Kwakigra

I was a huge fan of Breath of the Wild when it came out and played the hell out of it. At a certain point, it felt like I hit the logical end point and there wasn't much else to do. When I started playing Tears of the Kingdom, I got exactly what I wanted which was more Breath of the Wild. I'm still playing ToTK and really enjoying it.

Tears of the Kingdom is more of a lot of things. The expansive world of BoTW was expanded even further upward to the sky and downward to the depths, the combat is better, the annoying mechanics are remedied, there is far more to experience, there are many more missions and things to collect, and there is far more customization and sophisticated use of the systems invented by Breath of the Wild. As I've been playing it (many more hours now than I played BoTW), I've been thinking about why I don't love it like I loved BoTW despite it me having more fun with it.

It's not uncommon to be disappointed by ToTK, and I've listened to many negative reviews. Oddly, I agree with most of what they say short of believing the game is bad or really failed in any way. I think ToTK is doing a different thing than BoTW. While ToTK fixed many mechanical issues from BoTW and added so much that BoTW might as well be obsolete from a gameplay perspective, ToTK completely lost the vibe that BoTW had which was that game's primary strength.

Breath of the Wild is mysterious, melancholy, and beautiful. It's a game about exploration in every way. Through the experience Link learns where he is, who he is, and the context of what is happening in real time with the player. The world feels especially dangerous because you start with literally nothing and you don't really know what's going on. The intrinsic and extrinsic rewards to the game are all to do with exploration. Seeing a century-old battlefield littered with the weapons of fallen soldiers amidst the ruins of a village totally reclaimed by nature is a particular kind of emotional experience, and there are many such experiences throughout the game. Unfortunately, there is only so much to discover and once the map is filled out, the cutscenes are seen, and Ganon is defeated, there isn't much to do after that but poke around the world for its own sake or test your patience with the annoyingly difficult DLC.

Tears of the Kingdom, a continuation of the story, is not so much focused on exploration. In ToTK, exploration is one of the many fun activities the player can do. The overworld is the same with some minor differences such as a network of caves, and the skyworld and underworld are filled with treasure and beauty but not much in the way of themes or emotional resonance. Far more so than in BoTW, the world of ToTK feels like the player's personal playground to experiment with and relax in. It's just not that serious.

Unlike in BoTW, it's easy to forget the main antagonist is even a problem in ToTK. The game is more interested in world building for its own sake. For example, the people of Kakariko village are far more concerned with local archaeology than the potential doom of the world. Most characters in the game are more concerned with their low-stakes slices of life than Ganondorf politely sitting in the castle and not threatening them at all. No one is in any real danger. Groups of villagers attack monster camps with ladles and pot lids and not one bad thing can ever happen to them. The tone from the previous game is obliterated, but it's fun, and I don't think this is a bad thing. I am ok with the focus shifting from discovering the world to greatly expand the capability to goof around in that same world.

I would say that BoTW is the meal and ToTK is the dessert. Many people were disappointed that ToTK wasn't another meal of the same quality as BoTW, but personally I'm ok with having dessert.

In this music video, the US military attempts to intercept a UAP. A pilot, ordered to make a killing shot, refuses his commands and instead engages the enemy in a dance off. The alien defeats the pilot, causing central command to mobilize all branches of the US military to outdance the alien threat. Since the full military might of the world's sole superpower is engaged in the largest theater of war ever, the shadow government neutralizes everyone involved to maintain the status quo. This causes the alien to "throw it back" to the beginning of the loop.

I can't exactly explain but this is exactly my sense of humor.

Intro

For reasons this subject has recently become very relevant to me. I would like to discuss the nature of parental abuse through the lens of Dnd so that… our dnd games will be more realistic and emotionally cathartic. It's a pretty thin veil over what I'm actually talking about so those unfamiliar with Dnd will find this perfectly understandable. As your cptsd buddy who gets it, this is your literal trigger warning before choosing to continue and I don’t want to hear any crap about it from anyone who doesn’t know why it’s necessary to include this sentence. Without further ado, these are my tips and guidelines for understanding how to run a player character who has an evil-aligned parent who left them with cptsd:

Terms

Abuse, neglect, and exploitation are the tools of evil-aligned parents, but there are differences in manifestation of these tools whether the parent is chaotic evil, a demon, or lawful evil, a devil. The evil carried out by demon or devil parents has similar effects on the victim (feelings of worthlessness, anxiety, unresolved latent rage, depression, unrelenting stress, suicidality, etc.).

