doES ANYONE ELSE REALIZE THAT WE’RE LIKE, THE FIRST GENERATION ON TUMBLR
GIVE IT 10-15 YEARS AND WE’LL ALL BE GROWN UP AND AN ENTIRE NEW SET OF KIDS WILL BE ON HERE BLOGGING ABOUT COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SHOWS AND BANDS AND MOVIES AND BOOKS
THE ONLY THING THEY’LL STILL BE BLOGGING ABOUT THE SAME AS WE WERE IS DOCTOR WHO
HOPEFULLY
We’ll probably all be blogging about Sherlock season 4.
Collapses on floor. Hi. FMA fans, I present to you my Neocities thesis: A complete catalogue of everything Ed’s worn in the manga and Brotherhood (excluding one-off promotional images) between the years of 1911 and 1915
I see Hollywood is now very into the idea of buying something once and then owning it forever and being able to make infinite copies. Which. Isn’t quite the message they imparted upon me in my childhood. In the spirit of their own long-held stance:
I like that Zelda doesn’t seem to want to do anything to rebuild the monarchy. She’s all about the community and outlying towns, and keeping all the various kingdoms together as friends than she is about restoring Hyrule Castle. It’s even explicitly stated that the castle has fallen into ruin after the calamity, meaning she’s done nothing to try and fix it up since.
She’s the last surviving member of the Royal Family, and she spends her time traveling the countryside with Link solving everyone’s little problems and issues. She’d rather live her life in Hateno, building schools and helping children learn than uphold traditions and rules of the monarchy.
And I love that. She always hated the royal traditions with its pomp and circumstance, and she was always much freer and herself when she was out in the wild exploring and doing research.
I was watching a video analysing how the Yiga clan were handled in botw and how the person analysing it lamented the fact that Kohga was a joke character who totally destroyed the much more threatening image the yiga clan had all throughout the game. Although I do understand the sentiment (I felt that way for a long time) I’ve come to realise that we might not be viewing it in the right perspective. I ended up writing a comment under that video explaining how I saw things, and realised that maybe it could interest people here too? So here is the fleshed out version of it:
I think part of why they made Kohga extremely goofy compared to a way less goofy clan of literal assassins is to emphasise how even though the clan originally held some understandable beliefs, it has become a cult of personality over the years, and like most cults, the leader is way less charismatic than his followers make him out to be. Indeed, from the outside, it seems absurd how anyone could take Kohga seriously, let alone kill under his command, but from the inside, Kohga is the Beloved Leader That Guides Them Towards Victory, and anyone threatening him deserves to die.
In a way, yiga clan members feel like vulnerable, impressionable people who were enrolled into a cult and given a Big Family and a purpose (and a lethal weapon) by their lovable Master Kohga who wants the best for them… Except if you want to get out, then you’re a filthy traitor who also deserves to die. It’s especially visible when you beat him and they all get personally mad at you for killing him. They didn’t care about Ganon, they didn’t seem to actually understand the bigger picture, they only cared about Kohga.
It also shows how, like the rest of Hyrule, the Yigas are very much disconnected from their own history, seemingly holding on the grudge their ancestors held more as an excuse to continue to enact violence and perpetuate the cult of personality than fighting for a “noble” cause. Only Kohga seems to actually care about Calamity Ganon, and the rest of the yigas seem to be just tools to him. Wether or not he’s actually conscious of what he’s doing is unclear. Is he a fully aware con artist, or is he purely another product of Yiga indoctrination?
So yeah, to me it feels like a parody/critic/mockery of cult dynamics. It shows that this gang of assassins are indeed a real menace, but for seemingly no reason other than “that one lunatic they admire told them to” and “if they go away they get killed”. The reason why the clan was originally created becomes almost anecdotal. Under the current leader, no one is required to actually know what they’re doing, they just need to follow orders.
In the end, I think it is the intention the developers had because cults are a rampant problem in Japan. At the very least, even if it’s not a actually conscious critic, it’s a concept that is much more present in their cultural landscape than ours and that almost certainly influenced how they handled the Yiga clan. Basically, cults are not cool and can even be dangerous both for the public and their members. Cult leaders especially are not cool and often are con artists. Therefore, Kohga couldn’t be badass, he had to be a doofus getting beaten in the most unexceptional way possible.
post-totk Link, having just fought his second iteration of Ganon, wandering the tunnels beneath Hyrule Castle banging two sticks together yelling “if there’s a third Ganon hiding under this castle you legally have to tell me”
Demise, glaring through his door’s peephole in annoyance: come back with a warrant
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