Salad Fingers Explained: An Analysis of Broken Imaginations 

Visit www.Audible.com/wendigoon or text ‘wendigoon’ to 500-500

Wait until you see the next episode, it explains EVERYTHING.

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!”

“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.

I showed my dad the first salad fingers episode when I was a kid, and he cancelled our internet for 6 months.

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 also have to mention that Salad is british, the poor guy" almost made me spit out my food

David Firth is basically the walking embodiment of “it’s not that deep”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

speaking of personalized horror, the thing that scares me the most is the utter loneliness that salad goes through

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 bet the guy that does the "wendigoon out of context" videos is going to have a lot of fun with this one

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

No human being has ever had bigger “cool high school history teacher” vibes than this man

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 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

boards of canada's "beware the friendly stranger" may be the most itchiest song ever made. works perfectly with salad fingers

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 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.

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.

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.

You know David has been laughing his ass off at people who have been trying to find the hidden meaning to this series.

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.

didn't realize I wanted you to do a salad fingers video so badly

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~

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.

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.

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.

Wendigoon: The creator says Salad Fingers has no narrative English Teachers: The red door is meant to symbolize conflict.

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

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. 😋

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.

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

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.

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 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

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

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

"Broken imagination", "polluted wonderland" this script goes hard Goes the hardest

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.

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.

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.

I know I'm late to the party but here's my take: Salad Fingers is the shared imaginary character of 3 children, Hubert, Marjory and Jeremy. He exists sort of as a way for their trauma to have a happy ending because they're kids and Salad is always happy as a way for them to twist their pain into something fun and joyful. Anyway, the main thing that made me think this was "The Cage" episode. I think one of the children was stalked by a boy and then forced to perform a sexual act on him (given the way Salad rubs his hands around the bars in an up and down motion). The reason the curtain drops and everything goes back to light and upbeat is because as a SA survivor myself, you kind of wish for a curtain drop moment like that when you reflect. Ok that's my take, it's definitely not perfect but its the one that resonates with me :)

Thank you Dad for once again covering the interests I’m too scared to go through myself

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.

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 have a profound respect for Salad Fingers Purely because it remembers what makes horror good. Mystery

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’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.

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.

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 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.

No way... Wendigoon just dropped an hour-long Salad Fingers video? Amazing! *edit:* oh awesome they gave me my checkmark 😮

when my sister was getting married, we both laughed remembering that scene with Salad wearing a veil looking at the mirror

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 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.

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

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

WOOOOOWWWWW never in my life did I think I would see such a thorough breakdown of my childhood trauma LOL thank you wendigoon

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.

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.

45:09 You perfectly described my reaction to 9/11. I was five at the time, and the way I made sense of what my mother described to me would easily make for a darkly surreal cartoon. I imagined bad men with evil laughter mind controlling the pilot to crash his helicopter. I knew there were people on flight but didn’t really comprehend it. I felt bad, but in a superficial way, as I ran off to play immediately after my mom told me what happened (basically just that bad men made a pilot crash into a building, nothing more explicit than that).

Dude you are literally insane. You uploaded two banger vids in the span of two days. Absolute legend. Thanks dad

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.

I swear this guy must just constantly be editing, he’s making awesome hour long videos almost every day

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.

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.

he goes long periods of time without uploading, then hits us with a double. What a guy

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.

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.

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.

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

When I started making my own theories about salad I got the idea that he represented someone born into trauma, which is why he finds things like rust and other odd things lovely. I recognized when I got older that the things I was around in my traumatic childhood are things that I now find soothing. The scene where salad is in the cage and then pulls down the curtain to fly away on the tap in my mind 100% represents dissociating/detaching from traumatic situations

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.

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

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.

18:44 You said it's a 14-year old series I'm guessing based on the RU-vid upload date of episode one, but it's closer to 18 years as the first animations were created as Flash videos before RU-vid existed. They were being shared and getting cult status in the early days of Internet animation on niche sites like b3ta long before they got uploaded to RU-vid

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

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.

