Aimless jabber

I've long had a bit of a personal fascination with 'yandere' characters, particularly of the female variety. I have several reasons for this, but I'm not going to talk about any of them -this isn't about me, it's about other people, because I've observed repeatedly that people who do not themselves find the archetype appealing tend to dismiss the appeal to others by interpreting said appeal as being a delusion of 'I can fix her, and I want to'.

I imagine there are people for whom that's part of the fantasy, maybe even most of the fantasy, but I suspect most men who find female yandere characters appealing do so for a rather different reason, grounded instead in a common social contract that is really kind of gross when you spell it out explicitly, but which is normally dressed up in a flowery, idealized way that purports to be something entirely different, something Not Gross.

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But first, I should briefly explain what I mean by a 'yandere' before I go on, as not everyone uses this term the same way. I am, for example, given to understand that in the original Japanese context it tends to be used as a much broader umbrella term than I usually see it used in English, covering basically any unhealthy relationship style.

For the purpose of this topic, by a 'yandere', I mean a woman who is deeply obsessed with a specific man, devoted solely to him and expecting an equally deep and loyal devotion in return. If you're unfamiliar with the concept and my description sounds pretty nice to you, let me provide specific examples of common expressions of these expectations in yandere characters:

-Many yanderes view Her Man interacting with other women with deep suspicion and hostility, immediately demanding explanations of why Her Man was seen having any interaction at all with another woman and often implicitly expecting Her Man to simply not talk to other woman at all if even slightly possible. In extreme cases, this expectation may be enforced with violence and murder, whether upon any 'rivals' (Read: women who casually interacted with Her Man one time in passing) and/or upon Her Man, potentially all the way to promising a murder/suicide pact if Her Man cannot live up to her standards of monomaniacal devotion.

-Many yanderes will stalk Her Man, following him throughout the day and making note (Possibly literally) of his every action. This can occur both before and after any relationship is formally declared; Her Man doesn't necessarily need to know she loves him, and agreeing to be her boyfriend or husband doesn't necessarily mean the secretive stalking stops. This often directly feeds into the prior point, including potentially being enraged by 'rivals' even if absolutely no one has any idea of her interest in Her Man.

-Messaging Her Man at all hours of the day, and freaking out if he fails to respond to any of them for more than a few minutes, no matter what he might be in the middle of doing.

-In general, yandere characters are often intrusive, often violent, and often don't really care about that whole 'consent' thing.

So that's all pretty terrifying and unreasonable to be on the receiving end of, yeah? I do understand why plenty of folks don't see the appeal...

... but let's talk about what it is alternative to for many people.

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Alright, so in US and Japanese pop culture -and in everyday, real expectations that this pop culture is directly echoing- and certainly in at least some other parts of the world I'm less familiar, there's a pretty common collage of expectations: man and wife marry, husband works a job, wife stays at home with the kids. That's the short and sweet summary, and in most pop culture depictions of this idea it will be presented as natural, ideal, and very happy. Simple as that.

But let's talk about social contracts.

I dunno about other people. but 'social contracts' is my default way of referring to the many expectations-based rules that people live by and impose upon others but rarely spell out explicitly and usually only communicate at all through punishing a lack of compliance. Stuff like our shared expectations about how one behaves when there's a queue, or how one behaves in a stranger's home, or how one behaves in school or at work. 'Workplace culture' might better communicate the concept to others, though?

In any event, that sweet little husband and wife scenario I just described, when broken down into the implicit social contract many people are truly holding to, gets.... less lovely. In pseudo-legalese framing:

-Husband promises to bring to the table as much money as he can. 'As he can' meaning: he should always pursue the highest paycheck he can, should always accept raises and promotions and increases in responsibilities and overtime work and accept jobs far away if they pay better and jump to a completely different company if it pays better and should otherwise always grab any opportunity to bring in more cash, without any regard to effects it has on his time with his family or on his health or on his happiness.

-Wife promises to be Husband's personal prostitute, personal housekeeper, and personal nanny to the children that are expected to occur as a result of her first duty.

Now, that might sound cynical and disconnected from reality to you. Alternatively, it might sound to you like I'm just parroting the decades-old 'all men are horndogs and all women are goldiggers' sort of stereotyping and you're rolling your eyes at me, but whatever the case, let me narrow in a common phenomenon in marriage that fits neatly to this contractual framework:

The wife withholding sex to punish her husband.

The usual explanation offered by women who regularly employ such a tactic is to claim women simply have lower sex drives than men (ie 'all men are horndogs'). I've never believed this as it doesn't make much evolutionary sense and studies don't seem to support it at all, but what actually does fit is the contractual aspect: in basically any contract -formal or otherwise- humans default to an expectation that if one party reneges on their part of the deal, then the other party (Or parties) can renege right back. No pay to the worker means no work from the worker, for example. With a typical married couple operating within roughly the contract I laid out, if Wife feels Husband is not holding up his end of the contract, then Wife's options are:

1: Stop taking care of the kids. This maybe punishes Husband, but it definitely punishes the kids, who aren't at fault.