• Abuse is inappropriate treatment of an individual. It includes physical, psychological, emotional and sexual abuse.

• Neglect is the refusal or failure of a caregiver to provide for the needs of a child or vulnerable adult.

• Exploitation is taking improper advantage of an individual. It can involve finances, material, labor or activity.

Demon Parents

The destruction of the demon parent is obvious to most people and this is the kind of parent who is commonly described as a “monster.” The demon parent behaves like an unpredictable greedy animal who takes what they wish from their family as they please, including the satisfaction of their suffering. They disregard all ethics and morality in the pursuit of physical pleasure that they can never quite satisfy. The anger of feeling this lacking is relieved by using family members for target practice. Everyone in the family is consciously afraid of the demon parent because the demon parent will do whatever they want to vulnerable people to fulfill their sick desires without reservations or justification. The needs of others can not be conceived of by individuals depraved in this way and they use threats to coerce others into behaviors which benefit the demon. Demon parents, when discovered, receive deserved universal condemnation and in many cases criminal punishment.

• Abuse: Physically harm family members at any time for any reason.

• Neglect: Family focused on keeping demon parent placid, wouldn’t dream of provoking the demon-parent with expressions of need.

• Exploitation: Demon parent makes demands and use violence or the threat of violence to coerce their victims into performing services for them.

Devil Parents

Devil parents are most interested in conducting their evil within the bounds of established rules or through the arbitrary interpretation of those sometimes recently invented rules. Although their methods are different than the demon parent’s, the desire to exert control and be served is the same regardless of the kind of evil methods the parents employ. While demon parents’ chaotic nature prevents them from fully integrating into society or holding any kind of wealth or power therein, devil parents are experts in manipulation and exploitation who often find themselves in positions of leadership in society, equipping them with servants to use against their victims. They can convince a person who they are abusing and exploiting to be thankful for being tolerated. Their specialty is for their victims and onlookers to view their abuse as fair, justified, or mundane because individual incidents appear, especially to the victim, to be non-abuse as the abuse isn’t demonic in nature. The devil makes their victims feel indebted to them so that they continue to serve. Family members are used up until they are totally consumed, which frustrates the devil parent because they demand to be served regardless of the mental or physical condition of their victims, so they shame their victims to work through any amount of pain or disability. Their victims, conditioned by their own parent to believe that this is a natural parent-child relationship, is ashamed of the anger and frustration they feel and learn to suppress their ideas, their desires, and their emotions because all could be used as tools by the devil parent to demean and shame. Devil parents, when discovered, become attractive to potential victims and repulsive but acceptable to most healthy people who do not understand the nature of psychological torment as they have never experienced it, who don’t believe in psychology altogether, or are themselves openly practicing devil-parents as the techniques of devil parents are often celebrated in conservative circles. Shame and plausible deniability keeps victims from admitting that they could have been abused.

• Abuse: Devil parent will systematically deconstruct the egos of their victims so that they believe they are less than human therefore needing to work to earn their place in the family which is framed as a refuge from a society which is even less accepting (which appears to the victim to be true because cptsd victims of any kind of evil-aligned parent were deprived of the skills they needed to be taught to have healthy relationships of any kind). They will punish failure and accept any amount of success neutrally as if it were the minimum possible standard. Demean and shame family members to enforce hierarchy that children exist to serve their parents and be thankful their parents allow them to live. Anything to shatter confidence and self-respect is on the table unless some rule forbids it.

• Neglect: React to expressions of need or emotions with shaming and condemnation. Make victims feel embarrassed for having physical and emotional needs from their parent. Criticize the lacking nature of the child’s self-taught attempts to take care of themselves so that they feel incompetent and worthless. Ignore health problems caused by neglect, convince victims they are not having health problems since they weren’t neglected. Tell the victim they are not experiencing the emotions they are experiencing and by faking them are not living up to their obligations to the devil parent. Children of devil parents view death as a welcome retirement from the required service of their devil parent’s domain which would be selfish to indulge in while the parent “needs them”, and feel guilty for wanting to die despite having a such an extraordinary and “loving” devil-parent.

• Exploitation: The Devil’s primary purpose is to enthrall their victims, family and beyond. They believe others to be opportunities or obstacles. They will use systemic psychological torment techniques (which they likely learned from their own devil parents and chose to perpetuate) to make their victims feel that their only purpose is to serve the devil parent and be ashamed by any thought that is not oriented to benefiting the devil parent.

