#decision commitment

[askagamedev]

Do you think you personally put out better games, better art, under pressure? Some people put out masterpieces that only took the shape they did because they were under harsh constraints, cheifly low dev time. How about you? And is there a dichotomy between comfort and pressure to product quality that you find interesting?

That's an excellent question. You may remember the term [Decision Paralysis] used before on this blog. It's when a decisionmaker is presented with so many choices that they refuse to make (or put off making) a choice out of fear of making a mistake. Decision Paralysis affects everyone, including game developers like me. We can get so wrapped up in finding the perfect solution that we never commit to any one, for fear of that's solution's drawbacks... even though any solution that we commit to will have drawbacks regardless. This lack of commitment has side effects down the line - because we can't commit to something, we're afraid of our work being wasted or thrown out so we won't commit our best effort to it.

As such, pressure like a deadline naturally pushes us towards what I've taken to calling decision commitment - when we are willing to lock down a choice and accept all the benefits and tradeoffs that choice entails, rather than continuing to circle the options and never commit. It is closely related to what Mark Darrah likes to call completion urgency - the pressure to finish what we're working on. Decision commitment is necessary to make actual progress. Without any pressure to commit to a decision, dev teams can (and do) burn indefinite amounts of dev time and resources going in circles and end up with very little to show for it. When we've got a hard deadline, we know we have to buckle down and commit. That pushes us to give our best because we know it won't be wasted.

Lack of (or late) decision commitment really hurts craftsmanship and quality because we aren't actually committing to what we're building. If we are always keeping the back door open to drop whatever it is we're working on and changing our minds on the direction we're going, it always feels like a potential waste to do our best work. The quickest way to burnout is to feel like your work doesn't matter and your effort was wasted. Why polish, optimize, and improve if we're going to go a different way next week and throw this work out? No one likes to feel that way, so we naturally hedge our efforts with the minimum viable effort if we aren't sure whether it will be used.

This is all a long-winded way of saying "Yes, I absolutely do better quality work when I'm under pressure. Since I am confident we're doing this thing, I can give it my all." Without the pressure to deliver, the back door is always open and it's extremely hard to commit to the decision and give my best. If I know that we're absolutely committing to what I'm working on, I will build the best feature and content that I can. I believe that many other devs share this feeling for similar reasons.

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[ozmosiis]

re watching reanimator and it's just like. dude. dan isnt even just 'down bad' for herbert, no, hes down lower than hell for herbert. he watched herbert shove a syringe full of green glowstick juice into a corpse (not to mention dan checked it out), saw it sit up, and immediately MURDER his fiances dad, and still said 'mmm yeah gonna stick around' like dan isnt even enabling herberts behavior. hes actively supporting it. herbert, at 3am, could whisper in his ear, "daniel lets commit medical atrocities together" and dans already getting his shoes on. he never signed up for science but by god did he sign up for that evil twink

[unpretty]

Rare non-kink-taxonomy-hell ask: your description of Sorrowverse Joker as actually good at manipulation and gaslighting, to the point where the act he puts on might sometimes resemble Therapy Joker, has actually made me interested in a version of the Joker. Which has never happened before. Could we hear more about him/this aspect of him? Love your writing btw

what if we had a rare limited-time crossover event

✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: 🤡:･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ✧

"Helloooooo nurse."

"Don't whistle," she snapped, shutting the door. "I'm doing you a favor," she reminded him.

"I thought you were recognizing that denying me cosmetics had no purpose but to dehumanize me," he said.

"You know what I mean," she said, pushing her glasses higher on her nose. "And I'm not a nurse." She pulled the sparkly pencil case she'd brought from the pocket of her coat to offer it to him.

He did not so much rise from his bed as unfold. A spider of a man, all long spindly limbs in ill-fitting pale pink. With all the green of the rest of him, it made him look floral, a mop of green hair and his eyes pastel. Even the white of his skin had a green tinge on closer inspection. She'd been sure it reminded her of something and had spent hours online trying to find it. She'd decided on a small emerald moth, staring at stock photos of delicate wings almost translucent and trying to remember where she ever could have seen one.

Charming as a bouquet full of insects.

He plucked the bag from her hand and pulled what looked like a butterfly knife from inside. He grinned, and when he did his face seemed to grow twice as long and half of it teeth. Gleaming purple metal spun between long fingers, but when he pointed it at her to watch her recoil, it had the teeth of a comb. He waggled his eyebrows at her before running it through his hair, using both hands and raising his elbows much higher than necessary so his shirt rode up. She pressed her lips together rather than dignify the performance with a response.

