'Stranger Things' Theories: D&D Hints About Season 3, How The Show Connects To Stephen King's 'It'

So you've already torn through Stranger Things 2, and you've listened to our in-depth breakdown on /Film Daily. What now? Time to theorize about the future of the show, of course, and to examine a possible connection to a smash hit movie that came out earlier this summer. Take a look at the latest Stranger Things theories below. (Spoilers ahead, obviously.)

Let's organize these in order of plausibility. Remember that theory about how the Dungeons & Dragons game at the end of the first season might predict everything that happened in season 2? That ended up not coming true, but that's not stopping Nerdist from digging into more D&D lore to predict what may happen in season 3.

In Stranger Things season 2, episode 8, entitled "The Mind Flayer," Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo) suggests a parallel between the malevolent "shadow monster" that's controlling Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) and a character from the game called a mind flayer, which, according to Nerdist, is a member of a race of "psionic tyrants from another dimension that harvest entire races for their own twisted ends and live in an evil, subterranean cave network known as the Underdark."

The outlet points out that in D&D mythos, there are more powerful mind flayers that exist, known as arcanists and liches, that lean on sorcery to make their powers even more fearsome. The theory goes that because we saw Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) using her special Force powers – the equivalent of sorcery – to close the portal between her world and The Upside Down, that Eleven could be the next victim of the Shadow Monster/Mind Flayer so it can hijack her powers for its own evil plans.

The Duffer Brothers have even hinted at something similar in an interview talking about the ending of the new season:

"The hope we wanted people to get out of it is that this thing [is still out there]. They've shut the door on the Mind Flayer, but not only is it still there in the Upside Down, it's very much aware of the kids, and particularly Eleven. It had not encountered her and her powers until that final episode. Now, it knows that she's out there. We wanted to end on a little bit of an ominous note on that level."

Better watch your back, Eleven.

By now, it's common knowledge that the Duffers were heavily inspired by the works of Stephen King. So it's not too surprising that we'd see a few hat tips in King's direction in the new season. EliteDaily may take things a bit too far, though, when they suggest that Stranger Things and It are set in the same universe. The bulk of their reasoning seems to come from a few Twitter posts, which I'd argue just point out homages rather than direct connections:

Bob's parents are from Maine, and he was haunted by an evil clown when he was a kid which would've been in the late 50's #StrangerThings pic.twitter.com/G1SfJiCHRd

— Stranger Facts (@DexertoST) October 29, 2017

Finn Wolfhard says the same line in both #StrangerThings and the movie IT pic.twitter.com/70RvYf1AwG

— Stranger Facts (@DexertoST) October 29, 2017

He also found victory over the clown when he stopped showing fear. #Parallels

— Hunter Radesi (@hradesi14) October 30, 2017

I'm not buyin' it. But if you're the type of viewer that has to convince yourself that there's a literal link between the two properties, I can't stop you from doing that. That Mind Flayer theory, though...there may actually be something to that one. What do you think? Is it legit? Does that explain why season 2's ending was sort of anticlimactic – because the Mind Flayer is watching Eleven and marking her as its next victim? Sound off in the comments below.