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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 2611852" data-attributes="member: 151">I wasn't questioning your anecdotal evidence...just that it was anything other than anecdotal.  Having a creature named a Wendigo in WoW, a villian from the X-men and the Hulk and a bunch of folks from a Native American literature class don't really qualify as making it mainstream.  I mean, let's be honest here, how many of your friends play D&D or are fans of fantasy and mythology?  I would venture that they (and anyone who posts here) has a much higher awareness of more obscure mythologies.  I would also suggest that knowledge of a particular mythology like the wendigo would also vary from region to region.  How many people are that familiar with the specifics of the Jersey Devil outside of New Jersey?  How many even knew of it before the advent of the hockey team?  IME, very few.  I'm sure folks in Mass. are more likely to know about the Dover Demon than someone in Flagstaff, for example.Take a look at the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendigo" target="_blank">wikipedia entry for the wendigo</a>.  Eliminate gaming references, and you have a handful of pop-culture references to the wendigo made in the last 20 years or so.  Exclude Charmed (lord knows I DO <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />) and you've got Ravenous (a <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0129332/business" target="_blank">relatively obscure</a> cult film) and the movie Wendigo...which has suprisingly little to do with the legend. Ginger Snaps (which was just plain obscure, with no US release) is a werewolf film/trilogy with some references to the wendigo.  Charmed's episode was in 1999, while the previous films were in 1999, 2001 and 2000, respectively.  All the book and poem references go back considerably further.  And in most cases, they're using the wendigo because its relatively obscure.It may be common knowledge and a household name amongst gamers and the area where you live...but I'm just not seeing the wendigo as commonplace by any measure.  If anything, I'm seeing it as a vague legend used when more common legends (like vampires, ghosts and werewolves) aren't desired.</blockquote>

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