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

Here are the main motifs that I got from this series: -Fetishization of decay. Salad has a fetish for rust; in a sexual way but it clearly is more pervasive than just that, rusted objects have a very strong power over him. This fetish can also be seen with the dead dog and the other depictions of him forming relationships with filth and corpses. -Sadomasochism. Salad takes pleasure both out of his own pain and the pain of others i.e. murder. The romancing of the dead dog also factors into this. -The fact that in his delusion, the dead dog is half his age and he was going to be taken in by the cops for this. The fact that pedophilia is an aspect of his fantasy and the awareness that it's something against the law, to me, holds some meaning. -Fixation with body parts. The sewn together skin, collected hair, hoarded corpses, and blood-smeared mirror stored in a box all factor into this. -The entire weird undertone that's at once extremely horny and extremely restrained. I'm going to be looking at this in a Freudian way bc I'm a literature student and we're allowed to do that, psych majors keep seething. The thing that ties all these themes together, to me, is the mother. Lets view the symbol of the mirror shard that holds the memory of his mother. It is stained with the blood that brings him both pain and pleasure, reflecting how his mother nurtured him with abuse. When it comes to the weird sexual vibe of the "orgasmic" rust and all that, the Oedipal connotations of this needs not be stated to anyone who knows the definition of the word (and I won't be the one to break it to those who don't!). However, I'd like to look at one of the less-frequently discussed Freudian concepts of the Eros and Thanatos drive- the respective drives towards life and death. Eros is the desire for life-giving actions, sex, eating, friendship, etc. Thanatos is the death drive, manifesting in violence, self-harm, suicidal tendencies. With Salad, it's clear that these two concepts are muddled in a way that, by no coincidence, parallels the nurture-abuse relationship he had with his mother. Because of this, he is attracted to corpses, to decay, to rust. The fact that he marks the mirror with his blood, his blood that he takes so much pleasure in, and saves it shows that he does hold quite the affection for his mother despite her abuses. Having formed a decent argument for Mr. Fingers' disastrous upbringing that has left him mentally warped down to an extremely basic level, I'd like to talk about the meaning of the mirror shard itself. A mirror shows only a reflection. When he looks into the shard, Salad sees only his mother, not himself. The only part of the mirror he keeps is the one containing his mother. I believe this reflects the idea that Salad is lacking a certain essence that would make him a complete person. All his emotional drives are dictated by a dead woman and so thoroughly that he continues to love her. How could he be a complete person? Perhaps this is why he collects hairs, intimate pieces of people who Are, unlike himself who Is Not. Perhaps this, too, is why he imagines his friends, faxcimilies of humans with their own complex lives reduced to finger puppets. Befriending a corpse is much the same. What was once a person is now something far simpler, but it still maintains the shape of a man. This also explains how, even within his own fantasy, he is a criminal. The fact that he has sex with a decaying dog, in his mind, is normal. That is simply where his sexuality is inclined, there is no moral breach to him there, this much is natural. The sin, however, is the fact that the dog corpse is underage. It's in his delusion, this is something he adds to the scenario whether consciously or unconsciously. I believe this reflects on how he internalized the insults from his mother as a standard for how he truly is a bad person. If, in a hypothetical situation, Mr. Fingers could gain the perspective that the decaying dog aspect of this fantasy is deeply deviant and Wrong, for this reason I doubt that he would ever seek to change it. The wrongness of it is an aspect of the fantasy. Because he's so emotionally crippled, because his drive for life is so muddled with his drive for death, his mind is stuck in this eternal limbo of being creepily horny. He touches the rust that feels almost orgasmic, but to actually reach that orgasm is at once straying too close to the Eros side of the world and straying too far from mother; towards the adult sphere. If you're a fan of serial killer documentaries, I feel like there are a few rhyming lines between here and there. It's a familiar refrain. CONCLUSION: Salad Fingers is a half-formed homunculus of a man, given birth but not life, given breath but not essence, given body but no soul. He is crippled beyond repair and trapped from help by the machinations of is own mind, and these machinations all bring him pleasure. That is the outcome of his abuses. P.S. Wendigoon if you read this, love your stuff! Keep on trucking! Been around for a while, was worried I'd get bored after the conspiracy iceberg was over but you've only gotten better, way to turn algorithm luck into a real career! That's not always common. Thanks for posing the prompt, I love this kind of analysis (clearly) and it's cool to have a space to spew it out, even if it's a space so temporary, tiny, and ephemeral as a single comment.

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.

People analyzing salad fingers: this is so very DEEP David Firth: haha funny green man goes brrrrr

My personal theory is that Salad Fingers shows the outside perspective of the average day-to-day-life of a British person.

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.

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 :)

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

Man this was such a treat. This was one of the first “series” on RU-vid 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 RU-vid horror” itch that salad fingers hits. Keep up the amazing content 🙏🏼

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!

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.

As someone with cptsd, I can definitely see how this could reflect the phenomenon of children representing their trauma through imaginative play. I've certainly played out my fair share of interesting themes.

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.

"no child should ever know about topics like these" kids everywhere rushing to make their friends watch these videos in the 2010s: that sign can't stop me because i can't read no but seriously, I love this interpretation of it. Growing up in an extreme sort of environment can make children sort of... draw into themselves and try to process it, and when they do that, they often have no choice but to come out of it thinking that it is normal because thinking it's not normal just *hurts.* To the point of deliberately avoiding that which seems normal, or being scared of it, or being sent into a crisis by it when you can't do anything but face it- like that little girl who could speak that made Salad Fingers freak out. Story time, I had a lot of not very good friends when I was younger. They were very... obsessed with violent types of things, to the point where it permeated our relationships. We would play games where we'd scroll down the front page of snuff sites like bestgore until there was only one of us who could bare to keep looking, and whenever we wanted to be really serious about a promise or a plan for an event, we would do a blood promise- writing the conditions on our arms with sharpie and then underlining it with one cut by a boxcutter. We discussed all sorts of terrible things and shared media that was frankly way too graphic for kids in second grade to be seeing, and violence and gore and death became very normalized. I still remember the first time I suggested a blood promise to someone and they were understandably DEEPLY concerned. It's been a long time of working through the steady white noise of violence going on in the background of my mind, but now that you mention it... I kind of see my younger self in salad fingers.

49:50 you can here him kinda tearing up when talking about his idea of the story and man it really hits like a truck it really is tragic and you can see how invested wendigoon is in it