So this is kind of an Until Dawn spoiler….
September 28, 2015
12:14 am
When the game makes everyone freak out about Wendigo bites we were just all like “WHAT??? WHEN HAS THAT EVER BEEN A PART OF WENDIGO STORIES? HOW CAN THESE PEOPLE NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT WENDIGO?”
The poor wendigo is surprisingly misunderstood. At least how they come into being. The whole cannibalistic aspect is well known. I want to say the curse around it is a “you kill it, you become it” type deal, but I’m unsure of that. Though to be on the safe side it’s best to not let it bite you, which is sound advice when dealing with any monsters. And since this is the wendigo we’re talking about, go above and beyond what you normally do to avoid eating other people.
Are you saying my “Don’t Be A Cannibal” wristband will have to be complemented with a pamphlet on kuru?
Honestly, “To be on the safe side, don’t let it bite you” is pretty sound advice even if we AREN’T talking about monsters. I just figure it’s a rule for life. Thing is trying to bite me? Don’t let thing bite me. Thing is NOT trying to bite me? Don’t encourage it, either.
Oh idk…If their good looking enough, maybe a nibble or three is ok.
Or birdies. cute little birdy nibbles are ok, they need it to move around
The answer is to kill it, then quickly kill yourself.
I -want- to say that it just varies based on which tribal mythology you look in on, cause I’ve been reading up on them after The Secret World reboot into Secret World Legends. If I recall some of the myths -do- have them transmit the curse by biting other folks, but it’s more that you just start getting wendigo urges, you can be cured and you don’t have to give in. Others have it so that it’s just some people end up becoming wendigo because they did something bad and greedy and invited a dark spirit into themselves, and then there’s the dudes who get it because they killed the wendigo… I’m about 90% sure they’re all different monsters from different languages but associated with the same thing so they all got labeled the same way by colonists though.
I think UD wendigos are created when people are starving to the point of cannibalism? I can’t remember, I’ve only watched Markiplier play. Or heard, really. It was more for background noise than actual watching.
If you eat the flesh of a person, the spirit of the wendigo can find purchase in your body and transform it.
Being starved is only part of it. The journal left by the flamethrower guy says that there has to be a wendigo spirit that will begin to posess you even before you begin starving. Cannibalism only seals the deal. I didn’t get that far into markiplier’s playthrough to see it, but I think it happens either way that Josh begins being possessed as he is going insane in the mines. Whether or not this required wendigo deaths to occur yet or not, I’ve yet to see anyone do.
Josh was just going nuts because he’s been off his meds for months, for psychological disorders that he’s been treated for since childhood – in one instance he was even institutionalized for it.
so now I’ve read the whole wiki on wendigos. they’re essentially white walkers yea?
or rather, sorry, white walkers are essentially wendigos
No, Wendigos are people who engage in cannibalism. Others (or White Walkers for you show-watching scrubs) are a different species entirely, made of ice and able to raise and command the undead. WIGHTS are what you call the zombies, but they are really more like revenants; just people brought back to life, no cannibalism involved.
Yea………. I think you’re talking to someone other than me.
Revenants are the dead who’ve come back to exact vengeance upon their murderer and nobody else. Wights are closer to traditional zombies.
I’ve never seen Game of Thrones, mainly because HBO is expensive.
That’s just a possible description of them; a revenant, in its simplest forms, is simply a dead person that’s “returned” to the realm of the living, whether resurrected, or as a zombie, it doesn’t matter
Revenants are actually what we now call vampires. They ARE slightly different from the East European vampire. They are a bloated corpse that returns to the home of their family every night to drink the blood of their loved ones, or in some cases, will just hang around being super unsettling.
Wights (or draugr, if you’re going with the Norse name) are barrow fiends. Zombies eat flesh, whereas wights just suck the life energy out of you with a touch, and they live in barrows (burial mounds).
