Art can be a training ground for experiencing emotions
January 3, 2023 3:37 PM Subscribe
In Every Zelda Is The Darkest Zelda, Jacob Geller explores, discusses, and spoils a truckload of Zelda games and also the Animorphs books. While diving into the darkness, Geller finds a message of light. A good video for any gamer contemplating the setting and conflict in their experiences.
Jacob Geller is a national treasure. My fave vid of his is this one: Who's Afraid of Modern Art seriously it's lifechanging
posted by capnsue at 4:24 PM on January 3, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by capnsue at 4:24 PM on January 3, 2023 [3 favorites]
More on topic and having watched the rest of the video, he is correct, every Zelda is the darkest Zelda. Those games do not take place in a happy universe, no matter how bright and colorful it is.
The very first Legend of Zelda, the original 1986 game, starts with rather meloncholy music that transitions their opening graphic from day to night with a musical shift darker, and then gives a thumbnail sketch of a post-apocalyptic setting.
Ganon has won. The only thing that could possibly counter his power is broken and lost. The few people you meet are hiding in caves while monsters roam the once beautiful and peaceful kingdom.
The fact that it's got 8 bit graphics and a bright color palette doesn't make it cheerful.
And, like he did, I found that a great deal of that went over my head when I was a child. The bright colors and cute graphics were what I noticed and my 12 year old mind didn't connect people living in caves with much of anything. It was just the way things were.
But, there was also that feeling that there was more, that there was a depth that I couldn't identify somehow.
I maintain that Majora's Mask was one of the most overtly grim games, along with Twilight Princess, but it's worth looking at the Zelda timeline and noting that almost every single mainline Zelda game happens as a result of the Hero of Time LOSING the prior game and the forces of evil winning.
As a child I spent hours combing over the map with my friend searching for hidden secrets. As an adult I spend hours combing over the games with critical analysis searching for meanings.
posted by sotonohito at 5:31 PM on January 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
The very first Legend of Zelda, the original 1986 game, starts with rather meloncholy music that transitions their opening graphic from day to night with a musical shift darker, and then gives a thumbnail sketch of a post-apocalyptic setting.
Ganon has won. The only thing that could possibly counter his power is broken and lost. The few people you meet are hiding in caves while monsters roam the once beautiful and peaceful kingdom.
The fact that it's got 8 bit graphics and a bright color palette doesn't make it cheerful.
And, like he did, I found that a great deal of that went over my head when I was a child. The bright colors and cute graphics were what I noticed and my 12 year old mind didn't connect people living in caves with much of anything. It was just the way things were.
But, there was also that feeling that there was more, that there was a depth that I couldn't identify somehow.
I maintain that Majora's Mask was one of the most overtly grim games, along with Twilight Princess, but it's worth looking at the Zelda timeline and noting that almost every single mainline Zelda game happens as a result of the Hero of Time LOSING the prior game and the forces of evil winning.
As a child I spent hours combing over the map with my friend searching for hidden secrets. As an adult I spend hours combing over the games with critical analysis searching for meanings.
posted by sotonohito at 5:31 PM on January 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
I wrote this a long time ago:
In 2012, The Verge asked a question of their community: “You’ve Just Been Given Control of a Great Video Game Franchise!” What do you remake, and why?
I wrote this:
posted by mhoye at 5:42 PM on January 3, 2023 [14 favorites]
In 2012, The Verge asked a question of their community: “You’ve Just Been Given Control of a Great Video Game Franchise!” What do you remake, and why?
I wrote this:
Now, I’m an inveterate Legend Of Zelda fan, but if you’re paying attention to the sociopolitical background noise in that series, it’s… well. Literary theorists call this sort of thing “problematic”, which an in-field shorthand for “inconsistent and, if you look carefully, kind of sadmaking.” Your role as a hero there is to ostensibly to gain the powers and tools you need to defeat Ganon, noted evil megalomaniac, and secure the safety of the Kingdom of Hyrule.Anyway, there you go.
But if you look a little closer, your role there is explicitly to restore the status quo ante of the Kingdom of Hyrule, power structure and all. The Royal Family stays Royal, the gods stay gods, the people stay the people. It’s a little… undemocratic.
