We might be dealing with salmon zombies: Things in the Splatoon Raiders release date trailer I think are interesting (part 1)
Gonna try to get this post out before ProChara drops his trailer analysis video and makes me look like I'm just repeating what he says there. :p The Splatoon Raiders trailer had a lot of interesting little details that I noticed or saw other people pointing out, so I wanna go through it again and discuss some of them. Sounds good? Good.
Starting from the beginning it looks like we've got the same setup in character creation as last time except there's now a button to preview your character's voice, which makes sense as that's one of the few things unique about your body type. From what I heard we're still using the same voice clips for the player as in the previous games, which doesn't surprise me.
Speaking of things unique to body types, eyebrows seem to still be locked to gender type, as we get to see the full range of the type B inkling's eyebrows at one point and it doesn't include anything we see on the type A.
The unibrow is an interesting inclusion, I'll say that much. Major respect to anyone with the confidence to pull that off!
I'll admit that none of the hairstyles we see in the trailer spoke to me very strongly, but I find the use of ocean trash as decorations a really interesting aesthetic touch. Is it just to sell the "stranded on an island" vibe, or is ocean pollution an important aspect of the game's themes and motifs?
But okay, let's get into what I think is the most interesting aspect of the trailer and the part I allude to in the title of this post: The Salmonids. They're back with several new variants, but also a new appearance and a sickly new ink color.
As I reckon most people reading this can tell their new look is based on what happens to real salmon during spawning periods, where they undergo extreme physical changes, becoming bright red with hooked mouths. You can see that happening with the Salmonids too, some of them almost looking a bit bird-like, but I want to focus on another detail: All the salmonids we see in this trailer have this white crust on their fins.
There's a post by @inkpun (sorry for the ping but I like to give credit where credit is due) that likens this crust to the way that real salmon will, after spawning, start rotting alive as the physical changes they undergo during spawning season are so drastic that it deteriorates their bodies from within. I'm not gonna post any pictures of it here because it's pretty gruesome, but if you just look up "zombie salmon" you'll finds tons of stuff about it. Gnarly stuff.
And I think that's what the visual reference is but I believe there's something more going on here because of another recurring visual motif I noticed in the trailer: Lots and lots of crystals.
Something about the Spirhalite Islands is causing this buildup of crystals on almost every surface, forming into lots of little cubes. On the bigger crystal we see the robot drilling into it resembles bismuth in its texture, but there is something more it looks like, and that's salt.
And I don't think that's a coincidence, because we see these structures in the trailer that look a lot like salt and pepper grinders:
And the whole salt thing makes sense because the salmonids were already associated with food visually and thematically. They revere eating and being eaten as part of the circle of life, and food and cooking utensils are all over their architecture, but there is one more kind of crystal we see in the trailer, and it shows up in two places:
First here on this seemingly powered-up Stinger.
And second growing directly out of the back of this enemy at the very end of the gameplay section of the trailer:
And I think it's worth highlighting that the crystals are growing out of the white salt-like crust, too. They are directly connected in some way, and I'm thinking it is doing something to the salmonids, corrupting them in some way, and I think that because if you pay attention to the cohocks in the trailer you'll notice that they move with this exaggerating swaying, languid and loose in a way that simply doesn't look natural.
TL;DR: I think the devs are using the imagery of the way real-life salmonids start to rot while still alive post-spawning to indicate a kind of zombification, but the actual cause are the weird crystals we see all over the place. Something is going on with these islands, and the crystals are at the core of it.
I have a lot more to say on the trailer, but I'll split that off into a separate post since this one is already enormous.
One final thing however, please look at:
