out, to be able to get this close to the truth… I think this is more Vecna’s narcissistic traits that pull him to Nancy, why he wants to give her this information.”
She explains that as a character who exhibits the behavior of a malignant narcissist, Vecna will have taken his rejection by Eleven in his revelatory origin sequence incredibly poorly. And while his usual modus operandi is to embody his victims’ negative self-talk (another very real psychological phenomenon), this time he is telling Nancy his plans and then releasing her so she can report back to everybody—Eleven included—that the end is nigh, with the goal of discouraging and disempowering them.
“It has created a huge wound in Vecna, that’s the reason why he never leaves Hawkins,” Dow continues. “It isn’t because these are the easiest people to prey upon, it isn’t even that he dislikes this area… it’s that he wants to get to Eleven, he wants her to regret that she rejected him.”
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