Other people might be disappointed that salad fingers has no greater meaning, but I for one think it’s really funny to imagine David firth sitting at his computer going “and then salad fingers goes on a date with the corpse of a dog. But alack! The dog is half his age! Imagine the controversy!”
I remember hearing theories about this but with every episode, I'm just convinced it's not all related with a defined narrative. It's too random and it felt forced ascribing an overarching story to it.
“Salad fingers is British, poor guy” to me a Brit, salad fingers is a very accurate representation of a typical British day. I love seeing my day to day life animated.
This is not so much a theory, but more or less why the series freaks me out. Everything that Salad Fingers says is identical to something that my grandmother would say while she was struggling with dementia. She would often bring up "The war" since she was born in the late 20's and lived through WW2 as an adult. She would make refences to extremely disturbing medical practices that have been outlawed for decades, such as bloodletting, lobotomies, etc. She would get irrationally mad at random objects. She would talk to my grandfathers empty chair years after he had passed away, and lastly she would always call you the wrong name and when she did this it would be some kind of crazy old English name since she grew up in Scotland. Im almost 30 now and she passed away a few years ago, but its always so hard to watch anything Salad fingers related. Im sure my experience is not the only one like this, but it still feels very personal.
I experienced this with my great grandmother, except me and my siblings were the only people she was able to recognize in her later days. She used to win stuffed animals in games with the other seniors, then she would give them to us when we could come visit. She would tell us old iroquois stories, kept us connected to that part of our heritage. But yea i remember hearing some crazy stuff as a kid about her not recognizing people and having issues with Alzheihmer's I believe
funny enough i was thinking the same thing. salad reminds me a lot of dementia patients. im sorry you had to experience that, i worked in a nursing home and some things are def hard to see. im sending you love!
@@ghostcat11 "yea cause it ain't" One might ask "Why do you pay so much for old alcohol?" and the other would be the only one of the two to appreciate such "Old alcohol" Its depending on your perspective, if you're shallow and take the animation as something simple and think everything's on the surface, then you do you, it'll look like something superficial. Look into it deeper and you'd understand the story of it, thats the whole ass point. It does not make sense and not even in chronological order when telling something
Since “Glass Brother,” I’ve thought of it as a story about a guy who was severely abused as a child and exposed to unspeakable horrors that no child should have to experience. As a result, he’s developed a sort of dissociative disorder, maybe schizophrenia, in order to process all of the senseless horrors he’s been exposed to. A young child can’t comprehend why their brother is never coming back from the war, or why their mother is so mean all the time, so they manufacture their own understanding of these situations in the only way they can.
@@supercomputerz Sorry, my phrasing made it sound like I meant they were the same thing. I just meant that he’s unable to differentiate between reality and his delusions.
My brother showed me this cartoon when it was released. I never really thought too much of it, but my brother seemed quite enamoured by the stories and character. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my brother had been suffering with schizophrenia. May be he could relate to this cartoon in his psychotic state.
I’m sorry to hear of your brother’s suffering. My brother has schizophrenia as well. One of the first signs of his mental illness he showed was ascribing meaning to shows and commercials that wasn’t there. Not like how we are thinking “what does this mean?” about Salad Fingers, but in a bizarre, way off way. I hope your brother finds peace, as well as you and your family. I know how hard it can be. ❤
I found out i have schizophrenia a few months ago.. explains alot.. and my well, similar to your brother's.. strange enamouring of this series. It always.. hit something at home
@@meltedWax169Not pity here at all, but I wish you all the best. What you’re dealing with sucks, whether its you or watching a family member struggle. 🖤
That was my thought as well! It gives schizophrenia vibes of a child during WWI... It also kinda reminds me of flashback episodes of Bojack Horsemans mother
My brother also showed me this when I was a kid. I didn't think it was anything more than a joke that I didn't get, considering he was also showing me Jerry Jackson cartoons. Had no idea it was an ongoing series.
I’d actually love to see a Wendigoon deep dive into Courage the Cowardly Dog. Like maybe his thoughts on what the creatures’ real life representations might be for a couple episodes.
Yes NEXT 👏🏽VIDEO👏🏽 sometime soon…I wonder what would be his take on why the computer is the only helpful character (& why it talks) and that weird embryo scene that traumatized everyone’s childhood 🤔
Yes. The episode with the taped hairs, the demanding radio, and the cabinet is the most uncomfortable for me. It emphasizes the feelings of isolation, anxiety, and a profound sadness therein which I've struggled with much of my life, in ways I can't fully describe.
@Mama's Little Man 3rd this. Except add alcoholism, insane gambling and I like drugs. Talk about getting dealt a crappy hand in life. I’m 36 as well. Actually just canceled a shotgun I purchased when I was very drunk. I’m just about done with life. Are either you on anti depressants? Or benzodiazepines? I would go in there and DEMAND clonazepam or something. It’s what I take. I can function fine with it. It’s just getting started with life again and again. I am so wore out. You both need to go get on a benzo. They don’t like to give them out though so get ready for a fight. I wish I had some positive news to add but I don’t. I’m so used to the isolation and loneliness now it doesn’t matter. I just can’t ever get out of bed. Need to find a da,n job to get back into some normalcy. Good luck fellas.
@Mama's Little Man not trying to personal, but you’ve never been with a woman? Like even just holding one? There are lots of self help guides right here on TH-cam. Use them. Learning basic body language is very important.
I know this may sound weird, but Salad Fingers is somesort of comfort character to me. He has this childlike innocence, approaches everything with a curious mindset, despite the horrible world he is living in and the potential abuse he has gone through. I don't know why but it makes me happy to see a character be able to be happy besides everything.
I want to also add that PTSD in children often has the children re-enacting events that are traumatic through mediums like play, which is what it kind of seems that salad is doing
As someone with C-PTSD developed at the age of 6, the games I would play and scenarios I would imagine myself in to rationalize and normalize the trauma I endured were absolutely nightmarish. I look back on these memories disgusted at how a child can be exposed to such horrific thoughts at such a young age. In order for the child's brain to continue functioning though, it processes the traumas as normal, innocent, everyday occurrences- sometimes creating games and even fantasies in which the same events, if not worse, repeat over and over again. There's a dissociation that comes with it as well, putting the mind in this purgatory state in which you are aware of all the traumas happening to you, but completely unable to change or stop it, and unaware of the fact that every person you see is not experiencing the horrors you do on a daily basis. So, you start to play with these thoughts. You interact with the things that have happened to you like any other child. But soon, your friends don't want to listen to your stories anymore. You tell "funny" stories of your life, and your friends act confused, and tell you that THEIR dad doesn't do "funny" things like watch them in the shower. That their brother doesn't "take cough medicine" by putting needles in his arm and falling asleep. That their mom doesn't get "sad" like yours does. Their house doesn't have a "punishment room". They say the games you play are weird. They don't want to play house with you anymore, they say the way you play is scary. Why is it scary? It's normal to you.
Yeah, when wendi was talking about how these kids play these games I was thinking about how children kind of understand stuff and deal with it by integrating it into their play. So it makes sense for a child surrounded by these things to treat them as normal and explore them by acting these things out, even if it appears disturbing to adult eyes.
I scrolled down specifically to see if anyone had mentioned this. My imagination was like this as a kid with cPTSD. I was exposed to a lot of messed up stuff, didn’t understand it wasn’t normal, and would integrate those themes into my play and daydreams. I got in trouble a lot in school for bringing disturbing themes into our pretend play sessions, had no idea why everyone was upset. I get it now though. And now I’m wondering if any of this has something to do with why I LOVED Salad Fingers as a teen. Brains are weird!
I used to volunteer at a mental facility called Shadow Mountain in Tulsa for troubled kids or mentally disturbed children - I remember a boy and girl, both very similar. I'd rather not dive into what they told me, both being sexual trauma that actually brought me to tears - comparing them to games or stupid activities we did as kids. We had this stupid game called "Suicides" and no, it does not have anything to do with self-harm or ending your life. It was literally mixing drinks together or the absolute worse things together, and chugging it. The boy ruined the idea of suicides for me as well. Some parents that do this shit to their children should be shot on sight.
Salad Fingers reminds me of a person with Dementia and Alzheimer's. The "adventures" he goes on every episode are disjointed and distorted pieces of memories he once had - or imagined he lived through. These "memories" reach the forefront of his concouisness in no particular order other than spontaneous association. That's why there is no continuety, why he thinks he is giving up a child only to then forget about it and identifying it as a sponge to clean windows with. Thats why he goes on delusional memory-episodes and just suddenly forgets that he's supposed to hold the oven door open. That's why the names of the puppets change. Somewhere, in all of the confusion that is his brain, there was once a man with a life's story, but at this point, no one, not even himself is able to figure out what has once been real. He may also be a ghoul creature in postapocalyptic Britain, but that's not the main point.
That's the vibe I've gotten from it too! I started thinking more about it once I noticed how odd his mood swings are: one minute angry, two seconds later happy, then scared, and the cycle continues. He's just moving through time in a nonlinear fashion and jumping from emotion to emotion accordingly. I appreciate all interpretations though, this one certainly isn't all encompassing lol
it reminds me of like a weird dream. I saw an interview from David Firth were he said he got bored of making narrative stories and likes the vibe of dreams flowyness from one thing to another without explanation, and is inspired from his dreams.
I always thought of Salad fingers as an exploration of the kind of innocence that exists in a profoundly disturbed mind. He has the mind of a lonely and deluded child, lost in a grotesque and decaying world, with only haunting memories to keep him company. He seems like a survivor of terrible abuse and the horror is in speculating as to what the reality of the situation is. I was only ever aware of 2 episodes "Salad Fingers", from when I was at school. But when I saw the Ryan Reynolds movie "The Voices" fairly recently, I was reminded of it. Salad Fingers is repulsive, but we feel sympathy for him.
I feel like the “apocalyptic hellscape” that salad fingers lives in might be inspired by Salvador Dali’s desert landscapes in his paintings. It’s like a blank space for the subconscious and all the weird stuff that happens here.
I always saw Salad Fingers as a combination of the 2 biggest theories: A nuclear wasteland destroyed by war, and an imaginative man going on playful adventures. Imagining Salad being so alone, so distraught by the loss of his family, that he assigns friendly/familial roles to other mutated survivors and tries to include them in his playdates in a desperate attempt to recreate some sort of normalcy is so depressing to me.
all of david firth's work is surreal and dreamlike/nightmarish. Salad fingers is just a continuation of that. It's absurd and surreal like a dream, or a nightmare, and it's not much deeper than that
@@alexis_electronic I agree. The beauty of this surrealism is it means whatever it meant to you. I see a lot of comments saying "you're missing the point, it doesnt mean anything". And while I think that's partly true. I think THEYRE missing the point, because in its purposely ambiguous nature, I think its not meant to mean nothing, but actually meant to mean WHATEVER you want.
Here's an alternate theory: Salad Fingers was a boy who grew up in a household where he was exposed to things he was not old enough for. For instance, his parents would watch mature TV shows while he was around, and they would argue about things that he did not fully understand as a kid, but like in Wendigoon's version, it normalized things to the point where when he would play make-believe, he would imagine the weird sorts of situations we see, like accusing someone of being after his daughter and sleeping with someone half his age. Then, the war comes, and his oldest brother is sent off to fight in the war. The war goes poorly, and the opposing side ends up nuking the place where Salad Fingers live. At the time of the show, he is an adult and from living alone in a post-apocalyptic world, his experience of reality and imagination have begun to run together. What we see is what he experiences, somewhere in between reality and imagination. Alternatively, to better work in the glass brother portion, for a while afterwards, some of his family, including his mother, a brother (glass brother) and a little sister survive, but then he makes a mistake that gets his little sister killed. His mother and brother lock him up in his room, leaving him with finger puppets, where his imagination begins to take over, possibly helped on by some effects of radiation. Then one day they take away one of his finger puppets, so he breaks free in his anger and kills his mother and brother, which he rationalizes as escaping from them and smashing the mirror against the floor until he no longer sees his mother, when he was really smashing something against her head until he could no longer recognize her.
My interpretation has always been that of an abused child as well, given the imagery of children and of characters getting pregnant accidentally, it led me to believe that his mother the one from episode 11, was abusive toward him, leading him to have all of these horrific experiences and for it to seem completely normal, the child being left out in the cold, lots of death and what not. But that’s what’s great about interpretation art can mean whatever you want it to mean
I personally had a similar idea looking back at it, especially because of episode 11 and the consistent theme of child mistreatment. My interpretation is that the older men in his family went to war (with his older brother dying in the war), leaving him stuck home with his abusive mother. That would explain (at least in my idea) why the world is so disturbing. Then again, I'm honestly open to any interpretation, such as the idea of war ptsd. That was just my experience.
I still remember when MatPat dropped his own big Salad Fingers theory video, only for David Firth to basically go "Lmao nah." Edit: oh hey, somehow didn't expect it to be brought up, but considering Wendigoon's take it makes sense to bring it up in passing.
Although MatPat does a lot of reaching in his theory videos--his made the most sense. Especially if there WAS a deeper narrative here. I'm convinced the reason David Firth reached out to specify like he did, was because MatPat was the closest to getting it 100% right.... However, like Wendigoon said: That'd be bad for Firth if people ended up figuring out his series as a whole. He probably just wants to come across as if he never had any intention to tie these things together to make it less "predictable" or "pretentious", but his work absolutely says otherwise. Especially with the repetitive themes, terms, and environments that show there's already some degree of backstory which has at least psychologically affected the main character.
I get not agreeing but I personally think David was kind of an ass in response. (He's Brit tho so you know how sarcastically aggressive they can come off)
@@echoflame4279 honestly I kinda hate firth for that, trying to downplay a theorist just they made a "theory" which sums up the series well, like... How is that bad?
I love the respect given to the series while also giving out his personal theory, stating it could be entirely incorrect, but just one that he likes. I love how Wendigoon gives this respect universally too
I always theorised that salad fingers is about a old person with dementia. The reason for the strange behaviours and weird events is because it's the disjointed memories of an old person who's mind is disintegrating. The ww2 memories, the abortion, the party, the angry dad, it all seems like someone who can't quiet remember everything clearly. Also age regression is pretty common with dementia patients.
