The Legend of Zelda: whose colonialism, again?

Someone is wrong on the Internet! But on a subject that it's interesting to write about.

If Stokes of OverthinkingIt is to be believed, the Legend of Zelda series is a celebration of European colonialism, depicting "exploration, mapping, and domination of the other’s territory" and "exploitation and consumption of the other’s strategic reserves of Triforce. ... All that’s missing is some way to process the Triforce into opium and sell it back to the Oktoroks at a markup."

I'm left wondering whether the writer has actually played the Zelda games -- by which I mean the original-style games which he's describing, The Legend of Zelda through Link's Awakening -- and if so, whether he got to the end of them. You will control-F in vain for a certain proper noun in the above article.

In The Legend of Zelda and A Link to the Past, Ganon and his minions are Middle Eastern-flavored invaders who have overwhelmed an isolated Western-style kingdom. This is much more visible in A Link to the Past (Japanese title Triforce of the Gods, which gets into a different but related story), which is the most developed version of the original Zelda narrative. Ganon's backstory in this is the following, reprinted from the manual here:

One day, quite by accident, a gate to the Golden Land of the Triforce was opened by a gang of thieves skilled in the black arts. This land was like no other. In the gathering twilight, the Triforce shone from its resting place high above the world. In a long running battle, the leader of the thieves fought his way past his followers in a lust for the Golden Power. After vanquishing his own followers, the leader stood triumphant over the Triforce and grasped it with his blood- stained hands. He heard a whispered voice: "If thou has a strong desire or dream, wish for it..." And in reply, the roaring laughter of the brigand leader echoed across time and space and even reached the far-off land of Hyrule. The name of this king of thieves is Ganondorf Dragmire, but he is known by his alias, Mandrag Ganon, which means Ganon of the Enchanted Thieves.

Just in case this wasn't clear enough, in his initial appearance in Hyrule, he shows up dressed like this. Turban, long open robe, big sleeves, upturned Turkish shoes... Even the single-eye motif that Agathnim uses is a very close copy of the Hand of Fatima.

So, has someone who might have dressed like this ever come at the head of a conquoring army into the Western world? Not just that: the Western world has been seriously attacked by somebody who frequented the same tailor. In Suleiman the Magnificent's reign, the Ottomans conquored Hungary and almost took Vienna; note that Hungary is a traditional setting for fantasy about Europe, with Disney's adaptation of "Sleeping Beauty" being another example.

Alas, King Louis II didn't have enough Heart Containers.

The geography of Sons

Part of the appeal of Pearl Buck's style is that she's vague about names and personages, and flat-out doesn't provide dates -- intentionally giving an air of timelessness and making it difficult to correlate her events with those in the real world. (That's when she sticks to real-world chronology at all. In the novel Peony, she puts Tzu Hsi in the 1820s.) This makes for detective work when you want to line up her events with history, but once in a while, there's an event so distinctive that all her vagueness can't conceal it.

For the chronology of The Good Earth, Sons, and A House Divided, that event is the April 12th Incident, when Chiang Kai-shek entered Shanghai and massacred the Communists of the city, who were deep in the Kuomintang and expecting him to arrive with a Communist revolution. That event occurs early in A House Divided, and is the cause of Wang the Gormless (Wang Yuan) departing for the United States; he's perhaps 20 years old at the time, perhaps older.

Wang the Tiger is an old man at that time. He began his campaign late in life; I'd guess he was 40 years old, although he might have been as young as his mid-30s. (Chinese warlords remained vigorous for a pretty long while.) It was about 5 years after the beginning of his conquests before Wang Yuan was born, so he was probably 65 as of the April 12th Incident -- aged more by his sense of failure, due to inactivity after his early conquests, than by the march of time.

