minecraft forever and always

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

The etymology for Mbabaram “dog” has been reconstructed back to Proto-Pama-Nyungan, which was spoken “as recently as about 5,000 years ago”:

From *dwog(a) < *udwoga < *gudwaga < Proto-Pama-Nyungan *gudaga. Related to Dyirbal guda, Yidiny gudaga.

While the etymology for English “dog” has been reconstructed confidently only back to Olde English, which was spoken from about the 5th to the 12th centuries:

For BOTW, the main question you ask from the start is "Who am I?" and also "What happened to Hyrule?" You learn the answers to these questions over time as you journey across the land and remember things about your past. The answer to "who am I" is "I am the chosen hero," and the answer to "what happened" is "We failed to save everyone." When you learn that, the goal changes from "go and do the quests because the old lady said to" to "Do what you couldn't do back then and save everyone."

In TOTK, the question is "Where the heck is Zelda?" and it's not your question, it's everyone else's. All the NPCs want to know where she is and you're just kind of standing there while everyone discusses it. And then the game throws you an early game side quest where they tell you exactly what happened to Zelda, and then you just have to putter around for 99 years and watch everyone run blindly towards Fake Zelda while you just follow them without saying anything until the final hour.

And then they force you to listen to the exact same spiel about the Imprisoning War, 4 separate times, without changing a single word. Whereas in BOTW, you get to learn about the Champions and who they were and their relationship to you, and explain the Calamity to you in one cutscene.

Plus, they don't expand on anything from BOTW in TOTK. Link and Zelda are just living perfectly fine in society despite having basically been dead for a century. And instead of expanding on the Sheika mythos, they just try and pretend they never existed and put the Zonai in their place as the Ancient Precursor Race with all the Ancient Technology That's Been Lost To Time.

BOTW is ultimately about grief, remembrance, and life continuing despite what was lost. As we explore Hyrule, we get to see the devastated ruins from the Calamity and learn about how the survivors pay tribute to their fallen and work to pick up the pieces. We get to see exactly how this unspeakable loss affected each of the different cultures, how the sudden reawakening of the Beasts is bringing it all back, and help them navigate through it all as the Hero. When you play as Link in BOTW, you feel the tranquil grief everywhere as you wander the world. It's the beating heart of the game.

TOTK is about... not really anything at all. Friendship, maybe? Uniting under a common goal? The bulk of the story is Zelda's flashbacks, and those ancient events are just about Rauru wanting to be the king of a unified Hyrule and Ganondorf resisting. And since Rauru is depicted as the hero, I can only assume this is meant to be the theme? It carries through into the Modern Era in a sense, with the flags of each of the cultures being raised in Lookout Point once you complete their quests, but it lacks any and all soul. We don't get any introspection into how all the races felt about this unionization in the ancient era, and in the modern era we're already on good terms with everyone and they're on board as soon as their people aren't at death's door. It just doesn't feel like anything, unlike BOTW's Beast quests were you got to learn about the civilizations, their histories, and how the Calamity affected them in particular.

TOTK has so, so much, but there's no thread connecting it all and it just leaves it feeling busy. The lack of a core identity is at the heart of all it's issues, because if you assign it something it gets way easier to sort it's narrative into something that makes sense.

For example, to pair it with BOTW's theme of life continuing after loss, let's make it about the perseverance of life through tragedy by focusing on the tragedies hitting all the civilizations in TOTK. With this core, we can go back to the Ancient Era and have what drove Rauru to unify the races be terrible tragedies wearing down each culture like they are in the Modern Era. Rauru decides that the only way everyone can survive is through pooling their resources and using their separate strengths to cover for the other's weaknesses, but Ganondorf opposes and thinks the only way the Gerudo will survive is if they keep their resources to themselves. Boom, now we have compelling motives for the two groups that keep the main conflict intact. Carrying this through into the Modern Era, the sage flashbacks can be about their people's separate blights and how joining together solved the problem, which ties it in to the modern Sages pledging allegiance to Link. Now it feels a lot less like the Sages doing so because the narrative demands it, and more so like they're listening to the wisdom of their ancient counterparts.

This also fixes the Zelda Problem. Let's scrap the mystery of it--what you identified as the core question of TOTK--and focus on the tragedy. How is Zelda's disappearance affecting the Hyruleans? How's it affecting the rebuilding efforts, diplomacy between the civilizations in this era of unease, the day-to-day of those in Hateno after she so thoroughly integrated herself into their lives? How can she be haunting the narrative instead of being some mcguffin to search for?

Also, slightly unrelated, but I think having Zelda's memories be locked behind Puppet Zelda fights instead of having them be just thrown on the ground around the world would make them way more cohesive story wise. Instead of the current loop of Link hearing about a Zelda appearance, not telling the quest giver that he knows what happened to her, and then going to fight the phantom just to report back like "yeah lmao not zelda" it could go like Link hearing about an appearance, letting the quest giver know right away that that isn't Zelda and then seeking it out to get another piece of the puzzle as to what exactly she went through in the Ancient Era. Just makes the effort more worthwhile.