His eyebrows were still pristine and had been since he'd been admitted. Precise arches with edges razor-sharp.

Without products to keep it in place, his hair fell back down at an angle from his widow's peak. "Don't pretend I'm not funny, Dr. Quinn," he said, metal twirling between his fingers again.

"Quinzel," she corrected.

"Nurse Harlequin," he said, rummaging through the limited personal effects she'd brought him. It was absurd to refuse anyone these few small comforts. She'd always thought so. It was punitive, the way they denied any dignity to anyone they were meant to be treating.

There but for the grace of God, she thought and tried not to.

"I don't have a mirror," he declared, holding a red vial she was sure could not be blood. He reached out to touch beneath her chin. "Hold still."

"Mr. J," she warned, refusing as she always did to refer to him by the only name they had for him.

"I love it when you call me that," he said with relish, using her glasses as a mirror to apply tint to his lips with a wand. "Say it again, doll."

"If they catch you wearing lipstick—"

"It's stain," he said dismissively. "They can't prove it. For all they know I got this the old-fashioned way, sucking dick in the bathroom again."

"Agai—"

"Excellent work, Harley," he said, and then his lips were on hers. She made a muffled sound of indignation and was careful not to move. He'd done this before, the first time they'd met, when he'd learned her name and had a good laugh about it. She'd slapped him for it then, hadn't protested when they'd put him in isolation for it. "Aw," he said as he pulled away, touching her lower lip. "I know it hadn't dried yet, but it doesn't show on you, does it?"

It was only stain, but his skin was so pale the red popped, his grin grotesque. A caricature of something unwholesome, white as a sheet and a mouth like a minstrel, too dark a thought to trust. It was hard not to think the worst of people, ascribe symbolism to nothing at all, fall into spirals. Enough real dog whistles without her inventing new ones.

"That's unacceptable behavior," she said, "and that's not my name."

"You don't call me by my name," he said, tapping the tip of her nose, "and I don't call you by yours." He dropped the pencil case back into her hands before she realized what he was doing, and she had to scramble to catch it in time. "Besides, you seem like a good ride." He made an exaggerated handlebar-revving gesture with both hands and winked as he stepped away from her. Something Fred Astaire in his footwork when he walked. She was careful to stay where she was, tucking the contraband back into her pocket.

"Do you harass all your doctors this way?" she asked pointedly, fixing her glasses again.

"Aggressively," he confirmed as he fell back into his bed. "The rest of them don't like it as much as you do, naughty girl." He sprawled sideways, propping his head up in a pose that might have been provocative if he'd had a curve anywhere but the jutting bones that slotted his hands into his forearms. "It's why they locked me up for being a deviant," he said with a limp-wristed gesture.

"They locked you up for killing people," she corrected.

"They were rich," he scoffed. "That doesn't count as people." Her nose crinkled, pressing her lips together again rather than do anything he'd interpret as a laugh. "You can tell because they didn't send me to prison."

"They didn't send you to prison because Gotham's justice system is fucked," she said. Arkham was privately owned with a budget inflated by charitable donations. It was inevitable that expensive-looking criminals were judged criminally insane, the worst of their excesses no longer a taxpayer problem.

He cocked his head. "Do I look sane to you?" he asked.

"Sane doesn't look like anything," she said. "We both know you knew what you were doing, and there's no medical intervention that would make you behave differently."

He grinned, too wide, too many teeth. She tilted her head a little, only enough to see around the edge of her glasses and confirm that his mouth blurred. "Yet here you are," he said.

"Rehabilitation isn't the exclusive domain of the medically impaired."

This job had been a nightmare from the beginning. Every day in large and small ways it wore her down, an endless river of bullshit trying to smooth down every part of her that believed in anything. No accountability, barely treatment, shifts too long with coworkers as sick as the patients. Less like doctors with patients and more like researchers with lab rats. Rubber stamps and no rocked boats and no goals greater than the status quo. Cameras easily bypassed by any employee who cared to, for whatever reason struck their whim. Her no better.

She should have done more. Her job shouldn't have been worth more than her principles. She could have done more than this, makeup and candy and burner phones in her pockets. She kept notes and told herself she'd blow the whistle someday. She kept her head down and kept her health insurance and knew herself for a traitor.