Wendigos are people who have engaged in cannibalism during times of famine such as harsh winters, and much like vampires being based loosely on Porphyric haemophilia, there is actually a Wendigo Syndrome where, after engaging in cannibalism, you start craving and preferring human meat over anything else.
aight here we go, MAJOR SPOILERS.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED
I AINT GONNA SAY IT AGAIN, REALLY
Basically what happens is that if someone is down to eat another person on that mountain, they get Wendigo’d. That wendigo is there because of the two sisters in the beginning of the game and that fell in a hole. Long exposition later, you discover that one of the sisters survived and had to resort to cannibalism to survive since her sister was a delicious yummy corpse. The surviving sister got Wendigo’d and is the main wendigo you see in the game.
Actually, it’s not because of the sisters.
Continuing the spoilers:
The Wendigos actually were around far, far earlier than the sisters. Remember those miners? Yeah, there were around 30 of them. 12 survived. How? They ate the rest of the miners. Those 12 miners started becoming Wendigos, as evident in the Sanitarium.
The Wendigos are a sort of “curse” in the area. Probably part of the Great Spirit story that Mike can find in the cabin with Jess. The Great Spirit was the one to down the tree, allowing the Mother Bear to catch and kill the Merchant that killed her babies. The Great Spirit is probably responsible for the transformation of human to Wendigo, and became a real worry with the miners.
I don’t know the story behind the Wendigo that Flamethrower Guy was chasing, though, sorry.
Love that someone called Banshee pops up to talk Wendigos.
i can explain the thing about the Wendigo that Flamethrower Guy was chasing, you see the wendingos are spirits that when you omnomnom on people on that mountain they enter you and turn you into way, there’s no other way to get wendigo’d.
the wending that flamethrower guy was a super strong spirit basically a elite wendigo spirit so strong that flamethrower guy (his name viktor i believe) had to chase it for a whole year, that tragedy is that he killed him and released the spirit when the two girls fell off that cliff so when hannah got hungry the ancient wendigo entered her and turned her.
(spoilers) that’s why basically you see her easily tearing other wendigos apart in the finale.
MORE SPOILERS :P
The Wendigo transformation evidentally requires a “wendigo spirit” to begin possessing a person before they turn to cannibalism. It tempts them into it. Also, there was a “Alpha” wendigo (I forget the name of it) that was killed by flame-thrower guy (it was the wendigo chasing Hannah and beth in the beginning, flame-thrower guy killed it to try and save them even tho he knew it’d set the wendigo spirit free to start over again) and thus ended up possessing Hannah. That’s why she was bigger and stronger than the other wendigos in the end.
Ok, as a nerd I feel I must clarify some things: most of the we dingo originated when a mining party got stuck in the mountain, nearly started and ate each other. Some were also produced by the techs in the sanatorium, don’t remember why. Prolly bad things. Almost all of them escaped, but then all but one, (the maka-whatsit, or what someone called the alpha) got caught by badass wendigo advance-plot-then-die man. The one he was hunting on the night of the sisters was the maka-whatsit. I think he killed that one. The theory is after the sister went wendigo she freed the wendigo the hunter had already trapped, letting them loose on the mountain. Basically what happens is the wendigo spirit inhabits someone who is starving and tempts them to eat flesh. I’m not sure if the scientist guys somehow faked this or just rounded up wendigo. But the deal is only sealed when you eat flesh. Also, josh was just batshit, not wendigo struck. That didn’t happen until he spent a while in the mine with the corpse if mr plot device.
Also had to read the wiki on Wendigos. Apparently Wikipedia needs a bit of love on that entry; it’s an Algonquin mythological creature that is created from people that eat other people, yet the entry fails to mention that the Algonquins had a very long history of war with the Iroquois nations, who infamously ate people.
It’s… complicated, obviously. It’s a question of whether it was due to starvation or “eat enemy hearts to gain their courage”, but it wasn’t particularly widespread, and a lot of it is likely propaganda by both the Iroquois and the Algonquin (don’t fuck with us, we’ll eat you/stay away from them, they’ll eat you).
Oh cool! cultural context!
Wendigo stories were largely a cautionary tale about greed (in addition to cultural taboos about cannibalism), the more a Wendigo eats the hungrier it gets, so it’s constantly gorging itself and wasting away. Different local takes on the story would ometimes say people became wendigos by committing greedy acts (eating people)while others said they were possessed by an unsavoury wendigo spirit that corrupted them, sort of a cause-VS-effect thing.
Isn’t that the same explanation for zombies? Well, Dawn of the Dead was, which is tied for Best Zombie Movie with the Dawn of the Dead remake and Sean of the Dead. So…
Marvel had a weird thing in some of their X-men comics a few years back where Wendigos somehow became infectious via wounds, Called World War Wendigo… Maybe that’s literally the only thing they know Wendigos from? They saw an X-men comic and went “Seems legit” (Only their Wendigos were basically Yetis.)
Read that storyline a little while ago, and what happened was that a food processing plant got tainted with human meat, can’t remember if it was an accident, suicide or what, and lots of folks became unintentional cannibals.
Too many zombie movies, I bet.
I’m pretty sure comics are where a LOT of people first heard of the Wendigo, yeah. One fought the Hulk and Wolverine in Wolverine’s first appearance, and since Wolverine is such a popular character, a lot of people probably heard about the Wendigo that way in passing. Of course, originally the Marvel Wendigo curse was a lot more like the actual mythological curse, and they only made up the werewolf-style bite thing a few years ago so they could have a silly event, because comics.
The Wendigo myth is a really culture-specific one, and its application in Until Dawn is both out of place and pretty inappropriate — especially as it has a long history of being used to oppress Native people via demonization and pathologization (“wendigo psychosis” is highly controversial and easily levelled against northern Native men, whether or not they’re actually from a culture with a wendigo concept).
That reminds me of a lot of creatures from Greek myth that could be seen as symbolic representations of enemies of the Greeks or foreigners in general. Centaurs are Anatolians, who had enough horses to use cavalry in battle, Amazons are Scythians, who had women in their military alongside men, Satyrs (and Centaurs) lack the sexual prudence that was encouraged in Greek men, etc.
Cannibalism makes wendigos in UD…that and a lil help of an ancient native curse that resides in the mountains
You eat people meat and then a scary mountain ghost possesses you and turns you into Cannibal Spider-man.
I think usually it’s you gotta eat a dude then a spirit possesses you and turns you into a wendigo. Mike Mignola did a really good story on a wendigo that was a weird play on that, where instead of being a cannibal and/or murderer themself, a wendigo could be someone who ran into another wendigo. Like someone who’s usually a murderer and/or a cannibal gets the curse, and they can pass it off to a person if they kill them. Essentially, they murder someone else and their soul goes free while the person who they murdered’s soul goes into the body they were previously occupying. Which I guess would mean there are usually OG wendigos at some point who started the chain by killing and/or eating someone.
The wendigo in the Hellboy story was named Darryl. It was a very sad story.
I know what the ACTUAL wendigo stories are, I just wasn’t sure what UD made up for them because I missed some story bits when my friend was playing through.
I was actually super impressed at how well they handled wendigos in the game. And also super amused at how stupidly quick a bunch of teens were to apply werewolf/zombie logic to them.
To be fair to the teens, UD is the first modern wendigo story I’ve seen where the wendigos are actually wendigos, and not misnamed yetis. I’d apply werewolf logic, too.
It’s also very easy to have never heard of wendigos before.
!SPOILERS!
Well, the Wendigos in Until Dawn work by “If you eat the meat, you’re screwed” logic. Slow transformation, weak against fire, pretty much indestructible otherwise. However, there is also an “Alpha Wendigo.”
Basically, as long as there is at least one Wendigo, that one contains the evil spirit that makes Wendigos. If that spirit is free, it will either possess another Wendigo, or if there are no others, pushes your brain into seeing cannibalism as an option. So, anyone trapped or starving is more likely to become a cannibal.
They can also mimic people, in game, and in some stories, to lure prey. The Wendigos also seem to have very partial memories/residual behaviour (Wendigo!Hannah not killing Mike or Josh)
Each Wendigo you kill releases their Wendigo Spirit/Curse/Essence thing. As far as we got with the collectables and all, it looks like more Wendigos can be created, but their “spirits” are unable to be permanently destroyed, resulting in more and more problems.
At least, as far as we collected.
Oh geez! No no, I figured you, like, knew what the actual lore behind wendigos was. That was more, like, thinking out loud, I guess? Well, thinking in type. Also because I really, really like that one Hellboy short and bring it up at any given opportunity I possibly can. Sorry if I came off the wrong way.
Maybe people freak out about wendigo bites because the human mouth is really unsanitary, bites can get infected fast, and if wendigos are some kind of cursed humans, then how bad must their unsanitary-plus-cursed mouths be? It’d be like a spooky komodo dragon bite. Demon sepsis. Roll a fort save or your limb swells up and rots right there on you.
It’s well played in UD, where conflicting assumptions are provided. Just like would happen if people who were unfamiliar with Wendigos encountered one, and got it confused with a George Romero zombies (viral zombie)… which are closer to a cross between Arabian ghouls (evil jinni) and the Haitian zombie (magic zombie)… but I digress. Coelasquid actually didn’t miss much, the characters also operate under assumptions and disinformation, until after that choice.
Big props to Supermassive Games (writers Graham and Larry) for considering how a general consumer of mass media Generation Z kid would react about some kind of “undead” thing. Actually most “general public” would assume given the current prominence of zombies in media since 2000.
“OMG Undead thing bit someone! They is doomed to zombify! Shoot them now!”
IMO this is why you don’t auto shoot people bitten by undead-ish things. In almost all cases save Remoero Viral Zombies you either make things worse, or kill an innocent (which can make things even worser). In the former they’ll quickly turn into the undead/demon (example Vampire like things). In the latter you could open yourself to evil spirits (because you killed an innocent). If it is a Viral Zombie you’ll always have time to splatter their brains later when they do finally die (just be ready to do it).
Soilers for Until Dawn:
Except for the fact that a couple cutscenes before the scene where they discover the bite on Emily the Stranger literally told the kids “The way you become a Wendigo is you eat someone else.” Granted one of them eventually misremembered some of the details of that and relayed that in the conversation, but that was only after Mike started panicking about it and voicing his assumption that it worked like a zombie.
Romero zombies aren’t viral zombies, or at least don’t follow werewolf rules. The setting rules there are: any dead body with an intact brain gets up and tries to eat you, because of some change that started with bodies in graves waking up. The bites don’t infect you with anything that turns you, you just might die from bleeding or normal infection, and then you get up and eat people the same as if you had died from an unrelated illness or injury.
That is correct. It’s weird that so many works that followed Romero’s footsteps use a different take on it that saying “Romero’s zombies” conjures a kind of zombie Romero never used. It’s a bit like that XKCD comic where so many astronomy debates happen that Pluto is categorized as a Dwarf Pluto.
The mouth thing was the first thing that I thought of.
A few different ways of telling the story of the Wendigo; evil spirit that possesses someone to eat people, a shape-shifter who takes human form to get close to it’s victims, a shadowy human like creature who just likes to eat people but it all centers around cannibalism=bad! The Monster Hunters Bible description was very Blair Witch. A monster that hides in the wilderness and lures people into the woods by mimicking voices and other sounds until that person became disoriented and could not find their way back. The Wendigo would keep hounding the victim until they become to tired and hungry to fight back and would then devour them. A few other monsters share this same back story. Your a typical ‘don’t go into the woods alone’ legend.
I think there was something else about Wendigo’s but it might be a different cannibalistic monster I am thinking of. Basically for every person a Wendigo, or whatever monster I am confusing with it though I am sure I am remembering right, eats it gains their life force or something that basically gives it an extra life should something manage to kill it. Basically for every person it has ever eaten it its life, it need to be killed that many times plus one extra for itself to completely kill it.
