Monkeys on Typewriters
Jun. 30th, 2024 06:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI really need to get better at disagreeing with people online. 99.99% of the time, I'm happy to block people, ignore people, or just generally nod and file away their opinion in the back of my mind with the expectation that it will make sense later, or if I had more information.
I also try to be careful that expressing my own opinions online isn't just an excuse to bully someone or make someone feel bad. I'm not deluded enough to think that I have an audience, but still, I don't want to be in the business of making unintended targets feel attacked.
But sometimes, every great once in a while, someone who usually has good taste will give voice to a strange prejudice that I don't think they're aware of, and I sort of want to, idk, reach out? Out of love and respect. As a kindness, sort of?
To give a specific example, the Dark Souls podcast recently did an episode about A Link Between Worlds. It was a great episode, but one of the hosts came right out and said that the Legend of Zelda games have no stories, and that the only reason A Link Between Worlds has anything approaching a story is because there were enough monkeys sitting in front of enough typewriters at Nintendo.
I think it's ironic for a person who produces a Dark Souls podcast to say something like that, because someone could easily argue that the FromSoft games are all about gameplay, with the "story" and "lore" only really being important to a small group of hardcore fans. And I think where the idea of "Zelda games have no story" is coming from is an ingrained prejudice that media designed to appeal to an audience that isn't the Dark Souls demographic (ie, adult men) isn't worthy of serious consideration.
What I would want to say (perhaps in a comment on the podcast Patreon?) is that Legend of Zelda games always have two stories. There's the surface-level story about "small elf boy saves princess from pig demon," and then there's the story underneath the surface, which is always infinitely more interesting. The reason the podcast hosts saw the subtextual story of A Link Between Worlds is because it's much closer to the surface; and, inversely, the reason they haven't seen this story in other Zelda games is both because they didn't think to look for it and because they don't consider the communities who do look for it to be worthy of consideration.
I don't mean to get into culture war bullshit, but this is definitely sexism, with a bit of ethnocentrism thrown in as well. If the people who do the interesting sort of fandom meta for Zelda games (by which I mean literally anything that isn't arguing about the stupid timeline) are mostly not male and mostly not white, why should you pay attention to them? That sort of thing.
One of the reasons I get upset about this is because it directly affects my career as someone who writes about video games, and especially as someone who would like to write about the Legend of Zelda series. I taught an entire class about The Wind Waker that was extremely successful, and then I published some extremely successful articles based on that class, and then I wrote a book that... no male editor would touch. And all the editors are male. It's frustrating to have created something interesting that a lot of people care about, but then be denied a platform because "the wrong type of people" care about it.
ETA: And one more bit of irony is that the audience for a book about The Wind Waker has a significant overlap with the readership that actually buys books. There's no shame in admitting that YA romance novels and manga are keeping the traditional publishing industry afloat. Why would you want to gatekeep yourself out of growing a large and diverse audience?
And sure, I want to push back against sexism and ethnocentrism. Of course I do. But really, I just think the broader culture would be more interesting if you removed the gates that are labeled with, like, "only girls are allowed to like Legend of Zelda" or whatever. A good analogy is how, back in the early 2010s, the majority of male comic book fans and gamers hated cosplay. This prejudice seems ridiculous now. Even if it's not for you, why deny your subculture a cool and interesting thing that benefits everyone?
But my anxiety has unfortunately transformed my general policy of "tread softly" into "don't ever say anything that might be interpreted as disagreeing with anyone for any reason." And that's not healthy.
I also try to be careful that expressing my own opinions online isn't just an excuse to bully someone or make someone feel bad. I'm not deluded enough to think that I have an audience, but still, I don't want to be in the business of making unintended targets feel attacked.
But sometimes, every great once in a while, someone who usually has good taste will give voice to a strange prejudice that I don't think they're aware of, and I sort of want to, idk, reach out? Out of love and respect. As a kindness, sort of?
To give a specific example, the Dark Souls podcast recently did an episode about A Link Between Worlds. It was a great episode, but one of the hosts came right out and said that the Legend of Zelda games have no stories, and that the only reason A Link Between Worlds has anything approaching a story is because there were enough monkeys sitting in front of enough typewriters at Nintendo.
I think it's ironic for a person who produces a Dark Souls podcast to say something like that, because someone could easily argue that the FromSoft games are all about gameplay, with the "story" and "lore" only really being important to a small group of hardcore fans. And I think where the idea of "Zelda games have no story" is coming from is an ingrained prejudice that media designed to appeal to an audience that isn't the Dark Souls demographic (ie, adult men) isn't worthy of serious consideration.
What I would want to say (perhaps in a comment on the podcast Patreon?) is that Legend of Zelda games always have two stories. There's the surface-level story about "small elf boy saves princess from pig demon," and then there's the story underneath the surface, which is always infinitely more interesting. The reason the podcast hosts saw the subtextual story of A Link Between Worlds is because it's much closer to the surface; and, inversely, the reason they haven't seen this story in other Zelda games is both because they didn't think to look for it and because they don't consider the communities who do look for it to be worthy of consideration.
I don't mean to get into culture war bullshit, but this is definitely sexism, with a bit of ethnocentrism thrown in as well. If the people who do the interesting sort of fandom meta for Zelda games (by which I mean literally anything that isn't arguing about the stupid timeline) are mostly not male and mostly not white, why should you pay attention to them? That sort of thing.
One of the reasons I get upset about this is because it directly affects my career as someone who writes about video games, and especially as someone who would like to write about the Legend of Zelda series. I taught an entire class about The Wind Waker that was extremely successful, and then I published some extremely successful articles based on that class, and then I wrote a book that... no male editor would touch. And all the editors are male. It's frustrating to have created something interesting that a lot of people care about, but then be denied a platform because "the wrong type of people" care about it.
ETA: And one more bit of irony is that the audience for a book about The Wind Waker has a significant overlap with the readership that actually buys books. There's no shame in admitting that YA romance novels and manga are keeping the traditional publishing industry afloat. Why would you want to gatekeep yourself out of growing a large and diverse audience?
And sure, I want to push back against sexism and ethnocentrism. Of course I do. But really, I just think the broader culture would be more interesting if you removed the gates that are labeled with, like, "only girls are allowed to like Legend of Zelda" or whatever. A good analogy is how, back in the early 2010s, the majority of male comic book fans and gamers hated cosplay. This prejudice seems ridiculous now. Even if it's not for you, why deny your subculture a cool and interesting thing that benefits everyone?
But my anxiety has unfortunately transformed my general policy of "tread softly" into "don't ever say anything that might be interpreted as disagreeing with anyone for any reason." And that's not healthy.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-02 07:31 pm (UTC)[squints]
Okay, so if we assume that's true, maybe Ocarina of Time only got so big because it pioneered 3D adventure game mechanics. Maybe the story had nothing to do with it. But how then would you account for the cultural impact of Majora's Mask, a game that flipped a lot of assets from OoT and in its dungeoneering and boss-fight aspects is frequently too friggin' finnicky to control reliably and less rewarding to play? If not for the story and the expertly calibrated Weird Bleak Vibes(TM), how does this guy propose to account for the fact that people are still rabid about this game after all this time?
Heck - I love A Link Between Worlds, and I love its story, and especially how the story is delivered in a way that's a throwback to LttP and other SNES games. Intentionally so! It's a really cool iteration on the series' existing trends and themes and the monkey/typewriter thing in this context is insulting on multiple levels.
I feel like there's been an increasing sentiment of dismissiveness toward the Zelda franchise in the past few years from guys online who fancy themselves serious gamers, and this is very weird to me as someone who started gaming in the late 90s-early 00s when LttP/OoT/MM were considered, like, Big Canonical Video Games. And I remember the backlash to Wind Waker's art style, but I also remember that some years on we seemed to reach a consensus that "the kneejerk reactions were foolish and WW was always good." But now nerds are back to considering the franchise unserious? I don't even know anymore.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-06 12:06 pm (UTC)I agree, and I think this is exactly it. This attitude feels like a throwback to an earlier decade when self-identified gamers were desperate to prove that games are "art." And certainly, A Link Between Worlds is difficult to compare to a text-heavy, niche-audience title like Disco Elysium, but games criticism has moved beyond the necessity of that comparison.
The podcast in question is called What Out for Fireballs. It's generally quite good, and the hosts are both sweet and emotionally intelligent men. If I had to guess, I'd say that the host who made this particular comment has a bias against anime and anything with an anime style, which seems to be a common mindset among a certain set of Gen-X American nerd men. I personally have a bias against American superhero comics, so I get it. Still, I don't think I'd commit to a podcast episode about X-Men and say that all superhero comics are generated by monkeys on typewriters.
Anyway! Thank you for this comment. Good points all around. I actually copied your argument into the text file I use for lecture notes, because I couldn't say any of this better myself. So at least one good thing came of the silly podcast-related frustration I've been stewing in this week, thank you.