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Apr. 1st, 2019 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenofzanokay so someone in a zelda community i’m in linked a long-ass video analysis of ocarina of time. “oh ani i bet that was your shit” WRONG because it was BAD ANALYSIS
I mean none of the conclusions this dude came to about oot or its themes were incorrect, but they were...really obvious and surface level stuff. he was like “oh it’s subtext” but then literally his examples were...lines from the text of the game. my guy. my dude. my man. that’s text.
he was also (fairly, mostly) comparing oot to princess mononoke...except some of the shit he said made it clear that he had ALSO misanalyzed parts of mononoke, and fundamentally misunderstood how the cultural contexts in which those texts were created functioned at all (eg, chalked everything up to shintoism, which is...more of a factor than the entire context)
he also literally compared lady eboshi to ganondorf, which is when i closed the fuck out of that video, because, you have fundamentally misunderstood one or both of these texts to a comical degree
lady eboshi is explicitly not the bad guy. in fact, in princess mononoke, no one is “the bad guy”. that’s part of the entire point of the film. she also has motivations that aren’t entirely selfish, ie she is providing a space for women and injured people to live freely and do things they wouldn’t be allowed to do elsewhere, and acting to protect those people and that space. ganondorf in oot, however, is never shown to have any motivation other than “i want it all”. he does not make things better for the gerudo people he is supposedly the ruler of, and when he is the king of hyrule, he does not make things better for any of the people or the land.
he also misunderstood the point of the first three dungeons, where you go through the deku tree, dodongo cave, and jabu-jabu. he described this part of the journey as “purification”. that’s...not really what’s going on? i mean there is some literal cleansing happening, but mostly he is given those tasks as a means of proving he is trustworthy enough to give these relics to. like, he doesn’t have to purify jabu-jabu because jabu-jabu needs purifying. jabu-jabu appears to have been doing mostly okay with the weird electric parasites in him. likewise, he doesn’t even really cleanse the deku tree--the deku tree is ALREADY DYING, which the deku tree is implied to know. it’s the effort and the defeat of a large enemy which proves that he is ready to take on this quest.
like no wonder this guy thought “ocarina of time is a game about how the passage of time is inherently bittersweet” was a deep dive into the game’s subtext, since he missed the point of THE FIRST THIRD OF THE GAME so hard.
like the bits of link as a child are...link literally going through coming-of-age rituals. the deku tree tests him to make sure he’s ready to leave the forest. the gorons test him to make sure he’s a goron brother (arguably the state of goron adulthood, at least in that game), king zora and ruto test him to make sure he’s literally ready to get married. this...isn’t subtle? this is link going through rites-of-passage one right after another, double-time.
and the kicker is, that’s still not enough. in attempting to save hyrule, he lets ganondorf in early, and he’s still not enough of an adult to save hyrule. he’s barely taller than the sword destined for him. which is why he’s put in stasis for seven years.
and like...people in the game talk about how he lost that time? how, for the good of the world, link’s childhood was literally sacrificed? at the end, when he’s allowed to go back and live those years over again, that’s the happiest ending we get, and that’s bittersweet, because, he knows things he shouldn’t know. he had a taste of late adolescence/nominal adulthood, and even if he can be sent back to that time to live those years, he still has the knowledge and experience he gained as an adult.
it’s also pretty explicitly bittersweet that, in order to have a hero who could save hyrule, hyrule had to go to shit for seven years.
the game explicitly calls time cruel. this isn’t subtext. the game is about growing up, and growing up too early, and how that fucks someone up, and it’s also about the passage of time changing things that were safe and familiar into something unfamiliar and dangerous. to a lesser degree, it’s about being powerless to fix your situation and having to wait for something to change, and we see people in hyrule reacting to that in different ways, but there’s a better argument for THAT being subtext than like...the. the main theme.
