Re: The Darkness of the Archives
Nov. 9th, 2025 09:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingFor me, the fantasy of this story is “what if the people pushed to the margins are actually very important,” which is something I’ve been thinking about lately.
Echoes of Wisdom (i love her) and Age of Imprisonment (i love her too) aside, Zelda is painfully marginalized in these games, and damn if I don’t know how that feels.
You can call this “damseling,” but I don’t think it’s necessarily a gender thing. Rather, human societies tend to set up hierarchies of “what matters” and “what should be ignored.” We can’t give equal attention to everything, so this is admittedly a useful distinction.
And indeed, there’s a lot of cultural activity that does in fact benefit from marginalization. To give an immediate example, I like this blog here on Dreamwidth precisely because it’s quiet, asynchronous, and not networked socially. Likewise, there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work that happens on Discord that no one needs to see. I enjoyed Hades II, for example, but I don’t care about how the game may have been shaped by conversations on its official server.
The problem I have is when broader institutions are set up to push people away from the center, thus denying resources and opportunities and agency to people who don't already enjoy the privilege conferred by resources + opportunities + agency. This is what I’ve been struggling with as someone who, to give an example, wants to publish my writing. The pushback feels almost mythical, like: YOU ARE NOT THE CHOSEN ONE.
And I have very literally been relegated to windowless offices in the past, a situation that has nothing to do with my actual qualifications or performance or workplace popularity, but rather the same: YOU ARE NOT THE CHOSEN ONE. It’s disheartening, to say the least. In addition, it’s often absurd and counterproductive. Departments that marginalize talent don’t survive.
So the fantasy of the Ganon character in this situation is essentially: What if there were someone who recognized value and absolutely did not give a shit about pre-existing structures of power? It’s a fantasy of strong forward movement that breaks a stale and dusty stasis.
It’s easy to say a character like Ganon isn’t a good person, because he doesn’t behave as a “good” person should. Still, sometimes you really need a bad guy to smash through calcified hierarchies, even if it’s an intensely disruptive and messy process.
Because let’s be real, it’s only because of Ganon and his bullshit that anyone cares about Zelda at all. Together they break the status quo, and these are fun games to play (and hopefully this will be a fun story to read) because the status quo needs to be broken.
But also the fantasy is, like. What if tech oligarchs actually cared about culture and education. Imagine that lmao.
Echoes of Wisdom (i love her) and Age of Imprisonment (i love her too) aside, Zelda is painfully marginalized in these games, and damn if I don’t know how that feels.
You can call this “damseling,” but I don’t think it’s necessarily a gender thing. Rather, human societies tend to set up hierarchies of “what matters” and “what should be ignored.” We can’t give equal attention to everything, so this is admittedly a useful distinction.
And indeed, there’s a lot of cultural activity that does in fact benefit from marginalization. To give an immediate example, I like this blog here on Dreamwidth precisely because it’s quiet, asynchronous, and not networked socially. Likewise, there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work that happens on Discord that no one needs to see. I enjoyed Hades II, for example, but I don’t care about how the game may have been shaped by conversations on its official server.
The problem I have is when broader institutions are set up to push people away from the center, thus denying resources and opportunities and agency to people who don't already enjoy the privilege conferred by resources + opportunities + agency. This is what I’ve been struggling with as someone who, to give an example, wants to publish my writing. The pushback feels almost mythical, like: YOU ARE NOT THE CHOSEN ONE.
And I have very literally been relegated to windowless offices in the past, a situation that has nothing to do with my actual qualifications or performance or workplace popularity, but rather the same: YOU ARE NOT THE CHOSEN ONE. It’s disheartening, to say the least. In addition, it’s often absurd and counterproductive. Departments that marginalize talent don’t survive.
So the fantasy of the Ganon character in this situation is essentially: What if there were someone who recognized value and absolutely did not give a shit about pre-existing structures of power? It’s a fantasy of strong forward movement that breaks a stale and dusty stasis.
It’s easy to say a character like Ganon isn’t a good person, because he doesn’t behave as a “good” person should. Still, sometimes you really need a bad guy to smash through calcified hierarchies, even if it’s an intensely disruptive and messy process.
Because let’s be real, it’s only because of Ganon and his bullshit that anyone cares about Zelda at all. Together they break the status quo, and these are fun games to play (and hopefully this will be a fun story to read) because the status quo needs to be broken.
But also the fantasy is, like. What if tech oligarchs actually cared about culture and education. Imagine that lmao.
no subject
Date: 2025-11-10 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-11 02:39 pm (UTC)Like I was recently thinking about generative AI, and how it's not necessarily "bad" by default. There are a lot of interesting things it could do! In terms of animation, for example, you could have human artists draw the key frames while AI generates the in-between frames. This would make the process of creating animation infinitely easier without sacrificing any of the artistry, and it would also help prevent burnout, crunch overtime, and physical injury.
If I were a tech person trying to market generative AI as a world-saving tool, I would definitely make this argument, and I would pay high-profile animators (and other internet-famous digital artists) to showcase my product, thereby conferring an air not just of cultural legitimacy, but also of coolness (or rizz, or whatever).
But tech people don't do this, because they don't care about culture. Because they don't care about culture, the people who create culture hate them.
So then you get behavior like Elon Musk pushing ads for the books he (supposedly) reads on Twitter because Joyce Carol Oates called him out for having his head shoved so far up his own ass that he's never posted photos of cute animals or beautiful sunsets. And, in a situation similar to Luigi Mangione, Musk's pathetic attempts to demonstrate that he has culture have united all corners of the internet in mockery.
I'm not saying we should go back to the steel baron days, but it's wild that contemporary tech oligarchs don't understand the tangible real-world benefits of, like, building a fancy library and opening it to the public.
Sorry for ranting. This is just something I've been thinking about a lot lately.
no subject
Date: 2025-11-25 05:41 pm (UTC)