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rynlingI decided to stop being a whiny little malcontent and actually do something productive, so I sent an email to one of the curators of The Rec Center, a lowkey weekly email newsletter collecting fandom news and interesting fan art. This is what I wrote:
A few weeks ago on The Rec Center newsletter, you shared a piece of fanart of Ganondorf from Tears of the Kingdom in which the character was painted with bright green skin. That artwork is gorgeous, and I love how the artist employs pop art techniques to create a bold visual design.
This feels like a good opportunity to draw your attention to an emerging current in Legend of Zelda fandom, in which fan artists have started to express concern that Nintendo’s own depiction of Ganondorf as a desert-dwelling villain with green-tinted skin has its roots in harmful stereotypes relating to Judaic and Islamic peoples.
I’d therefore like to invite you to consider the manly beauty of Rehydrated Ganondorf with healthy and natural brown skin, which you can appreciate in two fantastic pieces posted on Tumblr (here) and (here). I’d also like to share (this) amazing artwork by the award-winning comic creator Yuko Ota, who plays on the East Asian elements of the original character design.
I want to emphasize that I don’t mean to criticize your excellent taste or the artist featured in your post in any way. Rather, I just wanted to pass on a cool and interesting reinterpretation fueled by the transformative power of fandom. We gleefully stan this horrible man, and they’re all good Ganondorves.
I actually think every artist who draws green-skinned Ganondorf in This Year of Our Lord 2023 needs to spend a solid fifteen minutes in time-out, but I'm trying to be more tolerant of accidental antisemitism and Islamophobia. It's just really in the water these days, and there isn't a lot of education concerning where it comes from or how it manifests. In the end, the most important thing is for everybody to be chill and not send death threats over fictional characters.
A few weeks ago on The Rec Center newsletter, you shared a piece of fanart of Ganondorf from Tears of the Kingdom in which the character was painted with bright green skin. That artwork is gorgeous, and I love how the artist employs pop art techniques to create a bold visual design.
This feels like a good opportunity to draw your attention to an emerging current in Legend of Zelda fandom, in which fan artists have started to express concern that Nintendo’s own depiction of Ganondorf as a desert-dwelling villain with green-tinted skin has its roots in harmful stereotypes relating to Judaic and Islamic peoples.
I’d therefore like to invite you to consider the manly beauty of Rehydrated Ganondorf with healthy and natural brown skin, which you can appreciate in two fantastic pieces posted on Tumblr (here) and (here). I’d also like to share (this) amazing artwork by the award-winning comic creator Yuko Ota, who plays on the East Asian elements of the original character design.
I want to emphasize that I don’t mean to criticize your excellent taste or the artist featured in your post in any way. Rather, I just wanted to pass on a cool and interesting reinterpretation fueled by the transformative power of fandom. We gleefully stan this horrible man, and they’re all good Ganondorves.
I actually think every artist who draws green-skinned Ganondorf in This Year of Our Lord 2023 needs to spend a solid fifteen minutes in time-out, but I'm trying to be more tolerant of accidental antisemitism and Islamophobia. It's just really in the water these days, and there isn't a lot of education concerning where it comes from or how it manifests. In the end, the most important thing is for everybody to be chill and not send death threats over fictional characters.
