#gotta commit to the bit

[pedropascalgavemealobotomy]

Hi right now I am simping™️ for Adam Sandler

I would show up in my usual hoodie and shorts to see if I win

I’d totally win, guys what are you talking about

Please of you are in New York City come to this and even if you don’t look anything like him, please enter it would be so funny

RSVP

[blackjackkent]

Mistyped "git commit" as "bit commit" in my work command line just now and am finding this way funnier than it has any right to be.

[the-haven-keepers-collective]

I refuse to be this petty on main but I need those of you who follow both of my blogs to know this because it's so funny to me:

"You shouldn't give advice"

".... Help I need advice"

I'M FUCKING WHEEZING-

like it's not about the same thing at all, but after my inbox being nothing but readings it was really funny to get these two so close together. I admit, I cackled a little.

[dio-the-thot-exterminator]

faked my death on discord let’s see how long until they notice idk on day: 3

[theselfiemuseum]

It was almost Halloween at the Hozier concert

[onewithblankets]

this week on game changer, I am faced with the realization that good actors are, in fact, good actors

[seokmattchuus]

Four of my six saves made it (jeemin, koko, yuju, gyuri). Guess I'm stuck watching the show 💀

[flying-ham]

haymitch why were you willingly going thru withdrawals when ripper got arrested in catching fire if you knew how to brew white liquor yourself the whole time

[impcr3atur3]

Is Lux alright after that Piano fiasco?

he's very used to it

[celestialrealms]

Fun fact: In Barbatos's intimacy storyline in Nightbringer he ends up living with Solomon and MC at Cocytus Hall temporarily. Here's a highlight from his 40 intimacy call:

The way he makes Solomon sit in the corner. 😭 You cannot convince me he didn't raise this man.

[elderwisp]

speaking of rowrow, would u guys like to see him as a peanut?

[grimmbunny24]

As much as I despise Kilgrave and would never wish anyone to be his victim, I really want to see his rendition of Popular.

you and ii defyyiny gravity

[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 :) )

[babykittenteach]

Sometimes... twitter is fun.

[radarchives]

[seth-the-giggle-fish]

Three year anniversary of Fart Patrol

Happy two years to Fart Patrol aka the silliest high effort music video ever made for an April Fools bit