Going off your theory, there's a thing with second hand trauma when learning of tragedy as a kid. You make believe that you're going through these scenarios so you can make sense of things in your own way if you act it out. Sometimes when you're surrounded by death growing up it becomes normal, enough that you might see the decaying as toys or add it to your art if it was a prominent part of your life. Personally I grew up around a lot of tragedy and death that it became normal and essentially had a fascination with it that I saw a kind of beauty with it. I can see this theory making a lot of sense because it lines up with what is happening
I've developed some interest or viewing of death and violence as a form of art or beauty, i grew up with a shit ton of my mother's friends dying around me. There are so many more things that i cant put into words
@@meltedWax169 I feel like when you see it as a kind of beautiful natural thing you want to show others its not so bad and to not be afraid when the time comes. It's a type of understanding we grew up with and learned to be better people from it. Tragedy happens and it's difficult to shield children from something like that without them trying to figure out why something happened at all. There's a show called bluey that touched on this and all the while the bird that was dying was hardly shown on screen but we learned the main character didn't have the understanding to go through what was happening. she acted it out at home the exact way it happened because she wanted to understand her feelings of this random bird dying even when it was given care.
Oh man you just summed up my life. I didnt know there was a word for it! When i was a kid i grew up with a lot of fights, and arguments and what not ( not to me obviously but i would see it everyday) i used to hate it but now it sort of looked cool and pretty in a weird way. I thought i was a psycho or something for thinking like that but im glad theres a word for it!
@@ke-hc9yd don't worry about the reply I didn't think it was an actual thing but that's what it's called, I thought there was an official name or something for that kind of trauma 😅
Same my childhood had a lot of death and misfortunes the earliest of which was my grandfather dying of cancer when I was just 3. I knew from my parents that he is "dead" meaning he won't wake up again so I understood death as eternal sleep. But I never really understood why. Why won't he wake up anymore? Why is he dressed so nicely if he was just sleeping? Why is he in a box? Why is he being put underground? What if he wakes up then we'll have to dig him out again? Kids are really good at making their own interpretations no matter how nonsensical or far fetched it might be
exactly, Salad Fingers just shows what regular life is like here in the UK. People are really just "like that" over here. Its basically just a documentary, theres no deeper meaning.
I like how Salad Fingers himself isn’t the monster of his universe, even if due to his own childlike personality, he inadvertently gets a couple other characters killed. He’s just making the best of living in post apocalyptic Britain while having a bright and positive attitude in the process. 😋
Dude salad fingers was extremely creepy back in the day I can't believe I haven't thought about it since. Thank you for reminding me about it! Much love goon~
As someone with a host of mental problems, such as PTSD, autism, and being British, I found that many things about this series were relatable to my experiences with those issues.
Children with perverted childhoods tend to find comfort in perverted things. When I was a child, I had a difficult time falling asleep. So, in order to help this problem, I would imagine a zombie patrolling outside my door. The zombie would have a cart, and if I had my eyes open, it would kill me. Surprisingly, I felt comforted by the zombie's presence. Your explanation as to why Salad fingers is happy in his perverted imagination rings true.
I used to always believe that if I didn't think of and worry about something bad happening, then it would happen. So a lot of my free time growing up was spent thinking up convoluted scenarios involving my serious death or injury. Which somehow comforted me, now that it wouldn't happen/if it happened, I'd be prepared.
@@scarletbard6511 no way, i do the exact same thing! I've always had the shittiest luck so my thought process was that if I envision the worst case scenario, I'd sort of "outsmart the system" when things turned out better than I imagined. By that logic, I'm actually pretty lucky!
I used to imagine monsters standing over my bed that would eat me if I moved because then they knew I was awake,, I always thought it was weird that I would scare myself to sleep, good to know I'm not the only one lol
I think this is to somehow confirm your anxiety, stress and fears. Many people with trauma don't feel taken serious and daydreaming or thinking about gore and other horror situations gives you the feeling you are allowed to feel what you feel..
I interpreted this as salad fingers having something similar to dementia? And is suffering from a very intense loss of memory and creating his own world and own universe. The barren wasteland universe resembles his psyche deteriorating and the general theme of decay/rotting/rust is him grappling with slowly losing his grip on reality. Our brain tends to hold on to our most revisited/traumatic memories so those are the ones he keeps being forced to revisit- being left behind in the war, his mother berating him and favoring his brother, perhaps even a miscarriage? (I’m trying to figure out what that baby thing was tbh). The characters and experiences he can still remember are warped now and he speaks for them the majority of the time because they are not fully there or fully what they used to be.
Ok back back back it up- has salad ever been gendered? I think that maybe salad is/was (?) a woman who has some sort of traumatic sexual experience with someone much older than her and had a very traumatic miscarriage, an eating disorder (constant illness, forcing yourself to eat awful things only to throw them up, being obsessed with what you see in the mirror) I also think some of this happened on her birthday? Birthdays are important to salad somehow. Salad underwent many traumatic experiences as a child is now being forced to relive them in a very distressing/visceral way as their mind and reality is slowing decaying around them.
I remember as a kid I took everything at face value and just assumed that Mr. Fingers was some sort of intelligent cryptid and this was what he saw normal humans as. Though rewatching it leading up to this video, I actually imagined that Salad might actually be a parent whose mind just broke after losing his child by some unknown means. It would explain all the weird symbolism around children, and maybe some of the situations shown are him being guilt ridden and trying to explain what happened without knowing how to confront it. Now how the fuck this ties into him very clearly boning a dead dog I have no clue. But hey, no theory is perfect.
Could be that the dog symbolizes the child's mother. Disapproval for an inappropriate relationship would also explain the lack of support from those around them.
That’s exactly what made him so popular. He’s like a guy at a party sitting next to you on the couch and telling you a bunch of crazy shit. I mean this in the best way possible.
he reminds me of that one friend you don't even gotta drink or smoke with, just his genuine presence brings a natural fun and his stories are just so fulfilling and the way he tells them, been stuck since the icebergs vids LOL...
The perception of how children interpret things in their minds and imagination especially dark subjects that they are too young to comprehend could easily work in Salad fingers with the very confusing visuals and meanings
Especially because children IRL often use imaginative play to process traumatic/intense events. I used to work as a daycare teacher and I could always tell who I needed to give extra affection to based on how their imaginations were running that week.
As a child my mother watched the soaps everynight and I picked up on some of them, So when I played with my barbies it'd always been some big family drama such as people dying/cheating/whatever its insane what kids pick up on and thats why I think adults need to be careful with what they say around them, you'll never know what they'll sponge up.
Our driving instructor had a neat anecdote about a guy who used his pointer and middle finger to turn the radio dial instead of his pointer and thumb. He thought it was kinda strange, until he saw the guy’s dad was missing his thumb.
@@arandomcomic2993 I definitely get that- Salad Fingers specifically nails the timing and voices that set off my anxiety perfectly so it’s a little too much to watch through on my own lmao
As someone who works in Disability Care, I have seen a few of my clients with some characteristics like Salad Fingers’. There are many times I’m on the job and wonder in dread what must have happened to have them say the disturbing or child-like things they’re saying or wonder how they see the world. So if Salad is an adult, he could be an adult with a behavioural or mental disability and a traumatised past that fuels his child-like imagination. But I really like the child theory too.
I think it was for the best that David didn’t bother to try to come up with a story or take any of the several fan theories and make it cannon. He would’ve ended up making the same mistake as Scott Cowthon; stitching together a bunch of loose threads to create a nonsensical chimera of a story that adds a new limb every time a Game Theory video comes out.
As a fan of both stories, honestly yeah. Salad Fingers and FNaF are two entirely different types of beasts from a narrative perspective. Salad Fingers' mystery comes from its unknown, surrealistic nature that relies on audience interpretation of events. FNaF's mystery comes from its convoluted plotline and how every piece does (or is supposed to) fit together, but the exact ways that they do are unknown (to both audience and creator, same as Salad Fingers). When FNaF comes with new content, you _know_ it's supposed to fit somewhere, but theories can completely overhaul and mix around current theories with just a minor plot detail. When Salad Finger comes with new content, it's generally understood it won't pertain to a central story. Both stories imo are intriguing in different ways.
This is literally the reason I stopped watching GT, Matt gained so much influence from actual game developers his channel ended up being the genesis of the theories he was "elucidating us" on, like a self perpetuating machine. I exaggerate only slightly
I fucking loved this series it’s so oddly comforting yet off putting like he means well but just does awful things I think he doesn’t understand other living things have consciousness
@@Vicari0usly I wouldn’t say that. Sociopaths generally know what they’re doing and don’t tend to feel guilt about committing horrific actions, because they can’t. Salad could probably be considered somewhere within the dissociative/delusional sphere, if you wanted to put those kind of classifications on something so unclassified as Salad Fingers.
We were Salad Fingers disciples in high school and I can still remember one of our friends writing this huge essay hypothesising the meaning behind Salad Fingers, it involved him being an old army general who had lost his memory and was now living inside this weird fantasy world......? This kid also gradually stole all the clocks in the school and took them all home and hid them in a cupboard, and eventually the school had no clocks and they never replaced them. The 2000s were a strange time.
Your theory really hits home for me. As a child I had a hyperactive imagination but also a lot of anxiety. I had made some experiences which brought some not great ideas into my mind and my imaginary worlds were kind of corrupted from that. The monsters I would fight became children stuck in tight places and 'The Naked Man'. Luckily I got through it and am in a much happier place now.
I had a similar thing! My psych said it was called 'Maladaptive daydreaming' where the mind escapes into its own scenarios but they aren't always 'happy' escapes. E.g. a recurring scenairo i had for a while was being found under the rubble of my collapsed school. Its a weird way that the brain tries to process its surroundings. Im glad you are doing better now though
I had a dream where I was watching TV, but then a giant goat and a giant goat child were destroying the city so I had to drive out, but for some reason we left out my grandmother. But, I got in the car first, and drove to death. I had this other dream where there was a conversation. Child 1: You sure you want this shirt? It'll make you wanna kill yourself. Child 2: Don't worry, I always wanna kill myself. Child 1: Ok, I'll deliver it, then. CUT! Announcer: The competition for creepiest dolls has begun! Policeman: One of these dolls is a skinned child. [IMAGE OF CHILD 1 AND POLICE MAN LOOKING AT EACH OTHER] Then stringed instruments going BA DA BUM!
My recurring cursed thought was always that the Devil had my parents and my sister all in cages, and was making me choose one to save and to let the other two die. Usually I had to do something to save the one I got to choose, but I typically just broke down crying at the idea of choosing and tried to think about something else.
Coming from an abusive household, your theory on salad fingers made a lot of sense to me. I remember coming up with stories using my toys and incorporating topics that I overheard my parents arguing about. Also watching Salad Fingers, my first thought was about how much it resembled Courage. It's like you read my mind with this video. Great work as always :P
@@skullkid692 no theory should be disregarded. You don't have to believe it. That's why it's just a theory. That's the beauty of things like Courage and Salad that don't ever explain what's really going on. It can mean whatever you want it to mean
I remember watching the first couple as a teen and interpreting Salad Fingers as some sort of unethical science experiment left for dead in a wasteland or escaped to this wasteland. I was tickled by the idea of a huge government entity frantically trying to find Salad Fingers believing him to be extremely dangerous and he's just in the desert finding bodies and fondling rust.
Honestly, I appreciate that you respected the fact that the series isn’t anything bigger, just a spooky little thing. We honestly need more stuff like this
I’ve gotten extremely desensitized to this series from the sheer amount of times i’ve watched it. However, listening to someone trying to explain the series I’ve, quite literally, grown up alongside is uncanny.
My interpretation? Dave's playing a 'yes, and' game of improv with himself. There's no grand narrative, but it's like putting together a puzzle with blank pieces and no edges. He puts random things together in one part, then he has to find new pieces that fit into the old pieces for the next part. I imagine all the fan theorizing infects his own creative process to a degree, and something someone said about one episode becomes a beat in a new episode, but he's not intentionally trying to piece together a narrative. He'll make callbacks, because it's an episodic series and so Salad Fingers will reference Salad Fingers. But every new episode is more just a response to the rest of the series, like playing a game where everybody in the group comes up with a story one word at a time.
It is crazy at which speeds you can pull off videos that are not just almost an hour long, but clearly well researched and thought out as well, props to you!
My theory is he has war trauma and dementia, and he uses images of war (dead bodies) and items from the nursing home (puppets, bugs, etc.) to represent all the faces he forgot the details of.
The "Personallized" horror idea is honestly a really cool idea. What scares you? War, welp, that's Salad Fingers, Post Apocalypse, Salad Fingers. Scared of loosing your mind and grip on reality, Being left clueless to your own reality, That's Salad Fingers
I can assure you I was not expecting such a life-altering perspective on the universality of art as "Through the handiwork of a now-dead artist I can see these blocky features of something that's supposed to be a person [and] for a moment I share the same thoughts that Picasso did all those years ago whenever we both think that this woman has pretty eyes" in an hour-long analysis of Salad fingers
@@Tom_Hillman it seems to be a southern/Texas thing. One of my online friends from Texas does that when talking in voice chat, and we can't help but giggle about it, much to her embarrassment. We don't mean to laugh, but it is kinda funny and charming in a way.
@@Tom_Hillman It's technically correct to say "When ever he wakes up" but it sounds like he's saying whenever. It's like the difference between everyday and every day, or maybe and may be.
@@jakedanielsen4512 It implies he wakes up more than once. often, he'll say something like "whenever JFK died" as if he died more than once 😭 the way he says it too always misleads me into thinking he's talking about something happening multiple times 😭
As someone who had never watched Salad Fingers before, I did come up to a similar conclusion that this was a child's imagination. While I would think that this might be a rather disturbed child, it's mostly a matter of details in the story rather than the whole grim and dark aspects of it. Children have a VERY morbid imagination at times, and that's simply because when you're a child your mind keeps absorbing information and imagination is just a way to compile this mess and process it in ways that will be more digestible and comprehensible to you. The random nature of events is absolutely reflective of that. If you've seen children play with toys before you'll absolutely see the same thing in the "black goo baby" story. Children will pick up toys and make them fight, then claim they're brothers, then they'll discard one toy and pretend it doesn't exist only to pick it back up and change the plot completely in five minutes. The one thing that makes me want to refrain from calling it a "broken child's" imagination is because it also feels like to me this is just a child's imagination only from an adult's point of view. Here's an anecdote to explain my point : While I was playing Smash Brothers with my nephew when he was younger, his mother who didn't like the game tried to prove to me that it had a bad influence on him. To do so, she simply asked him as we were playing : "honey, what are you doing right now ?" to which he responded "Well, I'm killing him :) " "To kill" is something that to the mind of an adult is something shocking and awful, but to a child this is just a synonym for "beating someone in a fight". So to go back to salad fingers, when we see that he opens himself up to give birth to that black thing, well of course he would, how else would one deliver a child? Only from an adult's perspective, this is gruesome and gore to the extreme. And even some other details like how he likes seeing himself bleed, man, I remember when I was a 7yo kid you wouldn't believe how many boys thought they were edgy and cool because they said they liked drinking their own blood upon injuring themselves. To me it really seems like most if not all the gory and disturbing details can be explained like this. All of the more mature concepts only further this explanation, the whole "chasing a girl too young for him" seems like something a kid either overheard from family members or even something he saw in a movie or a TV show. And while I'd agree that the one part about the child dying from being cold seems a tad too grim to fall into that category, I personally remember hearing the story of "the little girl who sold matches" from a very young age, and it was absolutely the sad version where she dies from the cold at the end. So in conclusion, I absolutely agree that there doesn't seem to be any overarching storyline that needs to be understood. I think salad fingers is probably just a fun series of surrealist horror and I think that's pretty cool.
If In your imagination you saw everything as dead and decaying, including your surroundings. And everything in that imaginary world either ate or otherwise brutally killed each other, then you’re a severely damaged child. This is not normal “inside a child imagination” behavior…
@@richardtherichard26 You clearly don't remember being a kid, especially a kid who somehow found gore sites and had Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books.
@@lainiwakura1776 no I definitely do… apparently I was just a much much more well adjusted child than most… again this is abnormal behavior for a child. If you think this is normal. YOU are abnormal. This is NOT normal behavior. See normal kids think about things like sports, superheroes, the wiggles, why the sky is blue, why grass is green. Why their friend teddy down the street has 2 dads instead of a dad and a mom. Why little Jessica gives them a funny feeling and makes them wanna share their Oreos at snack time. *NORMAL* innocent kid questions. Go ahead and ask the next 100 children you see what they’re thinking about, and I promise not 1 gives an answer even remotely resembling this abomination. Children don’t think like this. They don’t view the world this way. Damaged children *might* but realistically they lack the imagination to create a world so bleak… but damaged adults do…. If you thought like this as a child you need to see a therapist… *IMMEDIATELY* … before you become the country’s next mass murderer… this isn’t normal behavior for a child. This is “horror movie child who’s about to murder the entire family in their sleep” behavior. Period. Like it takes just the slightest bit of common fucking sense… 😂😂😂
Nah, i dont think so. It deals with too many adult concepts to be the perspective of a child. He makes references to feeling orgasmic, he cooks himself meals and lives in his own house. He clearly lived a full life, he makes plenty of references to the "old days" with kenneth, or the war for instance. He even has his jobs he does. I think a much more suiting interpretation is a man dealing with schizophrenia/dementia in a post-apoc setting/ or he's so insane that the setting is just how he interprets the normal world. Delusions and hallucinations typically come from unresolved childhood trauma, explaining why these episodes all deal with potentially traumatic past experiences. Dealing with abusive family, being unable to come to terms with lost family/friends, hiding for your life from bombs and warnings coming over the radio, being scorned by an ex-lover simply because their family didn't like you. All of these are potentially traumatic experiences that lead to him being the fucked, mentally ill saladman he is now, and he copes with them by maintaining this world of rot and decay where everything is perfectly fine. He speaks in riddles like many schizos might, he views events in a very nonlinear and confused way, he regularly forgets basic tasks he's doing despite they're being very important, he'll even have conversations with himself. Sure, a child might do all this as well, but they are doing it out of a sense of wonder and enjoyment. Salad Fingers is stuck in this childlike mentality his entire life, you never see him stray from it for a second. These things are rules that determine his existence, he is very violently punished if he goes against his voices. That isn't a child's imagination. That is a traumatized, schizophrenic man's demons tormenting his every waking moment
Imagination exists in such a weird zone of thought. someone could show you the most horrifying, gut-retching, vile horror beyond comprehension, and it wouldn't be half as scary as something personably tailored by your psyche to be the scariest potentiality of what it could be. I hope that makes sense.
I always thought that Salad Fingers was a person suffering from some manner of deep delusion, because that was the personal horror and tragedy in the story for me, being so deep into delusion or hallucination that you become unable to tell the difference between the two. As a child I had a great aunt who suffered from dementia, and she was actually very nice, and relatively calm, but she spent almost every waking hour just lost inside her own head, living half-remembered memories and speaking to people that weren't there, or thinking that the people around here were other people from her memories. But it's better that it remain unexplained. To explain the story would ruin the way people interact with it.
The series always exuted loneliness to me. Especially looking back at it now, as an adult. I think a lot of it comes from my own experiences, but it really comes off that Salad just wants a friend. But due to social anxiety, and just being a weird person, people just kind of avoid them, or act distant. A big thing for me is when Salad gets just kinda scared when someone actually responds. It's reminiscent of the many times I tried to talk with people and the conversation took an unexpected turn. Just a weird person in a weirder world.
My theory on salad is a lot like what you said, but salad isn't one particular person and just embodies the horror felt by children during their childhoods. Like his horrible abusive mother, thats really relatable for an unfortunately large amount of kids. Or going to any kind of medical professional and it seems like they are out to get you while your parent just watches. Being forced to cook on your own, or lured into a trap by a stranger. I could go on with all the metaphors I see in salad fingers, cause it doesn't just stop at trauma or childhood fears, it goes all the way into certain mental illnesses, like dementia, schizophrenia, ADHD and ADD. Some times the characters aren't consistent or have no cohesive plotline and to me it feels on purpose, like they are just symbolic of any person given the situation. Salad fingers is an episodic depiction of a bad childhood, from the perspective of multiple children.
I think it would be more accurate to say "states of neurodivergence" considering that all those you listed are indeed thus. Only the first two are considered mental illness.
I'm glad you highlight the concept of 'personal horror'. It's something I've been trying to achieve as a creator, on and off, for years. It took a long time (without actually talking to anyone else about it) to even grasp the concept of it, of leaving blanks that the minds of the audience could fill with their own particular unpleasantness. And to realise that I was doing it myself when I read/watched such things, and why when I tried to explicitly include the things that I imagined in my own stuff, they lost their power. Having them exist in that swimming, malleable state of one's own imagination kept them unsettling, but committing them to a definite form and explanation robbed them of that ability to continually pose unsettling questions. And it's that that's really the big takeaway here; basically, fear of the unknown.
Glad you mentioned courage. Explore that particular childhood trauma, if you please. That was one of my favourite shows as a kid, making it worse that i didn't even know english nor could i read subtitles at that age. I was following it basically on a visual level, which i think basically made it stick with me even more. That was a lot of nightmare fuel for a kids show
I always took Salad's interactions with children as not being Salads child, but being Salad himself. This is especially supported by the 'Glass brother' episode, as well as his constant self insertion as the people he talks to. A childhood of constant verbal and physical abuse, possibly loosing his only friends in the great war, dealing with the ever looming threat of saod war and possibly having been sent there himself, he has completely diluded himself. The world we watch is from his prospective, not reality. Now that I think about it, Salad might be Henry Fischer. He's called Henry/Harry a couple times, he self inserts as being Henry on the receiving end of a angry father for sleeping with his daughter, then later on Salad sleeps with the dog commenting its half his age, only to mention its parents hate him amd to say "you arent ready to loose your daughter". He mentions Fischer going to the great war then proceeds to argue and insult to insinuate Fischer was a deserter. Makes sense to me.
I think you meant Jeremy Fischer, not Henry Fischer, but I do agree with you; I thought that Fischer was definitely a reflection of salad the first time I watched the episodes, which was only reinforced by the most recent episode. It's definitely interesting to think about
I feel like the most impressive thing about Salad Fingers is the shock value. Specifically because I feel like we tend to write off things that exist just for "shock value" mainly because they aren't generally very interesting beyond the shock value. But Salad Fingers feels artistic because the it's not just conceptually shocking, it's almost viscerally tactile. It captivates the senses from the beginning. Watching our protagonist happily stroke rusty spoons evokes an involuntary imagination of that rusty spoon sensation within the audience, which intensifies the other horrible associations we have with rust, like tetanus, dishevelment, degradation. For me, Salad Fingers is impressive because the shock value always retains novelty. It's almost like South Park where even when you think you've seen it all, you're still surprised on some level that they really went there. By leaving us with more questions than answers, it compels the audience to speculate, thus inadvertently revealing something about the internal psychee of audience themselves. Or something. Idk. Surrealism.
Thank you for dusting off and presenting this hidden gem to people that have never seen it or have seen an episode or two a long time ago. This video auto played after another one of your videos and a few minutes in when you said to stop this video and go watch them first, that’s exactly what I did because I remembered that it was so abstract that I had to have the whole thing fresh in my mind to “get” and appreciate your analysis
He has an editor named Kate (not sure on her name but he’s mentioned her before). Still amazing seeing as he is also a college student and finals season is upon us
If salad fingers was released today as is, no one would notice it. It’s one of those early internet things that got attention because there was nothing else quite like it at the time. It’s still a work of art though.
On its own, sure it wouldn’t have gone viral like it did. But David Firth wouldve still made a name for himself as a filmmaker and animator. His creepy, funny, and aggressively North English style is legendary
i honestly like the idea that there's no story. the series just reminds me of waking up from a weird nightmare that made sense at the time (while dreaming) but upon waking up, holds no chronological sense in reality. david captured that feeling really well, which by itself is impressive enough for me. i feel like if a normal person tried to make a surreal nonsensical series it either would make too much sense that it kills the mystery, or so little sense that there's no immersion. his series is just forever gonna be the uneasy dream you had last night
Yeah, I was thinking as I was listening to this while cooking "this sounds like a dream I'd have" not so much the content specifically but the "this happens then that happens" and just how nonsensical yet upsetting it is
I've always been curious as to the undertones regarding parenthood and birth and infants. The milk and nettle, the pram, the foetus, the loss of a child is repeated. Maybe it symbolises the loss of a child, perhaps the loss of innocence and his own childhood due to trauma.
‘The curtains ruffled gently in the wind.’ This symbolizes the conflict the heroine feels over the loss of her job, and the stress surrounding the intergalactic concert she has to attend.”
This series was my first brush with internet horror/surreality and I still remember it so fondly. I remember less fondly how my friend somehow acquired a Hubert Cumberdale finger puppet and talked in a perfect imitation of the Salad Fingers voice through it to me.
@@syntheticteapot cyriak’s Kitty City used to be my favorite video as a kid. A lot of his vids scared the living fuck out of me, but looking back, it was a specific type of terror I fond for today.
That theory is plausible, I can see it. When i was small and my friends were trying to egg me into watching a horror movie I knew I'd hate, I told them "I don't want to add it to my brain-catalogue," which was the only way I could describe the feeling that once you saw something horrifying, that image/concept became a part of you, even if you can't fully comprehend it. As a grown-ass adult there are still a few things I wish I'd never seen as a child and even now, actively avoid exposing myself to.
Oh man, exactly that! I'll usually explain it as, "I don't want anything coming in between me and my gut feelings," if that makes any sense -- like, if I'm walking down a dark street and something feels _off,_ I don't want to question if I'm actually reacting to my surroundings, or just to a spooky memory. I don't want to get in the habit of forcing myself through stuff to "not be a chicken." I want to trust my instincts enough to be able to react to them without feeling foolish.
One word that comes to mind whenever I watch a salad fingers episode is demented. Which leads me to think that salad fingers himself is just that. Alot of the time dementia patients kind of revert back to this childlike state while also keeping some of their adult understands/experiences. Like for example that one episode of Bojack Horseman illustrates this perfectly, with recalling memories thru flashbacks with pieces missing, his mother also getting attached to a stuffed bear and caring for it like a child, her drugging holly hock with diet pills and so on and so fourth
Your theory reminds me a bit of an experience in my own childhood. My grandmother had to flee Prussia during the second World War and told me those stories as a child. I was absolutely fascinated by it and began imagining and playing out what my life would be like if I was in a similar situation. Once I asked my mother whether we would take our elderly neighbour or a sack of potatoes with us if we had to flee. After that my mum told my grandma to stop telling me those stories but my childhood was still heavily influenced by her stories of the war
My great grand uncle was a Russian jew during ww2 and he helped every Jew in the neighborhood escape including my great grandma. The caretaker of the apartment building (she was a teen who really hated Jew's) ratted him out to the german soldier's and SS that had arrived. Very sadly he was tortured and executed in the town square. Never told them anything. Man's a damn hero to me and I only wish I could've met my great grandma to talk about him.
@@tbotalpha8133 You are right, at the time they were already part of Poland but my great grandparents like a lot of people living there still called it Prussia because they didn't feel like they belonged to Poland. So my grandmother still called it Prussia whenever she talked about it despite it being factually wrong. Thanks for pointing it out :)
I was afraid this would be another "post apo fallout" theory, but thankfully you delivered an absolutely fantastic take on personalized horror, on the importance of ideas instead of answer and about art in general! For me the biggest terror of Salad Fingers came with the filthy, grotesque world he lives in; when I was a small child, we lived in a flat where no matter what cleaning stuff you would use, everything seemed dirty and ugly, and the cocroach infestation didn't help stuff getting better. Later we would move to a better place, but this disgust I felt then, and fear of living in an ugly surrounding, with grease, filth and r u s t everywhere makes me really uneasy to this day. This shouldn't be like this. Nobody deserves to live in dilapidated and infested spaces.