The "weak and unready" man in the seat of the central government early in Wang the Tiger's career must have been Yuan Shikai, carrying on Yuan Shao's 1,700-year-old family tradition. (Pu-yi is spoken of very differently by Buck's characters and narrator, with a level of contempt and hatred that's startling for a writer whose attitude towards rape and torture is basically "boys will be boys." Then again, her genial, forgiving attitude is reserved for Chinese atrocities, and she calls down the thunder of Heaven on the Japanese in Dragon Seed -- despite the fact that Japanese crimes were no worse than Chinese, and often less bad. So her hatred for Pu-yi is because of who he worked for, not what he did.)

Wang the Tiger was born around 1882. Pearl Buck mentions that Anhui is Wang Lung's home province in the passage about the fire-wagon in The Good Earth. (The city that they take the firewagon to is Shanghai, almost the only city in China in the 1860s-70s where you could find Westerners, railroads, and so on.) We know that Wang the Tiger's conquests were just over the border from his home province, and they were to the north; this means either Shandong or Jiansu.

But there was a disastrous flood late in Sons, where the river burst its embankments and drowned the countryside. Most of Shandong is very flat, and the Yellow River flows through it in embankments, while it doesn't flow through northern Jiansu at all; this means southwest Shandong must have been the scene of Wang the Tiger's early conquests.

The only city in southwest Jiansu which is directly on the Yellow River, near a substantial chain of mountains, just over the border from Anhui, and a long but doable march from a port city is Jining. The port Wang the Tiger later took was Rizhao; he marched through a secondary city to get there, and this would have been Linyi. (Pearl Buck also used the name Linyi for a character in Pavilion of Women -- a philosophical novel, not a licentious one, but and/or and strongly recommended -- further collaborating this theory.)

I can't guarantee that Double Dragon Mountain is not imaginary, but if it was historical, I'm pretty sure that it's the pair of peaks just east of the Moting Reservoir and southwest of Zhangzhuangzhen.

The "lords of the north" to whom Wang the Tiger pledged alliegance were the Beiyang Government, specifically the Zhili Clique. The revolutionaries in the south, opposed to all warlords, were the Kuomintang. Wang the Tiger was among the numerous warlords left in place as administrators after the KMT victory in the Northern Expedition of 1926-28, which destroyed the Beiyang Government, shifting the alliegances of the various remaining warlords over to the KMT.

Wang the Tiger probably died in 1932, the year in which Japan siezed Manchuria, FDR began his first term in office, and Hitler and the social-conservative parties got 40% each of the vote in the Wiemar election of '32, with the Communists (with 20%) as tie-breakers.

The distance from Jining to Rizhao is about 200 miles, which give a sense of just how much the automobile distorts our perception of distance: a 3-hour drive in modern terms is enough in real-world terms to allow the subordinate leader of the other place to operate pretty much as a governor.

To see these areas in Google Maps: the Shandong Peninsula is the peninsula of China that juts out into the East China Sea, facing Korea. Zoom in there and look a bit south; Rizhao is just southwest of the larger port of Qingdao. Jining is almost due west. The probable Double Dragon Mountain is east of Jining: zzom in until you can see the Yishan Scenic Areas (which are probably where Wang the Tiger made his camp when he first entered the Jining region), then go a bit east, and look just southeast of the Moting Reservoir, west of the Zaogou Reservoir and southwest of Zhangzhuangzhen.

Incomprehension of nice-guy rage

If Leigh Alexander really comprehends nice-guy rage as little as she appears to in this article, she should stop by the blog Alvanista sometime; its main product is bottled nice-guy-rage distillate. Not that I blame its author -- and you have to love anyone who picks the nom de keyboard Cless Alvein. (You are expected to know who that is.)

Let me also observe that there is something mildly contradictory about the author of the blog "Sexy Videogameland" lamenting compliments and catcalls she gets in the street. The blog title (counting the chibi avatar on the banner) and the resentment do not match.

Given the character of her complaint, I want to ask -- and I mean this in earnest as a hypothetical, and not as an insult -- why she doesn't wear an abaya or a burqa; both garments have the sole purpose of giving men less to stare at.

