Salad Fingers/WMG

Salad Fingers is a woman from an alternate WW 1 that went nuclear.

This explains her mannerisms, memories, "cross dressing," and location all in one go.

David Firth is Chris Cunningham

...aka the director of Aphex Twin's Windowlicker, Come to Daddy, Monkey Drummer, Rubber Johnny, and Björk's All Is Full Of Love.

They both make bloody frightening works, with funny elements. And Firth made a fan video for Aphex's Milkman. Yeah.

Salad Fingers eating himself at the end of episode 6 is a metaphor for...

Completely losing his mind. By eating himself, he is destroying his last threads of sanity. His 'new self' eats his 'old self' and goes completely insane.

Salad Fingers is based off David Firth's dreams (or nightmares)

Come on, what type of person thinks of a web series like Salad fingers in their waking life. It's the stuff of nightmares! Probably because they were likely based on nightmares. David Firth's twisted, demented psyche conjured up every episode, and David dreamed them. The reason it's so Mind screwy is because they run on dream logic, and are based on those nightmares conjured up by fears, worries, and pure horror.

There Was a Nuclear War

This would be "The Great War" he keeps referring to. All the bizarre beings (including salad fingers) are mutants who survived the atomic holocaust, and the whole thing drove him mad.

• But,wait! It gets worse!

The Great War is the same one in the fallout universe,and it is set in a particularly Bombed area of The United States. The girl that you saw during the picnic episode? She was from Shady Sands,and was looking for some help,because she got kidnapped by raiders but managed to escape and ran off,leading her to this hellhole!

But,wait! If this is set in the fallout universe,where is all the Raiders,or the brotherhood?

Seriously? Who would want to go to the place where Salad Fingers lived? Anyway,the brotherhood only come when there is tech,and the only technology I saw in the series was that bloody radio,and that probably didn't even work in the first place! The raiders also come when there is stuff to pil-- HEY! Wait! Maybe they did come! Maybe Salad Fingers was an odd ghoul living there,with the long fingers and all,and went totally insane when he saw the raiders destroying everything he knew! Maybe he had friends! Those were the sock puppets! Maybe it's set just after the war,since he says to a sock puppet that he didn't see him,since the person who the puppet was based on was a soldier in the great war...

Hey,wait. That doesn't make sense. The Great War was nuclear warfare,so...HOW CAN YOU GO TO A NUCLEAR WAR?

Maybe Salad Fingers meant the resource wars,not the great war. That was probably the nickname for the resource wars.

• • ...dude, stop watching Salad Fingers. It's messing you up.
    • OK. XKCD should help...Maybe...Oh god.... SALAD FINGERS IS HORRIBLE!
  • ...Firth might actually be hinting at this one--At one point, Salad Fingers is shown singing "We'll Meet Again," which is best known as part of the score from "Dr. Strangelove."
    • This troper is not opposed to the show taking place in the Fallout universe, but the character of Salad Fingers is clearly English.
      • He can be English American.
        • The Fallout games only show what happened to America... THIS is what happened to Europe!
          • Word of God does say that Europe got it worse than America.

Not only was there a nuclear war, Salad Fingers is a Distant Finale for Threads.

Decades after Northern England is destroyed and civilization dies out, only a handful of children born after the war have survived, and despite being severely mutated by the radiation and driven insane by the loneliness and desolation of the wasteland that used to be Sheffield, are managing to eke out a very meager living.

Think about it. They both apparently take place Oop North, the burnt hellscape Salad Fingers lives in looks suspiciously like the one that was left after Sheffield was destroyed (complete with medieval-style hovels and scattered remnants of the world that was), and Salad Fingers, like the characters in Threads, seems to survive off of wild animals and expired canned foods left over from before the war.

• Nah. Salad Fingers still speaks idiomatic contemporary English, albeit with a northern accent, whereas the first generation raised (let alone born) after the war in Threads spoke in ungrammatical phrases which largely seemed to be local dialect nouns. Plus Salad Fingers himself has ideas about needing to go off to the war, suggesting that he's from the generation which suffered the attack.
  • Maybe it's not that distant of a finale, then. It could take place around the same time as the movie - or shortly afterwards - in a more rural part of England. If he's from the generation that suffered the attack instead of the one born after it, then his still managing to speak coherently (sort of) would make more sense. The Mind Screw (mutated creatures, Companion Cubes coming to life, etc.) could all be his hallucinations.^[1]

Salad Fingers is Murdoc Niccals' mother.