@@ForeverLaxx Well. I think everyone can enjoy content despite the original intent of said content. It’s much easier to connect this theory to personal experience than a post apo world.
@@sticksandabush7491 In other words, "I don't care what the creator says it is, I want it to mean *this* instead because it feels more important to me if it is." Yup. You're a Wendigoon fan, that's for sure.
@@ForeverLaxx I do care what the original creator says and I do follow the post apo theory. Actually, when the game theory video came out that followed this theory, that’s when I found out about salad fingers. I just wanted to say that there are so many ways to enjoy media. If no one’s hurting someone else with how they enjoy something, I don’t believe their way of enjoyment should be insulted or made less valid. I think it’s absolutely wonderful to see all these different interpretations of the same media.
David Lynch is pretty famous for making films that seem to have some really deep meaning but he usually refuses to discuss said meaning. There is a dreamlike (or nightmarish, depending) quality to many of his work and what I recall of Salad Fingers that seems to have a meaning but then said meaning slips away.
this one REALLY lands for me. as a kid, i was obsessed with military stuff. im not even totally sure why. i'd spend day and night drawing tanks and planes, and HORRIFIC battle scenes with ultra violence. and to me, it was totally normal and not weird in the least. my favourite movies growing up were starship troopers and the 1950s war of the worlds. i played mechwarrior 3 until the mouse broke. and my time at school was spent playing "army" with the boys, where as the other girls were playing dress up and stuff... my imaginary worlds as a child were closer to warhammer 40k than they were to GI joe. your interpretation of this series has actually come to make me enjoy it so much more, now that i can look at it through the lens of my own childhood.
It makes sense with your theory. My grandpa died of ALS and having a big family where that was our first big loss, everyone was there every week. And I caught my little brother and cousin ‘playing’ grandpa where they’d lay there motionless like grandpa was before he passed. I knew they didn’t understand or know what they were doing. I’ve brought it up to them recently and they didn’t remember.
Not gonna lie, your theory really hit me cause I was a child with imaginations like that cause my parents and my environment exposed me to very gruesome topics like death, and etc. I thought things played out like that and now that I'm a teenager, I still remember what I imagined as a kid and dismiss it as intrusive thoughts now
I actually like that there is no specific meaning except what WE want, and that Firth seems happy to let us imagine and theorize what we want. That is my favorite kind of art.
My favorite fact about David Firth will always have to be the fact that he made "Men from Up the Stairs" in response to people looking too deeply into the meaning of Salad Fingers and some of his other works. You see that one actually has meaning if you look into it, the meaning if you look into it is about taking a shit lmao.
I think it's remarkable that Firth was able to make a series so surrela and unsettling but still frames Salad Fingers kind of compassionately. He never means harm and as a result you can identify with him a lot in some abstract ways.
personally salad fingers has always hit close to home in a interpretation that salad fingers is a person who's imagination has been tainted by the abused they've gone through and the suffering around them.
For the longest time, my interpretation dealt with PTSD after a war. Salad never really left the field. He can’t accept that his friends died, or his brother died, or that the world wasn’t safe. It fits, but I also think that there is another way to look at the series. Salad fingers is addicted to heroin, or some other opioid. He likes rusty spoons, and claims that the feeling is “orgasmic.” This could be a call to rusty needles, the “orgasmic” feeling could be the high that he gets. As for the actual episodes themselves? They’re fever dreams of things that actually happened to salad before he became a dope fiend. Distorted memories of his past life. While the dog corpse date….thing, could be a present day reality for Salad. This could allude to prostitution, either Salad soliciting a prostitute that’s too young, or perhaps Salad IS the prostitute. Forced into a life of abuse to pay off his drug debts, with the only release being that cold, rusty needle that makes him bleed. The idea of the dog being “too young” also leads me to think that Salad is the prostitute in this scenario because he could view himself as “too young” to be dealing with the abuse and drug addiction. He’s happy in his world because he HAS to be. He doesn’t have any other choice in the matter.
I like your analysis of "there is no analysis". Abstract art can be good and good art can be abstract. I also like the "Salad is an imaginative traumatized child" theory.
As a writer myself, who tries to tell detailed stories that have their own explanations for everything... often I find when I have my friend read them, she picks out details that I had no intention for having any meaning. Every mind works differently, and every person has an entirely different interpretation of the same scenario. It's true of the real world, and it's true of fiction. Often I find that my friend's interpretations of my stories, are far more interesting and "deep" than what I had originally intended. It's because of her imagination of my own writing, that helps me come to the realization that I'm a good writer. My point being, the greatest creativity of any story, often comes the audience it's presented to, rather than the creator. Keeping a story up to interpretation is a powerful tool, because there is no *single* truth, it's all speculative, even in the world around us.
I am a genuinely horrible, and untalented writer, but being a dungeon master, and running Dungeons and Dragons games has taught me something: Whenever I would have some sort of mystery story, my players would pick up on clues that I didn't even put there on purpose, and come up with theories based on that. It came to the point where I just put random stuff I feel like sounds cool/creepy together, and let them come up with an explanation in their head. My point is: as a writer, if you manage to just throw out some vague stuff, that feels like it hints at something, people will automatically interpret it as this deep, genius story telling, even if it's just barely cobbled together garbage. I named this story telling technique the Scott Cawthon.
This is actually super common, and why some shows with amazing writing have endings that pop up from nowhere, or don't make sense at all. It's because the fans pick up on their own little details, or make theories based on things done for a joke, or some off hand comment. An example of this a few years ago was when Drax, from guardians of the Galaxy 2, jumped into a creatures mouth to try to stab it from the inside. This led quite a few people to thinking that Drax, being so tough, would be the one to kill Thanos, paralleling what happens in the comics. Readers, and viewers often latch onto stuff the writer forgot about after a paragraph.
Man this was such a treat. This was one of the first “series” on TH-cam I really got into back in middle school following new episodes when they finally dropped. Awesome vid. You should cover Don’t Hug me I’m Scared, I’d be really interested to see your take! It itches that “nostalgic TH-cam horror” itch that salad fingers hits. Keep up the amazing content 🙏🏼
I was 3 years old when salad fingers debuted, but recently I’ve been trying to overcome my fear of surrealism (I hate unexplainable things, also tied into fear of the unknown) and as soon as you mentioned you’d be making this video, I binged the salad fingers series. It was oddly cute and very interesting. But I like your interpretation, it’s okay not to know everything. Thank you for teaching me how to be okay with that. Also Hubert Cumberdale holding a cup in the market episode will forever be my favorite thing ever.
that’s fascinating, i can’t imagine ever having such an aversion to things that are unexplained/not known, as i’ve always had quite the opposite reaction towards such things
@@ARSZLB the disturbing nature of salad fingers was off putting at first to me but I eventually got over it, but I still appreciate the stylistic choices, like when he goes on the date with the dead decaying dog. Normally I’d be upset but I was actually in awe as I was accustomed to the tone of the show by then 😅. Now for my fear of ET the small Spielberg alien, that’s still ongoing.
One of the most distressing moments of my life was watching all of my cousins roar with laughter while Salad Fingers locked a kid in an oven. As young as I was, I was so confused and horrified and to this day I have a hard time watching the series, even though it’s excellent. Love to see you covering it!
I was fairly young when these started coming out. I vividly remember the exact moment I stopped watching: my best friend and I were watching in the middle of the night when we were home alone, and when Salad Fingers turned his teeth into a music box, we shrieked and slammed the laptop shut. We never even went back to it to finish the episode. Good stuff
Please please please cover "All Tomorrows: A Billion Year Chronicle of the Miriad Species and Mixed Fortunes of Man", its such a bizarre and interesting book, would fit right into the type of content you cover :)
YES! I watched Fredrick Knudson (Down the Rabbit Hole) and Jabroni Mike read some of the book in a livestream and it is one of the most fascinatingly beautiful and horrible things ever conceived.
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Visit www.Audible.com/wendigoon or text ‘wendigoon’ to 500-500
i like the banana shirt today. I guess since the series is… bananas
omw
nice job 👍
Love you wendigoon :)
I love you
Wait until you see the next episode, it explains EVERYTHING.
I’m calling rn that it’s a rickroll
I highly doubt that David
Oh shit. Is there genuinely a new episode coming?
YO LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Did you ever learn how to draw? I never did.
Other people might be disappointed that salad fingers has no greater meaning, but I for one think it’s really funny to imagine David firth sitting at his computer going “and then salad fingers goes on a date with the corpse of a dog. But alack! The dog is half his age! Imagine the controversy!”
YESSS not meaning anything is my favorite part
Oh god it’s exactly like a kid going “and then…” that’s brilliant
I remember hearing theories about this but with every episode, I'm just convinced it's not all related with a defined narrative. It's too random and it felt forced ascribing an overarching story to it.
thats legit hilarious though
I would be terrified if salad fingers had a moral lesson.
“Salad fingers is British, poor guy” to me a Brit, salad fingers is a very accurate representation of a typical British day. I love seeing my day to day life animated.
he has friendlier neighbors tho
Are you guys ok?
@@jackmurphy1081 They're British
this feels like a tumblr thread
salad fingers loves spoons, hes just like me xx
I showed my dad the first salad fingers episode when I was a kid, and he cancelled our internet for 6 months.
lolz - and the poor man STILL can't unsee it. My mum found him as adorable as i do. She's 70. We also like Die Antwoord...
this is so fucking funny i’m so sorry but it made me crack up
That's rough buddy
For the best
Good thing you weren't watching Happy-Tree-Friends
This is not so much a theory, but more or less why the series freaks me out.
Everything that Salad Fingers says is identical to something that my grandmother would say while she was struggling with dementia.
She would often bring up "The war" since she was born in the late 20's and lived through WW2 as an adult. She would make refences to extremely disturbing medical practices that have been outlawed for decades, such as bloodletting, lobotomies, etc. She would get irrationally mad at random objects. She would talk to my grandfathers empty chair years after he had passed away, and lastly she would always call you the wrong name and when she did this it would be some kind of crazy old English name since she grew up in Scotland.
Im almost 30 now and she passed away a few years ago, but its always so hard to watch anything Salad fingers related. Im sure my experience is not the only one like this, but it still feels very personal.
I experienced this with my great grandmother, except me and my siblings were the only people she was able to recognize in her later days. She used to win stuffed animals in games with the other seniors, then she would give them to us when we could come visit. She would tell us old iroquois stories, kept us connected to that part of our heritage.
But yea i remember hearing some crazy stuff as a kid about her not recognizing people and having issues with Alzheihmer's I believe
I can see how that would be traumatic for a person yeah 😕
funny enough i was thinking the same thing. salad reminds me a lot of dementia patients. im sorry you had to experience that, i worked in a nursing home and some things are def hard to see. im sending you love!
This is incredibly interesting and makes sense when I think about it
You’re making a lot of sense!
David Firth is basically the walking embodiment of “it’s not that deep”.
@@ghostcat11 Won't stop others from doing it tho.
@@Web720 Damn internet autism.
For salad fingers but his other shorts do have a obvious critique on mental health in the uk. Maybe 😆
@@mitchconnor9748 agreed, many of his shorts make critiques on mental health/society in the UK
@@ghostcat11 "yea cause it ain't"
One might ask "Why do you pay so much for old alcohol?"
and the other would be the only one of the two to appreciate such "Old alcohol"
Its depending on your perspective, if you're shallow and take the animation as something simple and think everything's on the surface, then you do you, it'll look like something superficial. Look into it deeper and you'd understand the story of it, thats the whole ass point. It does not make sense and not even in chronological order when telling something
Since “Glass Brother,” I’ve thought of it as a story about a guy who was severely abused as a child and exposed to unspeakable horrors that no child should have to experience. As a result, he’s developed a sort of dissociative disorder, maybe schizophrenia, in order to process all of the senseless horrors he’s been exposed to. A young child can’t comprehend why their brother is never coming back from the war, or why their mother is so mean all the time, so they manufacture their own understanding of these situations in the only way they can.
Me too but I thought he has Autism. Based off personal experiences.
This.
Yes i remember this theory being a thing back in the day 😂
schizophrenia is not a dissociative disorder
@@supercomputerz Sorry, my phrasing made it sound like I meant they were the same thing. I just meant that he’s unable to differentiate between reality and his delusions.
My brother showed me this cartoon when it was released. I never really thought too much of it, but my brother seemed quite enamoured by the stories and character. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my brother had been suffering with schizophrenia. May be he could relate to this cartoon in his psychotic state.
I’m sorry to hear of your brother’s suffering. My brother has schizophrenia as well. One of the first signs of his mental illness he showed was ascribing meaning to shows and commercials that wasn’t there. Not like how we are thinking “what does this mean?” about Salad Fingers, but in a bizarre, way off way. I hope your brother finds peace, as well as you and your family. I know how hard it can be. ❤
I found out i have schizophrenia a few months ago.. explains alot.. and my well, similar to your brother's.. strange enamouring of this series. It always.. hit something at home
@@meltedWax169Not pity here at all, but I wish you all the best. What you’re dealing with sucks, whether its you or watching a family member struggle.
🖤
That was my thought as well! It gives schizophrenia vibes of a child during WWI... It also kinda reminds me of flashback episodes of Bojack Horsemans mother
My brother also showed me this when I was a kid. I didn't think it was anything more than a joke that I didn't get, considering he was also showing me Jerry Jackson cartoons. Had no idea it was an ongoing series.
"I also have to mention that Salad is british, the poor guy" almost made me spit out my food
It's upsetting to see no one commenting on that bit lmao
I missed that but, I'm British and I have to agree with him lol
Bri’ish
It is so bleak and miserable here
@@thehypest6118 WELL ATLEEEEEEEEE-
I’d actually love to see a Wendigoon deep dive into Courage the Cowardly Dog. Like maybe his thoughts on what the creatures’ real life representations might be for a couple episodes.
