However, either she didn't have a great aim or she was trying to play it safe because she didn't hit him in the face even once, and that may be the reason why Vecna is still alive. Obviously, Nancy was trying to play it safe. She even cut off the muzzle of her shotgun so she could have the best odds.
Nancy later led the team back into the Upside Down with the purpose of killing Vecna as Max, Lucas, and Erica lured him in, and Nancy, Robin, and Steve managed to burn Vecna, with Nancy shooting him several times, and though they weakened the creature, he's still alive.
Vecna Letting Nancy Go Easily Was Pointless
Stranger Things season 4, volume 1 ends with the ominous warning that Nancy Wheeler is the next victim of Henry Creel, otherwise known as One and Vecna.
Vecna doesn't kill Nancy (Natalia Dyer), but he does leave her with a vision: a dark cloud, dead soldiers, and armies of monsters. This is Hawkins' future if Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) wins. He's dangerously close to winning, too, what with four being the magic number.
By targeting Nancy, Vecna would demonstrate that he's more frightening, intelligent and powerful than anyone initially assumed. She's easily the character who knows the most about him and understands fragments of how his mind works.
While intending to get his revenge on Eleven and Brenner, Vecna also goes after victims who have dealt with traumatizing experiences in the past (reminiscent of his childhood and his time at the Hawkins lab).
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.
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.
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).
It seems that the reason why Vecna wasn't killing for the seven years after the Hawkins Lab massacre was because he was waiting to become more powerful as the Mind Flayer and Demogorgons took more victims, as he was likely weakened after being thrown into the dimension.
However, within the red smoke of Vecna's Mind Lair, it wasn't the song itself that saved her, but the memories it conjured up. What broke through to Max was the happy, loving memories of her friends, particularly Lucas and Eleven, and these were what truly allowed her to break free of Vecna's grasp and escape.
The theory is that Karen Wheeler might be Vecna's sister, Alice Creel. As we know, Vecna is actually a man of many names, including 001, Peter Ballard and Henry Creel. We saw Henry and Alice together as children briefly in a flashback and it is believed that Henry killed his sister along with his mother.
His first three victims — Chrissy Cunningham, Patrick McKinney, and Fred Benson — are all peers of The Party, people they know from school, which makes Vecna's terror all the more real.
However, either she didn't have a great aim or she was trying to play it safe because she didn't hit him in the face even once, and that may be the reason why Vecna is still alive. Obviously, Nancy was trying to play it safe. She even cut off the muzzle of her shotgun so she could have the best odds.
What is the significance of 4 for Vecna? The new season shows that the four chimes of the grandfather clock symbolize the four victims Vecna needs to claim in order to enter our dimension and take over humanity.
“The reasons that he chose Nancy are because she's connected to Eleven, she already is connected to Vecna by her traveling to the Upside Down, and Nancy is a reporter. She already wanted to find out the truth, so she also has so much of the back story already.
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.
As Sink put it: “You kind of learn in the season that he targets people that are in a real [bad] place, and Max is obviously one of those people. Just with everything with Billy, so she was kind of like the perfect target.
Presumably, Vecna chose to conceal his true identity as he spoke through Billy, explaining some of the strange pronouns used during the conversation.
In episode 7, Vecna is revealed to be Henry Creel (played as a youngster by Raphael Luce), the son of Victor Creel (Robert Englund) and his wife Virginia (Tyner Rushing) shown in the 1950s flashbacks.
The theory predicts that Vecna wants to regain his human form, and he will use Will to do so in Season 5. Knowing that Vecna singled out Will in Season 1, it's a reasonable theory, but it might go too far. After all, Vecna already has a human form, and he has vowed to eliminate humanity.
Fred Benson, a friend of Nancy's who was similar to Barb, was cursed and killed by Vecna. His death brought back Nancy's trauma, guilt, and grief over Barb's death.
(All of which have been cited by show creators the Duffer brothers as inspirations for the villain.) But he does have a surprising weakness: music.
In the visions of her trauma induced by Vecna, Chrissy's mother appeared both mentally and emotionally abusive towards her daughter - and it's implied her comments about Chrissy's figure caused her daughter to develop her eating disorder.
Vecna adopts psychological warfare to target his prey – which, you could argue, very much serves as an allegory for trauma, depression and mental illness, which is all too real.