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Billy's death at the end of season three made Max feel guilty about herself, negatively affecting everyone close to her, causing Vecna to use that to his advantage when trying to break through Hawkins.
While restoring Eleven's powers in Stranger Things season 4, Brenner explains that Vecna/Henry does not just kill his victims, he absorbs them and takes on their characteristics. As a result, it appears that Max's consciousness has been absorbed by and resides within Vecna.
Vecna attacks Max for the second time at the end of season 4. Eleven saves Max, but Max is in a coma in the season 4 finale. Fans want season 5 of Stranger Things to give Max a full recovery and a happy ending.
As Eleven holds him off, Nancy's group flambés Vecna's physical body in the Upside Down (though the monster disappears and survives the attack). When Max is knocked out of the trend, she's already lost her eyesight and all her legs and arms are broken.
In the Upside Down, Eleven is being restrained by Vecna's vines while he attempts to kill Max, breaking her legs and arms before he begins to take her eyes.
Related Stories. But even the Hawkins crew's four-phase plan of attack and Eleven's revived telekinetic blasts are not enough. Vecna holds off Eleven long enough to brutally attack Max in his signature style—she levitates, her eyes go white and bleed, and he snaps her limbs.
Yeah, Bower says Brown was crying real tears during that scene. “She was terrified and freaked out. And Caleb [Heymann], our DP, was very smart and saw that she was having this reaction in the beginning of rehearsal and decided to shoot her first. It's so pure and beautiful,” Bower said.
He takes everything from his victims. In this case, the "everything" Vecna took was what makes Max the person her friends know and love. The moment she died, Max's essence left her body and became the property of Vecna, explaining why Max is not there to greet Eleven inside her own mind.
Since her limbs were still broken and she's now comatose, it seems Max will still be blind after Stranger Things' season 5 time-jump, as Vecna had already “taken her eyes.”
He sent fragments of the Creel House flying at Max in a last-ditch attempt to stop her, but it was too late: she had returned to reality. After surviving the attack, Max listened to the song at all times to protect herself from Vecna.
At his empire's height, Vecna was betrayed and destroyed by his most trusted lieutenant, a vampire called Kas the Bloody-Handed, using a magical sword that Vecna himself had crafted for him, now known as the Sword of Kas.
So, while Eleven restarted Max's heart and brought her body back to life, she was trapped inside of Vecna's hive mind. As terrible as that sounds, it offers the perfect segue into Season 5. Namely, the only way to save Max's soul will be to kill Vecna. By doing that, all the souls Vecna absorbed should be set free.
Brenner (Matthew Modine) states in the Stranger Things episode "Papa" that Vecna "consumes" everything about his victims, Vecna targets traumatized victims because it builds for him a well of sad and angry memories to draw from. With each victim, he can become gradually more powerful.
Once he takes control of the mind, he traumatizes them by showing the visions of their dark past. He takes them to unknown places and gives them a glimpse of himself. The pain of his victims doesn't end here. Every single one of his victims experiences nose bleeding and severe headaches as well.
Vecna lives in the Upside Down and preys on people's past traumas and guilt. The monster curses its victims, making them relive their trauma in progressively more gruesome ways until it violently kills them. (And we mean, like, really violently.)
The fight distracts Lucas from holding onto Max, who levitates under Vecna's thrall. And then it happens: her bones break, her eyes bleed, and she collapses, dead. Max is dead for a minute, but Eleven (who has been psychically piggybacking onto her from Nevada) uses her powers to restart Max's heart.
After serving as bait for Vecna, she becomes his “final sacrifice,” getting her bones broken and losing her vision during a low point. Once the fight is over, she dies in Lucas' arms, unable to see or feel anything as Eleven looks on from her mindspace.
In an interview on theHappy Sad Confused podcast released today, the Duffer brothers said that Max is alive, but “brain dead, blind, and all of her bones are broken.”
In his twisted mind, Vecna believes that he his helping the world by wiping out humans, as a "predator, but for good." When Vecna asks for El to join him, it's because he also sees her as a predator, "better" than humans. He offers her his path as a sort of freedom, as they reshaped the world in their image.
He is terrifying because he has access to secrets and the guilt that accompanies those secrets. Vecna's use of his victims' guilty conscious to terrorize his prey is an obvious tool in his arsenal.
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.
Clocks represent a passing of time, which can represent the fact that Vecna's victims' time has nearly run out — it is no coincidence that many of the clocks are set to midnight. Throughout the series, we learn that Vecna is a human who found himself trapped in the Upside Down for years thanks to our girl, Eleven.
While Vecna was severely injured by Steve, Nancy, and Robin, he was still able to kill Max, opening the final gate that was needed for the Upside Down to spill out into Hawkins. Because Eleven was battling Vecna in Max's mind, she was able to bring her friend back to life, albeit in a coma.
Instead of escaping Vecna's Mind Lair by hearing her favorite song, Nancy is actually released by Vecna himself. Her freedom comes with a price: He gives her a vision of his plans for Hawkins and tells her to pass that message on to Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown).