u/SolarRaccoon_

In Mtg, both pests and the downcast, marginalized and dispossessed of society are associated with Golgari (particularly on Ravnica), but I feel like outside of fantasy theming, bugs and rats aren’t particularly Black-coded, at least not more than other animals.

Would White care for them as an extension of its moral consideration, maybe?

Hi!

The other day, I attempted to color Don’t Starve’s ‘’main character’’ Wilson, so now I’m moving on to the first unlockable character in the original game, Willow. As far as I know, she doesn’t have a last name.

Willow is in her 20s and, like Wilson, is from the early 20th century. We don’t know that much about her life, except that she grew up in an orphanage in which she was tormented by both cruel caretakers and nightmare creatures*. It’s not entirely clear how ‘’real’’ the creatures are, but Willow eventually burns down the entire building to save herself from one of them after being locked in a supply closet by her caretakers.

In Don’t Starve, nightmare creatures manifest when your Sanity meter, which represents general mental well-being and is lowered by fear, stress and mental strain, so this is clearly not a good combo. This is one of the rare times that they manifest outside of the parallel world of the Constant, though, and it’s not entirely clear how that works. Still, the theme is here.

Willow herself has a relatively low Sanity total, representing that she’s less mentally stable than most.

Later in life, she seems to have worked with the antagonist of the game to bring other people into the Constant (mainly by committing arson), but we’ll get back to that some other time. The rest of her life is largely a mystery and we don’t really know how she ended up in the Constant with the other characters. We do know, however, that she sees it as a new beginning for herself and she’s probably not unhappy to leave the real world behind.

In the game, Willow is pretty one-dimensional: she likes fire. Most of her quotes are about setting things on fire or how much she would like to set things on fire, her mechanics are centered around fire, and she even regains Sanity points when she’s close to fire.

Previously, she would even automatically start fires if her Sanity was too low, but that mechanic has been scrapped because, despite being flavorful, it has catastrophic consequences and everyone hated it.

She does have a non-fire related character trait: she carries a teddy bear, Bernie, which helps her regulate her Sanity. This role is featured in her animated short, as is her great attachment to Bernie. In the multiplayer sequel Don’t Starve Together, Bernie was eventually made to grow to giant size and physically fight nightmare creatures as needed, although the lore behind this isn’t really explained.

I think it’s pretty clear that Willow’s main color is Red, and not just because of the fire. She is impulsive and mostly acts based on her immediate desires (for fire, usually). She’s also shown to be a poor team player because she doesn’t listen and isn’t careful.

I would put her in Rakdos for her self-centeredness and her destructive habits. It’s unclear if she’s what we would call evil, but she has a morally dubious past for sure.

Hi!

I’ve fallen back into Don’t Starve Together lately despite not being very good at it and my brain, through no will of my own, has been trying to color the characters so I thought I would put the process into words here. Don’t Starve characters aren’t super developed but they’re likeable and have a certain personality.

I’ll be starting with the closest thing the game has to a main character, Wilson. He is the ‘’default’’ playable character you start with, with no particular strength or weakness.

Wilson is in early 30s, was born in the 1890s and is described by the creators of the game as a ‘’gentleman of independent means’’ and by himself as a scientific genius. He was kicked out of his university after an experiment went wrong and destroyed their silence lab and moved to an abandoned house where he practiced chemistry by himself, with little to no success. One day, he is contacted by a voice on his radio who offers him secret knowledge and teaches him to build a portal that takes him to a parallel world of wilderness called the Constant, where the game is set.

His in-game quotes indicate that he is sarcastic, enjoys puns and generally has a pretty bleak outlook on the Constant. He puts in the work to survive, but he regularly makes pessimistic comments, is generally grumpy and can be callous. This edgier side of his personality was toned down in the multiplayer sequel, Don’t Starve Together, but I’ll take it into account.

Wilson takes a lot of pride in his scientific prowess, even though his backstory strongly implies that his ego doesn’t reflect reality. In the Constant, however, he really steps up and invents the items you craft through the game. He is even the one to have canonically completed the story mode of the original game (though in gameplay, this can be done with any of the playable characters).

Overall, I’d say our boy Wilson is a case of non-evil Grixis. He is ambitious, impulsive, self-interested and very committed to science and using ‘’the power of his mind’’, but he isn’t a bad guy and what can be read as callousness is pretty understandable considering that he was thrown in a dangerous alternate dimension populated by monsters to survive with nothing but his wits.