The obvious answer is that one who dresses in such a fashion is assumed to be a footsoldier of Islam, and is likely to have experiences at least as uncomfortable as catcalls in consequence. But if there were no danger of this, would she still object to wearing Arab or Pashtun hijab? If so, there's something else that she values more than freedom from catcalls.

Incidentally, this is well worth reading, for sanity's sake.

Just how necessary _are_ starfighters?

If people in the Star Wars setting go to the trouble of building things like this, starfighters must be genuinely good for something in the galaxy far, far away -- even though all we ever see them do on-camera is blow up...

What do games do, and what's wrong with Farmville?

Linked to by Hacker News: a defense of Farmville and similar casual games.

I see three problems with the author's analysis:

1. Market fundamentalism is incorrect. People are not omniscient and are not perfectly self-controlled (I seem to recall that Ayn Rand tried to deny Aristotle and accidentally claimed omniscience for everyone). Even if people were, we would not be the rational actors, the "homo economicus," of the economists; see Chesterton's The Everlasting Man for further discussion of purely economic motives, and consider the results of the Ultimatum Game.

John Stuart Mill understood perfectly well that "Homo economicus" is a simplification for theoretical modeling; later generations of economists have ignored him, and have Flanderized the concept into something that tries to predict real human behaviors.

2. Classical music is not "pure music" created for the sake of the art; it's 17th and 18th century popular music, which attracted some very talented individuals and has enjoyed the prestige they conferred on it ever since. Remember the story about Beethoven's setting of the "Ode to Joy" in the 9th Symphony -- the first violinist grasping the deaf composer's shoulder, and turning him around to see the thunderous applause of a packed concert hall? This is not something that happens in the rarefied, aristocratic world of art for art's sake; this indicates that this really was a popular idiom.

This goes double for opera; the culture of movies -- the glamor, the vain stars, the vainglorious directors -- was present in opera first. Richard Wagner was a tyrannical genius director on a scale that not even Hitchcock approached.

3. Entertainment is not just about entertainment. Aristotle pointed out the importance of catharsis, of the intensifying and purging of emotions; I would also add that well-done fiction gives the reader life experiences which it would be impractical, impossible, illegal, tedious, or dangerous for the reader to acquire on his own. This experience is acquired more keenly in games than in anything else -- only in games does the reader speak of the main character's actions as "what I did," rather than "what he did."

Games are also extremely educational -- you can't help but learn about a game's setting when playing it; so set the game in the real world (Rise of the Phoenix, Age of Empires 2, Dynasty Warriors) to give the reader a lot of specialist knowledge in a hurry.

So, the ideal game is one which provides catharsis, gives life experiences, and teaches about a subject; Farmville's clickfest style does none of these three, so we can call it an inferior game.

Backstroke of the West

I was very much amused by learning of Star War: The Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West, but I also thought at the time that it had its strong points. (It remains a desire of mine to create a work in which an Anakin-equivalent says, "I was just made an elder in the Presbyterian Church," and means it.)

It turns out that it has more than just that moment. You can watch the movie using a subtitles kit here; this is better than looking for it online, as it ensures that you own the original movie's DVD. (Lucas looked on The Phantom Edit somewhat benignly, but I don't want to promote pirating his works, or anyone's, even unintentionally.)

So, to get to my main point: underneath the TranslationTrainWreck (for which this movie is the TropeCodifier) lurks a substantial improvement over the original script. (TVTropes doesn't have a trope for that, before you ask; AdaptationDecay is the closest. This is not a Woolseyism, since a Woolseyism is a comprehensive re-working of a product for a new audience, while this is an upgrade of the original on the original's terms.)

I've not watched much of the movie so far, but consider the difference in tone between the original's and Backstroke of the West's dialogue in the duel between Anakin and Obi-wan on the one hand and Count Chocula on the other.