Sounds like an early Slavic (most likely Ruthenian) Vampire myth. The Slavic peoples of eastern europe came up with a lot of the early vampire folklore, and some myths do mention a vampire needing to be killed once for every person they had killed, mainly because each person they drained became a kind of thrall/back up body.
That sounds a lot like the vampires in Hellsing. Now I’m wondering, is it coincidental or well-researched?
I remember my mixed French Canadian-First Nation grandfather telling me Wendigo stories as a child. He also claimed that some Wendigo folklore, such as a vulnerability to silver and an association with full moons, was a result of contact and mixture with the French fur traders. The French knew about old werewolf legends, back when they were caused by people making deals with demons/becoming possessed by demons, so a little bit of those late 1600s werewolf legends fused with the Wendigo stories. A very minute influence, but influence nonetheless.
Huh. That’s really interesting, actually. I’ll definitely have to go back and rewatch the third Ginger Snaps movie, because it didn’t make a whole lot of sense at the time. It’s a werewolf movie but it conflates werewolves and Wendigos. And it’s set in historical (colonial?) Canada, so I guess it makes more sense than I thought! Very, very cool. Thank you.
Ravenous is also a similar film.
Muhuhuhuhuhu, this is great!
I was the same at that part of the game, like, this plot device is trying way too hard.
Also, when you play it for the second time, it becomes SO obvious where the characters are supposed to die, and if they live they’re practically not part of the story anymore. Such a bummer.
Yeah, that part was quite “when the fuck did we establish this”? Because there was nothing said about that. But well, that girl gets a slap for her uninformed accusations. Probably would make great reaction gif to not sourced information.
but if a wendigo bits a wendigo, does it turns into a person?
worser. it turns into a lawyer,
Objection your honor! The defense is eating his own client!
I’ll allow it for now, but defense attorney, you’d better….YAHHHH!
Knowing full well what the answer is the question I need to ask is.
If you kiss will it turn into a princess.
(If you can kiss that are princesses still an option really??)
At least they’re not sparkly…
I probably won’t play UD as I’m too much of a weenie for most horror games/movies, but I actually like when characters make wild assumptions that don’t actually pan out (if it doesn’t cross over to ignoring what’s actually happening and holding the idiot ball). It’s a nice contrast to movies where somebody immediately guesses all the rules for how a monster/alien/foreign thing works.
If you’re like me where you want to see the story, but are too much of a weenie to play, try watching a playthrough on Youtube. Most horror games are still too scary for me, but it’s less so when it’s not “your” life on the line. I looked up a bunch of different clips, including a “perfect” playthrough with the best ending, and I didn’t get too scared. Mostly.
I know in Pathfinder fighting a wendigo is pretty horrifying. They curse you to slowly go insane until you kill and eat another member of your race, after which you take off in a run so fast that your feet burn off and you ascend, walking in the clouds. You are considered dead, and are now a wendigo.
I am on 2 sides of this honestly. To be fair I really had no knowledge of Wendigos other than they exist and Marvel Comics had character(s) based super loosely on the legend. So I can buy them not knowing about it and assuming.
Until Dawn Spoilers Below:
That said, I too thought it was stupid that they panicked and assumed “it works like a Zombie Bite!” in the LP I am watching of the game because 2 or 3 cutscenes before Mike and Ashley saw the bite The Stranger literally told them “You become a Wendigo by resorting to Cannibalism and being possessed by an evil spirit.”
Granted Ashley misremembered that fact and relayed that misinformation, but that was after Mike was making the big stink about the bite already. I can see her panicky mind remembering that and peppering in the zombie stuff because of Mike’s loud and scared assumptions though.