"Come closer," he said, gesturing with his fingers.

She was halfway across the room before she thought to stop and ask, "Why?"

He was grinning again. "Because I wanted to see if you would," he said, and at the look on her face he threw his head back to cackle. She pressed her nails into her palms and felt her face burn. "This might sound racist," he began.

"Then don't," she warned.

"No, no, it's not like that, I just—"

"Don't."

"I can't tell if you're blushing!" he said, exasperated. He swung his legs around to sit upright, his knees a mile apart. "That's all I was going to say, honestly. Is that bad? You can tell me if it's bad."

"I would call that an 'inside thought'," she said, still blushing. He cackled again.

"Really, though," he said, crooking his fingers again, "you should come over here."

"Why?" she asked first this time.

"So I can kiss you stupid," he said.

Her face felt hot again. "I'm not doing that."

He rolled his eyes so dramatically it took his whole face with it. "I have to come over there?" he asked rhetorically, gesturing at her. "Come on, now, doll. Give yourself a little agency, here. I'm locked up. You get to leave. That little love tap earlier was fine, there were cameras on, I get it, kind of hot if I'm honest, pretty into that. But I've got limits too, you know. You want me to play the big bad taking advantage, that's fine, I'm into it, but trust's a two-way street. Get over here and make it clear you know what you're here for, yeah? Despite what your bosses think, I'm not actually an animal. I'm not sitting here waiting for pretty girls to maim."

"I don't think that," she said, defensive.

"Naw," he said, "you're just coming in here when you're not supposed to be and standing in grabbing range, waiting for nothing to happen. Get over here or leave, I'm not going anywhere."

She half-turned, looking at the doorknob, but hesitated. She wanted the last word, but didn't have one ready and her throat was dry regardless. She felt sick.

"You're real scared I'm gonna laugh at you, huh?" he asked, and she whipped her head around to stare at him. He was leaning forward, chin on his fist, watching her. The pale shade of his eyes made it more predatory than it otherwise would have been. His smile was a wry gash across his face. "That happen a lot?" he asked, cocking his head. "Men telling you you're pretty as a prank, asking you out to make fun when you believed it?" She scowled, and his smile split into a grin. "Awww. Poor l'il Harley. C'mere, then. You wanna make a show of being vulnerable, be vulnerable. Least you can do, don't you think?"

The worst part was realizing, the moment he said it, that it was the thing she most dreaded. That he'd laugh at her for believing him.

She came close enough to stand between his knees, but couldn't bring herself to make eye contact. She looked at the hole in his ear where they hadn't let him keep his earrings, instead.

"There's a doll," he said, grabbing her wrist and yanking so she'd fall into his lap. She narrowly avoided her knee hitting him somewhere awkward. She was distracted by how bony his thighs felt compared to hers, all his limbs too thin as his arms went around her waist. He kissed beneath her ear, and she thought of his mouth, the wide span of it and all those teeth at her throat. "Doesn't being honest with yourself feel better?" he asked against her skin.

"This is very, very bad," she breathed, her voice shaking. Her own body heat was mortifying. He felt halfway to a corpse.

"Awww, don't be like that," he said, and she could feel him smiling. All those teeth. "What's the worst that could happen?"

[o0anapher0o]

A thing we underestimate, I think, is how impulsive Tommy actually is. Obviously Buck is 'the impulsive one' and the cool, confident and competent persona Tommy has (which we already know is bullshit Mr Fake mouth static), kinda distract from the fact that he makes snap decisions all the time he can’t possibly have thought through (because there was no time). Do we think he even thought 20 seconds before he agreed to fly into a hurricane for a man he hadn’t spoken to in five years? He went to talk to Buck, a guy who for all he knew was straight as a ruler, and it took about a minute of flirting before he decided Fuck it I’m kissing him about it. It probably took two seconds after Buck opened his dumb mouth when Eddie crashed their date for Tommy to decide the date was over, and under two minutes from sitting down with his shitty coffee to agreeing to give Buck a second chance.

That’s not to say he couldn’t justify his decisions if pressed (he can and he does ‘I didn’t want to pressure you’), or that he isn’t fully prepared to live with the consequences, but you cannot tell me he considered either the reasons or the consequences in the moment. That comes later.

And because he tends to play responsible adult to bratty baby bi Buck it kind of distracts from how reckless most of these decisions are. The majority of them have the potential to backfire really bad. Death, heartbreak or getting punched in the face type of bad.

