Me and my boyfriend talked it over a bit. He thinks everything is trolls. I think the family are some kind of blue Elves, like Moon Elves from DnD, the creature running the toll booth is a troll, the guy getting his paper is some kind of troll or ogre, and the little guy with the “Cash for Gems” sign is a goblin.
Canuckvania?
I figured they were trolls. But I think the biggest argument they might be blue elves is that we don’t seem to see anything else that might be an elf in the trailer. Just some Ogre-like creatures.
That said, I partly think troll because of the character design. As in these are ‘uncool’ characters, or at least nerdier brothers. While I assume elves might be depicted as the cool kids. But of course unicorns are like racoons here, so it seems a hard guess.
I figured the cool kids would be your fair-skinned, Tolkien-esque, High/Sun Elves. Or the mermaids, since they seem to be able to get around on land somehow.
No not Canadian but we do share pretty all the same spelling for things from my understanding. Australia.
Ah. The bit about lots of rain threw me. Australia mostly makes me think of desert and scrubland.
Depends on where you live. In places like the middle of Australia it’s absolutely like that but in the coastal areas of Melbourne where I live there’s a lot of cold and rain outside of summer.
Most of my little bit of knowledge comes from a guy I know in Sydney. We had a thing a few years ago, when he would come up here on business trips and vactions (he quit that job, and does something for the RAAF now). He would say things, like how he liked coming up here because he’d never seen so many trees and so much green in one place before, that gave me a general impression of desolation.
But then again, when I was a kid, I had several White’s tree frogs. Which are… well… tree frogs. So there have to be rainforests they live in.
Eh most of Australia is desert but hardly anyone actually lives out there. It’s mostly coastal cities like Sydney, Melbourne, etc. The crazy people in our country live out in the arid areas with the drop bears.
I remember watching a documentary which went on a wild tangent of a theory that stories about the drop bear were originally ancestral memories of the Indigenous Australians encountering a species of Thylacoleo.
Instead of, y’know, just an Australian branch of the Fearsome Critters sub-genre of tall tales. Like the American jackalope or agropelter.
We did apparently have a tree dwelling ambush predator in Australia but it’s mostly just taking Koalas and exaggerating their features to absurd degrees. Incidentally, you do in fact want to look up when walking under certain trees as their branches can break off and, well, a thick branch from a tree hitting you on the head isn’t good for your health.
Just got back from Alaska. Loved the scenery, seafood, outdoor activities.
Did not like being #4 on the food chain with no means of defense though. Or the Hipster filth.
The only thing I know about Alaska is it’s an attraction for idiots who want to “find themselves” or “live a natural life” without having the most basic clue about wilderness survival and end up being expensive rescues or, in some cases, corpse retrievals.
The agropelter is the same concept, and why I thought of it when you mentioned the drop bear. It’s a beast from the folklore of American lumberjacks that throws sticks at people from high up in the trees. When a lumberjack got killed or injured by a particularly large branch, it was because of the agropelter.
I thought that was Oregon or Washington state.
Not sure what compels people to “find themselves” by retreating to a region they know nothing about.
Depending on who you ask we either came up with drop bears to warn against falling branches or to screw with gullible tourists. It’s probably a little of both, we do love screwing with people.
I just remember reading a discussion about the guy from Into the Wild where some native Alaskans chimed in and basically said what I said, that morons come out there with similar ideas or the same ideas from reading the book and end up having to be rescued at the taxpayers expense because they didn’t have the slightest idea what they were doing. As for the second part, they romanticize nature and forget that it is in fact quite deadly and will kill some pudgy middle class person cushioned with the comforts of civilization.
One of my cousins lives in Alaska. She moved there after her husband took a job up there with… oil… natural gas… something like that. They’re just… normal people. He works that job. She works at a grocery store. Two kids. A dog.
Pretty average. Except living on the banks of a giant lake, with nobody else around, and moose and bears in the yard.
Yeah. There’s a lot of places like that in the lower 48, but in Alaska there’s way more land for that, and the wildlife is much, MUCH bigger and more aggressive. Alaska truly is a frontier. There are places where the only way in or out is with a propeller-driven aircraft. I want to go back for hunting, I wonder how hard it is to rent a rifle there.
Nope. Most places in Washington or Portland that Californians go to “discover” themselves in are within city limits of Seattle and Portland. There is a cold-weather Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training point for the Military in Washington, but its way out there on federal lands. Fun fact, you can harvest protected animals during the training for survival.
City-folk romancing the wilderness and not realizing how domesticated they are.
Probably why most of them shake their heads at the tourists who come out there expecting to live off the land.
That’s what I suspected. The other example I know of is Timothy Treadwell. Which was, funnily enough, also in Alaska. Dude got himself and his girlfriend eaten by starving bears who moved into the area and were different to the ones he was spending his time around.
It happens in the lower 48, too. Last year I helped search for some guy who wandered out into the state park where I live. The official story is he got drunk, and disoriented. But, when I saw him after they found him, I suspect he was on something else, and came out here with the idea of “communing with Nature” and all that.
I’m not sure why I included bears as not-average in that post. I guess because they’re grizzlies, while the bears where I live are black bears. Like I said, I live in a state park (hence, the occassionally shoddy internet), so deer, bears, coyotes, bobcats, and all of that are commonplace. I think at one point, they were even talking about re-introducing elk. A couple years ago, we finally got the TWRA to admit there are cougars here in west Tennessee, even though I’ve seen them since I was a kid.
Oddly enough you don’t really hear about people dying to stupid wilderness shenanigans all that often in Australia. Maybe it’s because everything here is so dangerous we learn quickly not to take it all for granted that it’s safe.