First of all, thanks for apologizing, BoxCrayonTales - and I hope you get to sleep better. I haven't looked at that study, but there's a ton of other reasons why getting enough sleep is important.

That said, I still disagree about the wendigo and myth. I think it's normal and reasonable for mythic elements to be adapted and changed in other fiction.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066832That is precisely the reason why I do not think myself or anyone else outside the Algonquin culture can do the wendigo justice. The wendigo is a cultural bogeyman without similar relevance to those outside said culture. I cannot stop myself from bringing my own cultural baggage with me. You demonstrated this perfectly when you pointed out that my appellation of "communism" is wrong. As I said, if I was trying to communicate a moral message about the evils of greed, I would probably have the most success using vampire counts due to my culture's history of evil rich people.

 I could certainly take inspiration from particular stories about wendigo, like writing a story about a ogress' granddaughter looking for a human husband and trying to make him an ogre through dreams, but I would not use the name "wendigo" because I do not understand its significance. I know that literally it derives from a word for owls and refers to an ice cannibal that features in many stories, but I do not understand it beyond those superficial features.

To a degree, this issue afflicts a lot of fairy tales simply due to their age.

I would say that the way myths happen is precisely because people bring their own cultural baggage when re-using and adapting prior material. The Greeks took material that were used by other cultures, and added their own cultural baggage to it - and the result of that was Greek myth. The Romans took material from the Greeks and other cultures, and added their own cultural baggage - and the result was Roman myth. The Europeans took Greek myths and added their own cultural baggage to it, and created their own myths, and so forth.

I'm morally certain that the same thing will have happened to myths in the Americas - we just don't have as good a record of it. I'm sure that Mississippian myths were adapted by other cultures, and those were changed and modified by Mukogean-speaking cultures, and those in turn were adapted by Algonquian-speaking cultures, and so forth.

I think trying to maintain only the original cultural context is impossible and further is contrary to how myths happen in the first place. That said, there are absolutely dumb, ignorant, and/or hollow adaptations that people have made. But you're setting the bar that means that essentially no adaptation is possible - even the ones that created the myths in the first place.

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Actually, now that I think about it, I had a wendigo in an old magic-themed superhero game back in the 1990s. Overall, the campaign was drawing on what would be called urban fantasy like Charles de Lint and Neil Gaiman. I had an evil cannibalistic monster possessing a young woman - though I'm not sure if I used the word "wendigo", that was what it was intended to be. It wasn't a very nuanced treatment, but then, not every RPG session needs to be a culturally nuanced work of art.

I have featured Algonquian-speaking people in one campaign and some related one-shot games, but I never used the wendigo in those games. I had a long campaign called "Vikings & Skraelings" set in alternate-history America where Icelandic colonies flourished instead of disappearing, with some later one-shots in the same setting.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066832I am honestly quite sick of the entire concept behind monster manuals and bestiaries. I would prefer to organize monsters by archetypes in order to cut down on the huge problem with filler and redundancy afflicting the books.

I think this is a point to itself which could be interesting to discuss independent of the wendigo.

Quote from: Chris24601;1067338Get a HappyLight (i.e. full spectrum lamp) and put it in your peripheral vision for 20-30 minutes a day. You'll feel loads better.

It definitely helps! I live in a semi-basement and get SAD pretty bad, definitely sleep better when I use the light.

As I think about it, Runequest is one of the few games that is really well equipped for doing the Wendigo.  As a spirit it has Int and Pow and can attack a target's pow until it is reduced to zero at which point the wendigo can start to use the body to kill its family and friends.