I actually know some of this stuff! I have to thank Diablo II for sparking my initial interest in Wendigo stories because I was curious what a wendigo was when facing down the mountains of fur and rage in-game. Also, Ominous, the only situation I have heard of like that with a Wendigo was from another webcomic called Geist Panik (I miss that comic) that had a Slavic character who was called a Wendigo. He was one of the good guys and gained more lives as he ate humans. He once nearly died going against a corrupted lake spirit which impaled him on a water tentacle and was causing him to bleed to death repeatedly, draining him of his extra lives. When they destroyed the spirit, they found a pile of corpses, and Mr. Wendigo gorged himself sick on the stockpile of extra lives! It was pretty funny/disturbing to watch the almost child-like, monstrous glee he expressed on finding the dead.
I’ve never heard of Until Dawn before, and I’m not big on horror games. I’m either laughing, or peeing myself. Usually the latter when it’s horror genre video games. This sounds like fun. It also reminds me of a silly tumblr post I’ve read arguing the finer points of Poisonous vs. Venomous. According to what I’ve learned of the legends, it’s possible to become an accidental Wendigo, or a forced Wendigo. If human flesh enters your system, you will become a Wendigo. So if somebody stuffed a piece of meat into your mouth and forced you to swallow, or told you that it was pork ribs, you were screwed. That was how serious a sin cannibalism was to the myth.
I didn’t know about their conflict with the Iroquois nation, though, and I forgot that the Iroquois had that heart-eating tradition going (heard about it maybe twice before). The former piece of information is pretty neat to learn. It would be interesting if tales of the Wendigo predated the Iroquois conflicts. That would have immediately made the Iroquois nation that much more horrifying to face to people who already abhorred cannibalism.
Probably got it from that old story by Algernon Blackwood. If a wendigo is biting you, though, you’ll probably be more worried about the loss of limbs, blood, etc.
My favourite bit of wendigo folklore is the fact you can (occasionally) cure them by treating them with friendship and courtesy…picturing the awkward dinner scenes (“ah, yes, this is my all-devouring cannibal buddy…”) between times amuses me no end.
So what you’re saying is there’s hope for Josh.
The Wendigo is more than just a story about a human-turned-possessed-cannibal-“monster”, it is — among other interpretations — also a cautionary tale about the dangers of the wild, and specifically, the danger of forgetting one’s humanity if they spend too much time in the wilds while hunting (or whatever)/the precariousness of the human state in a world of beasts and inhuman forces. The greatest taboo is cannibalism, so it stands in as a sign that the person in question has been gone too long, and is not just no longer civilized, but has ceased to be truly human and respect human taboos.
Under that interpretation, that you could possibly “rehabilitate” a Wendigo, even if it’s just enough so that they can speak and tell their story, makes some sense.
Cooked bear fat sometimes works, too, presumably because it tastes a lot like a hunter-gatherer living in the same environment would, but isn’t spiritually/psychologically bad/alienating for you (also cooked, which is a human thing rather than an eat-everything-in-sight-whether-it’s-stopped-twitching-or-not thing). Maybe urban/non-native wendigos would respond to bacon sarnies?
I want to draw a friendigo with a bacon sarnie now.
I feel like everyone is misunderstanding the game a bit. In Until Dawn, You don’t have to be on the mountain for the Wendigo spirit to posses you. Just desperate.
*Extreme Spoiler Warning*
Once your possessed the Wendigo increases your urges to eat human flesh to an extreme degree, but the physical transformation won’t happen until you actually start eating human flesh. That’s why the old guys diary states you shouldn’t kill them unless absolutely necessary and it’s better to trap them, because it sends their spirit out of the body to possess someone else.
Aand now I need to hunt down a copy of Ravenous.
You and me both.
Literally my entire knowledge of wendigos comes from one episode of Supernatural.
Wendigos always kind of spooked me out, don’t know why but they’re like the one mythological monster that could. Probably why Pet Sematary is the only Stephen King book to even come close to scaring me when I first read it.
Anyway, if I remember correctly from the various mythological takes on it since they do tend to vary the whole “possession” angle some stories take isn’t entirely made up since more than one myth involves a starving man claiming to have been touched or possessed by the wendigo and then driven to cannibalism. Upon being rescued they try to claim it wasn’t them, it was the wendigo that did it which makes them look crazy.