Which brings me to the break up, because that’s the same type of snap decision. Tommy is put in a situation and he jumps, damn the consequences. He doesn’t take the time to consider what he’s doing and he doesn’t give Buck the time to process what’s happening. Yes Buck jumped ahead with his ���move in with me’, but Tommy also skipped a couple of steps there and threw the whole relationship out in a split second decision.

[bvckbiter]

fandom talks too little about hylla and reyna. reyna killed her father when she thought he'd killed hylla. hylla dragged them out of puerto rico and found them sanctuary and employment on circe's island AND became one of circe's favorites. then when they got captured by blackbeard hylla also got them out of that situation by out-pirating literal immortal pirates. then in a span of three years, they split up, found their own ways to the amazons and cj, and became the leaders of their respective factions. when hylla's queenship was being threatened by otrera in son, she plotted a counter-coup and defeated an amazon queen who couldn't die two nights in a row in one-on-one combat, THEN led her cavalry to camp jupiter. (ik this woman slept like a corpse for a week afterwards). hylla used reyna as an absolutely ruthless bait-and-switch to capture orion, and all reyna said in response to that was, "bet." reyna carries insurmountable amounts of both guilt and gratitude towards her sister. even though they havent seen each other in a while, hylla still drops everything and does everything in her power to save her baby sister when she knows reyna needs her.

[palmettoshenanigans]

I'm not even gonna write an essay on this one, I'm tired and it's rapidly approaching the witching hour so imma just-

Neil is constantly shadow boxing with his fear of being Just Like My Father NOT because he fears that Wesninski Blood but because he fears the fragility of choice. Everything he knows how to do, all of his skills, combined with his natural disposition and temperament really do put him on par with his father - potentially even worse than his father if you think Nathan lacks Neil's ability to meticulously execute a long con.

Ruthless. Manipulative. Intelligent. Sneaky n Stealthy. Fast. Quick learner. Violent. Cut throat. Selective empathy. Observant. Skilled with weapons. Crime prodigy. Improv. Etc etc etc - Nathaniel truly is Nathan's son when you look at Capacity. Neil had very good reason to fear that - he really is a Wesninski in more than just name.

He just chooses to be kind. Chooses to care. Chooses Exy and friends and family and Andrew and Love.

But choices are both iron clad foundations and flimsy whisps in the wind

Neil isn't different from his father because of difference in Capacity. Neil is different from his father because of difference in Choices. And "Is that enough?" is such a scary question when it suddenly involves people he dared to care about.

[nina-ya]

so uh… it looks like I might be going to medical school in August…..

[sotiredmostnights]

i know everyone likes to put tharja in the "yandere goth girl" category but tbh i feel like pigeonholing her into one specific archetype does a huge disservice to her character. is she obsessed with curses and robin? yes. is she constantly shoved into a fanservice role by intsys? absolutely.

but i think a lot of people forget just how impactful a lot of her supports are...there's something about tharja that makes nearly everyone who interacts with her divulge their deepest secrets and points of anxiety with her. we see this with libra, who tells her of the abandonment he endured at the hands of his parents. we see it with nowi, whose cheerful demeanor slips off as she tells tharja of her missing parents. and although tharja is not the only one lon'qu confides in regarding ke'ri, their support is notably the only one in which lon'qu divulges that there was romantic involvement between he and his childhood friend.

and despite her antisocial exterior, she always listens mindfully and offers to help! she even goes out of her way to discreetly help the shepherds (getting virion to do odd jobs that benefit civilians, interrogating henry to make sure he bears no ill will towards ylisse, etc).

a big thing about tharja is that she IS kind. she IS considerate. she just also has a reputation to uphold as a dark mage and that (paired with her overall awkwardness ofc) makes her true nature hard to see at first glance

[rhowena]

The single most frustrating thing about the endless "well, maybe we should just release Predathos and get rid of the gods" arguments is that it not only strikes me as a bad choice, but it isn't even the party's bad choice. It's always felt like they keep insistently floating the idea because it's what they think they're supposed to do, because other people are mad at the gods and want to get rid of them, because the Archheart thinks it would be a great idea to leave and force their siblings to come with them, because someone else is going to do it anyway so it might as well be them, because Matt as a DM is enamored with the thought of shaking up the setting that way, because the anti-god NPCs the party has encountered are so much louder and angrier and more aggressive about demanding that everyone agree with them. People-pleasing is a TERRIBLE reason to unleash the apocalypse.

