Fridge Brilliance
- In the ending (of the single player game), Maxwell makes it clear that even the "king is bound to the board", meaning that he (or whoever is on the throne) still has to play by the world's rules. It can be said that the throned person is still in some sense a "pawn". And in chess, kings DO move like pawns, just in all directions!
- In addition to this, Charlie, Maxwell's former assistant and the eventual monster of the night, eventually comes to take the throne from Wilson and rule it with more power than even Maxwell did. She forcibly ripped Wilson from the throne to take it herself. In chess, when a pawn makes it to the other side of the board, it can be promoted to anything except the king, and this includes the queen piece. And while Charlie's true extent of rule over the world of Don't Starve Together is dubious, she is doubtlessly the most powerful person to sit on the Throne. Charlie can physically attack people during the night and wields the power of the darkness with vigor. By making it to the place where the king sat, aka the farthest end of the board, she became the world's Queen; the most powerful piece on the board.
- Wendy is noted in-game to have a much weaker attack than any of the other playable characters. This makes sense, as Wendy is only a child compared to the groups of adults around her who are also making their way to survive. And unlike Webber, who is augmented by the spider that ate him, she has no physical enhancements which would even the odds.
- One of the quirks of Wolfgang the strongman is that his muscle mass decreases the hungrier he is. While it doesn't work as suddenly for the human body in general, it makes sense. When the body is hungry and not getting enough food, muscle is usually the first thing to be broken down and used for sustenance.
- One of the noted downsides for Wickerbottom is that she gets a penalty when she's eaten spoiled food. The older one gets, the more susceptible to parasites and foodborne illnesses one will be. It fits, then, that Wickerbottom gets a sanity penalty if she eats something too far gone. With her old age and the time period, she may well have seen plenty of people get severely sick or die from eating bad food, and that's with doctors and hospitals available. Out in the wilderness, she'd be extremely stressed out at the idea of the already dubious food they eat being so far gone. Since one bite could carry that final nail in the coffin if it ended up being poison or carrying something nasty.
- WX-78 is usually considered the best character for Adventure mode, largely due to their upgrades. It may be completely intentional as whoever beats adventure mode is trapped in the throne to free Maxwell. Sure you could sacrifice one of the sympathetic characters tricked by Maxwell, or you could trap the soulless robot that hates all organics and has very little reason to return to the real world anyway.
- When Wagstaff was officially added as a playable character, he's added into the vanilla game. This doesn't seem weird at first, but Wagstaff seems to glitch when he's low on health and a few of his quotes have him acknowledge the fourth wall. Almost as if Wagstaff's presence wasn't supposed to be in the game...
- During the Gorge event, refined salt can be traded to obtain the silverware keys. This might seem a bit weird until you find out that in the Roman Empire salt was used as commodity money among soldiers because salting and brining (immersion in salty water) were two of the few reliable methods of food preservation available during that time. Which also reflects the secondary use of refined salt during the Gorge, as it can be used to restore food's freshness and delay its spoilage.
- Shortly after Woodie's new werebeast forms were revealed, fans on the Internet noticed one particular image of Wilson experimenting on a bird that looks suspiciously like Woodie's goose form. That might explain where these new forms came from!
- In the Turn of Tides trailer, we can see that Wigfrid has shadows under her eyes in the scene where she and Winona help Wilson stand, and her eye briefly twitches too. Later, Wilson and Winona succumb to the Gestalts, but Wigfrid is fine. This is likely because she had low Sanity in terms of in-game mechanics, which translates to low Enlightenment on the lunar island. Gestalts only bother players with high Enlightenment, which explains why Wigfrid wasn't affected.
- In the Reap What You Sow trailer, the characters are all seen doing different things to help improve the growth rate of their crops. Which largely seems to include watering and fertilizing them, or using book magic like Wickerbottom, which makes sense in The Constant. But then you have other characters like Walter who's talking to the plants, or Wes who's seen turning on a radio to play music. This actually makes sense in an abstract way, as talking to or playing music for plants has been long known to be a method of making them grow.
- The festival events in Together are only possible because there's more than one survivor in the same world. If they didn't have someone else to help gather the bare necessities (food, construction materials, firewood, etc.) and fight off the monsters, they wouldn't have time for anything else! Also such celebrations are a lot less fun when you're on your own.
- The character refreshes not only change how the characters work for the sake of gameplay, but also highlight the character development they've gone through in their time in the Constant:
- Wolfgang exchanges his former strength mechanics for one based on exercise. His short shows he searched out Maxwell for a shortcut to get stronger, but now he's shedding that crutch away and going legit.
- Wendy's original relationship with Abigail was largely one-sided, with Abigail simply doing the fighting for her. With her refresh, it's more evenhanded, with Abigail's attack buffing the damage Wendy and her friends can deal, and Wendy now being able to make potions that help her sister in turn.
- None of the survivors call Wes by name, only ever referring to him as "the mime". Well, it's not like Wes ever told them his name; he is a mime, after all.
Fridge Horror
- Maxwell is tortured by ragtime music. At first this seems pretty random. However, considering the way the player characters each sound like different instruments when they talk...
- For all we know, he could have been listening to tortured screaming the whole time.
- However, examination quotes from other characters reveal that the gramophone is indeed playing real music.
- Webber has one of the lowest sanity meters of all the characters in the game. Well, wouldn't you constantly be pretty stressed out at the fact that you're essentially living as a controlling parasite inside of the body of something that once ate you? Too much stress or horror on top of that would be fairly taxing, and a good way to go insane.
- Willow's sanity is also naturally very low. In addition to her pyromania, "From the Ashes" shows that she's been tormented by nightmare monsters from a young age.
- Conversely, Wendy takes a lowered sanity penalty from nighttime and monster auras. Considering how traumatized she was by Abigail's death, small wonder that the things that frighten other characters have less of an effect on her.
- In Next of Kin, we get to see a family photo of Charlie and Winona with their parents. How are they going to react to both their daughters mysteriously disappearing in fires?
- We can add a new layer of Fridge Horror if we take the lore behind the factory's fire in account: Wagstaff's factory burned down in 1919, while Wilson was taken into the Constant in 1921. Winona was taken away by Charlie two years before Wilson, yet she reached the Constant after the events of Don't Starve because the time discrepancy between the Constant and Earth is that wacky. The pinboard shown at the beginning of the cinematic implies that other characters might be in a similar situation, and this really makes one question what will wait for the survivors on Earth when (or if) they will be able to leave the Constant.
- And their situation pales in comparison to Wendy's. Wendy was still a child when she was banished into the Constant in 1911, and according to some of her quotes, she stayed in there for long enough to forget how her parents used to look like. She still looks like a child by the time of Don't Starve Together because the time flow of the Constant did not allow her to grow up. This without taking into account that she spent all of that time alone, forced to kill animals and monsters in order to survive, and with only the ghost of Abigail to give her the strength to hold on her sanity...
- Bonus horror for Warly, since Mama Angeline is an invalid, unable to get help on her own, and there's no sign of any other neighbors to check on her. She may have wasted away never understanding how or why she was seemingly abandoned, despite it happening directly in front of her.
- Why are there graves of all-but-confirmed human children in the Constant? Better yet, who buried them?
- Maxwell might only be using a fraction of the Codex Umbra's power judging by Wortox's examination quote for the book, which is "I don't think he knows how to use it." Maxwell is already powerful enough as he is, so what horrors could he inflict if he learnt how to use the book properly? And what does Wortox know that he's not telling us?
