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Perplexity about Willow's short film (SPOILER)


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So, I have some questions: first, why did a shadow attack Willow? So "they" can also enter our world? Without portals? Without nothing?
How come the monster attacks Willow in particular? At the time she was not connected (presumably) in any way with Maxwell's and Wagstaff's experiments.
Why does the shadow get scared of Bernie? I thought that the Constant had transformed it, but apparently it was already "demoniac bear" before.
And above all... how Willow saved herself in the storage room? What causes the explosion?
I know that art is emotion and feeling, and that we are talking about a game and not a work of narrative.
But this short film are beautiful scenes totally random, it doesn't make sense :'D

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1 minute ago, amethystMushroom said:

The shelf in the storage room contains Willow's lighter, and some bottles of presumably flammable liquid.

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Yes, but the dynamics of the scene remain dark and unclear. Too bad, it would have been the most exciting scene ever, instead it is left to the viewer's imagination. Mah.

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I assumed that because Willow was young she was able to see ghosts and shadows as the spirits can be seen easily by children. And the shadow being scared of the bear as she has a strong attachment to it and she feels safe when she had it so her attachment to it will protect her from any danger as she sees it as a protector. 

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About how Bernie scared away the Shadow, I believe stuffed toys in general provide comfort for children because they give children a sense of protection, this work in a literal sense in the animated short and it protected Willow from the Shadow.

I also read it in an article it states:

"Part of the reason why teddy bears provide comfort for children is because these transitional objects give children a sense of protection and security."

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The billboard in Winona's short alluded to many supernatural occurrences in the "normal" world, including shadow monsters if I remember correctly.

The shadow creature attacking Willow probably just means that she's prone to stress, insanity, and she has some supernatural power of her own after all. Shadow creatures aren't drawn to mentally healthy people.

Bernie powers will have to be speculated, but I think the Winona short established that the "normal, non-Constant world" is actually far from normal, but perhaps weird things happen on a smaller scale.

3 minutes ago, Pop Guy said:

dark and unclear

That has been the nature of DS/T for a while now.

I get what you mean, but in this case, I think it's forgivable because the animation has to remain as short as possible, many of the viewers already know that Willow has an affinity to fire, and anyone else viewing this needs to be told as quickly as possible this character's association with fire. Perhaps the storytelling could have been a little stronger here--there seems to be no indication of Willow reaching for the lighter or even a bottle of cleaning chemicals. Heck, she wasn't even holding the lighter when she came out of the storeroom.

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It's not the first time the shadows have invaded the normal world.

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I assume that Maxwell is kind of to blame.for bringing them out.

 

If we're assuming single player Willow is canon, then there's the fact that she lights fires out of thin air when she goes insane.

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I alway thought the survivors are stuck on the constant not the shadows. I thought the shadows could always enter the real world and the constant and were ever else as the live in the next dimension so are free to move in and out of existence at will and people with mental problems are able to see them. 

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24 minutes ago, ResettePlayer said:

The shadow creature attacking Willow probably just means that she's prone to stress, insanity, and she has some supernatural power of her own after all. Shadow creatures aren't drawn to mentally healthy people.

 

14 minutes ago, Ogrecakes said:

It's not the first time the shadows have invaded the normal world.

The shadows were present in the world since a while, being showing in different ways, with the addition of Maxwell as "public face", their presences started to be more explicit.

 

14 minutes ago, Ogrecakes said:

If we're assuming single player Willow is canon, then there's the fact that she lights fires out of thin air when she goes insane.

That would be Pyrokinesis (I mentioned that in one of my threads), and sounds good. 

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2 hours ago, Pop Guy said:

So, I have some questions: first, why did a shadow attack Willow? So "they" can also enter our world? Without portals? Without nothing?
How come the monster attacks Willow in particular? At the time she was not connected (presumably) in any way with Maxwell's and Wagstaff's experiments.
 

Propably when Maxwell had his Magic Show, some of the Shadow Creatures got away from the constant and got into our world.So the portal was the Codex Umbra

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They're nightmare creatures. Like a lot of children, she was frightened by nightmares and her teddy bear comforted her. Up to that point it's more of a metaphor. Then when the wardens took Bernie away, the stress/fear triggered her firestarter powers and she walked out of the normal world and into the Constant. Her vignette suggests that she was not dragged but entered the Constant seeking a new life.

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I googled it, and the only orphanage fire I could find in the right time period was the corn hill orphanage in 1901, which, based on willows age, seems accurate. This would put the short before Maxwell even found the codex, making this the earliest known sighting of the shadows in the real world.

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On 5/7/2019 at 1:04 PM, Ogrecakes said:

 If we're assuming single player Willow is canon, then there's the fact that she lights fires out of thin air when she goes insane.

I just assumed that was her using the lighter to remain her cool when she was insane. edit: cool as in the phrase “keeping her cool”. Kind of like the opposite of being insane.

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Willow may or may not be pyrokinetic, just fireproof all along. So being fireproof lets you do all kind of arsonism without any physical consecuence (assuming she made the fire with the lighter and the bottles).

The street peddler portrait from the gorge also makes me believe that after escaping the orphanage, she lived a sad and hard life in the streets. That may be why she saw the constant as a new beginning and probably embraced it purposely.

Overall in the constant she's funny, witty and cheerful, so she probably found true happiness in the fact that she now at least has friends. Survival seems to have been a common thing for her every day life since the beginning, so she probably worries about that less than the others.

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1 minute ago, ItsaGamer05 said:

I was also hoping they would show HOW Willow came into the Constant. It’s not like she just appeared magically, right?

But she did. All of them appear magically

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Just now, Mooagain said:

But she did. All of them appear magically

I mean, you’re not wrong. I guess I mean how did they appear magically? We know both Wilson and Winona built the portal thing (forgot what it was called) and that’s how they got in the constant. Willow’s short mainly focused on how she became a pyromaniac and shadow creatures being in the real world, which is fine but as I said before I just want to know how she came to the Constant.

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1 hour ago, Mooagain said:

But she did. All of them appear magically

They had reasons, it's not just magic.

They don't suddenly appear in the Constant, they're taken by portals, which in most cases they are tricked into building by Maxwell in return for something he promised him.

We don't see that happen with Willow, which is sad.

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3 minutes ago, Angel_Octoling said:

They had reasons, it's not just magic.

They don't suddenly appear in the Constant, they're taken by portals, which in most cases they are tricked into building by Maxwell in return for something he promised him.

We don't see that happen with Willow, which is sad.

Probably we'll see more details in the future, seems like this is just the beginning, by now.

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Regarding how the shadows exist/are visible in the regular world, and why they're attacking Willow, I figured that Willow was just insane, even as a child. You can only see the shadow creatures when your sanity is low, and they can only hurt you when your sanity is even lower. And maybe her bear helped her regain sanity in short bursts.

 

Or, if you interpret the sanity meter as representing stress, Willow was probably a pretty severely stressed-out kid, given that it looks like she's an orphan, or was abandoned by her parents, and has mean people in charge of her who take away her bear and lock her in a closet.

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We don't know how Willow entered The Constant. We know only know that Wilson and Winona gained entry by a man-made portals, with some help from the other side (atleast in Wilson's case). We've also seen portals dictated by other means, like ancient portal that brought the survivors to The Forge and the well that survivors opened by using an ancient key in order to escape The Gnaw.

Like @ShadowDuelist pointed out, whatever happened at the orphanage must have been earlier, since Willow is still a child in the animation and by the time she appeared in The Constant she was in her early twenties (from what we know from Don't Starve). Anything could have happened meanwhile.

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