[askagamedev]

The time required to develop games has been getting longer and longer. Do you think there's any solution to reduce this time, like some kind of technological innovation, for example?

Development times haven't really gotten longer and longer, except in the outlier special cases (e.g. Grand Theft Auto, Elder Scrolls). What generally happens is that you see these games in the news that have had long incubation or troubled development periods where they keep going in circles for years, and then finally must commit to finishing the game and take two to three years to ship the game.

The real way to stop this from happening is a stronger production team that enforces decision commitment and completion urgency on the development team. There's no technology in the world that can make commitment-phobic leadership finalize needed decisions. In many such situations, making a real choice means accepting the benefits and drawbacks of that choice. Real drawbacks are always less appealing than a theoretically yet-undiscovered perfect answer without any drawbacks, even if a perfect solution isn't actually feasible. Lack of decision commitment is the primary reason for long, meandering development cycles.

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[apothecastti]

it’s probably been said already but I SO appreciate how osvald’s story didn’t do the whole “nooooo I can’t kill the bad guy if I kill the bad guy I’m no better than themmmm forgiveness is the only wayyyy” shit.

mans was like I Will Get Revenge. He Will Die. I Will Kill Him Dead. and i love that for him

[epicfirestormer]

Why did he think that was a good idea to say

[rawliverandgoronspice]

re: sympathetic ganondorf vs evil for evil’s sake ganondorf, i think this is misrepresenting and underselling what’s actually offputting to people

“i’m evil because i’m evil” or “i’m evil because demise is evil” and the associated lust for power simply for its own sake has always been lame and low effort. there’s a reason it’s “shit tier” on the classic “villain motive tiers” thing

“i’m evil but there’s enough nuance to make the player at least somewhat sympathetic to me even if i’m still ultimately a bad guy” is a good thing that people like? i’ve never personally interacted with a zelda player who thinks windwaker ganondorf ruined the character or anything - he’s generally regarded as the gold standard of villain writing both in and out of zelda. this is roughly “high tier” on the tier chart

“actually TWIST i’m not evil at all, it’s the good guys who were evil all along, i’ve done nothing wrong and i’m completely justified in my righteous quest against the status quo, you’re the real secret true villain for being complicit in preserving it” is technically regarded as “elder god tier” on the motive tier chart but i would personally label it as “oscar bait tier”. these things *can* be compelling in conversation with the existing landscape, but often it comes across as a deliberate effort to subvert the audience’s expectations for the sake of being unpredictable (or worse, for the sake of proving you’re the smartest one in the room). in separate works where this conversation/critique is the entire point (eg. Watchmen or The Boys), that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and the audience sets their expectations accordingly. in an established, long-running franchise, however, this almost always reads as dripping with contempt for the audience, like walking into a room and going “you morons like this shit? let me, a person much smarter than you, explain what it’s Actually about, because you’re an idiot if you’ve been a fan of this series before now”

on top of that, in the context of a series like zelda, this type of story feels myopic and disrespectful to the future of the series. “welp i burned down the 20+ years of lore behind this character so i could do a deconstruction, good luck using them in any capacity in the future, sounds like a you problem”

all this is to say, i think it’s a bit disingenuous/strawman-y to suggest that people put off by this want ganondorf to have 0 depth at all. there’s a lot of room for different kinds of depth, it’s just that the trend of the last decade has been for “depth” to mean “condescending deconstruction”

Hey!

Thanks for taking the time to write this ask, I think it warrants an interesting conversation. To me, there's like, a lot of things about what you're saying, and tbh I do see where you're coming from --in part.

First thing first... No yeah unfortunately some people Are hostile to even WW Ganondorf. It's been a rising trend in the fandom since TotK was released --people being very against the concept of any additional complexity to the character, either not getting it or considering anything he says pure manipulation that doesn't even warrant a conversation, literally making fun of people who were intrigued by this and wanting more out of this particular thread. This position not only absolutely exists within the fandom --less so on tumblr, I'll agree there-- but it's not even hard to stumble upon as a pretty regular opinion that gets tossed around. I had some interesting asks thrown my way, let's say. The idea that Ganondorf is a remotely interesting character that deserves more thought than what he gets is very much Extremely not the norm, and the very fact that you, as a fan, likes him as a guy is perceived as weird and missing the point by a lot of people. Like a lot a lot of people.

