Rat God

No. Just NO.

Stranger Danger from an 80s - 90s kid who lived it

We talked to strangers. We talked to a LOT of strangers. We just knew how to do it safely.

"Don't talk to strangers" was not about never talking to people you didn't know. It was largely about sussing out appropriate help. For instance when I was little, I was always told that if I got lost in a store, I should go to the front of the store, find the checkout counter or customer service desk and ask for help, NOT just walk up to some random person in the store. When I was older I was taught that if I felt unsafe while walking alone I should duck into a store and ask the employees there to call my mom (remember, no cell phones).

I was taught to be very wary of someone randomly coming up to me to offer food or gifts andnot to get in a car with someone I didn't know who offered a ride, which if you think about it if you've ever been in a major city is a good way to avoid a lot of scams, not just kidnapping. It helped me at various points in my childhood learn to avoid religious missionaries on the street (no, I do NOT want that Watchtower, no, I do NOT want to come into your church, thanks). I was also taught not to open the door of our apartment for strangers, which is again a good way to avoid religious proselytizers and salespeople, as well as anyone who possibly might be casing your home.

The idea was to a) have a plan to ask for help, b) develop some discernment on WHO to ask for help, c) have some awareness that every single person you met might not have your best interests at heart. All of those things are still really important to know. The phrase "I don't talk to strangers" was an easy way to convey "I don't know you and I do not have enough information to decide if you are someone I should talk to right now," not "every stranger is going to kidnap me."

Kids in the 1980s and 1990s when "stranger danger" was a thing had a hell of a lot more freedom to interact with strangers than kids now - many if not most of us went places alone, took mass transit alone, carried out errands, stayed out with our friends all day, were sometimes home alone, and knew how to handle that. A fair number of the friends I had in my childhood were other kids that I randomly started talking to at the park, or wandering my neighborhood - I talked to strangers and made friends, in other words.

That also translated to being online. There were a lot of message boards, forums and websites for various interests, and people could and did just show up there and start talking to others who shared those interests. Some friendships that have endured 20 years or longer for me started when we both were in a forum talking about a band we both liked, or a movie we'd seen. We talked to strangers. We talked to a LOT of strangers. We just knew how to do it safely.

Being anonymous online

"Oh, we used to know not to give out personal information online and now every site wants it!" is not a misguided "stranger danger save the kids from mean adults!" thing.

EVERYONE was told that. ADULTS were told that.

A lot of the desire for you to use your real name and personal information online is for marketing and database creation. They want to know your interests and online activity so they can develop a better marketing profile for you. Why the hell do you THINK every company now wants you to use their app and tie it to your phone number? That's all valuable, sellable data for data brokers and marketers. YOU are the commodity. That data is also now potentially being used for things like ICE.

Using your real name online has led to people being fired, being rejected from colleges, etc. for nothing more than, say, being photographed drinking beer at a party or identifying as LGBT+. It's been used to take away people's disability benefits because they posted a photo where they smiled (yes, literally, this has been used against people) or didn't "look sick." Yes, it has also been used to identify people on the other side, but there's a cost to that. When your entire life is public and you have no privacy, there's a cost.

There actually IS a higher level of risk disclosing personal information online than there is in person. In your personal life you're unlikely to have literally a million people calling you or showing up at your door to scream homophobic insults, for example. That shit can and does happen online because more people have access to you. Internet trolls are a thing, and we can't pretend they are not. Things like swatting happen. If you're under an anonymous name on a fan site, that likely will not translate to being targeted in real life. If you're using your real name, disclosing where you live, your school or employer and your daily schedule as you live stream, it's a hell of a lot more likely that will translate to people harassing you offline, and that's happened.

At the time we were being told to guard our personal information, there were a LOT of dedicated, moderated places for children and teens to gather online and interact with others. Geocities, a website where you could create a free little website for yourself, had a children's section. There were Club Penguin, Yahooligans, and a lot of other websites specifically for kids and teens.

There was also software like Net Nanny that parents could install on their home computers that blocked access to certain sites or keywords, meaning it WAS taken as parents' responsibility to keep their kids safe. At the same time, with things like cable television, you could block certain stations to prevent your kids from watching them.

