YMMV / Salad Fingers

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Oh boy... Who or what is Salad Fingers? A Shell-Shocked Veteran who experienced war? A survivor of the Earth After the End? Just a delusional madman who looks Through the Eyes of Madness? Nobody knows, except the creator himself, who won't be giving any answers anytime soon.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: In the episode, "Glass Brother," Salad Fingers is making food with instructions on ingredients from the Glass Mother. One of the things she tells him to add is "spider milk." While it may sound like something made up for the series for the sake of sounding creepy and weird, spider milk is not only real, but it's also four times more nutritious than cow milk.
• Applicability: Any person who has been on the receiving end of physical/emotional abuse from their family can strongly relate to SF's predicament in "Glass Brother", and his protection of Hubert Cumberdale neatly corresponds to those people who work to defend their younger family members/children from suffering the same fate.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Several, most of them being Salad Fingers's daydreams.
• Cargo Ship: Several; Salad Fingers with spoons, nettles, taps and a dog carcass.
• Creepy Cute: Particularly in later episodes, with Firth having slightly changed Salad Fingers' design and fleshed out his personality. Beneath the creepiness, he's quite endearing.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: A large number of viewers interpret Salad Fingers as having schizophrenia, owed to his patterns of self-harm, his tendency to hear voices, and the fact that he lives in a state of near-constant delusions and hallucinations. Other viewers, meanwhile, theorize that he is autistic due to his stilted speech, frequent use of neologisms, and pronounced sensory issues.
• Epileptic Trees: Too many to list. The series being open-ended and starring an obviously disturbed protagonist makes a lot of episodes and the characters in them open to many interpretations.
• Faux Symbolism: A point David Firth tries to enforce. In fact he announced before its release that episode 11, "Glass Brother" would purposely debunk all the theories people kept sharing online to "explain" the series. This announcement notably happened after his reaction to the "Salad Fingers Explained" videos of The Film Theorists, which quite displeased him. David specified that he felt "honoured" to have his work "pulled apart and speculated over", but that the conclusions reached in the videos were not in the least what he was aiming for.
• He Really Can Act: While David Firth has always been considered a pretty good voice actor as well as an animator (as he's done voice work other than SF), his performance in "Glass Brother" is truly exceptional, wherein he expresses intense emotion in the titular character's plight with his family, horror at Hubert Cumberdale's kidnapping and Tranquil Fury upon retaining him.
• Moment of Awesome: Salad Fingers rescuing Hubert Cumberdale in Episode 11 from his "Glass Family". After being called weak and useless for the whole episode, he manages to cleverly outsmart them and break off any communication with them — all while subverting how he usually accidentally harms everyone he comes across!
• Nausea Fuel: It's everywhere, from Salad Fingers making his green, hairy nipple lactate with a nettle, to him cannibalizing on his doppelganger's brains.
  • The grub-shaped, unmoving thing that bursts from his guts in the ninth episode is made of this entirely. Even more screwy is the last shot of the episode, where the object is revealed to be a sandwich. Which Fingers is now eating.
  • Dr. Papanak eating the horse's flesh.
  • The Salad Fingers-like entities eating Milford's corpse.
  • The strange concoction that Salad's glass mother forces him to eat in Episode 11.
  • In the mini-episode "Market," Salad Fingers has a store where he sells some strange-looking meat he refers as "pickled cheeks." After some crows stole and ate them, Salad Fingers announces he has some "reserve stock" revealing those were actually pieces of his own skin.
• Realism-Induced Horror: Salad Fingers is an obviously mentally ill man (the exact specifications never clarified) and outside of the Surreal Horror imagery and art, the scariest moments of the show are often from him unintentionally hurting himself and the people around him, including children, as a result of his delusions.
• Ugly Cute:
  • Salad Fingers can be this to some fans.
  • The little girl from the picnic in episode five is also fairly adorable, despite having a few Creepy Child traits.
  • Hubert Cumberdale as a fleshboy or "real boy", due to the childlike voice and enthusiasm.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Salad Fingers themselves. While he has a male figure and voice, a popular theory is that they are a mutated female after having lactated when rubbing a nettle over their nipple and having a motherly relationship with some of their Companion Cubes. However, Fingers is seemingly confirmed male in episode 11 when their Evil Twin is referred to as their "brother" and Hubert Cumberdale calls them by "Mr. Fingers."
• The Woobie:
  • A few people who watch this think Salad Fingers is just too creepy, while others find him creepy but also endearing. What both sides can agree on is that he is a truly pitiful creature. The "Cupboard" episode, especially, as there's a scene where he's crying and some fans said they forgot he's scary because they felt bad for him. It seems that David Firth picked up on this interpretation of the character, and subsequent episodes made Salad Fingers a more tragic figure by focusing more on how hopelessly oblivious he is to the state of the world around him. Then we learn in "Glass Brother" that he might have a Freudian Excuse judging on how he envisions his mother.

---