That would be fucking dope!!
@@musict4379 if anyone could do the task justice, it’s Wendi
he could probably use the inner child healing after all his crime icebergs
and afterwards, Ed, Edd and Eddy
Yes
NEXT 👏🏽VIDEO👏🏽
sometime soon…I wonder what would be his take on why the computer is the only helpful character (& why it talks) and that weird embryo scene that traumatized everyone’s childhood 🤔
speaking of personalized horror, the thing that scares me the most is the utter loneliness that salad goes through
Yes. The episode with the taped hairs, the demanding radio, and the cabinet is the most uncomfortable for me. It emphasizes the feelings of isolation, anxiety, and a profound sadness therein which I've struggled with much of my life, in ways I can't fully describe.
@Mama's Little Man 3rd this. Except add alcoholism, insane gambling and I like drugs. Talk about getting dealt a crappy hand in life. I’m 36 as well. Actually just canceled a shotgun I purchased when I was very drunk. I’m just about done with life. Are either you on anti depressants? Or benzodiazepines? I would go in there and DEMAND clonazepam or something. It’s what I take. I can function fine with it. It’s just getting started with life again and again. I am so wore out.
You both need to go get on a benzo. They don’t like to give them out though so get ready for a fight. I wish I had some positive news to add but I don’t. I’m so used to the isolation and loneliness now it doesn’t matter. I just can’t ever get out of bed. Need to find a da,n job to get back into some normalcy. Good luck fellas.
@Mama's Little Man not trying to personal, but you’ve never been with a woman? Like even just holding one? There are lots of self help guides right here on TH-cam. Use them. Learning basic body language is very important.
Its not that bad
Maybe if he was chocolate chip cookies instead of salad he'd have more friends.
I know this may sound weird, but Salad Fingers is somesort of comfort character to me. He has this childlike innocence, approaches everything with a curious mindset, despite the horrible world he is living in and the potential abuse he has gone through. I don't know why but it makes me happy to see a character be able to be happy besides everything.
same here
I honestly find him kind of endearing. He reminds me a little bit of Yellow Guy from DHMIS
I find him terrifying and unsettling because of how he reminds me of someone who had a messed up life then got Alzhemiers
Salad deserves the world
He has a weird charm to him
I want to also add that PTSD in children often has the children re-enacting events that are traumatic through mediums like play, which is what it kind of seems that salad is doing
As someone with C-PTSD developed at the age of 6, the games I would play and scenarios I would imagine myself in to rationalize and normalize the trauma I endured were absolutely nightmarish.
I look back on these memories disgusted at how a child can be exposed to such horrific thoughts at such a young age. In order for the child's brain to continue functioning though, it processes the traumas as normal, innocent, everyday occurrences- sometimes creating games and even fantasies in which the same events, if not worse, repeat over and over again. There's a dissociation that comes with it as well, putting the mind in this purgatory state in which you are aware of all the traumas happening to you, but completely unable to change or stop it, and unaware of the fact that every person you see is not experiencing the horrors you do on a daily basis.
So, you start to play with these thoughts.
You interact with the things that have happened to you like any other child. But soon, your friends don't want to listen to your stories anymore.
You tell "funny" stories of your life, and your friends act confused, and tell you that THEIR dad doesn't do "funny" things like watch them in the shower. That their brother doesn't "take cough medicine" by putting needles in his arm and falling asleep. That their mom doesn't get "sad" like yours does. Their house doesn't have a "punishment room".
They say the games you play are weird. They don't want to play house with you anymore, they say the way you play is scary. Why is it scary? It's normal to you.
Yeah, when wendi was talking about how these kids play these games I was thinking about how children kind of understand stuff and deal with it by integrating it into their play. So it makes sense for a child surrounded by these things to treat them as normal and explore them by acting these things out, even if it appears disturbing to adult eyes.
and that makes sense as he is talking about the "great war" as war is a large cause of PTSD
I scrolled down specifically to see if anyone had mentioned this. My imagination was like this as a kid with cPTSD. I was exposed to a lot of messed up stuff, didn’t understand it wasn’t normal, and would integrate those themes into my play and daydreams. I got in trouble a lot in school for bringing disturbing themes into our pretend play sessions, had no idea why everyone was upset. I get it now though. And now I’m wondering if any of this has something to do with why I LOVED Salad Fingers as a teen. Brains are weird!
I used to volunteer at a mental facility called Shadow Mountain in Tulsa for troubled kids or mentally disturbed children - I remember a boy and girl, both very similar. I'd rather not dive into what they told me, both being sexual trauma that actually brought me to tears - comparing them to games or stupid activities we did as kids.
We had this stupid game called "Suicides" and no, it does not have anything to do with self-harm or ending your life. It was literally mixing drinks together or the absolute worse things together, and chugging it. The boy ruined the idea of suicides for me as well. Some parents that do this shit to their children should be shot on sight.
Salad Fingers reminds me of a person with Dementia and Alzheimer's. The "adventures" he goes on every episode are disjointed and distorted pieces of memories he once had - or imagined he lived through. These "memories" reach the forefront of his concouisness in no particular order other than spontaneous association. That's why there is no continuety, why he thinks he is giving up a child only to then forget about it and identifying it as a sponge to clean windows with. Thats why he goes on delusional memory-episodes and just suddenly forgets that he's supposed to hold the oven door open. That's why the names of the puppets change. Somewhere, in all of the confusion that is his brain, there was once a man with a life's story, but at this point, no one, not even himself is able to figure out what has once been real.
He may also be a ghoul creature in postapocalyptic Britain, but that's not the main point.
That's the vibe I've gotten from it too! I started thinking more about it once I noticed how odd his mood swings are: one minute angry, two seconds later happy, then scared, and the cycle continues. He's just moving through time in a nonlinear fashion and jumping from emotion to emotion accordingly. I appreciate all interpretations though, this one certainly isn't all encompassing lol
it reminds me of like a weird dream. I saw an interview from David Firth were he said he got bored of making narrative stories and likes the vibe of dreams flowyness from one thing to another without explanation, and is inspired from his dreams.
Right, he's a zombie in the post-apocalypse with only his disjointed memories of a dysfunctional family and a great war.
I always thought of Salad fingers as an exploration of the kind of innocence that exists in a profoundly disturbed mind. He has the mind of a lonely and deluded child, lost in a grotesque and decaying world, with only haunting memories to keep him company. He seems like a survivor of terrible abuse and the horror is in speculating as to what the reality of the situation is.
I was only ever aware of 2 episodes "Salad Fingers", from when I was at school. But when I saw the Ryan Reynolds movie "The Voices" fairly recently, I was reminded of it. Salad Fingers is repulsive, but we feel sympathy for him.
I saw the voices the first time when I was super sick it was like a fever dream literally terrifying
I agree!!
hes not replusive?i think hes kind of cute ,like a little cousin or smth
@@verycoolloser a disturbing little cousin that ur kinda freaked out by but love and find endearing anyway
The Voices is severely underrated.
I feel like the “apocalyptic hellscape” that salad fingers lives in might be inspired by Salvador Dali’s desert landscapes in his paintings. It’s like a blank space for the subconscious and all the weird stuff that happens here.
Yes i keep thinking Dali as well. Also got vibes like goyas black paintings to me
@@maschinka_ oh I totally see that.
I bet the guy that does the "wendigoon out of context" videos is going to have a lot of fun with this one
No human being has ever had bigger “cool high school history teacher” vibes than this man
mmh hm hm ☝️
its the beard that does it for me. Its just so dense and smooth, perfect history teacher beard right there
@@jamescanjuggle so accurate lol my history teacher had a nice beard too 😂
True dat - double true
So pretty❤
I always saw Salad Fingers as a combination of the 2 biggest theories: A nuclear wasteland destroyed by war, and an imaginative man going on playful adventures. Imagining Salad being so alone, so distraught by the loss of his family, that he assigns friendly/familial roles to other mutated survivors and tries to include them in his playdates in a desperate attempt to recreate some sort of normalcy is so depressing to me.
Yeah out of all of the theories involving salad being human/a being on planet earth. Those two combined make the most sense
This was basically the interpretation I always had, and I think it's one of the most common.
all of david firth's work is surreal and dreamlike/nightmarish. Salad fingers is just a continuation of that. It's absurd and surreal like a dream, or a nightmare, and it's not much deeper than that
@@cluborronn eh. could be.
at the end of the day the idea you come away with is the right one.
@@alexis_electronic
I agree. The beauty of this surrealism is it means whatever it meant to you. I see a lot of comments saying "you're missing the point, it doesnt mean anything". And while I think that's partly true. I think THEYRE missing the point, because in its purposely ambiguous nature, I think its not meant to mean nothing, but actually meant to mean WHATEVER you want.
Here's an alternate theory: Salad Fingers was a boy who grew up in a household where he was exposed to things he was not old enough for. For instance, his parents would watch mature TV shows while he was around, and they would argue about things that he did not fully understand as a kid, but like in Wendigoon's version, it normalized things to the point where when he would play make-believe, he would imagine the weird sorts of situations we see, like accusing someone of being after his daughter and sleeping with someone half his age. Then, the war comes, and his oldest brother is sent off to fight in the war. The war goes poorly, and the opposing side ends up nuking the place where Salad Fingers live. At the time of the show, he is an adult and from living alone in a post-apocalyptic world, his experience of reality and imagination have begun to run together. What we see is what he experiences, somewhere in between reality and imagination.
Alternatively, to better work in the glass brother portion, for a while afterwards, some of his family, including his mother, a brother (glass brother) and a little sister survive, but then he makes a mistake that gets his little sister killed. His mother and brother lock him up in his room, leaving him with finger puppets, where his imagination begins to take over, possibly helped on by some effects of radiation. Then one day they take away one of his finger puppets, so he breaks free in his anger and kills his mother and brother, which he rationalizes as escaping from them and smashing the mirror against the floor until he no longer sees his mother, when he was really smashing something against her head until he could no longer recognize her.
My interpretation has always been that of an abused child as well, given the imagery of children and of characters getting pregnant accidentally, it led me to believe that his mother the one from episode 11, was abusive toward him, leading him to have all of these horrific experiences and for it to seem completely normal, the child being left out in the cold, lots of death and what not. But that’s what’s great about interpretation art can mean whatever you want it to mean
I personally had a similar idea looking back at it, especially because of episode 11 and the consistent theme of child mistreatment. My interpretation is that the older men in his family went to war (with his older brother dying in the war), leaving him stuck home with his abusive mother. That would explain (at least in my idea) why the world is so disturbing. Then again, I'm honestly open to any interpretation, such as the idea of war ptsd. That was just my experience.
I still remember when MatPat dropped his own big Salad Fingers theory video, only for David Firth to basically go "Lmao nah."
Edit: oh hey, somehow didn't expect it to be brought up, but considering Wendigoon's take it makes sense to bring it up in passing.
Absolutely amazing and based
I still like MatPats theory
Although MatPat does a lot of reaching in his theory videos--his made the most sense. Especially if there WAS a deeper narrative here. I'm convinced the reason David Firth reached out to specify like he did, was because MatPat was the closest to getting it 100% right.... However, like Wendigoon said: That'd be bad for Firth if people ended up figuring out his series as a whole.
He probably just wants to come across as if he never had any intention to tie these things together to make it less "predictable" or "pretentious", but his work absolutely says otherwise. Especially with the repetitive themes, terms, and environments that show there's already some degree of backstory which has at least psychologically affected the main character.
I get not agreeing but I personally think David was kind of an ass in response. (He's Brit tho so you know how sarcastically aggressive they can come off)
@@echoflame4279 honestly I kinda hate firth for that, trying to downplay a theorist just they made a "theory" which sums up the series well, like... How is that bad?
I love the respect given to the series while also giving out his personal theory, stating it could be entirely incorrect, but just one that he likes. I love how Wendigoon gives this respect universally too
Wendi seems like a top bloke
I always theorised that salad fingers is about a old person with dementia. The reason for the strange behaviours and weird events is because it's the disjointed memories of an old person who's mind is disintegrating. The ww2 memories, the abortion, the party, the angry dad, it all seems like someone who can't quiet remember everything clearly. Also age regression is pretty common with dementia patients.
I like this one
Going off your theory, there's a thing with second hand trauma when learning of tragedy as a kid. You make believe that you're going through these scenarios so you can make sense of things in your own way if you act it out. Sometimes when you're surrounded by death growing up it becomes normal, enough that you might see the decaying as toys or add it to your art if it was a prominent part of your life.
Personally I grew up around a lot of tragedy and death that it became normal and essentially had a fascination with it that I saw a kind of beauty with it.
I can see this theory making a lot of sense because it lines up with what is happening
I've developed some interest or viewing of death and violence as a form of art or beauty, i grew up with a shit ton of my mother's friends dying around me. There are so many more things that i cant put into words
@@meltedWax169 I feel like when you see it as a kind of beautiful natural thing you want to show others its not so bad and to not be afraid when the time comes. It's a type of understanding we grew up with and learned to be better people from it. Tragedy happens and it's difficult to shield children from something like that without them trying to figure out why something happened at all. There's a show called bluey that touched on this and all the while the bird that was dying was hardly shown on screen but we learned the main character didn't have the understanding to go through what was happening. she acted it out at home the exact way it happened because she wanted to understand her feelings of this random bird dying even when it was given care.
Oh man you just summed up my life. I didnt know there was a word for it!
When i was a kid i grew up with a lot of fights, and arguments and what not ( not to me obviously but i would see it everyday) i used to hate it but now it sort of looked cool and pretty in a weird way. I thought i was a psycho or something for thinking like that but im glad theres a word for it!
@@ke-hc9yd don't worry about the reply I didn't think it was an actual thing but that's what it's called, I thought there was an official name or something for that kind of trauma 😅
Same my childhood had a lot of death and misfortunes the earliest of which was my grandfather dying of cancer when I was just 3. I knew from my parents that he is "dead" meaning he won't wake up again so I understood death as eternal sleep. But I never really understood why. Why won't he wake up anymore? Why is he dressed so nicely if he was just sleeping? Why is he in a box? Why is he being put underground? What if he wakes up then we'll have to dig him out again? Kids are really good at making their own interpretations no matter how nonsensical or far fetched it might be
You know David has been laughing his ass off at people who have been trying to find the hidden meaning to this series.
exactly, Salad Fingers just shows what regular life is like here in the UK. People are really just "like that" over here. Its basically just a documentary, theres no deeper meaning.