2: Stop taking care of the house. This probably punishes Wife and the kids far more than Husband, given that in this arrangement he spends much of his day away from the house.

3: Stop providing sex. This only punishes Husband (And Wife, if she actually likes sex), and hopefully actually does punish him. This makes it the best way to mutually renege on the contract.

Of course, in practice this can lead to Husband sleeping around, among other problems, but my actual point is that this contractual framing has incentive structures correctly aligned to produce this rather common behavior.

So I explained this whole framework to draw out: this common social contract doesn't actually include, y'know... love. I imagine there are men who are perfectly happy with not being in a loving relationship, but the fact that pop culture tends to try really, really hard to insist that pursuing this social contract will get you Twue Wuv has me suspecting most men do in fact want love in a relationship. If you are a man who buys into the pop culture propaganda, Marry For Love (You Believe), and slowly have the relationship break down in a manner that communicates that Wife views this as precisely the contract I've laid out, or something very similar to it... well, that's disheartening on the face of it, but it also brings us back to my original point.

Female yanderes.

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Because here's the thing about the yandere girl: she has her own social contract, and in most depictions her methods of enforcing that contract are Deeply Concerning, but the contract itself isn't transactional. She loves Her Man, and only Her Man, and she demands of him an equal devotion: that's it. She loves you, so you better love her.

Does she expect you to destroy yourself pursuing a high-paying career you actually hate a lot? No.

Will she demand you lavish her in presents and then punish you by withholding sex and displays of affection if you fail to attach big enough price tags to those gifts? No.

Will she divorce you and pursue a richer man if she feels you're too much of a 'loser' because you're only modestly successful at your career? Not a chance.

She will in fact happily follow you into your dream career and not care if you're just scraping by, so long as she remains confident you love her.

If you've become disillusioned with the standard contract that purports to be about love, but isn't, then the yandere's pure expectation of symmetrical feeling is oddly endearing. Indeed, with some yandere characters I would argue the contract is very nice, and it's only the enforcement mechanisms that are worrying.

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I could alternatively frame my argument as: pop culture so often demonizes affection-centric relationships, while exalting relationships that aren't based on affection and presenting them as 'stories of true love'. Isn't that messed up?

One of the more interesting or amusing trends in fandom to me has long been seeing people consuming media in which a major character suffers notably, then turning around and writing fanfic in which the events occur such that the character's suffering simply doesn't occur in the first place.

The result is often pretty destructive to the author's motivation!

After all, if you like something enough to write fanfic for it, if you like a character enough to care about them enough to want to write a fanfic about them -well. You like the person they are, the person shaped by those events in which they suffered. Writing a version of them that never experiences that suffering is thus writing someone who is different from the person you like, who you find interesting or relatable or whatever, and so very probably gutting precisely what it is that makes you like them.

You can write a fixfic without necessarily walking into this issue, of course, but it's pretty clear a lot of writers don't realize that their fondness for a given character at least somewhat requires they suffer their canon suffering to at least some point, at least not before they've already written the fix and lost their enthusiasm for their fixfic.

This video contrasting the Japanese text in Ocarina of Time to the English text (And also covering a lot of Hylian text stuff: a lot of it is apparently just gibberish, but not all) was broadly interesting, adding nuance and clarity on various topics (eg the Japanese text more heavily implies that Ruto's letter in a bottle was, in fact, written by Ruto) and to my surprise even covering some obscure mechanics points, but for me personally the most interesting takeaway was how the average 'tone' differs noticeably.

I personally always took Ocarina of Time as an unusually somber or serious game by the standard of video games of its time, and it's pretty clear this range of perception isn't exactly unusual in the English-speaking sphere. I was aware of there being various 'goofy' elements, like how Talon and Ingo are riffing on Mario and Luigi, how the Lon Lon Ranch crew all broadly wear medals with Bowser's face on them, and various other easter egg-y bits that you shouldn't take seriously in-universe, but I took these as a very small minority at the edges.

But this video makes me suspect that this is pretty heavily a product of the translation, and not even a particularly intentional shift in tone. The video covers various cases of wordplay and other humorous elements that the English text simply made no effort to approximate at all; 'twenty-three is number one' is one of the only times wordplay in the Japanese text was not quietly dropped in translation. It looks to me like the translators simply gave up on replicating the joke in many of these cases.

