In “Wrestling with Wild Things, Part 1“, I promised to go through the 2009 movies that made me cry and break down why I broke down. But I first spent some quality time with the most recent of the bunch, Where the Wild Things Are, parsing what it’s about and how it works.

I’m glad we’ve got that out of the way, because it’s time to turn on the floodgates.

Today, we talk about why memories make people sad, the narrativization of loss, advances in clinical psychology, and why everything you think you know about therapeutic art may be wrong. Oh, and there are references to Star Trek V and Wing Commander. You know, to get everybody in the mood.

The Wrestler, Wild Things, Up, and the secret to happiness, after the jump.

Enjoy today’s guest post by Chris Richards: some much-needed Overthink on the Legend of Zelda series. If you like it, or even if you think it’s out there, sound off in the comments!

Over the last three decades, there are few videogame franchises that maintain their marketing tour-de-force for longer than a few years. Halo has dimmed, Mario is no longer a staple of every game-based living room, and poor Sonic doesn’t even have a system anymore (or any real following that doesn’t rely on nostalgia…and even Stretch Armstrong can sell via nostalgia). But one franchise that has endured, and has actually grown in prominence, is The Legend of Zelda.

When the first game came out, it was popular enough, to be sure. But it wasn’t THE game. Mario Bros. 3 certainly sold more cartridges. But, over the years, the Zelda cult has grown to the point that its
hero, Link, is now more important in launching Nintendo hardware than Mario. Pretty impressive for a semi- androgynous, poor-and-uneducated, forest farmboy.

At the center of the whole series is a mystical artifact called the Triforce, a triangle-shaped golden MacGuffin of amazing power and influence (which we see little of, really). The Triforce was given to
the people of Hyrule by the Three Gods, Din, Nayru, and Farore, and contains their purified essence. After all the hoopla over the thing, you’d think that it would really be world-changing, like the One Ring or The Box of Ordon or Two Tickets of Transit. But no, the Triforce not only fails to live up to the hype, it also fails to live up to its own description. For the sake of this argument, I’m basing my arguments on The Ocarina of Time, but most of the Zelda games are just retelling the same story with new inconsistencies (there is no
Triforce of Plot Coherence)