Mythical Smackdown

Wendigos aren't skin walkers, user.

they're native american shaman who turn to using their spirit magic for nefarious purposes. Basically like witches, except they mostly just shape shift into whatever animal's skin they're wearing

But, and again this depends on myth, they have to commit some serious depravities to get there. For instance, cannibalism and ritual desecration of their families bodies. They're Indian boogie men taken up to 11. Like i said i don't know anything about wendigo other than the cannibalism thing (which is kinda where i drew the parallel, i mean they're both big bad indain spirits who used to be men till they did something seriously fucked up) but i live near reservations, and damn but the stories are scary man. They wont even tell em unless its the middle of the day and they do some hoodoo first to ward off evil.

Hmmm I never really thought my knowledge about the supernatural was lacking.

Could someone enlighten me about skinwalkers?

chups and the squatch are both the least supernatural of the four. the real question is wtf does a chupacabra look like? it's known to kill goats and small livestock with weird puncture wounds, some kind of bloodsucking proboscus, but whether it's human sized, bugger, goat sized, smaller, other sized all very vague. if we assume chupa's a bit bigger than a goat, sasquatch can probably snap it in half and survive even if it gets stung by the sucker. if chupacabra's actually a larger predator, it could conceivably down sasquatch with comparable strength.

I think most accounts of chupacabra favor it being smaller, so it'd probably lose to sheer gorilla stength. I think sasquatch would give a decent fight because again, gorilla strength, but werewolves and wendigos are supernatural and usually don't die to easy. I don't know what weakbess if any wendigo's are traditionally assigned, but no fighters are described as havingr silver at their disposal. if the wendigo is undead or given some other niche defeatable immortality i'd say fight to a very messy draw. if webdigo is just a sharper sasquatch born of cannibalism, then werewolf takes it with functional immortality.

funnily, if we go by minimalist interpretations, the creepy cannibal is probably first out with goat sucking bug and man/wolf giving it their all to be pointy enough to put down a goddamn mountain gorilla many times stronger than the combined competition.

>Okay, so, as has been pointed out earlier, it's unfair to make these comparisons without specifying which iteration of the monsters you're talking about. Let's consider the two easiest definitions. The mythological versions and the modern pop culture versions.

>The mythological versions have plenty of variations themselves, but the majority of the myths and folktales can be largely sorted into two archetypes. While stories of people becoming wolves go back to antiquity, the werewolf as a concept (the concept that evolved into the modern pop culture version) was mostly defined in the 15th-18th centuries in western Europe. The mythological werewolf was usually seen as a human sorcerer or witch, in league with the devil, who would turn into a large wolf to attack people or their livestock. For the most part the wolf form was not thought to have any special protections other than being a large and dangerous beast that could turn back into a human and escape detection at will.

>The mythological wendigo is largely defined from both European and native sources in the 14th-18th centuries. While, again, there is some variation among tribes, wendigos were largely thought of as human beings transformed by a winter spirit into emaciated giants with hearts of ice, super strength and the ability to create snowstorms. The widespread belief was that they could be killed by mundane means early into the transformation, but afterwards could only be killed by fire.

>So, by this metric, the wendigo wins hands down. The sorcerer-werewolf of the late medieval period was mainly a threat due to its duplicity, while the wendigo was a threat due to its ferocious strength and resilience. The werewolf has no access to fire unless he turns back into a human (which provides no guarantee of victory) while the wendigo can rip him apart regardless of his shape. Point goes to the wendigo. Idly, it’s interesting that the best sources we have on both monsters are from the same time ranges.

>Pop culture is a bit trickier but I would say we can still make do with some basic archetypes. The pop culture werewolf is, generally speaking, a superhumanly strong, anthropomorphic wolf produced when a cursed human is transformed by the light of the full moon. He is usually only vulnerable to fire or silver and in most fictions other damage is regenerated extremely fast.

