Magical White Supremacists from Space
Sep. 15th, 2021 09:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingYom Kippur begins today! Instead of fasting I am reading about lizard people.
Yesterday I ran across an interesting blog on Tumblr whose author posts reviews of New Age occult self-help manuals that he finds in used bookstores in California. Here’s a representative post:
https://normal-horoscopes.tumblr.com/post/655446306556362752/reviewing-occult-texts-i-find-in-southern
To be honest, I know almost nothing about New Age occultism that I did not learn from studying Japanese mass media culture from the 1990s. Although I’ve read a number of Japanese sources, I hadn’t previously encountered any of the original books published in the United States, and wow. Antisemitism sure is a theme. And like, not a subtextual theme, but a key central tenet.
I spent most of yesterday evening reading through these reviews and essays, and it gradually dawned on me that a lot of the occult imagery established by these books was incorporated into Japanese fantasy games from the 1990s. There’s a whole lot of New Age nonsense I encountered through games like the trio of Super Nintendo action-adventure titles published by Enix (Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma) and dismissed as generic fantasy tropes, so learning where all of this came from has been something of a shock.
I still maintain that Ganondorf isn’t a deliberately antisemitic caricature, but I’m also not feeling great about the Zelda games at the moment. The same goes for Chrono Trigger, unfortunately.
I mean, don’t get me wrong. I still love these games. I am not angry, just disappointed.
Yesterday I ran across an interesting blog on Tumblr whose author posts reviews of New Age occult self-help manuals that he finds in used bookstores in California. Here’s a representative post:
https://normal-horoscopes.tumblr.com/post/655446306556362752/reviewing-occult-texts-i-find-in-southern
To be honest, I know almost nothing about New Age occultism that I did not learn from studying Japanese mass media culture from the 1990s. Although I’ve read a number of Japanese sources, I hadn’t previously encountered any of the original books published in the United States, and wow. Antisemitism sure is a theme. And like, not a subtextual theme, but a key central tenet.
I spent most of yesterday evening reading through these reviews and essays, and it gradually dawned on me that a lot of the occult imagery established by these books was incorporated into Japanese fantasy games from the 1990s. There’s a whole lot of New Age nonsense I encountered through games like the trio of Super Nintendo action-adventure titles published by Enix (Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma) and dismissed as generic fantasy tropes, so learning where all of this came from has been something of a shock.
I still maintain that Ganondorf isn’t a deliberately antisemitic caricature, but I’m also not feeling great about the Zelda games at the moment. The same goes for Chrono Trigger, unfortunately.
I mean, don’t get me wrong. I still love these games. I am not angry, just disappointed.