Salad Fingers is The Man Who Rules the Universe.

They both live in an isolated shack in the middle of a desolate wasteland. The "cat" was probably just some corpse that Salad Fingers picked up one day and decided to try and feed it.

Salad Fingers is a Shell-Shocked Veteran.

He fought alongside his brother in The Great War and is scarred as a result. He is repressing the experience, as shown in the episode where he takes his brother's corpse out to dinner, and his escape from reality (seeking refuge in the middle of nowhere) has made this worse, to the point where all he has to comfort him is inanimate objects, thus his obsession with them. His finger puppets are the closest thing he has to company, and thus, he imagines them as such. While he lives a relatively happy life in complete and total denial, occasionally, his guilt in fighting the war manifests itself in this world of his creation taking such forms as the radio which torments him and the scene in which he eats his fingerpuppet-turned-human-turned-clone's brain. The ending of "Picnic" shows what happens when these things are gone--the veil is completely lifted and cold hard reality strikes him hard in the face...

• It's worth noting that Salad Fingers said Jeremy Fisher fought the Great War with him.
• When Salad Fingers digs up Kenneth's corpse, he states something along the lines of "It was frightfully rude of you blokes to leave for the war without me.", implying that he didn't fight in the war.
  • Or maybe his brother got drafted first?

Salad Fingers was a Historian with a Specialty in World War I Who went Mad After a Nuclear War

Alternatively, a guy who was just a Great War buff. But really, think about it! The man lives through a nuclear war, loses most everything, and gets hideously mutated. His madness drives him into delusions of being a part of his favorite point in history to study, Great War Britain. That would explain all the references to such! GENIUS!

Salad Fingers is a Time Lord

Think about it: a Time Lord gets stranded on a planet, he regenerates, but something goes horribly wrong. He goes mad and becomes delusional. The safety cupboard in the eighth episode was a TARDIS that no longer functioned.

• • And this explains the whole "Eating his own corpse" thing at the end of ep 5. Although in Salad Fingers context, he probably ate his past self.

Salad Fingers is raped at the end of episode 4.

A lot of things in Salad Finger's world are clearly just his delusions--the talking finger-puppes, the radio that functions without any machinery inside--and those delusions are his way of coping with the post-apocolyptic hellscape he is living in. The most impossible thing to ever happen on the show was when the "little boy" had him in that cage, so Salad Fingers just pulled down a curtain, then flew away on a giant tap. His escape was just a delusion he convinced himself of to avoid aknowledging that he was being raped.

The finger puppets, and the radio represent Salad Fingers' friends and family from before the Great War.

They all died in whatever catastrophe blew his homeland into a dusty waste. He has post-traumatic stress disorder, and copes by pretending the inanimate objects in his house are his old loved ones. The hair in episode 8 belonged to them.

• And the "Safety Cupboard" could be where he hid when the disaster happened.

The man in the BBQ apron has similar delusions.

His child died in The End of the World as We Know It, and he has convinced himself that the kid is in the baby carriage. That's why he gets so mad when Salad Fingers takes it away.

Salad Fingers is somehow related to the Slender Man

• It could all take place in the distant past, and by now he could have mutated further into what we now know as the Slender man. He even has the finger thingies.

Salad Fingers takes place in the Warhammer 40,000 Universe

Salad Finger's planet was tainted by Chaos, which would explain the various mutations he and the other people we see have. The Great War was the war fought when the Imperium of Man tried to retake the planet, while the "ghastly trenches" Salad Fingers mentioned once refers to the trench warfare that occured when the Death Korps of Krieg was called in to fight. Eventually, the Imperial authorities in the sector decided "screw this", and simply performed Exterminatus on the planet. For some reason though, Salad Fingers and a select others survived, possibly because they were in underground bunkers at the time.

Everything that is happening in the salad fingers world happens perfectly normally

Its just not Earth/This Dimension/This Universe. Salad Fingers is actually perfectly sane in this context

Salad Fingers's home was bombed out while he was in the safety cupboard

...Or at least, somewhere very close by was bombed out, probably taking family/friends along with any semblance of civilization. It would explain the fact that, every time Salad Fingers is in said cupboard, he ends up in intense emotional distress for no apparent reason.

