This review contains spoilers
When I was 15, I wrote a really long and stupid story that I'm not a fan of anymore.
I continued to publish chapters of it every week for several years. Even after I had grown tired of it, I still kept writing it. It just felt like I had to keep it alive, no matter how much it hurt.
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In The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, the thematic framing of the game is constructed specifically around the idea that the devs wanted to move on from the success of Ocarina of Time. It's interesting to me that all three of Aonuma's games are in some way a response to that game: Majora's Mask is a sequel and subversion of its linear coming-of-age tale and Twilight Princess is a reinforcement of some of its ideas and an even deeper dive into the power dynamics of adulthood.
Wind Waker is simply about moving on. The kingdom of Hyrule, full of worship of Ocarina of Time's plot with a statue of the hero of time himself and stained glass windows of the Sages that you saved over the course of your adventures in that title, is sunk beneath the waves. Its king wished it damned eternally, ashamed of what he had done in the name of preserving its existence past its expiration date.
The world is wiped clean in a Biblical flood, along with all notions of what a Zelda game is and should be. The ideas of Ocarina of Time are in the past, and the series is free to move forward if it so wishes to now.
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I think about my last novel a lot for something that's over and almost completely erased from public archives. It was five years of my life. That's a long time for someone who's as young as I am.
People try to get me to come back to it, to add on to it. To re-release it. To expand on the ideas and characters that were there. Maybe I will. But right now, I just want to make something new.
I buried it for a reason.
I continued to publish chapters of it every week for several years. Even after I had grown tired of it, I still kept writing it. It just felt like I had to keep it alive, no matter how much it hurt.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, the thematic framing of the game is constructed specifically around the idea that the devs wanted to move on from the success of Ocarina of Time. It's interesting to me that all three of Aonuma's games are in some way a response to that game: Majora's Mask is a sequel and subversion of its linear coming-of-age tale and Twilight Princess is a reinforcement of some of its ideas and an even deeper dive into the power dynamics of adulthood.
Wind Waker is simply about moving on. The kingdom of Hyrule, full of worship of Ocarina of Time's plot with a statue of the hero of time himself and stained glass windows of the Sages that you saved over the course of your adventures in that title, is sunk beneath the waves. Its king wished it damned eternally, ashamed of what he had done in the name of preserving its existence past its expiration date.
The world is wiped clean in a Biblical flood, along with all notions of what a Zelda game is and should be. The ideas of Ocarina of Time are in the past, and the series is free to move forward if it so wishes to now.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I think about my last novel a lot for something that's over and almost completely erased from public archives. It was five years of my life. That's a long time for someone who's as young as I am.
People try to get me to come back to it, to add on to it. To re-release it. To expand on the ideas and characters that were there. Maybe I will. But right now, I just want to make something new.
I buried it for a reason.
thealexmott
1 year ago