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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   20836 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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Interesting. What do you think is Buddhist about it? To be fair, I am Western, so I will always end up imposing some sort of a lens on that. There's a lot of western media and philosophy about dreams too, though.

It makes me think of the famous Iroha poem:

Colors are fragrant, but they Will eventually scatter; Who in our world Shall always be? The deep mountains of conditions [samskara] — We cross them today And we shall not have shallow dreams Nor be intoxicated.

Then we have the "Nightmares", which grow increasingly aggressive as you get closer to waking the Wind Fish. These represent attachments, which try to keep you trapped in the world of maya.

(Importantly, in the game, death is not the same as nirvana. Death just reincarnates you back into the world of illusion, and is an obstacle on your path to awakening.)

And also, something about the eight instruments of the Wind Fish and the Noble Eightfold Path? (OK, maybe this is a stretch.)

I won't go so far as to say that the game is "preaching" a Buddhist message. It just seems like its overall narrative speaks to a culture with Buddhist background assumptions, in the same way that (to take an example mentioned below) The Land Before Time is not exactly a "Christian" story, but the overall "sacrifice → tribulation → paradise" theme is one that Western audiences will understand instinctively because of their Christian background.

And also, something about the eight instruments of the Wind Fish and the Noble Eightfold Path?

Haha, I like that and I'd kinda buy it. The first Zelda game has 8 pieces of the triforce of wisdom, second has the 6 crystals for the palaces, third has the 3 pendants and 7 maidens, and this has 8 again.

There are only a few small numbers that a game can use. