WMG / Salad Fingers

Salad Fingers was raised in an abusive household.

The introduction of Salad Finger's Mother in Salad Fingers 11 has spurred me into this thought process. While Salad Finger's grasp on reality is tenuous at best, it's clear that Salad Finger's Mother is emotionally abusive towards him. This is difficult to refute since in every scene Salad Finger's Mother is in, she directly insults Salad Fingers. Hints of this were also shown in Episode 8 with the radio.

While he's never been directly shown, Salad Finger's father is probably not better either. Before Episode 10, very few characters other than Salad Fingers himself appeared, but the conversation present in Episode 6 between "Jeremy Fischer" and an unnamed father character is probably a good look at the actual character. This conversation, as shown by the end of it, probably ended in some violent confrontation between the Father and "Jeremy Fischer"

It seems like Salad Fingers may simply imagine scenarios and play all the characters inside. He has occasionally broken into aggressive insults towards the other characters in these scenarios. This could be him trying to emulate his father, or simply adopting his tendencies.

Salad Fingers is a woman from an alternate WWI 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 fan videos for "4", "Girl/Boy Song", and "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.

When Salad Fingers seemed to be consuming himself in Episode 5, he was really consuming the little puppet, and remembering consuming one of his platoon members, who look like he does.

That's why he likes to taste the little puppets, to remind him of the comrades he's eaten.

Salad Fingers is a Hive Mind.

After the Great War, Salad Fingers's platoon developed a hive mind, and became a roving pack of cannibals after the war ended. Whenever food is scarce, they pick one of their own and eat it. Then, Salad Fingers replaces the dead comrade with a puppet, so it's like the fellow cannibal never died. That's why Salad Fingers is shown eating himself in episode 5: because from the perspective of the hive mind, that's exactly what's happening. This also explains why five different sorts of hairs can exist in one house that clearly only has one mind inhabiting it: that one mind has many bodies.

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 Sequel to 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.^note Don't take this WMG too seriously, though.
  • Jossed, probably. In episode 10, we meet his former battalion, who are all at zombie-level intelligence.

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.
  • The Gentlemen could be the intermediate stage. Salad Fingers seems to have plant-like characteristics, so perhaps his shade turns paler, eventually white as he ages. Slender Man could be a Gentleman who Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence after consuming enough hearts.

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)?
  • Remember that WWI was originally called "The War To End All Wars." This is what the world would look like if it had been.

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.

• Psychosomatic? Dude, I don't think your brain can just fake a coma. It can fake pains and twitches and smells and stuff, but coma?

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.

Salad Fingers takes place in the aftermath of Threads

Which explains the post-apocalyptic Oop North vibe Salad Fingers has. Either he was a survivor that went insane in the aftermath of nuclear winter, or he is a brain-damaged mutant that was born in the immediate aftermath of the nuking of England.

Salad Fingers takes place inside the Instrumentality

Salad Fingers, Adventure Time, and Charlie the Unicorn all take place in the same universe

Yes, I know that they are very different in tone, and are made by different people, but this could work. Think about it. Considering the possibility that the "Great War" ended with a nuclear holocaust, and was not WW1, then it could be in line with Adventure Time's "Mushroom War." If the land of Ooo from Adventure Time is a very warped future version of this world (complete with mutated people and animals), then think of it like this. Salad fingers is in England, a few years after the apocalypse. Adventure Time takes place in America, about a thousand years after the apocalypse. The reason why Salad Fingers is so much bleaker is because America of Adventure Time has had much longer to adapt to the world After the End.

In addition, the Ice King's back-story about about the crown could very well be an allegory about his developing psychological problems that are similar to those of Salad Fingers. This would only be in part, though, since his ice powers are obviously real. In this case, the ice crown could also be a subtle way of explaining that he went through the effects of radioactive mutation. The ice powers just come from the fact that it's a fantasy series.

As I mentioned before, many of the residents are probably the ancestors of those who survived the cataclysm. Note that a lot of the characters of Salad Fingers look like horribly dilapidated humans. Now, it's somewhat logical to assume that some of these effects were passed down to the next generation (under the assumptions that (a) the DNA was somehow affected, and/or (b) the toxic radiation was still present by the time that the children were born). If this was the case, then the species would adapt some of these traits after a while. And, centuries down the road, a few of these features would become a little less horrific and a bit more natural (with "natural" being used in the weirdest sense possible). This explains things like stretchable dogs and unicorns, fire people, and a bunch of other things. The talking animals are result of a combination of this, their species beginning the long process of evolution, the inherent fantasy elements, and the fact that animals would have escaped zoos and wildlife preserves after the apocalypse, thereby migrating and crossbreeding with similar animals when compatible. The races that can't be explained by this come from other sources. Weird creatures, such as giants or witches, are mutated forms of several alien races. Either that, or they are legitimate fantasy creatures who came out of hiding when humans began to accept mutated animals and aliens. Also, the Lumpy Space people are canonically interdimentional, so that could also apply to other races. The candy people are the result of advances in science and candy-making technology (along with radiation poisoning, again).

Now to explain Charlie the Unicorn: It takes place during the same time period as Adventure Time, or perhaps a little before, but in another part of America. The odd nature of the creatures, along with the deranged habits of many of them, can be rationalized using the same reasoning that I used for the citizens in Adventure Time.

Salad Fingers is the Ruler of the Universe.

Think about it. Both Salad Fingers and the Ruler of the Universe (from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) live mostly alone, are unaware of everything outside their personal universe, are constantly amazed by the world around them (SF, admittedly somewhat less so), and are both completely unqualified to run for President. Sound similar, don't they? That's because they're ONE AND THE SAME!

Salad Fingers is a scarred war veteran living in our world and hallucinating.

He isn't living in a burnt-out wasteland. He's just a normal guy who is so screwed up in the head that he perceives himself as a ghastly green mutant and others as monstrosities. All of his "experiences" are just how he imagines them. The little boy who comes to Salad Fingers's house in episode 2 is a child going door to door for a school fundraiser and gets stuck in the house with Salad Fingers until he passes out and the child manages to leave. Milton Cubicle is a man whose baby Salad Fingers walked off with and chased him down to get the baby back. The little boy who puts Salad Fingers in a cage is a policeman arresting him and putting him in jail for the night. The little girl who talks is a girl who tries to be nice to deluded old Salad Fingers, only to lead to him breaking down further. Other Salad Fingerses are old platoon members who try to visit him. The tree who screams and calls him Daddy is one of his children, desperately trying to get him to remember his own child. Things of that nature.

• Expanded on here and here.

Salad Fingers killed his whole family.

Don't give me credit for this. I heard it somewhere else. He's so insane he convinced himself they all died in a war. He digs up his brother's body out of guilt.

There is no way to explain what is happening in the show

It's just too complicated for human minds.

The series takes places in the Dust Bowl.

Salad Fingers is more than just insane.

There is more to mental illness than just saying "insane." The various delusions imply some form of schizophrenia. He may have some form of multiple personality disorder, hence why he has a tendency to flip personalities and forget what he's doing very quickly. There is also evidence that he may be trans, due to the whole "birth" thing and the various instances of him wearing or referencing owning women's clothing. Any references to when the series takes place implies that it is somewhere between WWI and WWII, before The Great War became World War I. Knowing how mental illness and queer people of any sort were treated back then, no wonder he snapped.

Salad Fingers is Marjory Stewart-Baxter, and some things in the series clue us in on her life before "The Great War."

Hear me out, this isn’t some Tumblr bullshit, I have some backup for this. Throughout the series SF keeps talking about something called “The Great War” in which SF’s brother fought in. This series seems to take place in some sort of post apocalyptic early 1900’s time period, some believe a bad future where WW1 destroyed the planet. Around that time, it was only the men who went to war and the women stayed behind to care for the house, the kids, and even get jobs of their own. At one point SF wears a dress, and at another she lactates from her teats after rubbing them with nettles, and at another she becomes pregnant with some sort of slime beast, giving birth to it when it bursts out of her body. SF is referred to as male in the series, but there might be a reason behind that.

In episode 2 “friends” SF introduces us to three finger puppets. Hubert Cumberdale, Marjory Stewart-Baxter, and Jeremy Fisher. These puppets are used as guests for a get together.SF’s real name is Marjory Stewart, later Marjory Stewart-Cumberdale, and later Marjory Stewart-Baxter. Hubert was her husband who went off with her brother to fight in “The Great War.” Her brother died in battle and his corpse was sent to her family, who buried him. Hubert later also died, but his body was never found. The death of her husband left Marjory in shambles and she tried to rebuild the lives of herself and her children by marrying another man with the last name of Baxter. (Jeremy may have been one of their laborers, and one of the few people Marjory remembers in her current state.)

Baxter and her children later died in the chaos of whatever “The Great War” caused, remaining citizens were stricken with illness and mutations. Losing a brother, both husbands, her children, and her family caused Marjory to go insane, adopting the alias of a man named Salad Fingers as she can no longer remember her true identity. Marjory mutated into what we know is him, gaining an olive green skin tone, hands mutating to having three long fingers that bend in inhuman ways. Illness caused her voice to change due to vocal damage and to lose her hair and maybe even her breasts. Lack of food may contribute her her emaciated frame.Pieces of her life are still buried in her subconscious, causing her to do odd and surreal things as she roams what is left of her hometown, causing citizens desperately trying to rebuild their lives to look on in concern. In his insanity, SF gained several odd obsessions. Things like rust, blood, and nettles. There isn’t much evidence as to if these are related to his previous life.

I'm only going in depth with relevant episodes if you want to read the full theory here is a link.

Also keep in mind that there are a lot of spoilers in this so, be warned I guess. Also It would make more sense if you watch the series first.

Episode 4: Cage:

SF is going to try and find France, because he(she) has always wanted to visit. He then notices another mutated citizen who has been staring at him for quite a while. SF is uncomfortable with it, and laments that he may have to find France another day. The citizen then stops him, and starts to show affection and garble in a young sounding voice, so maybe he is a young boy. (Maybe even Marjory’s son who managed to survive but got separated from her and, despite all odds, recognizes SF as his mother.) SF puts his hand out to hold the boy off and he responds by playfully licking it. SF is very disturbed by this.

We later see SF talking to a pill bug, calling it Bordois and claiming it to be his little sister, asking her what she’s been gathering. Things take a disturbing turn when he says that Bordois’ body is “so much fun” and that he’d like to give her “a big stroke.” He then tries to, but ends up squishing her and seems genuinely surprised by this. He tells her that she’s “gone flat” and is “all gooey” and states “I shalln’t play with you again, until you’ve had a wash.” This is also where a lot of theories take a disturbing turn, and I want to warn those who have been victims of molestation and rape to turn away now if the subject makes you uncomfortable.

Original theories state that SF molested or raped his little sister, or is the little sister being molested or raped, and the bug scene is a representation of a memory of the molestation/rape. We do know that SF had a brother that fought in the great war, and since this theory here states that SF was originally Marjory, it is possible that Marjory was molested/raped by her brother. I think the brother’s name is clearly stated in the episode he appears in, and it isn’t Bordois. Bordois might have been a nickname or pet name that Marjory got from her brother. One theory I came across included the bug squishing as part of the molestation/rape memory, saying that the brother mockingly said that after she is left exhausted and covered in sexual fluids following the molestation/rape.

Anyways, SF gets a knock on the door and opens it to find a grubby tap tied to a string. After a tap-filled daydream, SF goes to retrieve it, only for it to be pulled away from him. So he chases after it. This leads him to step in a bear trap, causing him to pass out in bliss. Now we see SF in some sort of prison, and he begins to rub at the rusty bars of the window. We find out that the trap was set up by the boy, who blows him(her) a kiss. (The boy may be determined to keep his mother near him, in hopes that she will get better and remember him.) This display of love confuses SF, and he asks the boy what it’s all about. The boy responds by garbling some more, and yelling a bit, startling SF.

SF decides that he’s had enough of the situation, and wants to go home. The boy refuses to let him(her) go and becomes angry. SF then somehow manages to escape the box by pulling down a curtain. When the boy sees that the prison is empty, he starts crying. (Realizing that his mother is just too far gone to realize who she is or recognize her own son, and his fate is to roam the wastelands alone without any family to lean on.)

Episode 5: Picnic:

SF is trying to call up his old friend Charlie because he is arranging a picnic. He describes the different foods that will be at the picnic, causing him to become hungry and call himself Mary Mandolin. (Saying a remembered quote from her “Stop scratching your basket, belly.”) He then brings up Hubert, (incorrectly remembering him as Barbara Logan-Price, another friend of Marjory’s, possibly.) and gives him a friend hat. (A captain's hat to be specific.) And says “There’ll be fog on the shore tonight Bosun.” (Barbara’s husband may have been a sailor, or it could possibly be Hubert, or maybe even Baxter.)

We then see him(her) in his(her) wedding dress, looking in the mirror and crying. “You look so beautiful, it’s your big day.” (Remembering her wedding to either Hubert or Baxter.) He comments that the guests should be there at any time, and we transition to the picnic. It’s SF, and a rather normal looking girl. (Possibly Marjory’s daughter, who might be a hallucination considering that she doesn’t look ill or mutated. Judging by the dirt and blood on her clothes, she could have died from illness while her brother lived on as mutated. She may have died before her mother and brother became separated.) SF asks the girl if she’d like any food, to which she responds by nodding. While she’s eating, SF asks how she likes her food. The girl doesn’t really respond, so SF does so for her, calling her Mabel. (Which could be her name.)

Mabel continues eating and SF comments on her manners and says he’d like to make her his new playmate. (If you watch closely in the window behind him, the Marjory puppet appears. This could be hinting at how Marjory is beginning to remember her daughter, most likely remembering playing with her.) Mabel continues to eat as we zoom in on the Marjory puppet in the window, while SF comments on how dirty Mabel’s clothes are. We go back to the picnic, and SF states “My tummybox feels broken.” (Considering that he(she) has a “baby” in Episode 9, he(she) could be realizing or feeling that he(she) is pregnant, but not coming to a full realization. Marjory could have been pregnant before the results of the war happened.) He then asks Mabel if she’d like some pudding and she nods.

SF pulls out a rusty spoon and gives her some, reciting the “some like it hot” rhyme only replacing “some like it” with “pease pudding.” A crow who has been present during the course of the picnic steals the spoon, leaving SF in shock. Mabel is also shocked. But then they start laughing at the situation, realizing it’s actually pretty funny. Mabel says that she thinks the crow likes spoons too. SF flips out. The citizens of town only communicate through grunts and garbling, and SF is really the only one who can still form words. Mabel begins to ask what’s wrong, causing SF to freak out even more. SF resorts to hiding in a corner of his house, while the words of Mabel haunt him.

The shock of hearing another being form words caused to SF remember his true identity as Marjory. Marjory realized that she was hallucinating playing with Mabel, like old times, and began to wonder of the fate of her son, who she was separated from. She further realizes that the boy who trapped her was, indeed, her son and that she had left him to suffer through his life alone. She also remembers that she’s pregnant, but with how little food she’s been getting and her illness and mutations, that the baby is most likely dead and rotting inside of her. She boomerangs back to her Salad Fingers identity by the next episode.

Episode 6: Present:

Marjory has sunk lower into her insanity, having very vivid and horrible hallucinations. It’s revealed that Jeremy Fisher had gone to fight in the war as well, but his fate it not known. Jeremy gives him a toy horse. SF then eats Jeremy and plays with the horse.

Compare the two one sided conversations at the toilet and with Jeremy Fisher:

Jeremy fisher, I thought you were fighting in the great war.

Crikey, how long has it been since I’ve seen your chops?

I’d like to have a word with you.

Pardon?

I’m not one for accusations, but this one’s cast iron.

I don’t understand, what is this?

I’ve seen you. Tailgating my daughter with aspirations of deflowering her rose.

No! This isn’t true! You’ve got the wrong bloke, squire!

I don’t make mistakes comrade, this one’s textbook.

Wash those bad thoughts away.

So. Jeremy Fisher may have been sent away on leave, or discharged due to serious injury. We do know that Jeremy is black, from his puppet. I don’t necessarily know if only white people were allowed to fight in WW1, but for the sake of this let’s say that in this universe it wasn’t. Jeremy, again, may have been one of Marjory’s family’s laborers. He and Marjory may have been romantically interested in each other, or Jeremy had unrequited love for Marjory. Either way, Marjory’s father didn’t like it, and when he found out while Jeremy was out at war he was furious at the idea of a black man having relations with his daughter. When Jeremy came back, he confronted him about it. Jeremy tried to deny it, but the father just wasn’t having it. It is unknown what exactly happened to Jeremy, but he was most likely fired. Never to be seen by Marjory again. The horse that SF receives earlier is all Marjory has left of him, most likely. After the purple side of the conversations ends SF(Marjory) laments that she never did get to have sex with Jeremy.

Keep in mind that Marjory had gone quite a ways off the deep end, and her memories are manifesting randomly and surreally as her hallucinations get worse. The ending scene where SF is eating himself could be Marjory picturing SF eating her instead. Because SF has taken over Marjory’s mind. Marjory isn’t here anymore. Only Salad Fingers.

Episode 7: Shore Leave:

SF is eating dirt and talking to the Marjory puppet about how the “floor sugar” doesn’t quite taste right today, and that they should make a record. He later stumbles upon the body of Marjory’s brother, Kenneth, that the Hubert puppet supposedly dug up. SF claims himself to be Kenneth’s other brother, and takes joy in Kenneth coming home from the war on leave. SF comments that it was rude of Kenneth and Hubert to leave for the great war without him, and invites Kenneth in for a bath. SF put Kenneth in a suit, commenting on how handsome he his and then playfully tells him he should tuck him into bed that night and flirts with him. (Since SF and Marjory are now the same body and mind, there is conflicting sexual preferences.) There is a comment that Kenneth has come home to “spread his wild oats,” a euphemism for how promiscuous Kenneth might have been.

SF treats Kenneth to a diner of sand, and when the corpse falls over SF props him up with a broken crutch part and says that Kenneth is just sleepy. SF talks about how he’s been keeping himself busy by singing night and day at different concert halls. (This may have been the job that Marjory got so she could support herself and her children while Hubert was at war.) SF treats Kenneth to tea and then reminisces about frolicking with Marjory “many summers ago.”

We see a memory of SF measuring the distance between his house and a supposed moving tree named Mr. Branches, who hasn’t moved an inch more than 21 yards. Kenneth (with SF speaking for him.) asks for another vanilla crown, but SF scolds him for not eating his beef stroganoff.

Then it’s time for Kenneth to go back into the ground. SF (or maybe Marjory) is crying at the thought of putting him back (sending him back into war), and then sings a line from “We’ll meet again,” before putting him back into the hole. Then we see a memory of Marjory(in SF’s body) singing the same song on stage, wearing a dress. She chastises the piano player for being in the wrong key and walks offstage when they don’t listen to her.

Episode 9: Letter:

We open with SF reading a “letter” sent from the war while a tree root makes it’s way into the house. When the root makes its way into SF’s room, he eats it. Causing the tree to tell him that it hurt, and calling him daddy. SF looks out the window to see Mr. Branches is talking to him in a young boy’s voice, calling him daddy and saying that he’s bothered, and crying. SF makes his way to Mr. Branches and he tells him that he’s injured himself, and that he’s cold. SF tells him that he’d better “grow out of those branches” if he wants to come inside. This could either be Marjory’s hallucination of her son, who at this point is either dead or on the verge of it, or his ghost trying to speak to her in the form of a tree. Either way, SF is in control now, and he simply just doesn’t care about the boy.

The tree grabs SF around the stomach, squeezing as hard as it can. (Remember “tummybox” from earlier in the series.) SF wakes up in his bed, his stomach distended (with bloating resulting from an infection caused by the rotting fetus in Marjory’s womb.) and black goo on him (possibly rot from the fetus?). SF thinks that he’s about to die, and “alerts the correspondence,” like that’s going to fix anything. SF thinks he has scarlet fever, though that isn’t the case. In a quite alarming and disturbing manner, SF “births” the fetus by having it burst from his stomach and he passes out. (Or maybe it just rockets out of Marjory’s vagina because of how much her body is rejecting it. FYI there’s a disturbing face hidden in the furnace opening, this means nothing but I wanted to point that out.)

SF wakes up to find the blob of nastiness on the floor, and picked it up cooing about how he’s been waiting for it to arrive. Like it’s a baby. (At this point we can safely assume that SF’s and Marjory’s personalities have morphed together into some sort of bizarre double personality, and we have no idea who is in control anymore.) He says a little rhyme about how happy he is to have the “baby,” which he names Yvonne, and comments on how it has it’s mother’s eyes. (“She was a fair maiden, make no mistake.”) Immediately after, Yvonne is in a hole, meaning that SF is neglecting it or realized that it’s actually dead and attempted to bury it.

SF is now in a wheelchair, writing a letter with his finger dipped in ink on a shit-stained length of toilet paper, and hears a splat. He gets frustrated and goes to see what caused it. It’s Yvonne, who has fallen over from how it was propped. It seems that SF is attempting to care for it anyway, and scolds it for not doing it’s excersises. He tries to motivate it with “Heads, shoulders, knees, and toes.” But, of course, Yvonne doesn’t follow along. (“I think we’ve been given a duff one, Marjory.”)

Later on, SF is trying to keep himself alive with a homemade lung pump. His condition is getting worse, what with having a rotting fetus inside of him for so long only to have it rocket out of his body in such a way that he’s bleeding rot. He tells Yvonne that he may not be able to care for it, and makes it speak. Yvonne tells SF that he was doing a great job, and SF sends a message on his furnace for someone to come and adopt Yvonne.

SF traverses in his wheelchair to the house from the first episode. SF mistakes the resident for Aunty Bainbridge, and wishes to drop Yvonne off. SF finds that the window is dirty, and starts washing it with Yvonne as the resident just stares on, having no idea what is going on and how to deal with it. After the window is completely painted over, Yvonne is on the ground with its bucket tipped over and SF is eating a sandwich.

Salad Fingers is a preschool children's cartoon that airs in a Crapsack World.

Salad Fingers is the biological father of Vendetta from Making Fiends

Think about it. They are both rather creepy in some way, have green skin, and interact with non-human characters. Not to mention the settings of their shows are very surreal and a bit unsettling.

Salad Fingers is a woman who tried to have an abortion

We see a ton of baby imagery in the show....so here is my theory on it.Salad Fingers was once a beautiful woman, she fell in love with a man about to be drafted into the war and he promised to marry her when he got back, but he as well as Salad's brother were killed, soon after she found out she was pregnant, and not wanting the shame of being an unwed mother, went to get an abortion, but the doctor wants her to have sex with him in exchange, when she refuses, he mutilates her and she runs off, going insane at the loss of her fiancée, brother and now beauty (the black blob WAS an actual baby ...or what was left of it...the abortion never happened, but the baby died anyway and rotted into the glob inside Salad Fingers, which explains the lack of surprise and even temporary glee from Salad Fingers before her insanity acted up again.

Andrew Hands is either Salad Fingers' real name, or the name of somebody from his past.

The fact that the name is used by Glass Brother as an insult and genuinely shocks Salad Fingers when said indicates there may be more to the name than meets the eye.

The reason why Salad Fingers acts and sees the world the way he does is because he's under the influence of illegal drugs

He might be using some kind of drug (maybe cocaine, LSD, mescaline, PCP, cannabis, ketamine, salvia, or something of the like) to calm his nerves and put his mind at ease after all the troubles he has supposedly gone through in his life. The drug he might be using could be hallucinogenic, which is probably why his mental state is so screwy and he has all these weird visions of different people or things. Kind of makes sense if you think about it, doesn't it?

The "Crapsack World" Salad Fingers lives in is actually extremely localized.

As we see from Auntie Bainbridge's bell still working and from the toilet in Episode 6 still flushing, the electrical grid and piping are still being operated which means that there have to be waterworks and a power station somewhere close. Since piping only goes so far, this means that Salad Fingers actually doesn't live that far from civilisation. Because this civilisation can afford to send electricity and water to a wasteland, it is unlikely to be in a state of emergency. This would explain where the boy from Episode 2 comes from who not only isn't mutated but also, unlike Mable, has clean and fresh clothing. Maybe a nuke was accidentally dropped over a forest or some other kind of periphery (both houses and ruins seem to be incredibly rare near Salad Fingers' home which wouldn't be the case if the area was populated before the event).

The world of Salad Fingers was created by an Eldritch Abomination.

Namely, the "beast" whose "sun" Salad Fingers blames for having corrupted Glass Brother. In the same Episode, Salad Fingers bemoans to Glass Mother that he has been "trapped in here for too long" and calls Glass Mother's house his "home". This could be a hint that the Mirror Universe containing the Glass Family's house might actually be the world Salad Fingers originated from. Since Fingers claims that where Glass Brother was raised was "under the beast's sun", the beast too seems to live in the Mirror Universe. Maybe the beast was the one who banished Fingers to the other world in the first place or even that world's creator.

Salad Fingers is merely a senile old man living in his house, suffering from a combination of both PTSD and Dementia.

Everything We see is through the distorted worldview of a deeply traumatized individual whose lost everyone close to them. The world SF lives in is actually normal; he's simply a delusional old man living in his house. Jeremy, Salad Fingers, and his brother all fought in World War 1, only for his brother to die in combat. Salad Fingers was struggling with Shell Shock and not getting the proper treatment for it, it was exacerbated when Jeremy Fisher started dating Salad Fingers' daughter Marjory Stewart. Marjory got pregnant and subsequently got an abortion, and something happened that eventually killed Jeremy Fisher. The real Marjory isn't dead; she's probably living on her own somewhere, leaving Salad Fingers isolated and unable to care for himself, possibly because of his overprotectiveness and dislike of Jeremy Fisher (his "conversation" between him and Jeremy implies that he was accusing him of rape). Everything we see is through the fragmented and incomplete memory of a traumatized man who has no one.

• The people Salad Fingers interacts with are also not the mutated abominations we see, but are either outright hallucinations based off of SF's scattered memories, or ordinary people that are filtered through Salad Fingers' distorted perspective. The armless screaming man banging on Salad Fingers' door? He was an angry neighbor banging on the door to tell SF to keep the noise down. What Salad Fingers hung up on his wall was not a corpse, but an apron he mistook to be a person. The guy actually got annoyed and walked away before Salad Fingers opened the door, which is why the knocking stopped.
• The girl who has a picnic with Salad Fingers was merely being polite by eating with him, but her speaking triggered his PTSD in some way, so he ran back home and ducked into a corner. He actually didn't do anything to the girl, but imagined doing it, which is possibly part of why he ran off. The boy in the oven, meanwhile, wasn't trapped inside at all; he got out before Salad Fingers turned it on, and SF really was burning some fish.

Salad Fingers has retreated into a hallucinatory fantasy as a psychological defense mechanism.

At some point before the series, something catastrophic happened that turned SF's world into the barren wasteland he currently inhabits - given his frequent references to "The Great War", something like that seems likely, nuclear or conventional. An industrial or chemical accident is also a possibility. In the end, it's a moot point - something happened to SF's home, it was horrible, and he didn't enjoy it much.What we end up with is a lonely man trying to eke out a meagre existence in an bleak landscape, with no indication that anything of his old life remains. Between the sheer horror of his situation, the stress of adjusting to this brave new world, the pain of malnutrition and zero healthcare, and possibly pre-existing emotional trauma (like abusive parents and possible survivor guilt), SF's mind has concocted an elaborate fiction to emotionally sustain him. He's not a pitiable, wretched hermit living in a cold, filthy shack in the middle of nowhere, he's a quaint and sociable gentleman with a host of friends and acquaintances in an early 20th century domestic idyll. The Great War is not a defining factor of his nightmarish existence, it's a jolly old adventure that he'll be able to join in on in due course - his brother Kenneth is just keeping a space free for him in the meantime, and it'll probably be over by Christmas anyway.The fractured and demented imagery that SF generally takes in stride is a reflection of his own fractured and demented psyche, the fruit of all the pain and trauma SF has been carrying inside him. It shifts and warps with his subconcious fancy, a film of quasi-lucidity floating on top of a sea of mental illness like oil on water.His encounter with Mabel and his horrified reaction was a shattering of his delusions via the sudden injection of a perspective that his imagination didn't conjure up. It just didn't gel with his world and forced him to confront the fact that his life is a defensive fiction, a flimsy shield against the hopelessness of his life.

Salad Fingers is the collective consciousness of the traumatized children living through the horrors of war, abuse etc.

He's not one person. Rather, he's the personification of all the children experiencing the tragic effects of war. The adult tone of some of SF's adventures (saying rusty spoons are orgasmic) are repeated hearsay from either their family or any homeless people they come across and they implement it into child's play without knowing its actual meaning. The radio station reporting on the news gives the children information on the "Great War", and gives them additional topics to work into their worldview, hence its commanding tone as the children consider it the only source of learning they have of the outside world and lets it mend their impressionable minds in disturbing ways (even if it confuses and saddens them). The children were raised in these circumstances and don't consider any of it weird or horrifying as it's part of their everyday life, which would explain SF's casual non sequiturs to everything strange that happens around him.

Salad Fingers never fought in the Great War, and now is coping with survivor's guilt because of it.

This theory is mostly founded in a reading of Episode 7, when Salad Fingers says to his brother Kenneth, "It was frightfully rude of you blokes to leave for the great war without me." His delusions likely began before the war but worsened considerably afterward. Even in World War I's era (presuming that it is the real Great War which Salad Fingers refers to), a man with delusional tendencies would probably have been rejected from the armed forces as unfit for service. Given his occasional hostility to his brother's corpse throughout the episode, it stands to reason that Salad Fingers holds considerably mixed emotions about the men who went to fight, who were likely direct witnesses to the disaster that left the world in its present state, as well as its first victims (hence why confirmed veteran Jeremy Fisher's potential death is shown in relative detail an episode prior). In the aftermath, Salad Fingers has doubled down on his delusional thinking as a way to cope with both his guilt over surviving whereas so many other men like his brother did not and his deep-seated feelings of emasculation and inadequacy over being rejected from service to begin with.

