Stranger Things Creature Parallels - Tumblr Posts
Stranger Things - The Rat King
Most of the creatures in the show Stranger Things have an obvious parallel or base in D and D monsters. (Which I, having played D and D myself for a bit, absolutely love.) Yet at the start of season 3 I immediately saw another parallel with a mythical creature outside of D and D lore - The Rat King. (Which, please correct me if I’m wrong, is only seen in D and D through homebrew’s instead of any official work.)
I initially remembered the Rat King through the wonderful little Netflix cartoon Hilda, but I’ve run across it before while searching up random mythical creatures in my spare time(which I do quite often since I frankly absolutely adore them). So I looked it up again after finishing the season in order to see if my initial comparison held true.
Rat King’s are typically a creature made up of a large group of rats that are intertwined through their tails. Similarly, the first version of the fleshy Mindflayer we see in season 3 is made up of the hatched goop from all of the infected rats in the surrounding area(before it then moves on to humans).
They’re not just mythical creatures but also cryptids (with seemingly fake corpses of the phenomenon supposedly being found). The Upside-down creatures of the show could also be seen as cryptids with only a select people knowing about them/having seen them while the general public is normally unaware of their presence.
They’re associated most with Germany, which is another historical enemy of America and in the same general area of Russia(so it’s fitting that season 3 introduces both the fleshy Mindflayer and the Russians).
In folklore they are associated with bad omens and plagues, which fits super well with this creature’s love of announcing it’s presence and intentions beforehand and with it’s bodysnatching and infecting tendencies/abilities. (Also in real life rats were wrongly considered the plague carriers while it was actually the fleas on them, while in the show the rats were also just being used by the babies/young parts of the fleshy Mindflayer that had borrowed their way inside of them.)
In some stories Rat Kings were actually tied together/created by humans and thus held grudges against their creators. This could parallel the Mindflayer’s grudge against El for letting them into our world in the first place but then almost immediately(in its’ eyes) shutting it back out.
In Hilda, that Rat King is shown trading secrets but I’m not sure how that could tie into the fleshy Mindflayer just yet (hopefully I might think of something later)?
Finally, apparently the name of this mythical creature was first used to reference someone who lived off of others, like “an old king who sits on a throne of young knotted tails” or something along those lines??? That one’s a bit more confusing and hard to interpret for me but it could parallel how both the American and Russian governments keep using all their money to spy on each other and mess with planes/dimensions that they shouldn’t be instead of using their money to more directly help their citizen’s. Or it could even tie into the Mayor thriving off his corrupted team up with the mall operatives while paying no mind/not caring about the small town businesses that suffered from it.
Well, I think that’s about it! It’s highly unlikely they actually intended for this neat little parallel(since like I said most of the parallels are meant to be drawn between D and D monsters and Upside down creatures), but I thought this was interesting to speculate about nonetheless!!!