This is moderately interesting all on its own (and a bit funny: a slightly stilted translation resulting in a greater feeling of solemnity is not the usual result), but also adds a new layer of nuance to how Wind Waker came along with a more overtly whimsical art style and a larger amount of lighthearted subversiveness (eg the queen of the fairies looking like a child) and just general silliness coming through clearly. (eg the minigame guy who looks so bored but then gets really into providing sound effects when you do play his minigames) This probably didn't feel like a big shift in tone on the Japanese side!

I similarly wonder how much this ties into the following handling of Twilight Princess. I always felt like Twilight Princess was being, well, let's call it inauthentically serious. It felt like a story that was deliberately shooting for Dark And Serious in an attempt to recapture Ocarina of Time's appeal while not understanding what made Ocarina of Time work, and, well, if Ocarina of Time's solemn tone was substantially an accident of translation, then yeah! Of course that's how that would play out!

Trying to get back into the swing of running this Quest, with some art.

My original goal with drawing Sabrina was to actually get into What Sabrina Looks Like, as I've never had a natural opportunity to have her self-describe. I changed my definition of 'depicting Sabrina' halfway through because of my ongoing inability to draw humans in a way that is Appealing And Human; depicting her through Caras' eyes lets me say 'if that looks weird and wrong to you, that's Working As Intended!'

Something I've been struck by repeatedly over the years is how, in living all over the US, it's extremely common for people to default so heavily to 'use car to get to destination' that they pretty clearly preemptively dismiss other options without thought.

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I once lived in an apartment complex that had a pool at the office out front, and had its dumpster placed even closer to the complex's entrance. I was living as far back as was possible in this complex, waaay in back.

Have a very simplified drawing:

Much of the time I lived in this apartment complex, I walked my trash to the dumpster. (When I first moved in, all other tenants loaded their trash into their trunk and drove to the dumpster) There were several interesting things that happened with this I might talk about another time, but the point of this post is that one day a funny thing happened: I came out my door with my trash exactly as the apartment across from me had its door open, the mother living there herding her gaggle of kids to her SUV, carrying pool toys. The mother very conspicuously noticed me before returning her attention to her kids: this will be relevant in a minute.

The nature of the layout was such that we walked out to the road in parallel, arriving at the blacktop simultaneously. I pulled ahead here, as of course she had to unlock her SUV, load her kids and pool toys in, get everyone buckled up, close the doors, start the vehicle and pull out. By the time she caught up to me, I was already past the entrance to the cul-de-sac, and of course she passed me...

... except a detail I didn't draw in because I no longer recall the exact positions is that this complex had the highest, most absurd speedbumps I have ever seen in my life. (They were almost as high as my knee) They were absolutely miserable to drive over, and there were a lot of them: her SUV would pull ahead of me, but then hit a speedbump and painfully crawl over it while I caught up and then pulled ahead.

For reference, I was slow. I was very, very sick at the time, and that particular day I did not feel up to running or even jogging: I was simply walking at a sluggish, exhausted pace. The speedbumps were simply that effective at their job.

Finally, she got past the final speedbump and pulled way ahead, no chance of me catching up!... and pulled into the office parking lot, and proceeded to start unloading her kids and their pool toys. She was still in the middle of that when my geriatric walk got past her SUV, and she watched me go past, giving me a very funny look.

A few weeks later, the coincidence repeated itself: I came out with my trash as she came out with her kids. This time, her kids were carrying the pool toys, and they simply walked to the pool. This time, they were 5-10 feet ahead of me by the time they got to the office parking lot, and just walked right in with minimal fuss.

One aspect of Ocarina of Time was always pretty neat to me, but also something I didn't feel a need to bring up in fandom circles for decades because I thought it was so obvious there was no point to discussion because obviously everybody had already noticed it themselves, right?

But over the years evidence accumulated that it... wasn't actually Something Everyone Knew? I'd see videos or posts talking about 'secret' aspects of Ocarina of Time's writing that didn't mention it at all, people praising the writing's maturity and nuance that never addressed the topic, and of course Ocarina of Time fanfic conspicuously didn't mention it, even though fandom is often fond of filling in this kind of implication with a detailed story imagining what precisely might have happened.

So then I spent several years trying to figure out how to talk about it without sounding like I think everyone is dumb for not noticing this thing I found extremely obvious, gave up because a lot of crap was going on with my life anyway, and then finally recently arrived at giving the backstory I just wrote out for context.

So what's this Weird Secret Nobody Talks About?

Well, it's right there in the title of course: that Ocarina of Time tells us a war happened about a decade ago, and actually has a lot of clues as to the nature of that war if you pay attention, even though we only get a handful of bits directly addressing said war.

