Netflix and the Duffer brothers’ Stranger Things has always been tied to Dungeons & Dragons, the fantasy tabletop roleplaying game to rule them all (and in the darkness bind them). This season, the main villain is named after the character who is considered to be the greatest villain in D&D lore: Vecna. Who is this wizard, zombie, man-thing?
When we first “meet” Vecna in D&D, it is in the form of a shriveled hand and an eyeball—hot girl things. Before he was this dynamic duo of body parts, people have speculated that he was either a human wizard named Oerth or some kind of half-elf. Either way, the important thing is that he wanted power badly. In order to escape death, Vecna turned himself into a lich.
Critical Role and Adventure Time fans will know that a lich is magical undead creature, capable of magic itself. It’s like a better, cooler, more self-aware zombie. We don’t know how Vecna became a lich (there are a lot of conflicting theories). I like the idea that he read a lot of cursed books and book wormed himself into becoming a superpowered undead wizard. It gives me hope.
Vecna become a fearsome ruler that dominated an entire empire. He was unstoppable, until he was betrayed by his right-hand man, the vampire Kas. Using a magical sword that Vecna crafted for him, Kas defeated his former boss, and the sword, now known as the Sword of Kas, left behind only the eye and hand. But if you spend many hours in a library learning how to cheat death, you find ways to make that kind of situation work.
Despite being killed, he was reborn as a demigod of magic the world of Greyhawk. Using his cult followers, he tried to gain the powers of a greater god, but that did not come to place and left him imprisoned on the demiplane of Ravenloft. He would break free and attempt to shatter and rearrange the multi-verse to his whim in the city of Sigil(why do people keep trying to do that). He was defeated once more and returned to his mortal homeworld, still a lesser god.
So the Upside Down is being controlled by someone named after a super powerful undead creature who, even after being killed, came back and turned into a demi-god?
Teenagers can handle this.
(featured image: Irina Nordsol Kuzmina/Wizards of the Coast)
