Wednesday, June 16, 2010

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword OR: Help Gaza!

Tonight has beset me with a range of complicated emotions. On the one hand, I watched footage from E3 on the new Zelda game, on the other I read further on the horrors of the suffering in Gaza.

I would like to get to the both of these topics tonight. Let's start with the lighter note, since it is more important to be left with the impression of Gaza on our minds.

The graphics in the new Legend of Zelda game entitled The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword are set to combine the realism from Twilight Princess with the cell-shaded graphics from The Wind Waker, thus resulting in a style resembling impressionist paintings.

It was shown that bombs can be thrown as well as rolled, by making the respective motions with the Wii Remote.

In the storyline Link is born and raised in a land called Sky Loft, a land floating in the clouds. It may sound unique for someone to live on a floating land, but Link finds it ordinary. A land beneath the clouds is discovered, and it is being overtaken by evil forces. Link then travels to this land to protect it from evil. During the course of the game, Link will repeatedly travel between Sky Loft and the land. The Skyward Sword is his driving force for traveling between these two different places. The mysterious figure shown at E3 2009 in the concept art alongside Link is the humanoid version of the Skyward Sword. At one point in the game, the Skyward Sword becomes the Master Sword, thus chronologically placing Skyward Sword near the beginning of the theoretical Zelda timeline.



Now, to the other story, where there is no day saving hero, or ethereal force working toward righteousness.

M had a link on her profile that brought me back to much-need reality after basking in the glow of a fictional existence. The summary of the article said: This weekend 23-year-old American peace activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by a bulldozer as she tried to prevent the Israeli army destroying homes in the Gaza Strip. In a remarkable series of emails to her family, she explained why she was risking her life.

And it got me thinking of all the people working against her. Obama, the Nobel prize laureate; Sarah Palin, believing in Israel's indisputable right to a vicious empire. The list goes on and on.

Who will help people like Rachel Corrie? Who will stand with her?

It's hard to say and yet it shouldn't be. Through so much of the suffering I feel speechless. I'm not sure exactly how to express the grief it fills me with; grief from knowing no way to hold the guilty accountable, grief from realizing I might leave the world a worst place than I found it.


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