The most direct bit is why I spent decades assuming Everyone Knew: if you've beaten Ocarina of Time -if you got even around halfway through it- you have in fact definitely seen the most explicit reference to this war: when you clear the Forest Temple and the Great Deku Tree Sprout goes 'yeah, you're not a Kokiri', he explains that Link's mother fled soldiers chasing her into the Lost Woods and asked the Great Deku Tree to take her child as she was dying. (Presumably from injuries the soldiers inflicted on her in the pursuit)

(I've always wondered how other people 'fill in' for this that it apparently doesn't get other people assuming a war was happening)

This then connects to a lot of other bits to imply things: for example, Darunia mentions that the King of Hyrule is his Sworn Brother. He doesn't say why this is so, what the King of Hyrule did to earn this honor, but you might notice that Darunia declares Link to be a Sworn Brother upon killing the Dodongo King and so making Dodongo Cavern safe for Gorons to get food from: this suggests that Sworn Brother is earned for doing something greatly beneficial to a Goron, very possibly specifically in a martial capacity.

Which kind of suggests that the King of Hyrule and Darunia had battlefield experiences where the King of Hyrule saved Darunia's life or some such. And Link's backstory seems to indicate there was a war ten-ish years ago... hmm.

Also notable is that there's a number of allusions to the idea that the Gorons and Zora weren't always allies to Hylians, and in fact even to this day they're pretty reclusive: Zora's Domain is designed to only be accessible to Zora, Hyrule's royal family, and people who can prove a connection to the royal family. Death Mountain is locked off to the general public, with Link having to use Zelda's letter to get permission to go up it ie he needs royal authority to get through. (And Darunia hiding in his room is refusing to open the door until a royal messenger of Hyrule shows up) It seems like both peoples only recently got on good terms with Hylians, and are mostly trusting the royal family in specific.

Then there's the state of Hyrule Field itself. When Link is a child, the land is haunted by the restless dead: Stalchildren come out to attack relentlessly when the sun is down. Ocarina of Time (and indeed the Zelda series more broadly) pretty clearly ascribes to the 'the dead do not rest easy when they die having been wronged or having died brutally' model of the undead, with ghosts haunting graveyards, Adult Link's version of Hyrule Castle Town being a scorched wreck filled with zombies, the Shadow Temple being literally haunted and presented as being where all the royal family's metaphorical skeletons are stuffed into the metaphorical closet, etc, so this infinite legion of nighttime Stalchildren seems to imply a lot of people died horrifically in Hyrule Field not terribly long ago.

Conspicuously, 7 years later, the Stalchildren are gone. There's Big Poes and intermittently a smaller Poe will pop out of nowhere to attack Link, and Hyrule Castle Town is a zombie-infested wreck, but in spite of Gannondorf's reign being very explicitly very brutal the Stalchildren haven't stuck around. This is itself consistent with the restless dead model, where generally the dead do eventually rest easy without necessarily needing an exorcism or some such.

So there's an implication here that not too long ago -ten years ago, say- a cataclysmic war occurred that got a lot of people killed very brutally.

In turn, it seems like the current King of Hyrule probably was a big driver of the war ending in a peaceful manner: the Zora trust him, Darunia trusts him, and his key failing within Ocarina of Time is trying to make nice with another population that the Hylians have bad blood with (The Gerudo) and blowing off his daughter when she says the current Gerudo leader is a very bad man who shouldn't be trusted. It's easy to draw a throughline here, where Zelda's father tried to make nice with the Goron and Zora even though they were ancestral enemies, and it worked so well that of course he's repeating this tactic with the Gerudo.

The fact that the Shadow Temple shows us that the Hyrule royal family has a lot of skeletons in its closet also gives obvious possible reasons for Hyrule's neighbors mistrusting them. It's easy to imagine that Zelda's grandfather, and that man's father, and so on, were probably warmongers or otherwise not particularly pleasant rulers, with a history of waging war on their neighbors or otherwise being pretty awful to them, and the Zora and Gorons and Gerudo are wary of the possibility of this happening again.

The fact that Link's mother was probably on the run from Hylian soldiers (We don't get told their species, but if they weren't Hylians the usual thing would be to explicitly say they were Goron soldiers or whoever) is also suggestive of the nature of the war of ten years ago: it probably wasn't a war fought firmly on the lines of species. Probably Hylians were fighting among themselves, a civil war of some kind! Maybe Zelda's father couped his own father precisely over the man's aforementioned probable habits as a ruler, or maybe it was a 'grassroots' rebellion of peasants against the king's oppressive rule; I'm not aware of any particularly strong hints as to the likely details of this piece. But a civil war of some kind seems very likely.

As a kid, I found it fascinating how this game heavily implied a horrifically brutal war and a complex and un-'nice' history between all the current Good Buddy species, all without ever directly depicting it and doing so in a way where an adult watching their kid play would probably never pick up this info being communicated.

More art for the Quest, after... way too long.