Resisting Vecna from ‘Stranger Things’ as the tyranny of Whiteness with a different kind of medicine
If Vecna (Henry Creel) represents the Apotheosis of Whiteness—the obsession with purity, mastery, individual control, and the "preservation" of trauma—then you cannot defeat him with weapons that belong to Whiteness. You cannot "out-master" the master.
In the logic of the show, the characters usually try to fight back with guns, psychic blasts, and plans (Empire’s tools). But using Bayo Akomolafe’s philosophy, the "medicine" for resisting Vecna is not a stronger weapon, but a different posture entirely.
Here is Akomolafe’s medicine for the Mind Flayer and Vecna:
1. The Medicine of "Thick Time" (Resisting the Clock)
The Symptom: Vecna weaponizes linear time. He uses the Grandfather Clock. He counts down. He traps his victims in a loop of their past mistakes (trauma loops). This is the colonial imposition of Urgency. The Medicine: "Slowing Down."
Akomolafe says: "The times are urgent, let us slow down."
To resist Vecna, you do not rush to "fix" the trauma he is exploiting. You refuse the urgency of his countdown. You engage in "Thick Time"—a state of being where you are so present, so embodied, and so entangled with the "now" that the linear pull of the past (guilt) and the future (fear of death) loses its grip.
In the show: Music (Running Up That Hill) broke Vecna’s spell. Why? Because music creates a "sanctuary of sensation." It forces the listener into the immediate present. It disrupts the linear narrative of "I am guilty" with the immediate sensory reality of "I am here."
2. The Medicine of the Trickster / Eshu (Resisting the Plan)
The Symptom: Henry Creel is an architect. He builds a "mind palace." He wants perfect order. He is a spider weaving a precise web. He hates chaos. The Medicine: Shape-Shifting and Play.
Akomolafe invokes Eshu (the Yoruba trickster god) who dwells at the crossroads. Whiteness demands a clear path; the Trickster offers a maze.
You resist Vecna not by being a "Stronger Hero" (which is just a mirror of him), but by being Unintelligible. You embrace the absurd, the playful, and the weird.
In the show: Eddie Munson is the closest to this medicine. He is the "Freak," the Dungeon Master. He deals in fantasy and subversion. He doesn't try to be a "good citizen" of Hawkins. His final act was a concert—a performance—in the middle of a war zone. That is Trickster energy: answering the terror of Empire with the absurdity of Art.
3. The Medicine of Composting (Resisting the Archive)
The Symptom: Vecna "keeps" his victims. He displays their bodies in his mind. He is an Archivist. He refuses to let things die naturally; he mummifies them in pain. This is the Museum-ification of the world. The Medicine:Decomposition.
Akomolafe teaches us to "Compost" our grief. Empire wants to build monuments; Rewilding wants to become soil.
The resistance to Henry Creel is the acceptance of Death as Transformation, not Death as Failure. If Henry is obsessed with "immortality through domination," the medicine is "fertility through decay."
The practice: Instead of holding onto the trauma (which gives Vecna a hook), the victim practices "metabolizing" it—letting the identity of "The Victim" rot so that a new, strange life can grow from it. It is telling Vecna: "You cannot keep me, because I am already changing into something else."
4. The Medicine of the Monster (Resisting Purity)
The Symptom: The Mind Flayer wants to melt everyone into one biomass (Assimilation). Henry wants to wipe out humanity to create a "pure" predator world. Both hate the "messy" complexity of human relationships. The Medicine:Becoming Monstrous.
Akomolafe argues that we must become "monsters" to the status quo. We must allow ourselves to be contaminated by the world.
The "Jocks" (Jason) try to stay pure and protect the town. They fail. The "Nerds" succeed because they are willing to crawl through the slime.
The practice: To resist the "Purity" of Whiteness, you must embrace your own hybridity. You are not a "clean, independent self." You are a walking ecosystem of bacteria, trauma, joy, and ancestry. You resist the Mind Flayer not by building a wall, but by asserting that your internal ecosystem is too complex to be assimilated.
5. The Medicine of Fugitivity (Resisting the Gate)
The Symptom: The heroes are always trying to "Close the Gate." They want to seal the border between Hawkins (Civilization) and the Upside Down (The Wild/The Shadow). The Medicine: Sanctuary in the Cracks.
Akomolafe suggests that "Sanctuary is not a place, it is a practice." It is not about building a fortress (Hawkins) that is safe from the monster. It is about learning how to live in the "fugitive spaces" where the Empire cannot see you.
The solution isn't to "fix" Hawkins so it can go back to being a perfect 1950s suburb (which is what Henry hated). The solution is to let the illusion of the suburb fall apart.
The Shift: The characters stop trying to "save the world" (Whiteness's burden) and start trying to "find each other in the dark."
Summary
If Vecna is the demand that we be Perfect, Eternal, and Controlled, Then The Medicine is the permission to be Broken, Temporary, and Entangled.
We defeat him not by climbing higher (Ascension), but by falling together into the mud (Descension), where his psychic powers cannot track us because we have ceased to be the "individuals" he is hunting.