I think the issue is that the wendigo hasn’t exactly had a pop culture presence. For instance, before Until Dawn, my only exposure to them was Marvel comics (who seemed to mistake them for Yeti) and the newest My Little Pony (in which they are almost completely unrelated to legend).
I always thought if a person bites a person, they turn into zombies… :p
What if a wendigo eats a zombie, though? Then what happens?
I’m… not sure. WE MUST PERFORM SCIENCE!
You end up with a wendigo and a skeleton.
Well it wasn’t a spoiler until I read the text under the comic!
I think the spoiler is that the main antagonist/s is a/are wendigo/wendigoes. If I remember correctly, though I might be remembering a different game, before Until Dawn was released it was advertised on the premise of a serial killer killing teens in the cabin in the woods.
I just realized that the first part of my reply was redundant. :) read the second part of my sentence rather, but I am sure you figured out everything before I posted. I was just so excited that I could comment on something I actually have some idea about that I forgot people can figure out things much quicker than I can.
:( I am a sad panda.
I dunno man, I’d never heard of Wendigos before this game, but I wouldn’t exactly consider myself knowledgeable in that sort of thing.
you might hate me for saying this, but since when has being burned by sunlight ever been a part of vampire stories?
Not long – I think the first story to show it was Nosferatu. It doesn’t seem to have ever been part of folklore, that is, no one has ever believed that there are actual vampires that exist and are burnt by sunlight. Why would anyone hate you for that?
*Is Canadian*
*Knew literally nothing about Wendigo mythology until UD sparked an interest*
*Doesn’t understand why a bunch of teens from /California/ would know the legend*
Idk either, but I can add that there are a lot of weird cross-cultural American connections in California. It’s just what comes of it being a region of America that was colonized at a time when other parts of America were already so.
Pasadena, for example, was founded by people from Indiana who, during the vote on the name of their town, accepted one submitted by a local doctor, who had a missionary friend in Michigan who worked among Ojibwe peopel. Ojibwe is an agglutinative language and so their word “basadinaa” (meaning “it is a valley”, and which was badly mistranscribed as “pa-sa-de-na”) was part of the ending of several cool-story phrases such as “Crown of the Valley”, “Key of the Valley”, etc… plus, the name (or at least the Anglicization) sounded nice, so between the story-connotations and the nice sound, that’s what they kept. It’s not so weird to think that other Californians might’ve had stronger connections that led to a bit of cultural exchange.
Entry for “basadinaa” in the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary:
https://ojibwe.lib.umn.edu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=valley&commit=Search&type=english
Wiki-Record of Pasadena’s name etymology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Pasadena,_California#Origin_of_name
Wendigos>Zombies.
I was listening to a podcast the day before this comic was posted where they were talking about Wendigo and the way they came about. Got a good chuckle from the person bites another person comment.
Heh. This past spring, Mom wanted to name a ram lamb “Windigo.” I’m so, so glad I talked her out of it. Especially if the creature is gaining even more foothold in pop culture. She’ll use it on another lamb eventually, but at least my sweet little dude was spared the indignity of being called an Algonquin cannibal boogieman.
Or a place on Isle Royale. Whatever, Mom.
Only thing I remember about the Wendigo was that it was one of Wolverine’s early opponents
Yeah, the Windigo thing bugs me too. I actually wrote an Adventure/Horror novel about a teenager in the 1800s who learns his Uncle makes his living hunting supernatural creatures (the Yeti and loch ness kind, not the vampire kind… he is a big game monster hunter) and he decides to train with his uncle to become a Hunter too. Their first mission is to an island in Lake Michigan where a Windigo outbreak has occured. It annoyed the hell out of me when beta readers asked me “But if you get bit by a windigo you become one, right?” and I had to keep going “NO! That’s not how it works!”
