The GwG Halloween Monster Mash, Part 2: Tears of the Kingdom
Edmond Y. Chang, Contributing Editor
Here are my offerings for this year’s Halloween series and season: two monsters from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom that on the surface are good, gruesome, gloomy fun. But how might we engage and play with them that complicates typical readings and understandings of villains and mobs? As much as we want to push them away, dispel and destroy them, monsters always return, always respawn, and they reveal more than just darkness and danger: monsters are imperfect mirrors.
Screenshot of Ganondorf by the author.
First up, Ganondorf is back, and he’s been given a serious glow up. According to Hidemaro Fujibayashi, the director of Tears of the Kingdom, “From my perspective, of course there’s the understanding that Ganondorf is, of course, the evil antagonist, but he also plays almost as important a role as the main hero…So my only request I made was that because he’s such an important character at the same level as the protagonist, was to really make him a very cool, very awesome demon king.” Tall, rugged, muscular, with a mane and beard of red-pink hair, aquiline nose, and a bassy growl (voiced by Matthew Mercer), he is definitely very cool—definitely very awesome. So much so that the internet thirsted over this Big Bad calling him “hunk” or “sexy desert daddy” or “thick.”
He is over-the-top, an exaggeration bordering on camp, especially in light of the other (mostly) cutesy, cartoony creepies and crawlies of the game. What is fascinating about Ganondorf, of course, is that his glamorous appearance and hirsute handsomeness belies his dark ambitions, his machinations and manipulations, and his toxic masculinity—lest players forget that his power comes from the murder of Queen Sonia, the taking of her Secret Stone, and the virulent corruption of her healing magic. (No wonder the Gerudo are a matriarchal society.) What does it mean for players to desire this hunka-hunka-burning-hate? What does it say about us that we continue to find aggression, domination, and the subordination of the feminine attractive, even admirable? Granted, as with other Zelda titles, the great evils that imperil Hyrule are not redeemable (we cannot fix him) and always defeated, driven back or away. Yet, the fantasy of the monster, the fantasy of sexy Ganandorf remains.
Screenshot by the author.
On the other hand(s), a monster from Tears of the Kingdom that inspires no thirst save for a dryness of the mouth due to panic and horror are the Gloom Spawn. It is a creature that can best be summed up by the phrase made famous by John Carpenter’s The Thing: “KILL IT WITH FIRE!” Gloom itself is a substance, a disease, a malignancy released after Ganondorf’s dry, desiccated form was freed from his prison beneath Hyrule Castle. Gloom (or, dare we say, Ganandorf’s spilled seed) covers the land and underworld in thick, oily, red-black splotches and drains Link of health if touched. Echoing the game’s concerns about restoration and repair, with the loss of Queen Sonia, gloom is the antithesis of healing; it is the opposite of light, good, and life. Zelda games, particularly the recent titles, play with these dichotomies and binary oppositions; it is very clear who is good and who is not, what is heroic and what is not (though it would be interesting to see a Zelda world that did more).
When sentient and motile, it is terrifying. Gloom Spawn rise from a seemingly passive patch of liquidy blight, taking on the shape of five outstretched hands, each with a red eye in the palm. The Gloom Hands flow over terrain like a slime mold with an alarming alacrity and hunger. The atmosphere seems to grow darker, danker, and the game’s music becomes anxious, haunted, and discordant. If Link is not careful, the Hands can take hold of and restrain him and sap away hearts. Even once the player gets the hang of dealing with Gloom Spawn—using advantageous terrain, area of effect attacks, death from above, even drawing the creature out into the sunlight—the grabby, graspy, hungry hands are still shudder-worthy nightmare drool. (The one at the bottom of the Deku Tree is the worst!) However, how might we see the Gloom Hands’ desire to take, fight, accrue, and absorb as a warped reflection of Link’s (and the player’s) motivations to explore, conquer, control, and consume? What if gloom is not anti-life but life-run-rampant like the cancers of climate change or colonization or Capitalism? Ironically, the desire of King Rauru to bring the different peoples of the world together as one kingdom (particularly the “gate keeping” of the Secret Stones) is the spark of resentment that created evil Ganondorf in the first place. The great hands needed to forge a kingdom are also the Gloom Hands doomed to destroy it.
Scholars, artists, and Halloween-goers often say that monsters refract and reflect social, cultural, and political fears and anxieties of the moment, but they also comment on the ways that we are always complicit in those terrors and horrors. The monstrous, the grotesque, the Other have always patrolled the boundaries of what is normal and abnormal, who gets included in the “us” and excluded as the “them,” and what bodies, identities, and beliefs must be hunted, fought, and destroyed in the name of protecting the social order. However, monsters are not so simple (even though they are too often just drawn that way). They can be violent, anguished, contemplative, cuddly, depressed, slothful, mirthful, determined, and even desirable. There is blood and feeling and complexity under their hides and scales and scars. And sometimes, in our desperation to vanquish them, ignore them, repress them, they point out the fallacy in our belief that they are the roots of our troubles, when in fact, we are the roots of them.
