Re: 2025 Writing Log, Part 38
Sep. 27th, 2025 07:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI also changed the PFP icon and visual theme of my main Tumblr blog. I call my new theme "touch moss," and it's not perfect, but I'll keep playing with it until I'm happy. For the time being, it's just nice to see something different.
The other day I left a comment on a mutual's post and said that it feels very cringe to be a Legend of Zelda fan these days, and I've been thinking about that ever since. It was one thing for Ocarina of Time to feature problematic fantasy trope bullshit in 1998, and it's another thing entirely for Age of Imprisonment to be about fighting a green-skinned hook-nosed wizard from the desert in 2025.
"Arabs are evil" has never been a good look, but it's especially upsetting at this particular moment, when the ongoing crisis in Gaza has (finally) become the subject of fervent worldwide attention. I tend to think the mindset that "media has a 1-to-1 correlation with reality" is a good way to give yourself mental illness, but Age of Imprisonment is just embarrassing.
The recent games aren't even fun. Tears of the Kingdom is visually inspiring and ambitious in scope but unfortunately very tedious to play, and Echoes of Wisdom is cute and creative but not even close to fully cooked. I hate to say this when there's still a lot of excellent fanwork going around, but I feel like the broader Legend of Zelda fandom has shrunk and stagnated.
Idk man. The spirit of Marie Kondo is with me, and she says: It does not spark joy.
The other day I left a comment on a mutual's post and said that it feels very cringe to be a Legend of Zelda fan these days, and I've been thinking about that ever since. It was one thing for Ocarina of Time to feature problematic fantasy trope bullshit in 1998, and it's another thing entirely for Age of Imprisonment to be about fighting a green-skinned hook-nosed wizard from the desert in 2025.
"Arabs are evil" has never been a good look, but it's especially upsetting at this particular moment, when the ongoing crisis in Gaza has (finally) become the subject of fervent worldwide attention. I tend to think the mindset that "media has a 1-to-1 correlation with reality" is a good way to give yourself mental illness, but Age of Imprisonment is just embarrassing.
The recent games aren't even fun. Tears of the Kingdom is visually inspiring and ambitious in scope but unfortunately very tedious to play, and Echoes of Wisdom is cute and creative but not even close to fully cooked. I hate to say this when there's still a lot of excellent fanwork going around, but I feel like the broader Legend of Zelda fandom has shrunk and stagnated.
Idk man. The spirit of Marie Kondo is with me, and she says: It does not spark joy.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-29 09:53 am (UTC)So it's not just me noticing this, either? I don't keep up with the newer games (low income be low incoming), but it really does astound me that they're still committed to this Orientalist, downright racist at times nonsense, and that if anything the newer games seem to be leaning into this more. It really is so bizarre — Can they not at least have the decency to read the room?
I remember thinking back before TotK came out that BotW was going to herald the beginning of a more deconstructionary era for Zelda. I don't mean in the sense that it was going to become progressive as such, but it really did seem like it was going in the direction of examining the consequences of a lot of its core elements — Hell, Link and Zelda's relationship in the game itself is built on the ways they're reduced to their roles in a manner that's incredibly abusive and traumatising. It's hardly novel in the wider scope of action RPGs, but it was something for Zelda. For all the flaws of that game's Gerudo Town, at least they had a goddamn town and were treated like actual people with everyday lives and motivations; that was something for a half-Arab kid like me, and I hoped it would signal a positive trend.
Both the fandom and the franchise itself really do seem to have stagnated. I don't get the sense we've moved forward much, really, at all, and if anything everything feels smaller, and weaker. I can't shake the feeling of being left behind at a party after everyone else is gone.
The spirit of Marie Kondo is with us indeed. It's disheartening.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-04 06:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-05 08:29 am (UTC)No need to apologise! I'm here and delighted to engage with your posts whether or not you reply (though of course, your replies are always a treat :) ).
It definitely feels distancing yourself from someone you once (and to a point truly do still) love because of the choices they've made time and time again in any case. I don't think I'll ever be able to distance myself fully — I've been treating this series as a sandbox for my own nonsense in spite of and oftentimes explicitly against what it seems to be messaging for the better part of a decade at this point — But it really does feel like the end of an era.
Again, I'm so baffled by their choice to keep making SWANA-coded people their ontologically evil antagonists in ways that feel anti-Arab and at points borderline antisemitic considering this current wave of visibility regarding the war crimes directed at the Gazan people and Palestinians more broadly. Do they not even have the savviness to preserve their own image? Like, even a little bit? Come on, did Capcom take the ability to create non-Orientalist villains (i.e. Vaati) in the divorce?
It really is such a relief to have someone else see the writing on the wall, as it were. I'm glad to hear the feeling is mutual. Here's to new and exciting (and hopefully inexpensive) frontiers!