Näcken ate the bramble flower
This theory goes hand in hand with theory #6. After encountering Tuva, Olle has to eliminate bramble vines in order to go to the town. These bramble vines have flowers growing in them:
There are four types of cursed humans in the game. King Nils, Näcken, Kärrhäxan and the undead. Only King Nils and Näcken are giant size. Its heavely implied that King Nils became a giant because he ate the bramble flower thanks to his storybook, the whole bramble bloom to be exact, but there is nothing said about that in Näcken's storybook, it ends with him living by the lake devastated and in sorrow. One could asume that these emotions are what made him became the insane monster we encounter in the game.
The thing is grief and sorrow is not enough to became a cursed human in this game… if it were then a lot of people from the plague villague would have become cursed titans after the plague had killed their loved ones and left them with nothing but despair yet it didnt happen.
When Olle has to go through the town covered by bramble we are shown that the Bramble vines can be quite fast in spreading throught the town, like…it takes them seconds to invade again the houses after Olle makes them go away with the lightrock.
So what if Näcken encountered them after sometime living in the lake?
In "Who you’ll meet: Näcken, The Dancing Fool" is stated that despite Näcken hating the town he still had to go there for food:
So he either wasnt a farmer or whatever food he managed to grow was not enough for him to sustain himself… and then he made the whole town dance to death before going to the lake. He probably managed to sustain himself for a while but after sometime and with his mental health deteriorating, there is a big possibility he started to starve.
Theres two things to point this being the case:
First, his appareance in the game
Näcken doesnt have any clothes on and he looks like someone who starved to death. Compare this with King Nails, he looks like a very old king but still looks alive and human.
Second and the most important, his personality. When Kings Nils ate the flower he did it in a state of pure grief for his son. When we found him, his personality is melancholic like in perpetual state of grief. With this we can conclude that what bramble does is that it amplifies the emotions of the person who eats it at that moment, making those feelings eternal and at the same time clouding their sanity so they become cannibals without noticing it.
So with this one could expect that when we found Näcken, his personality will be similar to the king because by the time he went to live by the lake he did it for grief. The storybook even specifies that "he was drowning in his sorrows". But when Olle finds him, he acts like this:
There is nothing in his personality that indicates he is feeling guilt, sorrow or even overall sadness. He acts like a predator. His emotions are in a loop of this: Calm when he is alone playing his violin
Sadism when he is hunting Olle
And frustration when he fails to eat him.
That along with his emaciated appearance could indicate a disturbing possibility. That he was in the final stage of starvation at the time he ate the bramble flower. In real life, starvation has devastating effects in the brain, it makes people do everything in order to survive. There are cases in which people became cannibals to avoid starvation in famines. Thats how bad it gets.
If Näcken was in that state when he came across the bramble vines with their flowers…then his behaviour when we found him makes sense. When he ate that flower, he wasnt grieving. He was starving, delirious and was eating anything he could get his hands on in order to survive.
So the bramble transformed him in an emotionally unstable, feral and obsessive giant who would do anything in order to eat his food (humans).
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