Original script:

[ANAKIN and OBI-WAN enter the EMPEROR'S THRONE ROOM. PALPATINE reprises his opening shot from Return of the Jedi, although with handcuffs. ANAKIN and OBI-WAN descend to speak with him.]

OBI-WAN: "Chancellor."
ANAKIN: "You all right?"
PALPATINE: "Count Dooku."

[COUNT CHOCULA enters with two WAR DROIDS.]

ANAKIN: "This time we will do it together."
OBI-WAN: "I was about to say that."

[COUNT CHOCULA leaps down to the main floor of the throne room, and approaches them.]

PALPATINE: "Get help, you're no match for him, he's a Sith Lord!"
OBI-WAN: "Chancellor Palpatine, Sith Lords are our specialty."

[ANAKIN and OBI-WAN remove their cloaks.]

CHOCULA: "Your swords, please. We don't want to make a mess of things in front of the Chancellor."
OBI-WAN: "You won't get away this time, Dooku."

[All three ignite their lightsabers and fight, CHOCULA backing off from the Jedi (see fight choreography). At a lull in the fighting:]

CHOCULA: "I've been looking forward to this."
ANAKIN: "My powers have doubled since the last time we met, Count."
CHOCULA: "Good. Twice the pride, double the fall."

[ANAKIN and OBI-WAN resume the attack. (High points of the fight include a WAR DROID with an extremely fast-firing repeating blaster which it holds perfectly straight as OBI-WAN approaches it with his lightsaber exactly in the way.)]

PALPATINE: [incomprehensible]

[CHOCULA is winning; he throws OBI-WAN under a gantry with the Force and brings the gantry down on what is obviously not a rather unconvincing OBI-WAN-shaped rag doll. ANAKIN resumes the attack and beats CHOCULA back.]

CHOCULA: "I sense great fear in you, Skywalker. You have hate; you have anger; but you don't use them."

[ANAKIN drives CHOCULA back, then cuts off both of his hands with an angled blow from his lightsaber. CHOCULA falls to the ground, kneeling. ANAKIN seizes CHOCULA's lightsaber with the Force and puts the two lightsabers across each other against CHOCULA's neck.]

PALPATINE: "Good, Anakin, good!" [Palpatine laughs.] "Kill him. ... (Whimsically:) Kill him now."
ANAKIN: "I shouldn't..."
PALPATINE: "Do it!"

[ANAKIN genuinely hesitates, then strikes off CHOCULA's head. What is obviously not an unconvincing CHOCULA-shaped ragdoll falls to the ground.]

PALPATINE: "You did well, Anakin. He was too dangerous to be kept alive."

[ANAKIN releases PALPATINE.]

ANAKIN: "Yes, but he was an unarmed prisoner. I shouldn't have done that; it's not the Jedi way."
PALPATINE: "It is only natural. He cut off your arm, and you wanted revenge. It wasn't the first time, Anakin. Remember what you told me about your mother, and the sand-people? ... Now we must leave, before more security droids arrive."

[ANAKIN and PALPATINE begin to leave. ANAKIN runs over to assist OBI-WAN.]

PALPAINE: "Anakin. There's no time. We must get off this ship before it's too late."
ANAKIN: "He seems to be all right."
PALPATINE: "Leave him, or we'll never make it."
ANAKIN: "His fate will be the same as ours."


Backstroke of the West:

[ANAKIN and OBI-WAN enter the EMPEROR'S THRONE ROOM. PALPATINE reprises his opening shot from Return of the Jedi, although with handcuffs. ANAKIN and OBI-WAN descend to speak with him.]

OBI-WAN: "Speaker."
ANAKIN: "Does you is all good?"
PALPATINE: "We are very good."

[COUNT CHOCULA enters with two WAR DROIDS.]

ANAKIN: "Is a time that we cooperated."
OBI-WAN: "I an individual beats not is all right." ["If I don't defeat him single-handed, it's all right"?]