Also annoyed me that, thanks to Marvel, people think they are just big yetis when it is more traditional for them to be skeletal demon monsters. I actually based mine on Grendel, which I hold is a natural born Windigo.
And I just realized I kept spelling it ‘windigo’ instead of ‘wendigo’. Damn you My Little Pony!
Either spelling is valid.
That’s because Windigos are Winners
What do you figure, Grendel absorbed a sibling in the womb with more success than Rusty Venture? (Adding kinslaying to his crimes!)
Whenever I bring up cannibalism, everyone argues from the ethical stance, rather from the biological and scientific stance. But I’ve once had someone bring up the Wendigo. People should learn more about how to have a constructive back-and-forth debate. Coming from completely different stances than the one the other person made will NOT convince them.
Ashley was the only one to make that assumption and freaked out to the point it got everyone else panicking. And that’s why she got to understand the palm of Emily’s hand.
Ashley and Emily were the two best-written characters in the game. They took two overplayed female archetypes – the cute-as-a-button bookworm and the stuck-up fashionista, respectively – and obliterated your expectations. You start out the game loving Ashley, but by the end of it you realize she’s just a coward (possibly a hypocritical one if you play the game a certain way). Emily, meanwhile, shows the shittiest side of herself right away – she’s high-maintenance, possessive, and belligerent. After her stint in the mines, though, you can tell she truly regrets and is horrified by what happened to Beth and Hannah. In the end, I don’t think Ashley actually contributed anything to keeping the group safe.
Ashley saves Chris’ life, or leaves him to die if you had him try and shoot her, none of the others will save him but her. Plus she’s the only involved party to state repeatedly and openly how bad she feels about the prank they pulled and what happened because of it. Sam and Chris can too, but they weren’t involved so it’s not the same.
I admit, I did like that they made Emily so unlikable but still showed off her toughness and intelligence in the mines.
In short, wendigos are former humans who crossed the line out of desperation and ate human flesh. Essentially, they incarnate the fear of death by starvation during winter, the bane of most hunter-gatherer communities.
I guess the teens in this game were all members of the school Free Climbing and Parkour Club.
Something that got me thinking
On this mountain what counts as cannibalism. In the beginning with Jess and Mike preparing to engage in hanky and panky. If they had decided on Oral stimulation and Jess swallowed Would that turn her into a wendigo?
Long Answer: Well, according the the game you need to first be possessed by the spirit which then eventually drives you to eat the flesh. So even if some how swallowing was enough for the mountain to consider it cannibalism, she would have first needed to have been possessed and the specifics of how to become possessed were pretty much VERY Specific.
Short Answer: Most likely not.
Eating human flesh draws the Wendigo spirit to them. You can be possessed before you eat but you don’t have to be. You’re only safe if all the Wendigo spirits already have hosts.
I just read this entire webcomic in a day. Really excellent work, I’m in love with it. Keep it up!
Maybe their new friend can explain it to them.
Hahaha I was wondering why Wendigos were becoming popular out of nowhere. Even here in Alberta they weren’t very well known until Supernatural (which is the poorest defeat of a Wendigo ever and I love Supernatural). According to my culture, they cannot be turned back and it takes a lot to destroy them. A lot of hacking and slashing and then a long time burning the crap out of the body. But you know, gotta overpower them before you get to that part. If you wanna read a story about Wendigos by a Dene; I recommend Richard Van Camp’s Godless but Loyal to Heaven.
However, I really want to play Until Dawn.
Why would I want anything to bite me, ever? I don’t care if its a mice, a dog, a little girl, a vampire, a werewolf, a tiger, a shark or a wendigo. Not letting other things bite you is just common sense
I’d let a werewolf bite me, if he did so nicely.
Okay, so I’m kind of posting here because the one wendigo story I can remember that has wendigo’s biting people to turn them into wendigos is the marvel version. And that might only be one version of the marvel version so…
my cousin did the voice of ashley in this game and no one told and i didn’t find out until i randomly decided to take a look at her IMDB one day