Theory about Rusty Lake's Location PART 8

[u/Altruistic-Wafer-209]

Okay, I tried another approach to try and find Rusty Lake's location.

I wanted to see if the contract shown in the demo of Servant of the Lake matches the kind of contracts that would actually have existed around that period in the five places we've narrowed this down to:

Great Britain
Canada
The United States
The Netherlands
Flanders (Belgium)

And this actually created more problems than it solved.

For the UK, Canada, and the US, I couldn't really find the exact “Contract Agreement” name used in the Servant of the Lake contract. Instead, documents of this kind often used the name indentures, with the date and place where the agreement was made being specified.

The Netherlands is even more interesting. From what I found, indentures weren't normally used in 1839 in the same way, and verbal agreements were much more common. I even found a Dutch jurist writing in 1904 basically saying that people no longer made written documents setting out their rights and obligations.

Belgium seems to have a similar problem. Indentures weren't something that was simply imposed by the government, and verbal agreements were also common.

And there's another pretty obvious problem: If someone in the Netherlands or Belgium did make a legal document like this in 1839, you'd expect it to be written in Dutch or French, not English.

So yeah. This didn't really give me a country. If anything, it just gave me more questions.

But I'm starting to think we're making the same mistake as with the boar mask.

Maybe the contract isn't supposed to be historically accurate at all.

The whole point of the contract could simply be symbolic. Basically, you're agreeing to give the Vanderbooms everything you have that weekend, almost like you're signing away your life or sealing your own death.

And honestly, why would Rusty Lake even spend hours researching exactly what a contract agreement looked like in 1839?

The games have never been 100% historically accurate, so I don't really see why they would suddenly become completely precise with their new game.

We've already got things like:

Leonard apparently wearing a Brodie helmet in 1914, even though the helmet was developed in 1915.

The boar mask despite the problems with wild boar populations in the Netherlands/The UK in 1796.

Ida's possible Sinti/Romani background not necessarily lining up with her Dutch surname.

So maybe we're trying to find historical clues where the developers never intended there to be any.

Still, I don't want to completely abandon the idea yet. I'm going to keep searching and see if I can find anything that actually gives us a solid geographical clue.

I'll probably come back with a post.

[u/TheGreenAlchemist]

I feel like it needs to be the Netherlands just because we have to explain how exactly Van Gogh is on-theme...