[COUNT CHOCULA leaps down to the main floor of the throne room, and approaches them.]

PALPATINE: "You two careful, he is a big." [大 'dà', Japanese On 'dai', is a common element in the titles of rulers, generals, famous figures, elemental forces of evil, and those few -- like CHOCULA -- who are all of the above.]
OBI-WAN: "Mr. Speaker, we are for the big."

[ANAKIN and OBI-WAN remove their cloaks.]

CHOCULA: "Pull out your sword. Dedicate the body for your Speaker."
OBI-WAN: "You this time ran to do not drop."

[All three ignite their lightsabers and fight, CHOCULA backing off from the Jedi (see fight choreography). At a lull in the fighting:]

CHOCULA: "I always at wait for this day."
ANAKIN: "Even since the last time fights with you hereafter. My force has promoted two times."
CHOCULA: "Very good, give me surprised and pleased."

[ANAKIN and OBI-WAN resume the attack. (High points of the fight include a WAR DROID with an extremely fast-firing repeating blaster which it holds perfectly straight as OBI-WAN approaches it with his lightsaber exactly in the way.)]

PALPATINE: "Good!"

[CHOCULA is winning; he throws OBI-WAN under a gantry with the Force and brings the gantry down on what is obviously not a rather unconvincing OBI-WAN-shaped rag doll. ANAKIN resumes the attack and beats CHOCULA back.]

CHOCULA: "Even since you I separate. I has been hating you; you are a sacrifice article that I cut up rough now."

[ANAKIN drives CHOCULA back, then cuts off both of his hands with an angled blow from his lightsaber. CHOCULA falls to the ground, kneeling. ANAKIN seizes CHOCULA's lightsaber with the Force and puts the two lightsabers across each other against CHOCULA's neck.]

PALPATINE: "Very good, the ratio is prosperous, very good." [According to Wookiepedia, Obi-Wan is rendered 歐比瓦 ("Oubiwa," lit. "Ratio Tile") or 歐比旺 ("Oubiwang," lit. "The Ratio is Prosperous) in this translation. For reference, his official transliteration is 歐比王 "Oubiwang," which means, approximately, "King Ou of Belgium." Palpatine's praising Obi-wan here instead of Anakin is a typo.]

[Palpatine laughs.]

PALPATINE: "Killed him, now killed him."
ANAKIN: "I can't."
PALPATINE: "Hurry!"

[ANAKIN genuinely hesitates, then strikes off CHOCULA's head. What is obviously not an unconvincing CHOCULA-shaped ragdoll falls to the ground.]

PALPATINE: "You make out quite good. Make him on the hoof very dangerous."

[ANAKIN releases PALPATINE.]

ANAKIN: "To, but he is not just a prisoner. I should not kill him; this not agree with."
PALPATINE: "This very nature. He hewed away your hand; you also kill certainly he revenge. The business of the vengeance is very familiar. Remember you to have ever tolded me your mother's, still there are those pathetic people?" [One theory: the translator, making his initial transcription, heard "sad" for "sand."]
PALPATINE: "We must leave here now; otherwise they all at worry."

[ANAKIN and PALPATINE begin to leave. ANAKIN runs over to assist OBI-WAN.]

PALPAINE: "Gold." [The translation renders "Anakin" as "Gold," "Anakin Skywalker" as "Allah Gold."]
ANAKIN: "He big in nothing important in good elephant." ["Good elephant" is the character-by-character translation of the phrase "it looks like" or "it looks like".]
PALPATINE: "Do not take care of him otherwise and too late."
ANAKIN: "We can't throw down him."


Which of these two sounds like the characters know that they're in an action movie, and which of these sounds plausible for the warrior monks of a pagan civilization from a galaxy far, far away? Even Count Chocula can be taken seriously in Backstroke (and the previous scene, Anakin and Obi-wan approaching the Trade FederationMandalorian spaceship, is even more comprehensively improved.) Just let Ted Woolsey (in one of his rare serious moods) or Neil Gaiman at the script as it currently exists, and Backstroke of the West would come out extremely good.

