tears of the kingdom

Three posts in one week seems like a lot in this economy but I finally beat Tears of the Kingdom and figured I'd splurge to mark the occasion with some potential spoilers. It occurred to me that I started around Memorial Day and finished around Labor Day, just enough game for one summer. Josha kept pondering the connection between the surface and the mines until it dawned on me at 4AM. I survived the hundredth wave late the other night and thought I must be getting close, but the game kept going. Then I got stuck with half health and no way to travel so I cooked with the four portable pots I had outside the final battle. Then I got a blood moon just as I finished that and had to do it all over again. Throughout the game I kept thinking of the fate of the Aztec at the hands of conquest. All the stories about Ganon were told from the perspective of an outsider civilizing force that casts his rebellion as wicked and power hungry. I thought about subtext in the codices and about whether the Cretans regularly lied to Paul as an inertial reaction to his mission. I grant people grace, then one of the books I read about the Aztec last year said no actually, a bunch of remains were found scattered around the Templo Mayor, evidence of brutality and human sacrifice. I'd hop in a time machine to ask the Cretans but maybe they really are all liars. I contoured a possibility that the Ganon relayed through memory was at worst led astray from good intentions. I thought he got the colonizing capitalist's treatment, branding the resistance leader as a bloodthirsty tyrant to enslave workers in the Zonaite mines. Then he shows up guns blazing laughing all maniacal about how it's him, he's the conquistador in fact. All ten plates of philosophy I had spinning in the air shatter on the ground as he cackles about covering the world in darkness, and I serve him my most disappointed Are You Serious Right Now face.

That would have been enough for a post, but on my way to write I read a story about an older couple ravaged by an attempted murder-suicide earlier today that I felt bound to invoke eventually. We signed a lease on a place in Montgomery Township years ago and soon after moving in I saw a listing for a house on the same block going for far less than we were paying. Everything seemed well enough until the last sentence of the description clarified that rent was below market because of a recent homicide in the unit, a murder-suicide I found out from a news article. One night on our way home to that place we were blocked by every local SWAT team, who'd shutdown the block because some other guy a few doors down in the opposite direction also shot his partner. Of all the lessons we could have taken from COVID it's clear that It's OK to Divorce Later in Life wasn't one of them, but to be fair to our collective body's apparent inability to learn this we never really seemed to comprehend It's OK to Divorce At All. Some ancient eukaryote devastated by mitosis blamed all those who'd already split for not giving fair warning, invented a god and blamed him, blamed the now separate half, and blamed all the life that grew between them as more and more layers of abstraction divided them. The change in perception from a whole to two halves is a lonely one, the pain of separation cuts deep, and if I strain hard enough I can almost see how a desire to iron the fabric and end the process of division entirely might emerge from that. But I think that's ultimately a fool's quest. The fabric ripples on and though some section of it might fall to static, it eventually snags on itself and self-organization snowballs into Self. One half is seen as one again, and what felt like the endless sprawl of Ganon is jockeyed into position contained as another cog in our entire machine.