People did talk about themselves. People had websites about themselves and their likes, they wrote about their day on Livejournal or reviews movies they liked on whatever website existed for that. They interacted. The difference was that every single thing they did, every single place they went, every financial transaction, was not posted for the world.

You may be wondering why the wendigo, which has become very popular in pop culture over the last 10 years or so, is usually depicted in Western sources with a deer head. This appears nowhere in Native American traditions, despite the creature having lots of folkloric variations. The association of the wendigo with deer is 100% Western, 100% modern, and has a long, weird history.

Just in case you need a primer, the windigo or witiko is a supernatural being from the Algonquin speaking nations of the eastern American continent. It appears as an emaciated figure, sometimes giant, sometimes covered in ice, sometimes both. In many stories, they have a literal heart of ice. Windigos are manifestations of cannibalism and winter, and hunt, kill and eat people. Someone who resorts to cannibalism to survive, or otherwise abandons their community for personal gain, will become one of them. A few stories tell of someone being “cured” and turned back into a human, but usually the only cure is to kill the monster. In the last several decades, native writers have  associated windigos with capitalism and deforestation as an extension of their selfishness. If you would like to know more about the properly Native windigo in context, I recommend Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History by Shawn Smallman.

The creature first came into horror fiction with Algernon Blackwood’s “The Wendigo”. Note the spelling, which would become the standard in horror, and generally in non-academic Western sources. In that story, it is not associated with cannibalism, but instead is a more generic “evil spirit of nature”. This wendigo stalks white people in the wilderness and turns a Native character into a new wendigo by seizing them and flying with them into the sky. This definitely better fits fears about non white people, fears about nature, and how the one is closer to the other than “civilized” people. Its description in the story is vague (the most we get is that it has burned its feet away by running into the sky). But when the story appeared in Weird Tales in the 1930s, Virgil Finlay illustrated it like this, the first antlered wendigo I know of.

This story was ripped off by August Derleth, a prominent Weird author in the 1940s and the main popularizer of HP Lovecraft. In his Cthulhu Mythos stories, he introduces Ithaqua the Wind Walker, which is an alien version of Blackwood’s monster. This fits into Derleth’s vision of the gods and monsters of HP Lovecraft falling into the four classical elements, with Ithaqua being invented to represent Air. Ithaqua is usually depicted as an icy, emaciated giant, so ironically is one of the more accurate wendigos to Indigeonous beliefs in pop culture.

Image from a recent French edition of Call of Cthulhu RPG, by Loic Muzy

In Pet Sematary, Stephen King uses a wendigo as the reason for why the titular cemetery is cursed. This is an update of the classic racist trope of the “Indian Burial Ground”, except this time what gets buried there comes back animalistic and evil. The racist implications of that are pretty apparent. This wendigo is seen briefly and has ram’s horns. It does not appear in the first film adaptation, but does in the more recent one… with deer horns instead, because those are trendy right now.

A good scholarly look at the real windigo versus the 20th century horror wendigo is “The Appropriation of the Windigo Spirit in Horror Literature” by Kallie Hunchman.

In the 1980s, a movie called Frostbiter: Wrath of the Wendigo was produced, but it wasn’t released until 1995 by Troma. From what I’ve read, it’s a pretty transparent ripoff of Evil Dead 2, with the characters being picked off in a haunted cabin with a zombie in the basement. The “twist” is that the origin of the horrors is a wendigo released by breaking a Christian demonology-style sacred circle. This wendigo is realized in stop motion animation, and has the most deer-like body yet.

A number of other independent horror movies in the 90s and 2000s used wendigos as a plot element. These follow the Blackwood/King approach of having the wendigo being something evil, ancient and Native American, reflecting white anxieties about living on stolen land more than Native anxieties about cannibalism and greed. Wendigo (2001) has the creature sicced on a white family when they hit a deer with their car. The Last Winter (2006) posits that global warming and fossil fuel extraction have unleashed the ghosts of dead animals, which are wendigo apparently, to revenge themselves on mankind. Which approaches the idea that greed is wendigo sickness, but I don’t think intentionally as a reference to modern Native literature. The “wendigo” in this movie are spectral moose and caribou.