Neutrally Evil Parents

It is also possible for a parent to be aligned neutral-evil and have a mix of the above distinguishing characteristics, as a parent my PC is familiar with. The neutral evil parent is a resentful ticking timebomb who will perform their evil lawfully when calm and chaotically when enraged.

Roll a d4

• Evens the neutral evil parent is calm and practices evil lawfully, use devil guidelines.

• Odds the neutral evil parent is enraged and practices evil chaotically, use demon guidelines.

PC Background Skills

PCs with cptsd, while debuffed from a panicked and disorderly survival mind, do have some unique abilities. PCs with Cptsd have an inflated perception skill because for their own safety they learned to never stop scanning their environment for potential threats ever. They tend to be excellent at identifying others by the sound of their footsteps and are themselves gifted at stealth and deception. They have skill in insight due to constantly monitoring the emotional state of the evil parent so they can hide when they identify the evil parent is becoming dangerous. PCs may have some skill in nature, survival, and medicine due to the practical experience of having to figure out how to care for themselves as children.

Depending on the nature of the abuse and the personality of the Player character, the PC could attain the Narcissist or Sociopath attributes. Unlimited ego from oneself and a disregard for all others may allow one to survive a chaotic and deprived environment, however applying this solution will shift the PC's alignment to evil.

Conclusion

Hopefully someone will get some use out of this… for their Dnd game. For anyone who has a player character who feels nothing but pain and knows their loving parents are related to that somehow but feel too guilty to explore that emotion, have your player character explore and radically accept the validity of that emotion in a controlled environment. The character will feel more acute emotional pain than they ever had before because it had accumulated over a lifetime and the body keeps the score, but the character will feel some relief from the constant ambient pain which had to be suppressed before. When they accept their own emotions and their own inherent worth, they can re-contextualize their experiences, learn the skills they were deprived of, and go on to lead a happy and fulfilling life at any age. That’s what I’m hoping for my PC. I'd like to hear from anyone who has a personal interest in this topic. For characterization purposes, do you think a PC in these circumstances might forgive their evil parent since they came from an evil background they are incapable of overcoming or condemn their evil parent for never being critical about how their behavior affects themselves and others in their entire life?

The reason I choose to continue living is that I only have one chance to inhabit a mortal body in this world so I’d like to see it through for as long as I can. What’s yours?

I voted for Biden in 2020. This was despite the fact that he is one of the main architects of modern American slavery through his crime bill which made the US the nation with the highest proportion of its own citizens imprisoned by far, who are quite literally slaves according to our constitution. This was despite him participating in the lies which caused us to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis in our pursuit of blowing up Halliburton’s stock value and taking control of large parts of the oil trade. This was despite his support of the neoliberal consensus which has lead to the deterioration of the economic, social, and physical health of the average American while the wealthiest’s share of the economy continues to grow meaninglessly. In fact, it was relatively easy for me to vote for Biden because the person he was running against was Trump who demonstrated worse tendencies on all of the above (while actually softening some prison laws, still fostered the increased social acceptability of acting according to blatant racism so I can’t even give him credit here) and more. According to my utilitarian principles, the evil choice I made was morally superior to the evil choice I did not make. Recent events have me re-considering this motivation.

To be clear, my opinion of Trump has not changed. Under Trump, I am sure I will be more likely to lose my loved ones or even my own life, although I am personally less at risk than his main targets. I am also sure that his influence would at least maintain if not increase the atrocities committed by the Likud-lead Isreali government with whom he has a strong relationship. Christian Nationalism is extraordinarily dangerous and if some of their desires are pushed through there’s really no telling the extent of future horrors we may have to deal with. If Project 2025 has a certain degree of success we may consider any pretense of democracy to be nullified. If I were only considering the immediate consequences of my decision, I would still support Genocide Joe.

I phrased that last sentence like that intentionally and it is the inspiration for this essay. The lesser of two evils in this case is now facilitating a genocide and I think that’s significant. In 2020 I didn’t think I had a red line which would cause me to allow a greater evil, and within the last few months I’m coming to find that I do have a red line I have to consider in and of itself and that line is genocide.

This is what I find particularly frustrating when I try to engage this topic in good faith, even among Biden supporters who are lucid about recognizing what is clearly happening before their eyes with their implicit support. Yes, they tell me, there is a lot they don’t like about Biden but he is the better choice. There is some equivalence implied here. Biden is guilty of a lot of things like union busting, failure to support a public option despite promises, the continuation of many unfair border policies, and oh yeah genocide too. I really want to emphasize that we are talking about the categorization and systematic elimination of a group of people from their homes which could not be happening as it is now happening without the economic and political support of the Biden administration. This is now among the issues we are telling Democrats we are ok with or not ok with via the use of the only political currency left to us being our votes.