@@Tw0DrunkGuys y'all just walk around eating finger puppets and talking to ya self🤨
@@fishgard4008 yup
@@fishgard4008 Seems accurate enough
@@Tw0DrunkGuys one discrepancy, they mention that they like France. This is a clear inaccuracy as no Englishman likes the French.
boards of canada's "beware the friendly stranger" may be the most itchiest song ever made. works perfectly with salad fingers
Itchy is.. a very apt term for it
Yo pad watches Wendigoon too. I don't know why but I love it when creators I enjoy watch each other's stuff
Geogaddi as an amazing album, julie and candy never fails to give me goosebumps
The flashbacks from seeing some of this on Cid...totally forgot about this.
Hey Pad!
I like how Salad Fingers himself isn’t the monster of his universe, even if due to his own childlike personality, he inadvertently gets a couple other characters killed. He’s just making the best of living in post apocalyptic Britain while having a bright and positive attitude in the process. 😋
Dude salad fingers was extremely creepy back in the day I can't believe I haven't thought about it since. Thank you for reminding me about it! Much love goon~
Was?
When something is so strange, the brain just represses it lol
Are you John Wayne?
My man saying "back in the day", it feels like just yesterday I watched salad fingers
As someone with a host of mental problems, such as PTSD, autism, and being British, I found that many things about this series were relatable to my experiences with those issues.
😂
Being british😭😭
I'm sorry for your disability. I know it can be hard to be British, but things will improve one day.
As a man who has never been British I'll never understand your struggle. But chin up, g'uv'n'or
Have you looked for treatment options? Being British should be something you live with, not suffer from.
Children with perverted childhoods tend to find comfort in perverted things. When I was a child, I had a difficult time falling asleep. So, in order to help this problem, I would imagine a zombie patrolling outside my door. The zombie would have a cart, and if I had my eyes open, it would kill me. Surprisingly, I felt comforted by the zombie's presence. Your explanation as to why Salad fingers is happy in his perverted imagination rings true.
I used to always believe that if I didn't think of and worry about something bad happening, then it would happen.
So a lot of my free time growing up was spent thinking up convoluted scenarios involving my serious death or injury. Which somehow comforted me, now that it wouldn't happen/if it happened, I'd be prepared.
@@scarletbard6511 no way, i do the exact same thing! I've always had the shittiest luck so my thought process was that if I envision the worst case scenario, I'd sort of "outsmart the system" when things turned out better than I imagined. By that logic, I'm actually pretty lucky!
I used to imagine monsters standing over my bed that would eat me if I moved because then they knew I was awake,, I always thought it was weird that I would scare myself to sleep, good to know I'm not the only one lol
I think this is to somehow confirm your anxiety, stress and fears. Many people with trauma don't feel taken serious and daydreaming or thinking about gore and other horror situations gives you the feeling you are allowed to feel what you feel..
Yooo I thought I was the only mf who did this 💀
I interpreted this as salad fingers having something similar to dementia? And is suffering from a very intense loss of memory and creating his own world and own universe. The barren wasteland universe resembles his psyche deteriorating and the general theme of decay/rotting/rust is him grappling with slowly losing his grip on reality. Our brain tends to hold on to our most revisited/traumatic memories so those are the ones he keeps being forced to revisit- being left behind in the war, his mother berating him and favoring his brother, perhaps even a miscarriage? (I’m trying to figure out what that baby thing was tbh). The characters and experiences he can still remember are warped now and he speaks for them the majority of the time because they are not fully there or fully what they used to be.
Ok back back back it up- has salad ever been gendered? I think that maybe salad is/was (?) a woman who has some sort of traumatic sexual experience with someone much older than her and had a very traumatic miscarriage, an eating disorder (constant illness, forcing yourself to eat awful things only to throw them up, being obsessed with what you see in the mirror) I also think some of this happened on her birthday? Birthdays are important to salad somehow. Salad underwent many traumatic experiences as a child is now being forced to relive them in a very distressing/visceral way as their mind and reality is slowing decaying around them.
@@kafrink we are quite sure it’s schizophrenia
@@kafrink it comes off as a pretty male character
@@kafrink omfg stop with the gender shit
didn't realize I wanted you to do a salad fingers video so badly
I didn't expect my favourite DF youtuber in this comment section but here you are. Imagine that.
Ay it’s Kruggsmash
Any ideas on finding a Salad Fingers based Dwarf Fortress mod?
Ay the greatest bearded bastard of all
Wasn't expecting to see you here Adam. 🎉
I remember as a kid I took everything at face value and just assumed that Mr. Fingers was some sort of intelligent cryptid and this was what he saw normal humans as. Though rewatching it leading up to this video, I actually imagined that Salad might actually be a parent whose mind just broke after losing his child by some unknown means. It would explain all the weird symbolism around children, and maybe some of the situations shown are him being guilt ridden and trying to explain what happened without knowing how to confront it.
Now how the fuck this ties into him very clearly boning a dead dog I have no clue. But hey, no theory is perfect.
Could be that the dog symbolizes the child's mother. Disapproval for an inappropriate relationship would also explain the lack of support from those around them.
Story works if the dead dog is a symbol for the girl, who could have died during childbirth.
Her dying could also be why he said, "You weren't ready to lose your daughter" to Baby Head Dog.
The dog was Finger's spouse.
Bro the kid theory is legit trash. Doesn't explain how Salads has the ability to tap in morse code or anything, obviously he has had a part in the war
Wendigoon is that one random guy that explains stuff you don’t know that much about but he does it perfectly and gets you interested
That’s exactly what made him so popular. He’s like a guy at a party sitting next to you on the couch and telling you a bunch of crazy shit. I mean this in the best way possible.
His like that one teacher in school, that makes learning fun
he reminds me of that one friend you don't even gotta drink or smoke with, just his genuine presence brings a natural fun and his stories are just so fulfilling and the way he tells them, been stuck since the icebergs vids LOL...
More like "Don't know shit about" this series, the analog horror, the James Dean timeline
Frfr
"Broken imagination", "polluted wonderland" this script goes hard
Goes the hardest
The perception of how children interpret things in their minds and imagination especially dark subjects that they are too young to comprehend could easily work in Salad fingers with the very confusing visuals and meanings
Especially because children IRL often use imaginative play to process traumatic/intense events. I used to work as a daycare teacher and I could always tell who I needed to give extra affection to based on how their imaginations were running that week.
Or Salad Fingers is an adult with the mind of a child.
Someone like Chris Chan, before that comparison became horrifying.
As a child my mother watched the soaps everynight and I picked up on some of them, So when I played with my barbies it'd always been some big family drama such as people dying/cheating/whatever its insane what kids pick up on and thats why I think adults need to be careful with what they say around them, you'll never know what they'll sponge up.
lmao honestly the barbie games i played with my cousin were horrible
Our driving instructor had a neat anecdote about a guy who used his pointer and middle finger to turn the radio dial instead of his pointer and thumb. He thought it was kinda strange, until he saw the guy’s dad was missing his thumb.
I also did that with my dolls as a kid 😭😭 it was fun
Thank you Dad for once again covering the interests I’m too scared to go through myself
Its not that bad, its more surreal than scary, at least for me
@@arandomcomic2993 I definitely get that- Salad Fingers specifically nails the timing and voices that set off my anxiety perfectly so it’s a little too much to watch through on my own lmao
He reminds me of an uncle
As someone who works in Disability Care, I have seen a few of my clients with some characteristics like Salad Fingers’. There are many times I’m on the job and wonder in dread what must have happened to have them say the disturbing or child-like things they’re saying or wonder how they see the world. So if Salad is an adult, he could be an adult with a behavioural or mental disability and a traumatised past that fuels his child-like imagination. But I really like the child theory too.
I think it was for the best that David didn’t bother to try to come up with a story or take any of the several fan theories and make it cannon. He would’ve ended up making the same mistake as Scott Cowthon; stitching together a bunch of loose threads to create a nonsensical chimera of a story that adds a new limb every time a Game Theory video comes out.
This is the sickest burn on Game Theory I've ever seen
As someone who isn't a big fan of Game Theory, I approve, 😂
As a fan of both stories, honestly yeah. Salad Fingers and FNaF are two entirely different types of beasts from a narrative perspective. Salad Fingers' mystery comes from its unknown, surrealistic nature that relies on audience interpretation of events. FNaF's mystery comes from its convoluted plotline and how every piece does (or is supposed to) fit together, but the exact ways that they do are unknown (to both audience and creator, same as Salad Fingers).
When FNaF comes with new content, you _know_ it's supposed to fit somewhere, but theories can completely overhaul and mix around current theories with just a minor plot detail. When Salad Finger comes with new content, it's generally understood it won't pertain to a central story. Both stories imo are intriguing in different ways.
This is literally the reason I stopped watching GT, Matt gained so much influence from actual game developers his channel ended up being the genesis of the theories he was "elucidating us" on, like a self perpetuating machine. I exaggerate only slightly
@@theinfernoburns finally someone else see's it.
I fucking loved this series it’s so oddly comforting yet off putting like he means well but just does awful things I think he doesn’t understand other living things have consciousness
oh man yeah thats a v good way of putting it, that's something about it that disturbed me a lot when I watched it as a kid lol
The scary part is that there are people like that
@@meltedWax169 yes, those are what we call ‘Sociopaths’
@@Vicari0usly I wouldn’t say that. Sociopaths generally know what they’re doing and don’t tend to feel guilt about committing horrific actions, because they can’t. Salad could probably be considered somewhere within the dissociative/delusional sphere, if you wanted to put those kind of classifications on something so unclassified as Salad Fingers.
.
We were Salad Fingers disciples in high school and I can still remember one of our friends writing this huge essay hypothesising the meaning behind Salad Fingers, it involved him being an old army general who had lost his memory and was now living inside this weird fantasy world......? This kid also gradually stole all the clocks in the school and took them all home and hid them in a cupboard, and eventually the school had no clocks and they never replaced them. The 2000s were a strange time.
That's beautiful.
Iconic
They put cages on the clocks at my school and I always wondered why.
when my sister was getting married, we both laughed remembering that scene with Salad wearing a veil looking at the mirror
Awesome lmfaooo I love that :”
"yyyYou look so beautiful!"
Your theory really hits home for me. As a child I had a hyperactive imagination but also a lot of anxiety. I had made some experiences which brought some not great ideas into my mind and my imaginary worlds were kind of corrupted from that. The monsters I would fight became children stuck in tight places and 'The Naked Man'. Luckily I got through it and am in a much happier place now.
I had a similar thing! My psych said it was called 'Maladaptive daydreaming' where the mind escapes into its own scenarios but they aren't always 'happy' escapes. E.g. a recurring scenairo i had for a while was being found under the rubble of my collapsed school.
Its a weird way that the brain tries to process its surroundings.
Im glad you are doing better now though
I used to lay under a blanket and imagine being a mummy
I had a dream where I was watching TV, but then a giant goat and a giant goat child were destroying the city so I had to drive out, but for some reason we left out my grandmother. But, I got in the car first, and drove to death.
I had this other dream where there was a conversation.
Child 1: You sure you want this shirt? It'll make you wanna kill yourself.
Child 2: Don't worry, I always wanna kill myself.
Child 1: Ok, I'll deliver it, then.
CUT!
Announcer: The competition for creepiest dolls has begun!
Policeman: One of these dolls is a skinned child.
[IMAGE OF CHILD 1 AND POLICE MAN LOOKING AT EACH OTHER]
Then stringed instruments going BA DA BUM!
Its sort of representative of boards of canada's geogaddi album. You should give it a look, because it's also apart of salad finger's history.
My recurring cursed thought was always that the Devil had my parents and my sister all in cages, and was making me choose one to save and to let the other two die. Usually I had to do something to save the one I got to choose, but I typically just broke down crying at the idea of choosing and tried to think about something else.
Coming from an abusive household, your theory on salad fingers made a lot of sense to me. I remember coming up with stories
using my toys and incorporating topics that I overheard my parents arguing about. Also watching Salad Fingers, my first thought was about how much it resembled Courage. It's like you read my mind with this video. Great work as always :P
The theory that its all in courages head makes the series lame. Should be disregarded.
@@skullkid692 no theory should be disregarded. You don't have to believe it. That's why it's just a theory. That's the beauty of things like Courage and Salad that don't ever explain what's really going on. It can mean whatever you want it to mean
I remember watching the first couple as a teen and interpreting Salad Fingers as some sort of unethical science experiment left for dead in a wasteland or escaped to this wasteland. I was tickled by the idea of a huge government entity frantically trying to find Salad Fingers believing him to be extremely dangerous and he's just in the desert finding bodies and fondling rust.
you were tickled?…
@@hernandez4856 that’s a way of saying they found it funny
Honestly, I appreciate that you respected the fact that the series isn’t anything bigger, just a spooky little thing. We honestly need more stuff like this
I’ve gotten extremely desensitized to this series from the sheer amount of times i’ve watched it. However, listening to someone trying to explain the series I’ve, quite literally, grown up alongside is uncanny.
My interpretation? Dave's playing a 'yes, and' game of improv with himself. There's no grand narrative, but it's like putting together a puzzle with blank pieces and no edges. He puts random things together in one part, then he has to find new pieces that fit into the old pieces for the next part. I imagine all the fan theorizing infects his own creative process to a degree, and something someone said about one episode becomes a beat in a new episode, but he's not intentionally trying to piece together a narrative. He'll make callbacks, because it's an episodic series and so Salad Fingers will reference Salad Fingers. But every new episode is more just a response to the rest of the series, like playing a game where everybody in the group comes up with a story one word at a time.
Seems like it
It is crazy at which speeds you can pull off videos that are not just almost an hour long, but clearly well researched and thought out as well, props to you!
