#it was fascinating. But there's the short version of me being a gd clown :'-)

[ziracona]

what do u mean by the until dawn windego posts thing??

Oh, uh. Let me see if I can think of a way to answer this concisely haha. (Until Dawn spoilers ahead fair warning, if you haven’t played)

So, like a year ago there was a post going around about stories involving Wendigos all being exploitative and, it not being okay to even use the word, and at the time I saw it in passing and thought, “Huh, I didn’t know that,” and did nothing else bc I had a lot going on. I’m kinda pissed at myself but c’est la vie. Probably the og author made a good faith mistake? There /is/ a first nation creature with a very similar title that is sacred, but I started a different writing project recently, and rememebred that thread and looked it up just out of curiosity, because it had seemed weird to me at the time. I played UD when it came out and watched the interviews, and there was a lot of making of stuff available, including interviews w Algonquin people they had contacted for Wendigo research, and it seemed that if the thing about Wendigos being bad to write stories about period was true, it was super werid that could have happened. It turns out, that is not the case. I read a whole bunch of interviews w first nation scholars talking about the Wendigo, and actually it’s kind of the opposite. It’s a very real supernatural entity culturally, extremely evil, that will possess and compel humans to terrible acts (specifically but not limited to cannibalism and violence), and to be feared. 

In reality, UD did about the best job I’ve ever seeen anyway of being realistic and honoring classic tradition, at least in western media. For example, Wendigos are often portrayed in fiction as being deer-like with antlers, but in tradition, that’s super inaccurate, and they basically look like giant, emaciated human beings. The horn thing is offensive and wrong, whereas the in-game portrayal is the accurate one. In addition, when westerners first arrived and got to hearing about traditions and beleifs, such as the Wendigo, they dismissed it out of hand, and told the native people they were wrong and there was no supernatural entity or posession going on, but rather a mental illness brought on by the darkness and harshness of winter, which westerners called “Wendigo Psychosis” (super fucking great at once for mentally ill people /and/ native tradition! Really knockced it out of the park, guys : )  ). And along with the rest of its complex meta narrative on horror and expectations, especially when it /comes/ to mental illness, Until Dawn worked in “Wendigo Psychosis” pretty pointedly and came down with a very solidly “No, the first nation people were right, it /is/ supernatural and real and evil”, underlined by actually /giving/ one of the most central characters, Josh, very active and debilitating psychosis, which, completely subverting viewer expectations, is not actually a driving force for the violence and tradgedy of the game, but a red-herring. 

In a sense, they put up real psychosis and let the player fall into the expected trap of assuming the ‘antagonist’ had gone insnae and was killing people because of that, then halfway through pulled a u-turn and flipped the script, and players spend the rest of the game trying to save Josh and feeling kind of fucking /terrible/ for falling into the planted expectations. In the end, the real threat is the very real and true supernatural evil (the Wendigos), and Josh is a victim everyone else in the story is partially responsible for the fate of. Anyway, it was a really cool way to work multiple metas together into a narrative, and I’ve always liked the horror meta with Josh, but I didn’t know how in-depth the supernatural side of it went too. I hope that answers your question? Basically, I saw a post that a lot of people saw (it went around a /lot/ for like 2 weeks), was too distracted and dumb to fact-check when I’m usually p diligent, and now feel le great shame of having been boo boo the fool, but am also happy to have all this very neat new meta information. : )