About Webber's lore

[cropo]

2 hours ago, eosdusknoir said:

surprisingly enough, a lot of animals can overfeed themselves to death. not tarantulas, but don't expect a lot of logic from constant monsters though, i personally like the wacky feeling of it.

what really makes me curious is this one line: 

what did webber ask help for? the main assumption is that he asked to be separated from the spider, but wouldn't it make more sense that he would've gotten eaten after entering the constant? there's so many possibilities here for his lore. klei probably won't make something too dark for him (though, a child getting eaten alive by a spider is kinda dark already, and don't starve isn't especially a rainbows game), but i'm sure whatever we get it'll be pretty sad, since most of webber's quotes are already pretty sad on their own.

i just hope spider boy lives a good, happy life

 

As I said, nearly every creature in the constant is cannibalistic. Even if Webber was a spider pre-constant and he died in the constant as a spider, another spider would have eaten him and then would have accidentally also eaten the human bones off of Webber and probably wouldn't have been able to digest entire bones. This would explain him being a spider before being eaten in the constant, he wasn't eaten alive, he died in the constant and was eaten by a spider that thought he was another spider and was revived.

[Milordo]

8 hours ago, cropo said:

As I said, nearly every creature in the constant is cannibalistic. 

Just like real life 

[cropo]

4 hours ago, Milordo said:

Just like real life 

There is a special meaning to it in Don't Starve, especially since most of the creatures have sentience like the pigs, and if Webbers examination quote is to be believed, even spiders.

[Milordo]

2 hours ago, cropo said:

There is a special meaning to it in Don't Starve, especially since most of the creatures have sentience like the pigs, and if Webbers examination quote is to be believed, even spiders.

If you eat your brother you become sentient?

[cropo]

54 minutes ago, Milordo said:

If you eat your brother you become sentient?

What? No lol.  This is kinda going off-topic but...

 

Don't Starve has elements of satire on colonialism, an Immigrant from the UK is promised a sweet life in the US only to have crippling debt and a worse life than was promised. Suddenly he finds(or, possibly is allowed to find) a drug-like power to find relatively small success in the world from a mysterious foreign force. Said foreign force was really trying to force him into slavery and even more misery than he had before then.  The same force that offered the same ''benefits'' to a civilization that uses tribe-like weaponry and building designs(the thulecite club is pretty much copy-pasted from the macuahuitl)

 

With no other option, he is forced to reach out to other people and offer them the same things if they immigrate to his new special version of ''paradise''. Our main cast of characters.  The characters, lacking something or missing something in their life take the offer, only to find that the world they reach in is not anything like advertised. They, to, are forced to deplete this new world of its resources and exploit the natives to chop trees, fight each other in manufactured civil wars to harvest their meat, and commit various other forms of cruelty on its inhabitants. It's important to note that every pig in the game has a name, they're not just some random npc mob, but the uncompromising world the players find themselves in somewhat forces them to desecrate them for their own survival.

 

Cannibalism was very commonly practiced among natives of various tribes that have been conquered in the past, and various forms of propaganda were made by their conquerers mocking them as savages for the act of doing so, considering them to be ugly, inhuman, dumb, lesser beings which is what the pigs in Don't Starve are. They're easily tricked and bribed, even into attacking each other for the players gain.  Many of the creatures that eat their own are sentient, Webber even hints that the spiders are sentient, this is an important distinction to make.

 

So it's not a coincidence that they made the decision for players to also resort to cannibalism before they had to backtrack on that feature, and it's no coincidence that they made Warbucks as a character for Hamlet, again before they had to backtrack on that decision. It's no surprise that Wagstaff intends to exploit the constant and its resources for his own personal gain.   People think it's bad character design that Webber can cause an entire group of spiders to kill each other to collect their meat so he can cannibalize it, but this is just part of the sad reality that Don't Starve has been showing the players from the start.   I think the reason he starts with monster meat and spider eggs is because he was sent to the constant with the intention of ''colonizing'' it, and then could bribe the resulting colony with the meat to exploit them further even if he personally does not want this.

 

What makes Don't Starve Together unique from Singleplayer is that it's building up a possible solution to this cycle.   Unlike the original game, which had no ''win'' conditions(only the sad revelation that the one responsible for the suffering was a middle-management slave), they actually introduce game modes like the Forge and the Gorge that do have win conditions that involve the players working  together to fight aggressive tyrants, or help natives of another land fend off an existential threat.  The recent update Return of Them has also introduced a new element to the issue of creating stable civilizations from the brutal exploitation of others, the Hubris of Nature. Even the shadow creatures(the ones exploiting and conquering worlds) are not immune to this cataclysmic event, their current middle-management slave is completely unstable and highly likely to be self-destructive for them as well, which is going to force their hand in being more active in future content. DST is certainly more optimistic than SP was.

 

I can't cover everything, but the themes of colonialism is everywhere in Don't Starve, even if you look at how Nightmare Fuel skins effect the characters.  Natives of the constant change physically, losing their intelligence and sense of self in their triumphant skins, Wormwood, being a thing of nature, is rotted and sapped of all life, while the human players triumphant skins gain prestige, power, and fancy outfits.

[Milordo]

6 minutes ago, cropo said:

 

Damn man, i was joking xD