My theory is he has war trauma and dementia, and he uses images of war (dead bodies) and items from the nursing home (puppets, bugs, etc.) to represent all the faces he forgot the details of.
The "Personallized" horror idea is honestly a really cool idea. What scares you? War, welp, that's Salad Fingers, Post Apocalypse, Salad Fingers. Scared of loosing your mind and grip on reality, Being left clueless to your own reality, That's Salad Fingers
i am not scared of loosing my mind, whatever that means. it would be scary to lose my mind though
I can assure you I was not expecting such a life-altering perspective on the universality of art as "Through the handiwork of a now-dead artist I can see these blocky features of something that's supposed to be a person [and] for a moment I share the same thoughts that Picasso did all those years ago whenever we both think that this woman has pretty eyes" in an hour-long analysis of Salad fingers
right??? ya never know what wisdom the Goon is gonna give us.
shame about him saying "whenever" instead of "when" though 😭
@@Tom_Hillman it seems to be a southern/Texas thing. One of my online friends from Texas does that when talking in voice chat, and we can't help but giggle about it, much to her embarrassment. We don't mean to laugh, but it is kinda funny and charming in a way.
@@Tom_Hillman It's technically correct to say "When ever he wakes up" but it sounds like he's saying whenever. It's like the difference between everyday and every day, or maybe and may be.
@@jakedanielsen4512 It implies he wakes up more than once. often, he'll say something like "whenever JFK died" as if he died more than once 😭 the way he says it too always misleads me into thinking he's talking about something happening multiple times 😭
As someone who had never watched Salad Fingers before, I did come up to a similar conclusion that this was a child's imagination. While I would think that this might be a rather disturbed child, it's mostly a matter of details in the story rather than the whole grim and dark aspects of it.
Children have a VERY morbid imagination at times, and that's simply because when you're a child your mind keeps absorbing information and imagination is just a way to compile this mess and process it in ways that will be more digestible and comprehensible to you.
The random nature of events is absolutely reflective of that. If you've seen children play with toys before you'll absolutely see the same thing in the "black goo baby" story. Children will pick up toys and make them fight, then claim they're brothers, then they'll discard one toy and pretend it doesn't exist only to pick it back up and change the plot completely in five minutes.
The one thing that makes me want to refrain from calling it a "broken child's" imagination is because it also feels like to me this is just a child's imagination only from an adult's point of view. Here's an anecdote to explain my point : While I was playing Smash Brothers with my nephew when he was younger, his mother who didn't like the game tried to prove to me that it had a bad influence on him. To do so, she simply asked him as we were playing : "honey, what are you doing right now ?" to which he responded "Well, I'm killing him :) "
"To kill" is something that to the mind of an adult is something shocking and awful, but to a child this is just a synonym for "beating someone in a fight".
So to go back to salad fingers, when we see that he opens himself up to give birth to that black thing, well of course he would, how else would one deliver a child? Only from an adult's perspective, this is gruesome and gore to the extreme.
And even some other details like how he likes seeing himself bleed, man, I remember when I was a 7yo kid you wouldn't believe how many boys thought they were edgy and cool because they said they liked drinking their own blood upon injuring themselves. To me it really seems like most if not all the gory and disturbing details can be explained like this. All of the more mature concepts only further this explanation, the whole "chasing a girl too young for him" seems like something a kid either overheard from family members or even something he saw in a movie or a TV show. And while I'd agree that the one part about the child dying from being cold seems a tad too grim to fall into that category, I personally remember hearing the story of "the little girl who sold matches" from a very young age, and it was absolutely the sad version where she dies from the cold at the end.
So in conclusion, I absolutely agree that there doesn't seem to be any overarching storyline that needs to be understood. I think salad fingers is probably just a fun series of surrealist horror and I think that's pretty cool.
This is my favorite interpretation so far
If In your imagination you saw everything as dead and decaying, including your surroundings. And everything in that imaginary world either ate or otherwise brutally killed each other, then you’re a severely damaged child. This is not normal “inside a child imagination” behavior…
@@richardtherichard26 You clearly don't remember being a kid, especially a kid who somehow found gore sites and had Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books.
@@lainiwakura1776 no I definitely do… apparently I was just a much much more well adjusted child than most… again this is abnormal behavior for a child. If you think this is normal. YOU are abnormal. This is NOT normal behavior. See normal kids think about things like sports, superheroes, the wiggles, why the sky is blue, why grass is green. Why their friend teddy down the street has 2 dads instead of a dad and a mom. Why little Jessica gives them a funny feeling and makes them wanna share their Oreos at snack time. *NORMAL* innocent kid questions. Go ahead and ask the next 100 children you see what they’re thinking about, and I promise not 1 gives an answer even remotely resembling this abomination. Children don’t think like this. They don’t view the world this way. Damaged children *might* but realistically they lack the imagination to create a world so bleak… but damaged adults do…. If you thought like this as a child you need to see a therapist… *IMMEDIATELY* … before you become the country’s next mass murderer… this isn’t normal behavior for a child. This is “horror movie child who’s about to murder the entire family in their sleep” behavior. Period. Like it takes just the slightest bit of common fucking sense… 😂😂😂
Nah, i dont think so. It deals with too many adult concepts to be the perspective of a child. He makes references to feeling orgasmic, he cooks himself meals and lives in his own house. He clearly lived a full life, he makes plenty of references to the "old days" with kenneth, or the war for instance. He even has his jobs he does. I think a much more suiting interpretation is a man dealing with schizophrenia/dementia in a post-apoc setting/ or he's so insane that the setting is just how he interprets the normal world. Delusions and hallucinations typically come from unresolved childhood trauma, explaining why these episodes all deal with potentially traumatic past experiences. Dealing with abusive family, being unable to come to terms with lost family/friends, hiding for your life from bombs and warnings coming over the radio, being scorned by an ex-lover simply because their family didn't like you. All of these are potentially traumatic experiences that lead to him being the fucked, mentally ill saladman he is now, and he copes with them by maintaining this world of rot and decay where everything is perfectly fine. He speaks in riddles like many schizos might, he views events in a very nonlinear and confused way, he regularly forgets basic tasks he's doing despite they're being very important, he'll even have conversations with himself. Sure, a child might do all this as well, but they are doing it out of a sense of wonder and enjoyment. Salad Fingers is stuck in this childlike mentality his entire life, you never see him stray from it for a second. These things are rules that determine his existence, he is very violently punished if he goes against his voices. That isn't a child's imagination. That is a traumatized, schizophrenic man's demons tormenting his every waking moment
I have a profound respect for Salad Fingers
Purely because it remembers what makes horror good.
Mystery
Imagination exists in such a weird zone of thought. someone could show you the most horrifying, gut-retching, vile horror beyond comprehension, and it wouldn't be half as scary as something personably tailored by your psyche to be the scariest potentiality of what it could be.
I hope that makes sense.
That's such a good observation i love this take damn.
I always thought that Salad Fingers was a person suffering from some manner of deep delusion, because that was the personal horror and tragedy in the story for me, being so deep into delusion or hallucination that you become unable to tell the difference between the two. As a child I had a great aunt who suffered from dementia, and she was actually very nice, and relatively calm, but she spent almost every waking hour just lost inside her own head, living half-remembered memories and speaking to people that weren't there, or thinking that the people around here were other people from her memories.
But it's better that it remain unexplained. To explain the story would ruin the way people interact with it.
No way... Wendigoon just dropped an hour-long Salad Fingers video? Amazing!
*edit:* oh awesome they gave me my checkmark 😮
Hey, I like your videos. You're a good growing channel, and if you see this, I wish you the best of luck.
Oh, hey, it's you. Guess I've found myself in a corner of TH-cam with these types of channels.
hi theft king
@@fatalerror6469 thanks so much! I'm glad you enjoy them!
I'm just running into you everywhere lately Keys 😆
Only Wendigoon would drop an hour long salad fingers video
The series always exuted loneliness to me. Especially looking back at it now, as an adult. I think a lot of it comes from my own experiences, but it really comes off that Salad just wants a friend. But due to social anxiety, and just being a weird person, people just kind of avoid them, or act distant. A big thing for me is when Salad gets just kinda scared when someone actually responds. It's reminiscent of the many times I tried to talk with people and the conversation took an unexpected turn. Just a weird person in a weirder world.
WOOOOOWWWWW never in my life did I think I would see such a thorough breakdown of my childhood trauma LOL thank you wendigoon
he goes long periods of time without uploading, then hits us with a double. What a guy
He literally uploads weekly tho?
Eh, it’s never really much longer than a week in my experience, he’s pretty regular. But yeah when he hits us with two in two days is awesome.
@@notmocka it’s been 3 weeks
My theory on salad is a lot like what you said, but salad isn't one particular person and just embodies the horror felt by children during their childhoods. Like his horrible abusive mother, thats really relatable for an unfortunately large amount of kids. Or going to any kind of medical professional and it seems like they are out to get you while your parent just watches. Being forced to cook on your own, or lured into a trap by a stranger. I could go on with all the metaphors I see in salad fingers, cause it doesn't just stop at trauma or childhood fears, it goes all the way into certain mental illnesses, like dementia, schizophrenia, ADHD and ADD. Some times the characters aren't consistent or have no cohesive plotline and to me it feels on purpose, like they are just symbolic of any person given the situation. Salad fingers is an episodic depiction of a bad childhood, from the perspective of multiple children.
ADHD and ADD aren't considered mental illnesses, they're developmental conditions, just to let you know
I think it would be more accurate to say "states of neurodivergence" considering that all those you listed are indeed thus. Only the first two are considered mental illness.
Truly sorry to nitpick, but I think clarity of language is important.
This is just a flat out WRONG comment 💀
@@wariogotdeleted It’s almost like….. it’s… an opinion 😱😱😱
I'm glad you highlight the concept of 'personal horror'. It's something I've been trying to achieve as a creator, on and off, for years. It took a long time (without actually talking to anyone else about it) to even grasp the concept of it, of leaving blanks that the minds of the audience could fill with their own particular unpleasantness. And to realise that I was doing it myself when I read/watched such things, and why when I tried to explicitly include the things that I imagined in my own stuff, they lost their power. Having them exist in that swimming, malleable state of one's own imagination kept them unsettling, but committing them to a definite form and explanation robbed them of that ability to continually pose unsettling questions. And it's that that's really the big takeaway here; basically, fear of the unknown.
Glad you mentioned courage. Explore that particular childhood trauma, if you please. That was one of my favourite shows as a kid, making it worse that i didn't even know english nor could i read subtitles at that age. I was following it basically on a visual level, which i think basically made it stick with me even more. That was a lot of nightmare fuel for a kids show
I always took Salad's interactions with children as not being Salads child, but being Salad himself. This is especially supported by the 'Glass brother' episode, as well as his constant self insertion as the people he talks to.
A childhood of constant verbal and physical abuse, possibly loosing his only friends in the great war, dealing with the ever looming threat of saod war and possibly having been sent there himself, he has completely diluded himself. The world we watch is from his prospective, not reality.
Now that I think about it, Salad might be Henry Fischer. He's called Henry/Harry a couple times, he self inserts as being Henry on the receiving end of a angry father for sleeping with his daughter, then later on Salad sleeps with the dog commenting its half his age, only to mention its parents hate him amd to say "you arent ready to loose your daughter". He mentions Fischer going to the great war then proceeds to argue and insult to insinuate Fischer was a deserter.
Makes sense to me.
I think you meant Jeremy Fischer, not Henry Fischer, but I do agree with you; I thought that Fischer was definitely a reflection of salad the first time I watched the episodes, which was only reinforced by the most recent episode. It's definitely interesting to think about
I feel like the most impressive thing about Salad Fingers is the shock value. Specifically because I feel like we tend to write off things that exist just for "shock value" mainly because they aren't generally very interesting beyond the shock value. But Salad Fingers feels artistic because the it's not just conceptually shocking, it's almost viscerally tactile. It captivates the senses from the beginning. Watching our protagonist happily stroke rusty spoons evokes an involuntary imagination of that rusty spoon sensation within the audience, which intensifies the other horrible associations we have with rust, like tetanus, dishevelment, degradation. For me, Salad Fingers is impressive because the shock value always retains novelty. It's almost like South Park where even when you think you've seen it all, you're still surprised on some level that they really went there. By leaving us with more questions than answers, it compels the audience to speculate, thus inadvertently revealing something about the internal psychee of audience themselves. Or something. Idk. Surrealism.
Thank you for dusting off and presenting this hidden gem to people that have never seen it or have seen an episode or two a long time ago. This video auto played after another one of your videos and a few minutes in when you said to stop this video and go watch them first, that’s exactly what I did because I remembered that it was so abstract that I had to have the whole thing fresh in my mind to “get” and appreciate your analysis
I swear this guy must just constantly be editing, he’s making awesome hour long videos almost every day
He has an editor named Kate (not sure on her name but he’s mentioned her before).
Still amazing seeing as he is also a college student and finals season is upon us
@@freeloading_toad
Well she’s doing a great job lol
If salad fingers was released today as is, no one would notice it. It’s one of those early internet things that got attention because there was nothing else quite like it at the time. It’s still a work of art though.
Yeah now it'd be lost in the vast landscape of TH-cam horror thats surged up over the past couple years. It truly was a gem of it's time
On its own, sure it wouldn’t have gone viral like it did. But David Firth wouldve still made a name for himself as a filmmaker and animator. His creepy, funny, and aggressively North English style is legendary
i honestly like the idea that there's no story. the series just reminds me of waking up from a weird nightmare that made sense at the time (while dreaming) but upon waking up, holds no chronological sense in reality. david captured that feeling really well, which by itself is impressive enough for me. i feel like if a normal person tried to make a surreal nonsensical series it either would make too much sense that it kills the mystery, or so little sense that there's no immersion. his series is just forever gonna be the uneasy dream you had last night
Yeah, I was thinking as I was listening to this while cooking "this sounds like a dream I'd have" not so much the content specifically but the "this happens then that happens" and just how nonsensical yet upsetting it is
I've always been curious as to the undertones regarding parenthood and birth and infants. The milk and nettle, the pram, the foetus, the loss of a child is repeated. Maybe it symbolises the loss of a child, perhaps the loss of innocence and his own childhood due to trauma.
