#dehydrated ganon

[blackautmedia]

Orientalism, The Gerudo, and Legend of Zelda | SWANA Representation in Gaming

It took a while, but here's a video essay about the portrayal of the Gerudo and the ways they reinforce orientalist beliefs about SWANA people, the portrayal of the Gerudo, and the broader storytelling implications that come about because of it.

The land and society once owned by the gods must be restored and brought to its former glory as it is fated to be led by the divinely chosen Hylians, the chosen descendants tied to the gods. To that end, to defeat the evil and violent Middle Easterner who has defied the natural order of Hyrule, everyone must sacrifice themselves for Link to become the divine governor of power.

Sections in the Video:

What is Racial Coding? (The Deku and Cannibal Horror)

Orientalism

Ganondorf - The Wicked Man of the Desert

Sav'aaq: Colorism and the Othering of the Gerudo

The "Good" Arab and the Conditional Humanity of the Gerudo

The Vai Outfit - Harems, Veiled Women, and Belly Dancers

Staggeringly Neutral - Link and the Gerudo as Queer Expression (Why James Somerton is wrong about the Gerudo)

Swapping and Shopping: Japanese Media

Orientalism of the Mummy - Dehydrated Ganon

The Native Zonai - The Source of the Right Arm

The Myth of Native Extinction

The Brown Body and the White Mind

Link Can Make it - Community Vs Saviorism

Divine Right to Rule

Japanese History and Zelda (Shinto in Zelda Lore)

Gameplay First - Zelda and Storytelling

Closing Thoughts

[ultimatefangirl-exe]

Alternate intro to Ganondorf

[anewcalamity]

<- Previous | Next ->

A New Calamity: Page 459

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Leonus @sparksplitter

Va Eheníhv @gerudoshikyapril  

Chapter 1 • Chapter 2 • Chapter 3 • Chapter 4 • Chapter 5 • Chapter 6 • Chapter 7 • Chapter 8 • Chapter 9 • Chapter 10 • Chapter 11 • Chapter 12 • Chapter 13 • Chapter 14 • Chapter 15

[fox-bright]

So those Tears...

in the new Zelda game, do we think the title has to do with the same sorts of tears that Midna used so devastatingly at the end of Twilight Princess?

'Cause Dehydrated Ganon is *definitely* actually a Dehydrated Twili, isn't he.

[sloth-powerart]

VROOM VROOM!

This was a sketch I did in my beginning streams, I don't remember much of the purpose but I think it was just a joke.                                                

[shishuri]

This is attention to details man

Ganon holds a bow straight while Link holds it at an angle.

Ganon also draws the bow like a samurai, (since this Ganon is more samurai like) he positions/aim the bow then draws.

(Not shown here) Even if Link uses a long bow like Ganon he will still aim at an angle since he is a soldier. He positions/aim the bow and draws at the same time.

The bow Ganon uses will recoil meaning this is a heavy bow. (They didnt need to add that detail in, but they did man)

[taboonle]

[pianokantzart]

When it came down to facing Calamity Ganon in BOTW, I gotta admit I didn't feel much of anything except a general interest in seeing Zelda again. Not much beyond that. But with The Demon King? Ooooh I am absolutely ecstatic to be granted the honor of personally beating the shit out of that guy.

[katkalis-the-fanartist]

As a Ganondorf lover, all choices of Dorfs are valid tbh

[solar--symphony]

This was the important thing about that Tears of the Kingdom Gameplay footage, right?

[blackautmedia]

Tears of the Kingdom and the Orientalism of the Mummy - Dehydrated Ganon

Plenty have talked about the portrayal of Ganon and the problems with both him and the Gerudo as a whole. I haven't seen as much talk about dehydrated Ganon specifically and wanted to share some of what I'm aware of.

TotK in many ways can be read with the number of plot points it lifts from classic mummy films, which in turn means it also picked up all the racial history and tropes that come with that.

Dehydrated Ganon and Phantom Ganon are mummies. He's explicitly referred to as such several times in the game and the game's opening relies on a number of classic mummy movie tropes in its presentation as introducing a corpse-like Ganon.

Here's an excerpt from the The Mummy On Screen: Orientalism and Monstrosity in Horror Cinema.

Male archaeologists, heroic adventurers and female heroines are all drawn to enigmatic corpses and/or racial ‘Others’, being variously hypnotized, transformed, romanced, coerced and/or transported away from their humdrum lives, sometimes through time to re-experience an ancient past in which they once lived, sometimes through space to Egypt where the monster stalks or seduces them.

Helen in The Mummy (1932) is a woman who succumbs not only to the influence of the Mummy but also to the lure of Egypt itself and its ancient ways that still hold sway.

 If one accepts Wood’s thesis, one can see the Mummy film as having a formidable formula, with the Orient serving as an effective site and its chief monster functioning as a potent medium for the release of the suppressed.

The game is built on Zelda being zipped to the past and her experiences in an ancient, mystical world and seeing the founding of Hyrule while Link is integrated into the resources left behind.

After Link and Zelda were drawn in by the Mummy's call to investigate beneath Hyrule following the rise in illnesses from the gloom.

Zelda is whisked away to ancient Hyrule where she spends time with her very heavily Native coded (which would need an entirely separate post on the tropes associated with that and the way the game uses Anti-Native tropes) Zonai pals.

She's in a rush to return home, but this new space also ends up being a big learning environment for her. She's exposed to this ancient and alluring culture that fascinates her and provides many of the wants and needs she expressed in BoTW.

She's given the supportive parents she's needed--a supportive father figure who explicitly supports her utilizing study to achieve her goals and a loving mother to teach her how to use her powers. She even gets a cool engineering/history auntie who shares a lot in common with her.

