Like, is it just an allegory for diesease and pestilince that tends to grow in swampy, damp, dark places or is there actually a type of body of liquid that would be poisonous to tread through and not by injesting or infecting through an open wound? 🤔
Oh yeah, lots of water can lead to all sorts of rashes and parasites. Some specifically that enter through your feet and dig through your body.
Some rashes can cause all sorts of nasty complications
Florida.
Sort of… and I’m starting this from memory but I’ll pull in some references.
Rotting vegetation in anoxigenic conditions, and specifically, rotting algae, can get buried in sand or other material or sediment, and create Hydrogen Sulfide gas, which, if you happen to walk across what amounts to a buried compost pile, well…
So its not injection or infection…
I suppose I didn’t consider gasses from the swamp being the poison. That makes way more sense than the liquid in the bog poisoning you (as indicated in the games, especially with Elden Ring and how rolling through the poison sticks to you even after exiting the pool).
Yeah I found a better citation for what I remember from my phycology studies back in the day. I even recall it being having something akin to a ‘sulfur weed’ or similar common name but it escapes me at the moment.
The specific algae I was trying to remember was Sargassum:
During the Sargassum inundation event in 2018, 11,000 Acute Sargassum Toxicity cases were reported in an 8-month span on just the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargassum
So if you are doing world building, Sargassum is some pretty cool stuff. It forms massive oceanic free floating mats, and when these get pushed ashore, it can result in the release of significant quantities of gas.
I know that some algal blooms can occur in swamps and some can produce cyanotoxins that take effect just from skin contact. If those two features can happen at the same time, I suppose that gets us there? But I have no idea if it can
Don’t give Miyazaki any more ideas
Jokes aside, closest I can think of would be trenches in WWI and a good chunk of the Netherlands (or was it Belgium) when Germany was nearly taking it also in WWI and the defending army decided to flood the region.
Also maybe if a swamp receives high quantities of radioactive material, though the poisoning wouldn’t require direct contact in such scenario.
Belgium mentioned!
I think you’re referring to this https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inundatie_van_de_IJzervlakte (Dutch language wikipedia, your browser can probably translate well enough)
Fairly sure that’s it indeed. Thanks for confirming!
The only places I could think of are not swamps and are all a result of horrible pollution like Lake Karachay or Rio Tinto. I think you are correct that the trope of the poisonous swamp stems from the fact that swamps are just not very nice places to be in as a human.