Wendigoon: The creator says Salad Fingers has no narrative
English Teachers: The red door is meant to symbolize conflict.
@don't be surprised Yep, it sure is.
‘The curtains ruffled gently in the wind.’
This symbolizes the conflict the heroine feels over the loss of her job, and the stress surrounding the intergalactic concert she has to attend.”
This series was my first brush with internet horror/surreality and I still remember it so fondly. I remember less fondly how my friend somehow acquired a Hubert Cumberdale finger puppet and talked in a perfect imitation of the Salad Fingers voice through it to me.
Not cyriak? His videos were/ are an amazing trip.
@@syntheticteapot cyriak’s Kitty City used to be my favorite video as a kid. A lot of his vids scared the living fuck out of me, but looking back, it was a specific type of terror I fond for today.
@@syntheticteapot Cyriak was definitely along that same timeline, dudes videos are absolutely hypnotizing
That theory is plausible, I can see it. When i was small and my friends were trying to egg me into watching a horror movie I knew I'd hate, I told them "I don't want to add it to my brain-catalogue," which was the only way I could describe the feeling that once you saw something horrifying, that image/concept became a part of you, even if you can't fully comprehend it. As a grown-ass adult there are still a few things I wish I'd never seen as a child and even now, actively avoid exposing myself to.
"brain-catalogue" is definitely a phrase I will be using from now on lmao
Oh man, exactly that! I'll usually explain it as, "I don't want anything coming in between me and my gut feelings," if that makes any sense -- like, if I'm walking down a dark street and something feels _off,_ I don't want to question if I'm actually reacting to my surroundings, or just to a spooky memory. I don't want to get in the habit of forcing myself through stuff to "not be a chicken." I want to trust my instincts enough to be able to react to them without feeling foolish.
That’s such a good way of explaining it
@@eyesofthecervino3366 That's an indication of tremendous wisdom, I think. Keep on that road. It will lead you to a bright future.
@@eyesofthecervino3366 god, I wish I had have run into this comment a couple years ago. Best of luck to you homie, don't give up 🙏
One word that comes to mind whenever I watch a salad fingers episode is demented. Which leads me to think that salad fingers himself is just that. Alot of the time dementia patients kind of revert back to this childlike state while also keeping some of their adult understands/experiences. Like for example that one episode of Bojack Horseman illustrates this perfectly, with recalling memories thru flashbacks with pieces missing, his mother also getting attached to a stuffed bear and caring for it like a child, her drugging holly hock with diet pills and so on and so fourth
Your theory reminds me a bit of an experience in my own childhood. My grandmother had to flee Prussia during the second World War and told me those stories as a child. I was absolutely fascinated by it and began imagining and playing out what my life would be like if I was in a similar situation. Once I asked my mother whether we would take our elderly neighbour or a sack of potatoes with us if we had to flee. After that my mum told my grandma to stop telling me those stories but my childhood was still heavily influenced by her stories of the war
Fascinating insight. Times were tough definitely we like to forget. Hope your grandmother lived well.
My great grand uncle was a Russian jew during ww2 and he helped every Jew in the neighborhood escape including my great grandma. The caretaker of the apartment building (she was a teen who really hated Jew's) ratted him out to the german soldier's and SS that had arrived. Very sadly he was tortured and executed in the town square. Never told them anything. Man's a damn hero to me and I only wish I could've met my great grandma to talk about him.
Prussia? World War 2?
Prussia dissolved in 1918. World War 2 kicked off in 1939, 21 years later.
@@tbotalpha8133 You are right, at the time they were already part of Poland but my great grandparents like a lot of people living there still called it Prussia because they didn't feel like they belonged to Poland. So my grandmother still called it Prussia whenever she talked about it despite it being factually wrong. Thanks for pointing it out :)
@@tbotalpha8133 what? Prussia was still a state in ww2
I was afraid this would be another "post apo fallout" theory, but thankfully you delivered an absolutely fantastic take on personalized horror, on the importance of ideas instead of answer and about art in general!
For me the biggest terror of Salad Fingers came with the filthy, grotesque world he lives in; when I was a small child, we lived in a flat where no matter what cleaning stuff you would use, everything seemed dirty and ugly, and the cocroach infestation didn't help stuff getting better. Later we would move to a better place, but this disgust I felt then, and fear of living in an ugly surrounding, with grease, filth and r u s t everywhere makes me really uneasy to this day. This shouldn't be like this. Nobody deserves to live in dilapidated and infested spaces.
except david firth has said its set in a post apocalypses and salad is just mad and cant accept the worlds gone
It's Wendigoon's classic "too smart for you" contrarianism acting up again. The creator says it's post apocalyptic so that's the end of that, huh?
@@ForeverLaxx Well. I think everyone can enjoy content despite the original intent of said content. It’s much easier to connect this theory to personal experience than a post apo world.
@@sticksandabush7491 In other words, "I don't care what the creator says it is, I want it to mean *this* instead because it feels more important to me if it is."
Yup. You're a Wendigoon fan, that's for sure.
@@ForeverLaxx I do care what the original creator says and I do follow the post apo theory. Actually, when the game theory video came out that followed this theory, that’s when I found out about salad fingers.
I just wanted to say that there are so many ways to enjoy media. If no one’s hurting someone else with how they enjoy something, I don’t believe their way of enjoyment should be insulted or made less valid. I think it’s absolutely wonderful to see all these different interpretations of the same media.
David Lynch is pretty famous for making films that seem to have some really deep meaning but he usually refuses to discuss said meaning. There is a dreamlike (or nightmarish, depending) quality to many of his work and what I recall of Salad Fingers that seems to have a meaning but then said meaning slips away.
David Lynch:
shows up on youtube
makes horrifying videos that imply a possible deeper meaning
refuses to elaborate
leaves
@@queenofnarnia1011 refuses to elaborate.
Dies.
Nightmarish is a good word for this lol
@@queenofnarnia1011 all part of the salad fingers grindset
@@queenofnarnia1011 you mean David Firth?
I love how you’re able to see the animation improve when you watch it all in sequence
this one REALLY lands for me. as a kid, i was obsessed with military stuff. im not even totally sure why. i'd spend day and night drawing tanks and planes, and HORRIFIC battle scenes with ultra violence. and to me, it was totally normal and not weird in the least. my favourite movies growing up were starship troopers and the 1950s war of the worlds. i played mechwarrior 3 until the mouse broke. and my time at school was spent playing "army" with the boys, where as the other girls were playing dress up and stuff... my imaginary worlds as a child were closer to warhammer 40k than they were to GI joe. your interpretation of this series has actually come to make me enjoy it so much more, now that i can look at it through the lens of my own childhood.
Closer to Warhammer 40k...good grief you had a vivid one
It makes sense with your theory. My grandpa died of ALS and having a big family where that was our first big loss, everyone was there every week. And I caught my little brother and cousin ‘playing’ grandpa where they’d lay there motionless like grandpa was before he passed. I knew they didn’t understand or know what they were doing.
I’ve brought it up to them recently and they didn’t remember.
i’m not sure how to respond to what i’ve just read.
bring this up on every family gathering
Not gonna lie, your theory really hit me cause I was a child with imaginations like that cause my parents and my environment exposed me to very gruesome topics like death, and etc. I thought things played out like that and now that I'm a teenager, I still remember what I imagined as a kid and dismiss it as intrusive thoughts now
I actually like that there is no specific meaning except what WE want, and that Firth seems happy to let us imagine and theorize what we want. That is my favorite kind of art.
My favorite fact about David Firth will always have to be the fact that he made "Men from Up the Stairs" in response to people looking too deeply into the meaning of Salad Fingers and some of his other works. You see that one actually has meaning if you look into it, the meaning if you look into it is about taking a shit lmao.
dude your pfp has no right to be so adorable
@@itryen7632 Heck, thank
Are those nuts on your suit?!
My personal theory is that Salad Fingers shows the outside perspective of the average day-to-day-life of a British person.
I first watched this series when I was maybe 7, it was really horrible and really fascinating. Glad to see you covering it, Mr. Goon!
i was 9 or 10... growing up when the internet wasn't particularly "safe" for kids was wild
I think it's remarkable that Firth was able to make a series so surrela and unsettling but still frames Salad Fingers kind of compassionately. He never means harm and as a result you can identify with him a lot in some abstract ways.
Dude you are literally insane. You uploaded two banger vids in the span of two days. Absolute legend. Thanks dad
Literally in the span of under a day
He’s the best! 🤗
personally salad fingers has always hit close to home in a interpretation that salad fingers is a person who's imagination has been tainted by the abused they've gone through and the suffering around them.
For the longest time, my interpretation dealt with PTSD after a war. Salad never really left the field. He can’t accept that his friends died, or his brother died, or that the world wasn’t safe. It fits, but I also think that there is another way to look at the series. Salad fingers is addicted to heroin, or some other opioid. He likes rusty spoons, and claims that the feeling is “orgasmic.” This could be a call to rusty needles, the “orgasmic” feeling could be the high that he gets. As for the actual episodes themselves? They’re fever dreams of things that actually happened to salad before he became a dope fiend. Distorted memories of his past life. While the dog corpse date….thing, could be a present day reality for Salad. This could allude to prostitution, either Salad soliciting a prostitute that’s too young, or perhaps Salad IS the prostitute. Forced into a life of abuse to pay off his drug debts, with the only release being that cold, rusty needle that makes him bleed. The idea of the dog being “too young” also leads me to think that Salad is the prostitute in this scenario because he could view himself as “too young” to be dealing with the abuse and drug addiction. He’s happy in his world because he HAS to be. He doesn’t have any other choice in the matter.
I like your analysis of "there is no analysis". Abstract art can be good and good art can be abstract. I also like the "Salad is an imaginative traumatized child" theory.
As a writer myself, who tries to tell detailed stories that have their own explanations for everything...
often I find when I have my friend read them, she picks out details that I had no intention for having any meaning.
Every mind works differently, and every person has an entirely different interpretation of the same scenario.
It's true of the real world, and it's true of fiction. Often I find that my friend's interpretations of my stories,
are far more interesting and "deep" than what I had originally intended. It's because of her imagination of my
own writing, that helps me come to the realization that I'm a good writer.
My point being, the greatest creativity of any story, often comes the audience it's presented to, rather than the creator.
Keeping a story up to interpretation is a powerful tool, because there is no *single* truth, it's all speculative, even in the world around us.
I am a genuinely horrible, and untalented writer, but being a dungeon master, and running Dungeons and Dragons games has taught me something:
Whenever I would have some sort of mystery story, my players would pick up on clues that I didn't even put there on purpose, and come up with theories based on that. It came to the point where I just put random stuff I feel like sounds cool/creepy together, and let them come up with an explanation in their head.
My point is: as a writer, if you manage to just throw out some vague stuff, that feels like it hints at something, people will automatically interpret it as this deep, genius story telling, even if it's just barely cobbled together garbage. I named this story telling technique the Scott Cawthon.
This is actually super common, and why some shows with amazing writing have endings that pop up from nowhere, or don't make sense at all. It's because the fans pick up on their own little details, or make theories based on things done for a joke, or some off hand comment. An example of this a few years ago was when Drax, from guardians of the Galaxy 2, jumped into a creatures mouth to try to stab it from the inside. This led quite a few people to thinking that Drax, being so tough, would be the one to kill Thanos, paralleling what happens in the comics. Readers, and viewers often latch onto stuff the writer forgot about after a paragraph.
Man this was such a treat. This was one of the first “series” on TH-cam I really got into back in middle school following new episodes when they finally dropped. Awesome vid. You should cover Don’t Hug me I’m Scared, I’d be really interested to see your take! It itches that “nostalgic TH-cam horror” itch that salad fingers hits. Keep up the amazing content 🙏🏼
i would love to see Goon do a vid on DHMIS!
I fully agree, would love a dhmis video
I was 3 years old when salad fingers debuted, but recently I’ve been trying to overcome my fear of surrealism (I hate unexplainable things, also tied into fear of the unknown) and as soon as you mentioned you’d be making this video, I binged the salad fingers series. It was oddly cute and very interesting. But I like your interpretation, it’s okay not to know everything. Thank you for teaching me how to be okay with that. Also Hubert Cumberdale holding a cup in the market episode will forever be my favorite thing ever.
that’s fascinating, i can’t imagine ever having such an aversion to things that are unexplained/not known, as i’ve always had quite the opposite reaction towards such things
@@ARSZLB the disturbing nature of salad fingers was off putting at first to me but I eventually got over it, but I still appreciate the stylistic choices, like when he goes on the date with the dead decaying dog. Normally I’d be upset but I was actually in awe as I was accustomed to the tone of the show by then 😅. Now for my fear of ET the small Spielberg alien, that’s still ongoing.
@Alondra Ramírez
I love the surreal and unknown, and ET is the scariest monstrosity I can conceive.
People analyzing salad fingers: this is so very DEEP
David Firth: haha funny green man goes brrrrr
One of the most distressing moments of my life was watching all of my cousins roar with laughter while Salad Fingers locked a kid in an oven.
As young as I was, I was so confused and horrified and to this day I have a hard time watching the series, even though it’s excellent.
Love to see you covering it!
I was fairly young when these started coming out. I vividly remember the exact moment I stopped watching: my best friend and I were watching in the middle of the night when we were home alone, and when Salad Fingers turned his teeth into a music box, we shrieked and slammed the laptop shut. We never even went back to it to finish the episode. Good stuff
Please please please cover "All Tomorrows: A Billion Year Chronicle of the Miriad Species and Mixed Fortunes of Man", its such a bizarre and interesting book, would fit right into the type of content you cover :)
Agreed 💯
I'm surprised he hasnt already
YES! I watched Fredrick Knudson (Down the Rabbit Hole) and Jabroni Mike read some of the book in a livestream and it is one of the most fascinatingly beautiful and horrible things ever conceived.