BIRTHING DEATH; 365 Impressions of a Dying World vol.4

All I wanna do at the moment is play Zelda. Hyrule, which if you don't know and which I feel like a total virgin for even writing about, is the mythical land in which Zelda is set. Thus far Zelda canon is pretty crazy, and there's a lot of time-jumping and multiple threads in a sort of quantum-manifold way, and which there's plenty of YouTube tutorials on so I won't go into so much detail; but from what I can gather (lol, changed my mind) Hyrule was created by three goddesses of creation, one of whom took an especial interest in Hyrule (Goddess Hylia) and bequeathed to it's people the Triforce as an artefact of immense power, the intended use of which was religious awe and general maintenance (or something). But the object through some founding kerfuffle was split into three pieces, one being 'absorbed' by Princess Zelda, a piece representing the sacred aspect of Wisdom; another being 'absorbed' by Link, Zelda's personal knight, specifically the piece with the sacred aspect of Courage; and a third being absorbed by the game's antagonist Ganon, a piece representing the sacred aspect of Knowledge. Why knowledge of all Triforce pieces is demonised in Ganon is ideologically questionable, but then what isn't these days right? At first I thought there was something Garden of Eden about the Knowledge piece of this fallen/wrecked artefact being 'bad', or at least suiting the villain more than the other pieces. Like, I got the feeling it was on par with the sort of propaganda which services centralised governing bodies, of the kind that both Old and New Testaments of the bible love so much (being a transparently religio-political tract, like most monotheisms actually). But then I remembered Buffy the Vampire Sayer season four and how that's about too much money/power tied up in the military/industrial complex, and how the paramilitary Initiative underneath Sunnydale University ends up being wielded by just one person because there's no collective by which her actions could be mediated and moderated; which is ultimately the role other people play in each of our lives. Thus the societal necessity of herd-living, going beyond whatever congenitally transmitted preferences we might have as a species. Society needs us to measure each other against a majority status, which in these hyper-individualistic times seems oppressive, villainous, but which actually (so long as the majority status generally favours democracy) safeguards against any singular individual or group hijacking the whole tiered edifice; like what happens on Buffy season four. In this way Ganon perhaps represents Knowledge centralised within a single individual with no external safeguards to ensure this information isn't wielded destructively. Seeing as entertainment media targeting any mainstream audience, but even more specifically with the younger ones (indoctrination?) tends towards the capitalist edicts of narcissistic curation of Self, and that within these entertainments any thought to the collective is only excusable under the moniker of immediate family or some mutual gain (seriously, watch a recent Disney movie), does Zelda's tentative caution against centralised power replicate popular culture's capitalist realism or does it resist it with something more minded to communistic peer-management? Certainly Ganon can be seen as the infernal endgame of individuals committing to the neoliberal-consumerist propagandising which enamours publics through carefully pruned/glossed medias, pitched as benign by being 'popular'. He is a literal neoliberal monstrosity, assimilating his environment through an increasing technological sophistication which only serves his purposes of domination and pitiless rule. But then what of Zelda and Link? What values do their respective pieces of the Triforce example; capitalist-individualistic, or socialist-holistic? Again, the setting is telling here which makes sense in a game that was released to debut the graphics and gameplay capability of Nintendo's newest gigs. In Breath of the Wild Hyrule is an embodied character, in as much as the Switch console is the first Nintendo platform allowing for richly detailed open world gaming. Traversing Hyrule as Link, meeting all it's different people's in the varied realms without bigotry or disdain (which technically as a royal personage, at least by association, you'd be at liberty to exhibit), engaging with this painterly world which reposnds to you with such intricately programmed interaticivity that it feels, miraculously, actually intuitive. Yes, being set so fantastically leads me to believe that maybe holistic is a better word for Zelda's potentially capital-resistant (vaguely creationist) premise. Not strictly socialist but that and more. But then in Zelda canon the three holders of the Triforce pieces have been battling each other for thousands of years, apparently being reborn over and over to do battle, never reaching a definitive conclusion but sustaining a shifting Hyrulian topography of light and darkness and everything in between. After all, perhaps the dynamic this tripartite theatre best exemplifies is the crisis-dynamic of capitalism itself, in as much as Ganon is the 'villain' which we could here read as crisis/recession/depression, infrequently allowed to surface as the prevailing sacred aspect (like the mechanical boom and bust of market forces). What's more, the goddess whose dominion the Triforce gleans power from presumably has the means to finish Ganon off once and for all (being a goddess), but so far hasn't done so, and we can only surmise actively and consistently chooses not to. What are we to make of this? That Ganon as a villainous devastator of the realm, using proxy Hylian power no less, is in fact a part of the goddesses plan? That the self-sustaining conflict between Zeld Link and Ganon spinning endlessly like a perfectly balanced gyroscope, is itself the divine plan (if there is one) and not an infernal anomaly in it that needs to be rectified? If this is the case then holism and socialism aren't necessarily bedfellows, and neither are holism and neoliberalism necessarily mutually exclusive. In fact, perhaps most holism as it's 'popularly' located is frankly apoltiical and, like the Link-Ganon-Zelda trifector, resembles nothing more than an infinitely variable search-engine; or the rabid hypertextuality of the Internet itself. I don't know. Either way I just wanna live in Hyrule right now.