So I'll just... I guess I haven't clarified my position in a while, so I will reclarify my position on our favorite evil dude: I do like him perfectly fine as a villain, I do not want him to be "redeemed" by the narrative, I think he works fantastically as an ongoing threat, I think they could make him even scarier and more offputting and that would be super fun and thrilling... and I also think he already is complex. Like, inherently. Everything Nintendo has been putting into him since his first appearance is complicated --even their attempts at flattening him back in TotK do not fully work because they can't scrub him of the extremely loaded ideas they injected into him from the get-go. Nobody forced Nintendo to do a Mega Orientalism when inventing him, nobody made them write the NPCs to have this super weird antagonistic relationship to the gerudos in OoT, nobody made them have all this lore of the one man born every hundred years, raised by twin witches --and then nobody made them press on that tension point in Wind Waker explicitely, and then, in a more subtle fashion, in TP too. Nobody forced their hand when it came to having the strange "round ear" situation, suggesting (confirmed even, in additional canon) gerudos are born unblessed. The fact of the matter is: everything to make the relationship between Hyrule and the gerudos complicated has been there since 1998. There's no need for a Switcharoo to prove that anyone is smarter than the audience: everything messy has always been baked within the worldbuilding itself. It's in the cartridges already!!

Perspective on it is what could change, though --because, except in Wind Waker, we never get even a hint of a sense that we should think, as an audience, that Hyrule's super weird relationship to the gerudos is maybe questionable. Worth thinking about at least. Which, given the optics, is wild to me that to bring this particular can of worms up is still very largely considered crazy talk within the fandom (that, or the Sheikah situation across the series, also insane in many ways). And yes, it would perhaps lead to themes that are a bit heavier than what Zelda has been overtly dealing with (though, again, Majora's Mask exists --and I do find a lot of unpacked ideas in the Wild Era, like the very unquestionned gerudo bridal pipeline, very uhhh unfortunate already if I'm being honest --even moreso because it is unquestioned). But Zelda, when well handled narratively, can do wonderful things with evocative subtext, open doors never fully crossed, a lynchian pressure on what should feel offputting. We don't even need a sad monologue about it. It doesn't even need to be handled explicitely. But I think the pressure point is just better when understood and incorporated in some form, instead of being denied so hard the world itself start to feel incomplete and unlived.

I do want to say... I get what you mean with the whole "oscar bait" thing. There has been, historically and in recent years, a tendency to be driven by an external, almost panicked sense of morality rather than by the internal drive of a story, its internal thematic logic. I also do think it can feel very corporate, very "Disney looking back at its own movies and scrubbing off everything Buzzfeed deemed problematic in 2014 while making everything glossy and lifeless and awful" and it's not that great!!! and tbh I can't say I would trust Nintendo to handle any appreciation for the fact that the story of an eternal golden kingdom cheering on beating the evil outsiders who want to corrupt everything good and pure and blonde about that perfect inherently good place, is like, extremely not neutral. It absolutely is a delicate thread to weave, and I agree that putting a definitive end to Hyrule is probably not the smartest IP move to do. But, Hyrule doesn't have to be condemned as Bad, it can be merely complicated. And ongoing, regardless. To keep on with the Disney parallel: The Lion King would feel weird if we started to peel off the internal politics of the hyenas, it's just not the right place for it, when everything about this story revolves around the Righteousness of the Divine Right to Rule. But if the Lion King was an ongoing series that had been looping on itself for a while... wouldn't it make sense to figure out how to achieve majesty by studying other angles too, eventually? Is it that strange to suggest the exercise is like, possible? That it can be handled with artistry and soul?

