#if i miss any other concerts this year. then whats ttHE POINT OF ALL THIS????

[froghwon]

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[sunnygang]

analysing the sep 24 wigfrid animated short (don’t starve)

I am rewatching some Don’t Starve animations and catching up on some i hadn’t seen yet. I am watching the Wigfrid animation tonight for the first time (the sep 24 one). I am a few months late, whoops!

I will be putting this analysis under a cut, since I will be pairing a lot of screen caps from the short itself! Also this turned out WAY longer than I originally intended it to. There’s a tw for incest mention in one paragraph (about a stage play that is relevant, NOT about Wigfrid) and I put the warning surrounded in asterisks and bolded before the paragraph referenced!

The short opens with a shot from what is safe to assume is her front hallway. Wigfrid is an actress and she appears to live alone in a nice home.

The walls are of course covered in her various photographs and stage play memoriam. Over the mantle on the left the framed poster reads  Die Walküre (The Valkyrie). Keep this in mind as this is Wigfrid’s best role. Also peep that nice chaise lounge she’s sitting on!

Some national culture, we get to see the newspaper she is reading. This paper is The Kronicle. The real life Chronicle newspaper, upon searching it, returned a good number of results. I am going to say that this particular article is the Ohio Chronicle (founded by the Lorain Printing and Publishing Co which was founded in 1829, the paper itself may or may not have been founded that same year), and I will get into why later.

The front page features the Tragedy in San Francisco. The tragedy of Maxwell and Charlie! The article header specifically reading “Tragedy in San Francisco! Many Still Missing After Devastating Earthquake!” This is around the same date, it has to be within a matter of days for this short to take place from the date of the Charlie and Maxwell disappearance in San Francisco. We don’t get to see Wigfrid reading this article, however. This is merely set there for the viewer’s sake. This is helping form our timeline of when these events all occurred. Many still missing. That means the search continues. This article could have been published a few days after the mentioned earthquake or a week even. Still, it gives us somewhat of a timeline to reference. The earthquake and the events of this Wigfrid short happened in relatively short time from one another.

This newspaper article header reads “Is It Curtains for This Prima Donna? Former Rising Star Seems Unable to Recapture The Magic of Her Precious Role”

Wigfrid isn’t shown reading the front article because she is focused on the news centered around herself. She’s called a prima donna here in this headline. Being called a Prima Donna can mean a number of things. It can mean a principle female singer in an opera or concert organization OR someone who is vain/undisciplined and finds it difficult to work as a team. She doesn’t have any quotes in DST that would indicate Wigfrid doesn’t work well with others. She mostly greets the other players warmly and hopes for good blessings from Yggdrasil, etc.

I think the journalists who wrote the article were looking to have this kind of double idea happening. The term Prima Donna comes directly from Italian for the types of female leads to the definitive aspect of the term. However around the same time (19th cent) it came to mean the second definition as well. Those writing the article likely wrote it with both aspects in mind. This gives Wigfrid her personal reason for wanting to ask Maxwell for help in some way. This is her drive. She is obviously a talented lead opera lady given the decorations and extravagant nature of her home. But this article says she is unable to recapture the magic of her previous role. The role in question looks to be very different from the Wigfrid Valkyrie we know. Her best role may be her Valkyrie role and maybe when she’s trying to branch into something else it isn’t working. And the critics and journalists think it isn’t good for her. She was a powerful Valkyrie, but not whatever this role happened to be.

We get to see her finishing reading the article (or maybe this short interrupts her just barely skimming it) and angrily crumple and toss the paper to the floor. She turns her nose up at it and dramatically walks to a bookshelf in the room and pulls out this record:

Die Walküre. This is the recorded orchestral arrangement for the stage play Die Walküre. In the bottom right of the record sleeve is the names of who I believe to be the composers for the recorded version of the orchestral arrangement. Vincenzo De Vera and Emmental Halle. Wigfrid’’s. Best. Role. The role with such “magic” that she has been since “unable to recapture.”

**incest mention in this next paragraph in the contexts of norse mythology and the real life stage play of The Valkyrie, not Wigfrid herself**

Interestingly enough, Die Walküre is a very real stage play. It is based on Norse Mythology about two twins who are separated in childhood and then eventually meet and fall in love (yikes!). This union angers the gods and they demand Siegmund die. Sieglinde and their unborn child are saved by the defiant actions of Wotan’s daughter, The Valkyrie. Valkyrie Brunnehilde faces the god’s retribution as a result of her actions.

More Valkyrie content hidden away in her shelves. She adored her role as The Valkyrie. Her house is, as we have seen, filled with memoriam from that stage play.

She plays the record and walks over to her wall and looks at her poster of herself as the Valkyrie. The newspaper clipping on the left reads “Audiences Left Spellbound by Soprano’s Powerful Performance.” Wigfrid is a GREAT performer and she is a soprano! She even has a little statue/sculpture of herself as The Valkyrie.

Here’s where I am going to go a little more into the Prima Donna bit. Wigfrid was the lead female for Die Walküre so she is a Prima Donna in that sense. however, she is also vain. She has surrounded herself with HERSELF. All over the walls in her home. Posters and pictures and photographs and SCULPTURES? You Prima Donna girl you, Wigfrid!

Her ceiling is even intricately decorated with scenes from Die Walküre.