>The pop culture wendigo is tougher, since the wendigo has not penetrated popular consciousness to the same extent. Most people have never heard of them. Still, perhaps the best one to go with is the wendigo of Algernon Blackwood’s short story of the same name. This is definitely the version the Pathfinder wendigo is based most heavily on, and most modern fiction tends to use an amalgamation of the mythical wendigo and Blackwood’s wendigo. Blackwood’s wendigo was a personification of the call of the wild, a powerful spirit that would call to men venturing through the wilderness. If they answered the call, they would be forced to run with the wendigo, running so fast that both beings take flight and the human’s feet catch on fire. As the man runs through the sky with the wendigo, he slowly transforms into something very much like it. No vulnerabilities are mentioned, but let’s be generous and say in this archetype it is vulnerable to fire, as is its mythological predecessor.

From: >yuki.la/tg/47747511#p47752767

As you can see, Veeky Forums has had the wendigo vs werewolf argument before.

Are the deer/elk headed ones wendigo or skinwalkers? I've been looking around and I get a mix of answers/images. Or is the iconography for both pretty similar at this point?

Forgot the last part:

>Now things get interesting. Blackwood’s wendigo is described as very large, so it’s probably pretty strong and tough, and we know it’s very fast and can fly. The werewolf is also very tough and very strong. The wendigo might be able to out maneuver it, but it’s unclear if either can do any lasting damage to the other, as neither has access to fire or silver.

>The only thing that comes close is the wendigo’s ability to drag victims into the sky, forcing them to run so fast they ignite from friction. This could conceivably injure the werewolf in a way it can’t recover from, but as the werewolf is not a man and has already given in to its bestial nature, the wendigo’s supernatural call and transformative abilities would probably have no effect. As a result, the wendigo would have to grapple with the werewolf in order to force it into the air, and the werewolf would fight the whole time. If the wendigo can be killed by physical trauma it probably would be at this point, but if not then the werewolf is held until its feet burn to stumps. So, neither can probably kill the other, but the wendigo might be able to cripple the werewolf, so I’m calling that a win.

Neither. Wendigos look like pic related. Skinwalkers look human, except they can shapeshift into different animals.

tell some!

I've seen the iconography for that with wendigo, what little of wendigo i've seen. But i don't recall anything about deer heads in the skinwalker stories i've heard. Most of them start with long thin manlike forms seen out of the corner of your eye in the dark.

elk head is wendingo in the modern iteration but not classical

skin walkers either look 100% human or 100% animal. no in between

The strongest version of the werewolf myth vs strongest wendigo? Is there anyway a werewolf can pull a win

This is accurate to what i've been told, with one exception. While in the form of a man they have the eyes of a beast, and while in the form of the beast they have the eyes of a man. Its one of the only identifying features

Thank you. This is really interesting.

Its become a more modern thing, they don't have elk heads in myth or folklore but the image seems to have stuck with some people

The deerheaded thing can actually be traced back, as far as I can tell, to this pic:

Said pic is fron a 1930s illustrated version of Algernon Blackwood's horror short story called "The Wendigo". Now, outside of being a Native American spirit monster found in the north, Blackwood's wendigo bears almost no resemblance to the mythical wendigo. It's also not physically described in the story, as none of the characters directly see it. My guess is, in the 1930s some artist cooked up this deer-satyr look for his illustration of the wendigo because the story gave him no visual to work off of, and subsequent artists who were only familiar with the wendigo from Blackwood's fiction saw this picture and copied it. Certainly the antlered wendigo shows up in a number of modern pop fiction works, like the mid 200s movies "Wendigo" and the "The Last Winter." But in mythology wendigos are just hideously deformed humans. They don't have any antlers or other animal-features. Pic related is a depiction of a wendigo in Native American art. It's stylized, but it incorporates most of the mythical attributes: giant human shape, a heart of ice, claws, fangs, and a ravenous hunger.

It's interesting to see how the myths morph with the passage of time, though I can see the skull addition as a way to differentiate visually from a zombie.

>>running so fast that both beings take flight and the human’s feet catch on fire.

I actually remember this story from when I was a kid. Spooky shit.