Pronunciation note: In "Word-Processor Romanizations" of Japanese ("Wāpuro rōmaji"), a long vowel is often indicated by a "u" after the main vowel: so "ojou" for "ojō", "youkai" for "yōkai", etc. I think the same is in effect for all the "ou" syllables above.

Anyone who has ever wrestled with getting Windows, or especially C++, to handle macrons correctly will appreciate the merits of the less confrontational, although much more confusing, Wāpuro rōmaji approach...

Fourteen-Ni!-ty-One

I've been reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus recently; it's an endlessly fascinating book, and while it has its dry moments -- and while the overall picture it paints is a grim one, of the Indians devastated by disease not because of European malice, but because of sheer dumb evolutionary luck -- there are moments in the book that are nothing short of comedy.

The biggest one is the story of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It's not just that Plymouth was founded in a manner completely unlike the conventional narrative; it's that Plymouth was founded in a manner that reads like the Monty Python version of the conventional narrative.

To set the tone of all this, remember: France, Spain and Portugal approached the New World as a military enterprise; England approached it like the Dot-Com Boom. There were a couple of Amazons created in the process, but there are an awful lot of Pets.com ventures littering this period, which we never seem to hear about.

John Smith was indeed saved by Pocahontas (her name means "hell-raiser," but she was a priestess in training; it's probably a good thing for the Powhatan gods that she converted to Christianity and married John Rolfe) -- moreover, he was saved, from his point of view, twice, once in a mock-execution that everyone except Smith knew was mock-, and again when she tipped off Jamestown that one of the leaders of the Powhatan Confederacy was going to attack them _somewhat_ behind its leader's back. He later returned to England to recuperate from minor injuries -- not inflicted by the Indians, not inflicted by a fellow colonist, but inflicted when he blew up a bag of gunpowder that he was wearing around his neck.

While he was in England, he wrote a book, including maps, on his adventures in Jamestown. He offered his services to the Pilgrims, to get them to Jamestown too, but with classical Puritan thrift, they declined, thinking they could rely on the maps in his book. They ended up in Massachusetts and spent three months (in which half their expedition died) trying to figure out a safe place to land. Smith crowed about this perhaps more than he should have.

Every bit of this sounds hard to believe -- and Smith's earlier life was even crazier -- but this was Captain John Smith (whose rank was in the self-established Army of Smith); he was one of those historical figures who come along from time to time to remind us that fiction is less interesting than reality, because fiction at least has to be plausible.

Squanto, along with about twenty other Indians, had been kidnapped by English traders who intended to sell him as a slave back in Europe. They made the mistake of trying to sell them as slaves in Spain -- and sailed straight into the arms of the Inquisition, who had been charged with prohibiting precisely that for the past hundred and ten years. (Imagine some venture capitalist in Silicon Valley having the brilliant, never-before-seen idea of invading the Philippines.)

Some of the Indians had already been sold as slaves; hopefully the Inquisition managed to track them down and free them. They offered those who hadn't been sold, Squanto included, safe passage to any point of their choosing; having picked up English on the voyage (and I think having some connections there), Squanto decided to go to England. He spent several years as a walking conversation piece for a London aristocrat, and finally managed to get back to Massachusetts (by way of a series of misadventures, even involving one captain so incompetent that he basically wrapped a fishing barque around a tree), just in the nick of time to greet the Pilgrims.

He served as the translator for a formal embassy from the Massachusett tribe, who wanted the Pilgrims' help to oppose another tribal confederation to their west; while he was with the Pilgrims, he taught them the ancient indigenous farming technique of burying fish with their seeds to ensure a greater harvest, which was entirely unknown in Massachusetts but which he had picked up from the Spanish.

And I haven't even mentioned how the Inca Empire was really destroyed by a zombie apocalypse...