All of these things are stolen from Zelda because of the evil mummy.

The game makes great effort to play into the exoticized idea associated with the Zonai, right down to infusing Link and Zelda in their culture with Zelda given a new outfit, home, and lifestyle, and Link gifted with Rauru's power.

The Zonai in TotK are characterized less by their beliefs or the perspective of Mineru or Rauru and more framed in relation to the resources they provide others--the secret stones, the Zonai devices, the exotic, mysterious, ancient powers and knowledge, the zonaite you mine, Rauru's arm, etc.

That leads into another issue with how Tears reinforces the idea of Native extinction in how the Zonai are more characterized for the resources everyone is extracting from them rather than their actual peoples' thoughts and feelings and how that form of erasure harms real Native people outside of the fiction.

There's also the aspect of how the land and resources of these Native people are almost destined to fall into the hands of largely white, "civilized" Hyrule leaders with every other group serving under Hyrule's order geographically and narratively while the Zonai are people we only interact with in memories or as spirits.

The Orient until the second half of the nineteenth century had largely proven a fruitful terrain for colonial conquest and achievement for the British, but from the Indian Mutiny of 1857 towards the end of the century various military setbacks began to point worryingly to a decline in British power…In the aftermath of such events, rather than being perceived as ‘passive’, with ‘no capacity for violence’ (Mercer and Julien 1988: 108), the inhabitants of the Orient became more forbidding, a change in perspective reflected in the literature of the period that simultaneously portrayed anxiety concerning Britain’s own newfound sense of vulnerability.

Richard Marsh’s The Beetle...depicted Egypt as every bit as capable as Transylvania of bringing a primitive threat to the civilized West.

As Marsh’s novel exemplifies, the legacy of the ancient Egyptians had transformed over the course of the nineteenth century from one that bestowed valuable knowledge into one that offered secrets best left unearthed, being increasingly tainted as the years unfolded through its association ‘with the mysterious and supernatural, the questionable and disreputable’.

Mummy films rely very heavily on presenting the "other" as an exotic and almost tempting place for the civilized white protagonists to find and change themselves.

They also acted as a way to depict non-white people to bypass several censorship restrictions in earlier decades, so you often see them framed as romance films with an emphasis on a commentary about that dangerous, tempting allure of the mummy being used as a commentary on interracial relationships and intermingling of the civilized and uncivilized with a white gaze in mind.

Many mummy films also would utilize racial coding to characterize the mummy as hostile, dangerous, tempting or seductive in relation to the white, civilized character, something done with several other movie monsters like Dracula, King Kong, etc.

No matter the Zelda game, the structure ends up being largely the same with Ganon in that Hyrule or wherever is shown to be peaceful until the "evil man of the desert" invaded and defiled their space with his wickedness and disrupting the order of the gods and the status quo.

Dehydrated Ganon specifically is another extension in linking Ganon and his wickedness and evil to his heritage and status as a SWANA-coded character, in a lot of using tropes associated with Black people, etc.

He's not just evil because he's a selfish overlord, he's an evil "other" Middle Easterner invading the pure and peaceful environment the game made the effort to set up, and his constant presence looms in the game in how his corpse-like mummy servant is busy carrying out his will.

The Mummy and Nubian were a particularly suitable pairing considering contemporaneous racial stereotyping...Elizabeth Young years later highlighted others, identifying the black ‘brute’ as a stereotype that ‘carried particular force’ in 1930s cinema as ‘a monstrous beast.

Cultural attitudes towards African Americans manifestly became intertwined with contemporary ones concerning those of North African Egyptian Mummies in this version of the play.

In addition to Zelda being taken to the ancient past, we have the element of Ganon stalking and scheming to his rise to power in how he defiles the sanctity of ancient Hyrule continuing in the pattern of referring to him as the "man of the desert," another means of codifying Ganon as inherently evil by way of his heritage. There's almost constant reference to his home, the desert and anything else associated with othering him.

Ganon has previously used religious iconography in how the Gerudo crest used to very closely resemble the symbol of Islam.

He also uses racial coding associated with antisemitism in how he's a green-skinned, hook nosed magic-wielder.

There's Anti-Black imagery in his muscularity and chains and how he devolves into a mindless, savage brute.

There's all the decades of sentiments toward SWANA people wrapped up in him and the mummy is a continuation of that in how dehydrated Ganon is presented as a stalking, corrupting presence who defiles the sanctity and draws the civilized white protagonists in with his tempting allure. Phantom Ganon is a looming threat who can arise out of nowhere.

I know dehydrated Ganon is the same dude as regular Ganon, but I do think there's an extra element to discuss in how Tears uses decades of old mummy horror and the racial coding that comes with that to further the idea that Ganon is an evil SWANA man who needs to be feared and eradicated.

[saccharinerose]

The dragon-goat-bunny person from the TotK trailer not having their name officially revealed is so annoying! How am I supposed to find fanart of them in the month before the game’s release 😡

[captain-krow-drozdov]

Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Mom Pick Me Up I Got Mugged In A 7/11 Parking Lot.

[izunias-meme-hole]

What death does to a scary ass villain from the 80′s and 90′s.

[shishuri]

if Phantom Ganon cannot reach you he will spread gloom to the vicinity, like fast..

[tinyetoile]

FUCK SPEAKING OF POINTED EARS

I JUST realized that Ganondorf gets his pointed ears after he gets the triforce of power

Since in OoT his ears are round but in WW and TP they're pointed

IDK IF THIS WAS ON PURPOSE OR NOT BUT IT SURE ALIGNS PERFECTLY