Salad Fingers 11: Glass Brother is a joke at the expense of theorists

If you've scrolled this far you've already read several different interpretations of Salad Fingers being a victim of some kind of trauma/abuse, whether due to the Great War, an unstable upbringing or his perpetual loneliness. David Firth is well aware of this side of his fanbase, even going as far as to discredit Matpat's video on the subject, saying he was completely off. Firth has said in interviews that many of his videos are inspired by his emotional reactions to the world and media around him (examples being The News Hasn't Happened Yet, David Firth's Health Reminder and several episodes of both Burnt Face Man and Jerry Jackson satirising pop culture, the latter even having an episode poking fun at low quality parodies of Salad Fingers).

The fact that the very next episode of Salad Fingers following Matpat's video was Episode 11: Glass Brother, in which we get a glimpse of Salad Fingers in an abusive household with very direct storytelling compared to the rest of the series, it's possible this is Firth giving theorists exactly what they want knowing they will eat it up, with Glass Mother even referencing an unseen "father" character at the very end as a cliffhanger to keep theorists busy.

This isn't to say Episode 11 was entirely made cynically or out of obligation to a fanbase demanding answers, but no doubt the episode was at least inspired by this aspect of his audience.

The events of Episode 13 are not a one-off but rather something that regularly occurs in Salad Fingers' world— Salad Fingers is regularly killed and replaced by a clone in some form of Twin Maker system, which grants him a sort of Resurrective Immortality. He asexually reproduces clones that share his memories in some way, and is later killed and eaten by the clone. This occurs in both Episode 6 and Episode 13, at minimum. He is aware of this process.

Doubles of Salad Fingers have been depicted at various points throughout the series. In particular, they are shown in Episode 6, Episode 10, and Episode 13 (where the creation of the duplicate is centre focus of the whole episode). They're sometimes exact doubles (as in Episode 6), malformed and unintelligent (as in Episode 10), or "immature" but quickly aging into an exact double (as in Episode 13).

Consistent across all these appearances is doubles of Salad Fingers being cannibals and eating other Salad Fingers. One Salad Fingers eats the other's brains like a zombie in Episode 6, without it being clear which is the "original". The malformed Salad Fingers in Episode 10 are indiscriminately gorging themselves on unidentified seemingly-human viscera. Episode 13 depicts the cannibalism as ritualistic and makes clear the "clone" Salad Fingers has killed and eaten the original.

Episode 9 and Episode 13 both have "offspring" bursting from Salad Fingers's body, which he treats as a normal occurance. This suggests it's normal for him to experience something like budding/blastogenesis. Note that for all the things he's encountered that he's found shocking or frightening, he's never found the presence of a double in itself shocking or frightening. The only possible exception is the encounter between the two Salad Fingers at the end of Episode 6, and in that case one was aggressively making accusations against the other. They are treated with "normalcy", even when they've been an actual threat to him.

In Episode 9, Salad Fingers seems very sick when "blastogenesis" happens and the "offspring" is just an inanimate blob, which he still treats as a child— this is something like a miscarriage. In Episode 13, however, the process results in the creation of a healthy clone. While Salad Fingers teaches this clone some things, the clone is born inheriting knowledge, like to call Salad Fingers "Mr. Fingers", and by the end of the episode, the clone acts like he's had long familiarity with Salad Fingers' companion cubes. Thus, sometimes the "reproduction" process produces malformed, unviable offspring, but other times it produces a near perfect memory-sharing double. Therefore it is possible that one and the same process be behind the various doubles of Salad Fingers that have been seen in various episodes. The fact that there is usually only one Salad Fingers around is explained by their propensity for cannibalizing each other— and perhaps the cannibalism is necessary in some way, perhaps to pass on memories. As soon as the clone in Episode 13 separates from the original's body, they discuss how delicious the original will be, suggesting they both expect the cannibalism from the beginning.

This theory might explain things about how the Reset Button works in Salad Fingers' world. For example, in Episode 10 he seems to have become elderly due to a Rip Van Winkle-like sequence of events, but his aging is undone by the next episode. This makes sense if he's sometimes replaced with a younger version of himself, as is explicitly depicted in Episode 13. Further, it might explain his apparent insanity as being the result of Clone Degeneration over time.

That Salad Fingers' "platoon" is related to the process depicted in Episode 13 is further suggested by the fact that Episode 13 contains the first military reference in a while — Salad Fingers' last words, "Give my regards to the colonel."