The Yeti.

Um... old werewolves were more or less either powerful spellcasters or cursed humans at least according to Slavic myths they originated from.

alright, lets see what i can recall. i'm no great storyteller, so i'll just get the gist of it.

>Some young guys from the rez go out on a hunting trip in the seventies , they still do it as a tradition kind of a thing
>They get told to stay away from x canyon, there is great evil there
>they think the elders are full of shit, and they track game into the canyon
>First night they're sitting around the fire, and one of them swears he sees a guy in the woods
>They look but they can't find anything, and they tell him to stop pulling their legs, but he swears it up and down it's true.
>They keep going, it takes them another day or so to track down the deer, and the whole time they keep seeing things, shadows and forms in the trees.
>Before they get to the end of the tracks there is this horrific smell.
> they get to the end of the tracks, the deer they had been following are all dead. They've been torn to pieces and strewn over a glade.
>despite the abundance of meat there are no scavengers, and there aren't any flies buzzing over the carcasses. They are just lying there.
>they're pretty freaked out, but they figure it was a bear or something, they are in denial.
>they decide to leave the canyon
>that night they stop to make camp, when they wake up in the morning one of them is gone.
>they go looking but they don't dare split up to search
>they find him.
>he's been eviscerated and hung from a tree by his entrails
>they hear laughing resonating from the trees.
>they run
>that night they can't sleep, they huddle around the fire, and it talks to them from the trees, tells them horrible things.
>they can't quite see it clearly, it stays just out of sight, but they can see it change. Man, wolf, bear, man, eagle, always circling. laughing and taunting them
>then in seems to leave. they relax for a moment.
word limit, one moment.

Dude you are pinning a lvl 20 sorcerer vs a Young dragon if I'm going by d&d comparisons.

The most powerful version of a werewolf is a powerful spellcaster who also has the option of murderfucking you up close.

Wendigo is just a ravenous unread magic beast that eats what it can.

Wendigos are plenty easy to distinguish from a zombie once they get big enough. Plus you can always play up the supernatural ice aspects, and the fact that they ain't dumb.

This seems as good a time as any to link to the Wendigo Apocalypse setting Veeky Forums came up with earlier this year:

>suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/47556791/

I've never seen a version of the werewolf powerful enough to beat an elder wendigo. Those things get thirty plus feet tall, are intelligent, and have a bunch of supernatural abilities.

>There's no warning, the first indication to the rest of them that something is wrong is the screams
>one of the guys on the edge, opposite side of where they last saw it is on the ground bleeding , he's been hamstrung
>they see a lone wolf darting back into the tree's and the laughing starts again
>after a few more sleepless hours the sun rises, and they get going.
>there are two of them left besides the injured man, and they have to carry him, and it slows them down. they don't make it out of the canyon.
>that night when they make camp it comes again, and it speaks to them
>it tells them to kill the injured man, that if they kill him and leave him as sacrifice it will let them go, if they don't it will kill them all before the dawn breaks.
>they can see its eyes, watching them
>one of them tries to shoot it and it doesn't even flinch, just laughs at their impotence
>The wounded man begs them not to do it, begs them to save him, but they're tired, and scared, they slit his throat.
>horrified they run, and as they leave the clearing they see something, some man, or almost a man but it doesnt quite feel right enter and they hear the sounds of tearing flesh.
>they keep going through the night, and they approach the mouth of the canyon just before dawn
>right as the sun begins they feel hope, its over
>and then something grabs them
>its grip is like steel, they can't get away
>it laughs and tells them never to forget, to live in fear, that one day it will come for them
>it tells them it has marked them, and it knows its own
>and then it is gone, the sun rises, and they are free.
>they leave the canyon and make it back to their cars, and they drive home to the rez.
>now they are the elders, and they tell young men this story before they go out, so they know not go to the canyon.

This sounds a lot like one of /x/'s creepypastas. Which reservation did you hear this near?

Uintah and Ouray Indian reservation.

Wendigo > Werewolf > Sasquatch > Chupacabra