The mainstream breakthrough of the deer-headed wendigo was in, appropriately enough for this blog, Pathfinder RPG. In “Spires of Xin-Shalast”, the last volume of Rise of the Runelords published in 2008, a wendigo is a major encounter. I suspect that either the author (Greg A. Vaughn), or one of the editorial staff had seen Frostbiter, as the setup involves a cabin haunted by dwarven cannibal ghosts who all killed and ate each other due to a wendigo’s influence. This wendigo is a hybrid of the Blackwood and Cree versions in terms of its MO: it is a cannibal ice spirit that wants to make more cannibals, and does so by abducting people and running off into the sky with them. Its design is the standard for what most Western artists depict wendigos as these days: an emaciated humanoid with the head and antlers of a deer (and the burned off feet of Algernon Blackwood, which are less common):

Image by Tyler Walpole, © Paizo Publishing

This wendigo definitely made a splash at the time; it was the first time I remember seeing a deer-headed wendigo, and art of that design started to become common. It pushed away previous wendigo depictions, which were typically werewolves (as French Canadian trappers had blended the concept with their own loup-garou, and Werewolf the Apocalypse had a whole faction of racist Native American “wendigos”) or shaggy and ape like (based more on the look of the Marvel Comics villain). 

What turned wendigos from “folklore/horror monster” to “fandom blorbo” was Hannibal, which first aired in 2013. In that series, the first murder is a woman’s body impaled on a stag’s head, after which protagonist Will Graham has visions of a black stag, and a man with the antlers of a stag, representing murder, evil, and of course the cannibalistic murderer Hannibal Lecter.

Since Hannibal was super popular with the shipping fandom set, wendigo themed characters became popular in its wake, creating a wholly new way to culturally appropriate the wendigo. This was magnified by Over the Garden Wall, which came out in 2014, and its villain The Beast. The Beast is never called a wendigo, but is an antlered giant associated with winter, and so is commonly head-canoned as a wendigo and associated with them in fandom circles.

As the wendigo has been used more by Western artists as an embodiment of fears of nature, instead of cannibalism and greed, this makes a certain amount of sense. Horned nature deities in European culture became increasingly demonized under Christian influence and moving away from the forests into farms and cities. In order to associate something with being ancient and pagan, artists and authors slap some horns on their monster, and use the word “wendigo” without its full cultural context because it sounds spooky, and they’re working from horror traditions rather than folk traditions.

I propose that current events also played a role. The antlered version of the wendigo burst into popularity in the mid aughts, after being one of multiple depictions in Western culture for decades. In the United States, most people are pretty far from the natural world. . Deer populations in the US spiked around 2000, and even though their overall numbers have declined, the number of them in cities on the East Coast has increased. So the biggest animal a lot of people are going to come into contact with, and in a disruptive and potentially dangerous context, is a deer. As the Western wendigo often represents the intrusion of nature into “civilization”, what better animal than the deer that jumps in front of your car or breaks down your fence?

I’ve always assumed the deer head wendigo stemmed from associating deer with Native Americans in that racist, infantilizing, dance-with-all-the-colors-of-the-wind bullshit way. Deer= Native American aesthetics because, as you mentioned, they’re likely the only large wild animals and are thus mystical and part of the beauty of nature. To quote a guy who has been thoroughly cancelled but unfortunately I can’t think of a better source of deer vitriol:

I used to live in the city and I loved deer then because I was liberal and in the city and I’d see deer when you drive out with your friends out to the country and you see a deer and everybody is like, “Turn off the car, don’t scare it, it’s just so beautiful, look at the beautiful deer, look how he looks around it’s just so mysterious and beautiful. God gave us a gift everybody just enjoy the gift of the beautiful deer.” But now I live in the country, and deer are in my fucking yard everyday and they suck, they’re just rats with hooves.

So my assumption was always that some guy was thinking about what to make a wendigo look like, going “Wendigo… that’s a Native American monster. What goes with Native Americans? Let’s flip through the old internal dictionary of stereotypes real quick. Dream catchers, totem poles, feathers, beads, those little tassel things on clothes, bald eagles, deer… hey, deer. Deer! And wouldn’t it be creepy if a deer was kind of fucked up? Boy, there’s an idea that’ll never get old!” And then we were off to the races.