And then we get here. We enter Wigfrid’s fantasy about performing as The Valkyrie who has to face a challenge. This challenge being a dragon that forms from this stack of newspaper pages. More entertainment pages that discuss Wigfrid’s stardom reaching an end.

Wigfrid’s real name is scratched out. So we know for certain that Wigfrid is NOT her real name. We can still call her real name whatever we please until we get more solid evidence surrounding her name. Wigfrid is probably Die Valküre’s name in the stage play that Wigfrid acted in. In The Constant it’s safe to assume that the character she takes on in the world happens to be this character, Wigfrid. At this point it raises some question as to whether or not Wigfrid is treating The Constant like a stage. Where she gets to really perform the role of The Valkyrie.

Back to the newspaper taking the form of a dragon, though. The papers are her enemy. The journalists writing about her in such awful ways literally conjure up as her enemy, a dragon, to vanquish. This reveals how she feels about the way others speak about her. Especially when they are critiquing her so harshly with claiming she is a fading star unable to capture her magic.

Wigfrid is thrust into the air by the dragon and she seems lost for a moment before she regains her composure and strikes down the dragon. These are the feelings she is expressing through her singing accompaniment with the arrangement playing on her record player. And Maxwell notices this.

Maxwell appears before Wigfrid through the newspaper. This intrigues me because we know that Them (the Shadow Creatures of the Constant) are capable of reaching into the real world from pages. Thinking back to Maxwell’s Codex Umbra where he first discovered Them and became Maxwell instead of William. Maxwell (or probably rather, They) reaches through these pages to communicate with Wigfrid and have her make a deal. The deal to regain her former glory.

Whisked away with this Shadow Maxwell form by the Shadows from the pages. And with that Wigfrid joins the missing group, taken to The Constant.

And then theres these shots in succession:

All that mail piled up. How long has it been since Wigfrid has disappeared. I think we can assume that some of the mail in her box might be fan mail. SHe has packages on her front step (in front of double doors for her entrance wowie!). I spy at least three packages there piled up with all the assorted mail she otherwise has accumulated while missing. I also spy at least four newspapers. It’s hard to say whether these newspapers are Morning Dailies, Afternoon Dailies, or Weeklies. And then we get the final, fifth newspaper copy tossed on top of the stack that labels Wigfrid as someone who is also now missing. This is an important newspaper because this paper is a DAILY newspaper.

The Kourier paper is likely a mirror to the IRL newspaper in Findlay, Ohio. This paper puts out a copy DAILY. I am going to assume that the first newspaper we see Wigfrid read is a weekly newspaper. It covers more national events such as the San Francisco tragedy. This final newspaper is a daily newspaper. This helps the timeline. Wigfrid has likely been missing for only five days at this point. At most it could have been a week, pushing it to of course seven days. Maybe one of the other papers in the could be another Kronicle copy, which I am deeming the weekly style paper. In my hunt for information about the IRL version of this paper in our real Ohio, I struggled to find specifics online whether this paper published weekly or daily. I do know for certain that tthe IRL Courier is put into circulation daily.

OKAY! Next I want to discuss the colors used in this short. Ignoring the fully colored bit in the center while Wigfrid fantasizes about performing for a moment.

In the beginning of the short we have warm colors. These colors can both reflect Wigfrid’s mood and also the time of day. Wigfrid is angry about the way she is being talked about in the newspaper articles. She is silhouetted by orange-red. It could also be the evening. Adding a little to what I stated just a bove about the newspapers, I think The Kronicle is a paper that is delivered in the afternoon. I personally deem this accurate because in this scene Wigfrid of course is just now reading this article (or rather just barely skimming it over for the first time). Judging by her reaction which I’ve detailed above. She isn’t reading it over again and having an already bummed reaction, One of her eyebrows is raised while she looks over the article before throwing it down. Thus, it was her first moment seeing the article along with us.

We see her anger melting into a kind of sadness, or forlorn feelings even when she first puts on her record. She is still angry of course, but she’s feeling a lot of emotions, as we do, at this point in time.

At the end of the short we have cold colors. At this point, Wigfrid has gone through her fantasy of performing The Valkyrie. She is feeling solemn about it all now though. What if the papers are true? What if I am losing my magic for my roles? I think it’s also into the night or even possibly into the morning. It’s either the shine of the moon coming in from the windows, or early morning blue hours peeking in. I don’t want to say that she spent the whole night fantasizing and performing for herself (The Valkyrie is not an 8 hour performance). BUT. When we get to see the scene where the last newspaper is delivered to her doorstep, it is again in the blue lighting. The Kourier newspaper delivered onto her stack of mail. The Kourier is a morning delivery vs The Kronicle being an afternoon delivery.

ALSO. Remember my post about Winona? WELL she was ALSO located in Ohio pre being dragged into The Constant. So far we have two characters safely concretely placed IN Ohio at the time of their disappearance. Obviously, The Shadow Creatures do not discriminate since Wes was likely trapped way back during the train derailment with William, and of course Charlie and Maxwell/William himself were taken from San Francisco.

Okay. That’s all I have time for this time around of over analyzing don’t starve content. I am glad I got into the imagery and symbolism this time around. I also went WAY in depth in this one. I plan on going in way depth on the other animated character shorts, so stay tuned!