I feel like... Yes, to acknowledge Ganondorf's humanity --not even to coddle it, just to acknowledge it-- implies taking in everything that makes him who he is, and that might rattle some foundational ideas about why this ancestral fight is even happening in the first place. I also do not think it means that he must be Good now. He can still punch a child and cackle maniacally, he can still be unredeemable --he can still destroy himself and others out of the most unconstructive spite ever, and we can still see the purpose in defeating him while basking in the "yea....." left in his wake (Wind Waker did that!!! Wind Waker did that and then we had more Zelda games!! crazy how that happened). This is hardly undoable. It does take some narrative skill, and some commitment to taking a bit of a risk, but Ganondorf is genuinely unmanageable as a character if you insist on your refusal to acknowledge his foundations --and I think it's partially why TotK's story is such a mess. He sells a TON, but you can't have him breathe slightly too loud without risking the entire world falling apart. They did try in TotK, so very hard, and to me they still failed--as insane as he behaves, Hyrule still doesn't come out of this looking good or particularly justified, because the very central core of Ganondorf's character is to be subjugated, and then rebelling in a destructive and brutally selfish, uncompromising manner that ends up robbing him of humanity --and the discomfort of that premise will therefore always haunt the conversation. Nintendo dug themselves into that mess. I feel like a lot of the Ganondorf fans I know merely... point at that. At the mess. And I feel like the longer the games avoid this mess, the more coats of spinach green they slather ontop of his skin, and the more nonsensical characterization they pile up, and the more Ganondorf will become a parody of who he once was, and what made him compelling to begin with.

And to top it all off, as if he wasn't contentious and complicated enough to handle already, they leaned into the internet turning him into a sex symbol for some fucking reason??? Yeah I genuinely have no idea how Nintendo will manage this dude moving forward, because to me, he is, at best, an endless source of (very lucrative) headaches, and at worst a ticking time bomb. I'm not sure how long they can get away with that TotKification strategy, is what I mean.

(Also: I tried to not overdwell on all the incredibly complicated conversation re: race and orientalism, but it's borderline impossible to have this conversation without acknowledging that I have never seen a major pop culture villain receive more pushback against "woobification" than him, and I don't think it's a complete coincidence let's say :) )

[moonlit-tulip]

One of the more recurringly-useful pieces of advice I've read—despite the dubiousness of its source—was this:

Hard decisions are generally not worth spending too much time or effort worrying about. Because, for a decision to remain hard even after extended thought about the tradeoffs, the expected values between the two sides have to be pretty similar-looking in a way that's not prone to resolving unambiguously on examination. At that point, worrying further tends to be just tossing good brainpower after bad.

It's better, instead, to decide arbitrarily between hard-to-choose-between options after a certain amount of thought rather than blocking indefinitely, accept the risk of sometimes choosing a bit suboptimally thereby, and save the brainpower which would otherwise have gone into those hard decisions, to instead spend on not messing up easy decisions. The sort where as soon as you think about it five minutes it's clear which way to go, but where you do need to have the slack to give them those five minutes' thought. Those are where the large changes in expected value with marginal application of thought are; thus you'll get better returns per unit brainpower invested there.

[sergle]

yall are about to piss me off by not having any PASSING basic knowledge of the way the u.s. military manipulates its recruits into joining by typing up one of your uninformed, unresearched, unempathetic, individualistic, unbelievably annoying posts about how 100% of the people in the military ended up there because they just Love America So Damn Much! they're extremely mature and informed at time of recruitment, they can totally leave anytime they want, they totally had tons of other avenues in life they could've taken, there was no rush at all to get income as fast as possible, and everyone in the military also totally is part of the combat divisions and personally enjoys being IN the military very much, big believers of violence. everyone in the military is shooting guns all day, that's how that works. they LOVE BLOODSHED. also I love the "amewicans haha" twang to this type of shit because you're actually TOTALLY stealing our Thing, which is turning systemic issues into Individual Issues. Instead of talking about the powers that be, it's so Personal Choice up in here. It's, "well you shouldn't have done it then. I totally wouldn't because I know better." you don't wanna talk about the military industrial complex as a whole, and you don't want to talk about recruiters, you just want to pin the blame on Specific Individual People one-by-one, as if they're responsible for the system that they're being ground up in. someone was in the military? bad person, no matter what. it's easier to believe that, I guess, than to acknowledge that Normal People (with high school educations) are manipulated and incentivized into joining a system that is Bad. at like age 18. but yeah no that 18 year old should have just been smarter lol haha anyway here are some screenshots for no particular reason

side note this reply of someone going "umm just get loans and go into a high paying field it's easy XD" as a direct response to someone trying to explain how most americans joining the military are being funneled in that direction out of a need for money.

and another person who Decided that americans join the military just CLENCHING their teeth thinking of other people, and not thinking completely selfishly about their own selves and their own income/housing/healthcare.

[jooniely]

I haven't seen anyone mention it but it's so fucked up that the Enforcers sent ISHA to STILLWATER PRISON??? she's like 6 years old or something??? Wtf?? The implications are insane