waddledoodles:
Butting into conversations I’m not part of like a boss!
But(t), edginess? I guess since I don’t see anything inherently violent or shocking about Kirby’s actions compared to other video game characters, I don’t see his games as having an edge to them—at least not where Kirby’s characterization is concerned. Perhaps if he were older I’d see the “edge”, but to me he’s just a kid. Like many kid heroes, he’s idealistic to a fault and doesn’t think things through.
Where I can see “edginess” is in the darker elements of the games—i.e., Dark Matter/Zero/Zero Two, Marx and Magolor, etc etc. That’s the thing that got me really interested in the series beyond that Ishikawa guy. Although I still to this day only care about that Ishikawa guy.
can tumblr handle the three-body problem!?!?!
maybe it’s that i DON’T see kirby as a kid (he is more ambiguously aged to me /shrug) so i see his poor impulse control as more of a character flaw than simple child-immaturity. and lately he just has childlike naivety, which is fine as a trait on its own but not when it REPLACES something i like, you know?
but in any case the early games to me have some really cool black and grey morality going on, not just with kirby, and it is here that i find edginess:
consider dedede! he breaks up the star rod, sacrificing everyone’s ability to dream, in order to protect dream land. but he does this without informing anyone of what he’s doing, and uses the fountain of dreams as a swimming pool to boot. he’s a hero, but he’s a dick about it. he also doesn’t give a fuck that the crystal shard does not belong to him, because he is king and he takes what he wants. like the stars in kirakira kids. so maybe edgy isn’t the right word? it’s not exactly depth, but it’s not simple good vs evil, either.
and meta knight in super star: “man dream land is kind of a crappy place to live sometimes, and i know a lot of people say this, but i would make a GOOD dictator.” he truly does have people’s best interests at heart, but he expresses that in a condescending and controlling manner. again there is complexity here.
this is part of the reason i like squeak squad so much!!! kirby is like “yo where my cake at HEY I BET DEDEDE TOOK IT” and dedede gets revenge by using him as a bowling ball. and they don’t team up or anything, dedede continues to be lazy and lets kirby handle it. like, even in 64, he was reluctant to go along with kirby. and then later meta knight is like “kirby no listen NO you are DOING IT WRONG let me handle ALL THE THINGS” and kirby is like “??? whatever HEY LOOK AT THIS EVIL CLOUD OF EVIL i wonder if THAT is what took my cake”, and then the squeaks turn out to be not such bad people after all. that was fun.
so when kirby games are less “here is a hero and here is a villain” than “here are some characters, you control this one, have fun”, i like that. they seem to be doing a good job with dedede, so here i will get into my feels on meta knight: maybe it’s just because he wasn’t really in mass attack much and the two most recent games besides that were epic yarn and return to dream land, maybe it’s that combined with my general wariness of anime influence, but lately he seems too nice. how meta knight works is, he swings from anti-villain to anti-hero to hero, protagonist to antagonist, and back all through there and it’s not inconsistent characterization, exactly, it’s more “here is a situation. how would kirby react to it? ok, now how would meta knight react to it?” and since kirby is the main character, the answer to those questions determines what meta knight’s role is in that particular game, and in turn how he treats kirby, because if they’re working together they get along, and if they’re not, well, meta knight has little patience for people opposing him.
so lately they have been uniting against common evils which is all well and good but now i want a situation where he does morally questionable things, or good things in a dickish or at least easily misinterpretable way, and he and kirby clash over it, and on top of that maybe we also can has kirby not being 100% poyo about it??!? and maybe dedede can be a third side in this? just so i can see their chaotic-(neutral-)lawful dynamic all laid out. interesting character interactions are my maxim tomatoes.
but meta knightmare ultra was pretty awesome because it emphasized his love of combat (and his arrogance) over his heroism, and that was fairly recent so i suppose i should not worry too much. although if they decide he doesn’t need to be a boss anymore now that we have galacta to fight, i might have to flip some tables.
Thanks for pretty much stating how I would have liked to respond except you did it better and with more examples. :B I do see Kirby as being a young kid as well, though maybe not quite as young and sweet as he is in the anime, but I definitely meant ‘edgy’ in reference to the games, and how they’re usually more complex than just little cartoon blobs doing cute things.
I especially love your summary of how Squeak Squad played out. That was pretty much why I warmed to the game, I think!