Playing Zelda
The best thing about video games is that they are fucking funny as hell. I was going to say that I only learned this as an adult, having grown up in a console-free household—but almost as soon as I thought it, I realized that is totally untrue.
I suppose one might say we could’ve been doing something more edifying with our time—this was my parents’ objection. But, some twenty years on, I still remember playing Kingdom Hearts at my friend’s place and cracking up at our absurdly built gummi ship. Tearing up with laughter after I lost all my weapons in Golden Eye and continued to awkwardly dispatch enemies with just my hands for longer than it felt possible like a stupid miracle had been bestowed upon me. So many other little, absurd things.
While I find Tears of the Kingdom’s Koroks too cute to torture them myself, I fully support the efforts to roast them on a spit and send them to the moon, among other things. You do, simply, love to see it—not the poor little Koroks whimpering oof as they fall from great heights, but the elaborate scheme to amuse oneself. It is lonely to be Link. You have to find some fun in this ruined world (of Hyrule and also our own).
The most we have laughed so far was at our repeated attempts to dive from the sky islands to a lake in Hyrule, missing the water by an inch over and over and over. How could we keep fucking it up, but just barely?? Watching Link, arms spread, falling through the clouds thinking big money big money, no whammies. The GAME OVER sequence gently sweeps your death off-screen, though I imagined a compilation of Link hitting the rocks and the grass and the trees—and also softly whimpering oof—overlaid with a [LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER] each time.
Anyways, this post is very short and scattered but only because I’ve been playing too much Zelda—just as my parents feared, I’ve wasted valuable time on video games. Now, when I look at trees, I wonder how I could stick them together to make a ladder or perhaps construct a flame-throwing-dick monster. But what is life if you’re not also laughing at the flame-throwing-dick monster? No regrets!