The only time they’ve really deviated from that formula was in Majora’s Mask, which I don’t think strictly counts as a Legend Of Zelda game, despite being arguably the best game in that series.
The game I want puts a spin on that; a new Legend Of Zelda in which, through the curse of the wayward Skull Kid, Link wakes up to that realization and seeks out the Princess and Ganondorf, who have known the truth of the situation for centuries. The player retreads some of the older games, seeking out some of the less-used artefacts and people; large parts of the game played as Gandondorf and the Princess as the real villain of the whole thing, the divinely-backed King of Hyrule, marshals his forces and eventually the Gods themselves to stop you from dethroning him.
Roughly sketched, the trailer looks like this:
Fade in, to the sound of ZREO’s version of “Farewell Hyrule King”, from WindWaker. In the old eight-bit Legend Of Zelda arcade font, the screen reads:
“We’ve fought for centuries.”
Quick, pulsing cuts of Ganon’s introductory scene from A Link To The Past, Ocarina, WindWaker.
In the purple “Link To The Past” text style: “Over and over again.”
More fade-in-and-out cuts from the final fights in Ocarina, WindWaker, Twilight Princess.
“Ocarina of Time”-look: “Hundreds of years.”
We pan over the world maps from Link To The Past and WindWaker.
“WindWaker”-look: “Thousands of miles.”
Style: Twilight Princess. “.. and all that time, I’ve never lost.”
Music fades out, at the end of the slow part of Farewell Hyrule King, and closes with the skittering-over-stone sound of a dungeon door closing.
“And all that time, I was wrong.”
Three heartbeat clips of Ganon’s face from different games.
“And now I have to go back.”
“Through the long years and distant lands.”
More clips of Link as he walks towards some of the iconic architecture of the series.
“To recover the ancient powers,”
“To summon my old enemy one last time.”
Style: Something new, light-grey on black, understated.
“To face the gods that have savaged our land,”
Slow pans around devastated landscapes, islands from the dark-worlds from A Link To The Past and Twilight Princess blurring into Hyrule. Broken ruins of the castles from various games.
“that Power, Wisdom and Courage might stand together at last,”
“… and set the people of Hyrule free.”
We now see Link walking into a small shrine, clearly built around the statue at its altar, a kneeling Ganon looking skyward. The Master Sword still embedded Excalibur-like in his skull; this is where he was last defeated, at the conclusion of Windwaker. Link brushes him off, as gently as an old friend, before putting two hands to the hilt of the sword and drawing it out. A thin shell of the stone crumbles away, and Ganon sags for a moment, and then rises.
He looks at the raised sword, and then to Link, and a voice that rumbles with scratching subsonic echoes asks, “You have woken me, here? Why?”
Link answers: “To end this. To give you everything you want.”
As previews of the gameplay, the trailer concludes with some exploration of canonical past environments by Link, but we also see Princess Zelda carrying a bow and a fine rapier, dressed as Shiek and creeping, Thief-style, through the rafters of Hyrule Castle at night, and Ganon parting a phalanx of armored pikemen with the same casual gesture you’d use to part a bead curtain.
Shortly we see Ganon, walking into Zelda’s room as she stands on her balcony, overlooking the kingdom. The princess knows he’s there, and doesn’t even turn around, smiling sadly. “Again, Ganon? And so soon?”. He shakes his head, and she turns around, looking quizzical as he replies “No, Princess, not this time. The Hero is Awake.”
“At last.”
A clip of Ganondorf, arm extended, levitating Zelda up to the back of an enormous arachnid creature, as she grabs on with one hand and pulls her rapier with the other. King of Hyrule snarling “You will not defile my kingdom” as an army of knights marches forward.
We close on a close up of Link, looking down briefly at the shield on his arm, emblazoned with the Crest of Hyrule. He smiles, tossing it to the ground and drawing the small Kokiri shortsword from his belt, Master Sword in his other hand. We pan back from that to see Link standing on a green hilltop, backs together with Princess Zelda, bow drawn and eyes narrowed, and Ganon, nodding to himself while his hands smoke with a green, burning-copper fire. As we pan further back, we see the hill surrounded at the base by thousands of soldiers, armored knights on horseback and snarling monsters in shining armor plate.
We fade out over the Crest of Hyrule and the title: “The Legend Of Zelda: Divine Kingdom”.
And then we fade to black.
I mean, sure. Almost pure fanservice, in a sense, but I think the idea’s got potential. The hard part is designing cooperative gameplay that makes sense for the very different character-roles involved, but I think that’s solvable.
Anyway, there you go.
posted by mhoye at 5:42 PM on January 3, 2023 [14 favorites]
Mhoye, I’m glad I’m not the only one to notice that Link’s job is to perpetrate genocide to maintain entrenched interests.
posted by rickw at 6:01 PM on January 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by rickw at 6:01 PM on January 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
I recall A Link Between Worlds explicitly states that there are many alternate Hyrules, and Ganon is invincible in most of them.
I think the conservative nature of fantasy is mostly an artefact of the plot requirements - if you want a cool ancient building to explore with traps that still work, you've already built an ancient civilisation that is superior to the modern day. (And if you don't, what are the players doing there?) Unless you take time to make them evil, time the Zelda series doesn't want to spend, you've just made change a negative force.
posted by Merus at 6:16 PM on January 3, 2023 [1 favorite]
I think the conservative nature of fantasy is mostly an artefact of the plot requirements - if you want a cool ancient building to explore with traps that still work, you've already built an ancient civilisation that is superior to the modern day. (And if you don't, what are the players doing there?) Unless you take time to make them evil, time the Zelda series doesn't want to spend, you've just made change a negative force.
posted by Merus at 6:16 PM on January 3, 2023 [1 favorite]
Mhoye, I’m glad I’m not the only one to notice that Link’s job is to perpetrate genocide to maintain entrenched interests.
Well, it's definitely looking like Tears Of The Kingdom is trying to be the closing statement of the Zelda franchise, so I'm holding out hope that we'll find some sympathy for that idea coming from Nintendo in a few weeks too.
posted by mhoye at 6:29 PM on January 3, 2023
Well, it's definitely looking like Tears Of The Kingdom is trying to be the closing statement of the Zelda franchise, so I'm holding out hope that we'll find some sympathy for that idea coming from Nintendo in a few weeks too.
posted by mhoye at 6:29 PM on January 3, 2023
Well, it's definitely looking like Tears Of The Kingdom is trying to be the closing statement of the Zelda franchise, so I'm holding out hope that we'll find some sympathy for that idea coming from Nintendo in a few weeks too.
Zelda makes too much money for that to be the definite end. They’ll be making Zelda games for 100s of years.
posted by jmauro at 10:20 PM on January 3, 2023 [1 favorite]
Zelda makes too much money for that to be the definite end. They’ll be making Zelda games for 100s of years.
posted by jmauro at 10:20 PM on January 3, 2023 [1 favorite]
Fantasy genre-stuff is almost always about maintaining some royalist status quo; the main exceptions are when someone is explicitly skewering the genre. If you want to change the status quo, you go to science fiction.
posted by kaibutsu at 1:00 AM on January 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by kaibutsu at 1:00 AM on January 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
Children wandering alone in the wilderness, enslaving wild animals, giving them steroids and making them fight. Pokemon is basically cockfighting for kids. So cute tho.
posted by adept256 at 1:27 AM on January 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by adept256 at 1:27 AM on January 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
If you want to change the status quo, you go to science fiction.
Alas SF's libertarian special boy fake novelty carries regressive and reactionary ideas perfectly well too. Just look at Elon Musk, who might as well have been birthed from Heinlein's ass.
posted by fleacircus at 3:09 AM on January 4, 2023 [5 favorites]
Alas SF's libertarian special boy fake novelty carries regressive and reactionary ideas perfectly well too. Just look at Elon Musk, who might as well have been birthed from Heinlein's ass.
posted by fleacircus at 3:09 AM on January 4, 2023 [5 favorites]
I just finished re-reading RF Kuang’s Burning God trilogy, which is sort of a retelling of recent Chinese history in a fantasy context, and does a lot with ideas like war orphans and civilians hiding in caves from war.
posted by sixswitch at 5:42 AM on January 4, 2023
posted by sixswitch at 5:42 AM on January 4, 2023
Fantasy genre-stuff is almost always about maintaining some royalist status quo
... I ... don't think so. This kind of statement doesn't speak much of familiarity with fantasy, to be honest. It's an incredibly diverse genre, with many different types of stories.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 8:05 AM on January 4, 2023 [3 favorites]
... I ... don't think so. This kind of statement doesn't speak much of familiarity with fantasy, to be honest. It's an incredibly diverse genre, with many different types of stories.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 8:05 AM on January 4, 2023 [3 favorites]
Zelda makes too much money for that to be the definite end. They’ll be making Zelda games for 100s of years.
Zelda has been on fairly rough footing for a long while now, with declining sales and increasingly tepid critical response, so the end of the Zelda series was plausible... until Breath of the Wild.
Fantasy genre-stuff is almost always about maintaining some royalist status quo
If we turn a little to the left, the Final Fantasy series is typically about overthrowing an evil empire, taking down organised religion, and finally killing god. I actually considered comparing the Zelda series to Final Fantasy 14, because that one has the most explicitly apocalyptic themes, but it's also one of the more unashamedly progressive games in the series. Your crew of plucky warrior-scholars are explicitly trying to build a brighter future, even rejecting the prospect of restoring an ideal past far rosier than any conservative vision; while you have the support of monarchies, the two nations your crew helps found are republics. (And, yes, the ancient advanced civilisation who built a lot of the dungeons you go through were evil and destroyed by their own hubris.) So it's definitely not universal, nor entirely determined by the needs of the story.
posted by Merus at 6:02 PM on January 4, 2023
Zelda has been on fairly rough footing for a long while now, with declining sales and increasingly tepid critical response, so the end of the Zelda series was plausible... until Breath of the Wild.
Fantasy genre-stuff is almost always about maintaining some royalist status quo
If we turn a little to the left, the Final Fantasy series is typically about overthrowing an evil empire, taking down organised religion, and finally killing god. I actually considered comparing the Zelda series to Final Fantasy 14, because that one has the most explicitly apocalyptic themes, but it's also one of the more unashamedly progressive games in the series. Your crew of plucky warrior-scholars are explicitly trying to build a brighter future, even rejecting the prospect of restoring an ideal past far rosier than any conservative vision; while you have the support of monarchies, the two nations your crew helps found are republics. (And, yes, the ancient advanced civilisation who built a lot of the dungeons you go through were evil and destroyed by their own hubris.) So it's definitely not universal, nor entirely determined by the needs of the story.
posted by Merus at 6:02 PM on January 4, 2023
Pokemon is basically cockfighting for kids.
Absolutely refuse to play it for exactly this reason. (Less worried about Zelda, but if they made Ganon an edgelord billionaire, and Zelda a union leader, then we'd be talking.)
posted by bonaldi at 8:00 AM on January 6, 2023
Absolutely refuse to play it for exactly this reason. (Less worried about Zelda, but if they made Ganon an edgelord billionaire, and Zelda a union leader, then we'd be talking.)
posted by bonaldi at 8:00 AM on January 6, 2023
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I was 12 when I played the first Legend of Zelda on my NES way way back in 1986. 20 years before this guy played Zelda for the first time. I know that I'm 48, that I'll be half a century old in just two years, that I'm already close to 62% finished with my life assuming I live to the average of 77.
But somehow just hearing an actual adult talking about how their first Zelda was Twilight Princess brought it home for me emotionally. I played Twilight Princess in January of 2007 since I was in Japan until then. We adopted our son in 2007, I played Twilight Princess with him sitting in my lap giggling along with Midna.
OK, existential crisis over, now I'll watch the rest of this guy's video. But damn does he make me feel old.
posted by sotonohito at 3:50 PM on January 3, 2023 [10 favorites]