like what did this guy think the main theme of oot was? “time travel is cool”? “always fight evil sorcerers”? “a hero will always come but sometimes it will be late but don’t worry about that because he came”? like it’s not the most profound game of all time, but it’s a little more complicated story-wise than like, pac-man, so it does have themes. the obvious candidates for thematic threads are...time and music. Because the game is called [musical instrument] of time. it’s about time. jesus christ dude
I mean none of the conclusions this dude came to about oot or its themes were incorrect, but they were...really obvious and surface level stuff. he was like “oh it’s subtext” but then literally his examples were...lines from the text of the game. my guy. my dude. my man. that’s text.
he was also (fairly, mostly) comparing oot to princess mononoke...except some of the shit he said made it clear that he had ALSO misanalyzed parts of mononoke, and fundamentally misunderstood how the cultural contexts in which those texts were created functioned at all (eg, chalked everything up to shintoism, which is...more of a factor than the entire context)
he also literally compared lady eboshi to ganondorf, which is when i closed the fuck out of that video, because, you have fundamentally misunderstood one or both of these texts to a comical degree
lady eboshi is explicitly not the bad guy. in fact, in princess mononoke, no one is “the bad guy”. that’s part of the entire point of the film. she also has motivations that aren’t entirely selfish, ie she is providing a space for women and injured people to live freely and do things they wouldn’t be allowed to do elsewhere, and acting to protect those people and that space. ganondorf in oot, however, is never shown to have any motivation other than “i want it all”. he does not make things better for the gerudo people he is supposedly the ruler of, and when he is the king of hyrule, he does not make things better for any of the people or the land.
he also misunderstood the point of the first three dungeons, where you go through the deku tree, dodongo cave, and jabu-jabu. he described this part of the journey as “purification”. that’s...not really what’s going on? i mean there is some literal cleansing happening, but mostly he is given those tasks as a means of proving he is trustworthy enough to give these relics to. like, he doesn’t have to purify jabu-jabu because jabu-jabu needs purifying. jabu-jabu appears to have been doing mostly okay with the weird electric parasites in him. likewise, he doesn’t even really cleanse the deku tree--the deku tree is ALREADY DYING, which the deku tree is implied to know. it’s the effort and the defeat of a large enemy which proves that he is ready to take on this quest.
like no wonder this guy thought “ocarina of time is a game about how the passage of time is inherently bittersweet” was a deep dive into the game’s subtext, since he missed the point of THE FIRST THIRD OF THE GAME so hard.
like the bits of link as a child are...link literally going through coming-of-age rituals. the deku tree tests him to make sure he’s ready to leave the forest. the gorons test him to make sure he’s a goron brother (arguably the state of goron adulthood, at least in that game), king zora and ruto test him to make sure he’s literally ready to get married. this...isn’t subtle? this is link going through rites-of-passage one right after another, double-time.
and the kicker is, that’s still not enough. in attempting to save hyrule, he lets ganondorf in early, and he’s still not enough of an adult to save hyrule. he’s barely taller than the sword destined for him. which is why he’s put in stasis for seven years.
and like...people in the game talk about how he lost that time? how, for the good of the world, link’s childhood was literally sacrificed? at the end, when he’s allowed to go back and live those years over again, that’s the happiest ending we get, and that’s bittersweet, because, he knows things he shouldn’t know. he had a taste of late adolescence/nominal adulthood, and even if he can be sent back to that time to live those years, he still has the knowledge and experience he gained as an adult.
it’s also pretty explicitly bittersweet that, in order to have a hero who could save hyrule, hyrule had to go to shit for seven years.
the game explicitly calls time cruel. this isn’t subtext. the game is about growing up, and growing up too early, and how that fucks someone up, and it’s also about the passage of time changing things that were safe and familiar into something unfamiliar and dangerous. to a lesser degree, it’s about being powerless to fix your situation and having to wait for something to change, and we see people in hyrule reacting to that in different ways, but there’s a better argument for THAT being subtext than like...the. the main theme.
like what did this guy think the main theme of oot was? “time travel is cool”? “always fight evil sorcerers”? “a hero will always come but sometimes it will be late but don’t worry about that because he came”? like it’s not the most profound game of all time, but it’s a little more complicated story-wise than like, pac-man, so it does have themes. the obvious candidates for thematic threads are...time and music. Because the game is called [musical instrument] of time. it’s about time. jesus christ dude