“Vote Blue No Matter Who” is a phrase that made me sick the first time I heard it and I have only grown to detest it more, especially since I acted according to it it through my actions in 2020. Recently I realized that this is less of a call to action and more of a threat. More explicitly, this phrase can be understood as “Vote for our candidate or the Republicans will fuck you up.” We better pay up or they can’t be responsible for what happens to us. Like other organizations who make threats like this, by paying up we are supporting them in what they do even if it’s under duress. As long as their heavy, the Republican party, is out there fucking people up the Democrats have license do anything as long as it’s not as bad. The DNC made a hard right-wing shift with Clinton and have been moving right since then, just not as far as the Republicans have. This is where damage control has gotten us. Democrats have pushed through so many boundaries and now we’re at genocide. Now the promise is, “You better support our genocide, or the Republicans will make it worse and fuck you up too.”

What is going to happen if we tell the Democrats that even though they are facilitating a genocide, we’re still going to pay up? What is the message the DNC will read from that? What precedent is going to be set? Are we going to be safer now that genocide will be seen as something we can compromise on? Do we really believe that Trump is the worst threat they can make, or that the lesser of two evils couldn’t eventually be worse than Trump? Do we really think by making this compromise here, on top of all the compromises we’ve made over the last few decades, that after this time everything will suddenly change and we can start talking about making average peoples’ lives better for once?

I can’t responsibly ask these questions without recognizing that the threat is very real. I am not an accelerationist and I do not desire the further deterioration of our society in hopes of a positive outcome through violent revolution. I do not want to have to risk imprisonment and death to resist government persecution. I recognize that a breakdown of democracy and subsequent shift to political violence would only advantage those most equipped for and skilled in the use of violence, whose society of nails would be governed by hammers.

It seems to me that failing to support the Democrats this cycle puts us at greater immediate risk of the above, and that is shocking enough to bring most reasonable people under control. The thing is though, I think that by leaving genocide on the table for anyone across the Overton window of elected officials to consider as a socially acceptable tool is a far greater risk in the long term.

I think that by making genocide just another issue of managing how much we can tolerate among the two sides, making it something that is tolerable under some circumstances, or especially encouraging the thinking that the charge of genocide is conditional on the political expediency of it victims, we are ultimately normalizing the general idea that genocide is an acceptable tool for elected officials across our “political spectrum” of right wing and big tent(right wing, centrist, some left wing) to support or even employ in the worst case as long as they call it something else regardless of international law. If this is ok, what is the next boundary the Democrats will push? I want to stop digging the hole we’re in now, suffer the consequences, and deal with Democrats who at least understand they will not get elected if they facilitate genocide. Honestly I’d like one day to not have to make the least evil choice and have the opportunity to support something after the DNC primary, and it doesn’t seem like damage control is leading us in that direction at all but away from it.

In practical immediate terms, Trump is hated outside of his base and has demonstrated that his endorsement is poison to politicians who are not himself more often than not. He is dangerous, but inspires so much more opposition to himself and his ideas than any other candidate I can think of. I even think that Trump’s genocide is going to be received very differently than Biden’s genocide since Trump will be far less tactful and far more honest about his motivations. The worst case scenario is possible under Trump and I don’t think it’s ok to dismiss that, but it is by no means a guarantee that Trump is the one to lead average Americans into fascism. It is a fucking frightening risk allowing a greater evil through inaction, but I think it’s the actual least bad option this time.

I’m open to being challenged on or discuss anything I’ve said here in good faith. I’m also open to rage-induced teardowns of the ideas I’ve proposed here as long as those teardowns are against my ideas and not against me as a person or others who are sympathetic to these ideas. I understand that this is an extremely charged topic and would like to encourage honest conversation as long as it doesn’t bleed into abuse which won't help anyone.

Edit: Whew, that was some important discussion. I hope it was clear that my intention was to clarify my thinking and explore different perspectives on my argument rather than me judging others for coming to different conclusions or trying to convince everyone I am sure I am absolutely correct. Importantly, I realized this entire argument is secondary. What is important now is direct action. Depending on the degree of success we have with disrupting this sick order, this whole conversation could become moot and that is my strongest desire. See y'all on the street.