okay this is a post i wrote to convince a few specific people that el’s the demogorgon so it’s all over the place and i apologize
el opened the portal to the upside down on the night of will’s disappearance. she’d never met him, but what happens in the UD is frequently linked to d&d and other media will consumes. in d&d lore, the demogorgon has two heads. when el comes up to the demogorgon in the void (a space where we know different minds can be linked from far away), perhaps she is walking into will’s mind, and behind the demogorgon we briefly glimpse something that looks vaguely like an egg:
i think this can be taken as el sort of being reborn once she opens the gateway, and this new version of her has strange connections to the demogorgon, particularly their powers:
later on in s1, nancy and jonathan find an injured animal that gets yanked away from them by an invisible force. earlier on in the ep, el throws lucas into a wall in much the same fashion. just as the demogorgon uses telekinesis to maim, el uses it to save the day - they’re two sides of the same coin. and of course in the finale, they both seemingly disintegrate into flakes, but when el reappears in the UD afterwards, the demogorgon doesn’t. similar-looking flakes appear in s3 on the beach in billy’s mind, possibly connecting them to mindscapes.
as for the s4 promo and the lab massacre, it’s pretty clear that el kills other children at the lab and blocks out the memory, and much of the promo implies a demogorgon was involved in killing the kids, despite one of the lines used in advertising - “it’s not the demogorgon” - and in one of the first teasers, mike’s s1 “something is coming” voiceover getting placed over a shot of s1 finale el, rather than the monster. this would most likely mean it happened the same night as the portal opening, but bloodied el in the rainbow room wears a lab gown which raises the question, who got her out of the tank? amidst the panic, did someone open it, take the time to dress her and send her off to kill the demogorgon? we know el escaped through a pipe, but in the 002 poster there’s a trail of blood leading up to an opening in the ceiling, so did she follow its up there? or are they one and the same and the el we see for the rest of the show sprung from the void too?
finally, we have potential foreshadowing from terry ives in the s2 void, who says “no” and vanishes after el tries to talk to her. to me this clearly implies that there’s something wrong with this el, that she’s not the kid terry expected.
there’s also this figurine:
tl;dr: the real jane died in the tank or the void and the one we know was created along with the upside down irreversibly linked to the demogorgon will had made up when she discovered his mind in the void. she’s both his hero and his monster