Salad Fingers actually had a sister named Bourdoise, who died in the fallout.

He pretends that the termite (or whatever the actual hell it is) is Bourdoise to cope with losing a family member, as with the rest of his Companion Cubes. This also might be the reason for his random cross-dressing in "Friends"; perhaps he had a sister who was going to get married, but some catastrophe happened and presumably killed her off before it could go through. He fantasizes about the "big day" that never happened by dressing himself up in a wedding dress, and since there would be a family resemblance, he can use his own reflection as a substitute for his late (or missing) sister.

Salad Fingers is Drusilla.

Mutated by the nuclear holocaust, but of course not dead. Just think about it. They're basically the same character.

Salad Fingers is a survivor of a Zombie Apocalypse.

The virus or whatever caused his green skin, rotting teeth and emaciation (and the wierd, prog-like fingers, think the headcrab zombies in Half Life). Naturally it affects the nervous system, leading to his wierd, awkward gait and bizarre delusions. Plus he totally eats the brains of his doppelganger at the end of that one episode. I think.

Salad Fingers takes place in an Alternate history of WWI

One in which the Triple Alliance pushed the Entente off of Europe and shelled England with millions upon millions of shells of various forms of gas and conventional artillery, leaving it a desolate, sparsely populated wasteland.

• Salad Fingers himself was a mentally ill man before the war, the gassing of England and the isolation only drove him over the edge
• The body in the backyard really is his brother Kenneth, he likely deserted and returned home to die after being gassed or badly wounded. The reason his corpse is just a torso and head? Salad Fingers ate bits of him to fend off starvation
• Salad Fingers was gassed just enough to ruin his lungs. His hallucinations are likely a way of warding off the pain of his lungs filling with fluid.
• The only survivors are children and others too handicapped to fight the war. The reason? England began to draft anyone and everyone who could hold a weapon in desperation, leaving, as noted, children (The two Salad Fingers encounters), the deformed (the stalker) and those that have extreme forms of mental illness (The "young boy" and "Aunt" Salad Fingers visits in the first and latest episode)
• The reason Salad Fingers had a complete freak out when the little girl spoke? Up until then, Salad Fingers had been imagining himself to be living in a fantasy based on happier memories when the Great War first started or was going well. With the little girl being the first human contact he's likely had in years, it forced him out of his fantasy and made him face reality, as noted in another entry on this very page.
• Maybe this takes place in an alternate version of the Leviathan universe, and the Clankers won out over the Darwinists at the expense of Earth's environment (which was ravaged by the hyper-increased CO₂ emissions caused by the war)?

Salad Fingers is a survivor of the First Alien War.

Unfit for slavery like many of the other survivors, Salad Fingers is horribly mutated by the alien's weapons. His/Her brother was probably an X-COM soldier. The skeleton he dug up was probably just a neighbour.

The girl in episode 5 is just another level of delusion

Think about it; yeah she's the first person that speaks in anything but various lengths of loud, staticy screaming. However, she knows his name despite apparently just now meeting him; okay perhaps she knew him before he was delusional, or it's the old "Oh that's just mister salad fingers, don't play with him children". But then he freaks out when he understands her speech, and she starts smiling, slowly tilting her head, and asks him "What's wrong Mister Salad Fingers? Don't you like my mouth words?" Nobody talks that way, ever. Except... SF himself. He wasn't being confronted with reality, he was being confronted with a whole new flavor of crazy, one he simply wasn't used to.

The whole thing never happened

Mr. Salad Fingers is in a psychosomatic coma in an insane asylum, or living in a real post-apocalyptic world where his deformities and the creatures he meets are hallucinations, or he is dead and in his own personal hell - either way, he's trippin' balls.

Salad Fingers is an alternate version of Lennie from Of Mice and Men

The both enjoy feeling things, and they're both rather tall. In this universe Lennie didn't have George or his Aunt Clara to keep him in check, so he was left alone with his own thoughts. We've seen in the book that he hallucinates when he's alone, so becoming a lonely delusional madman isn't too far off.

1. ↑ Don't take this WMG too seriously, though.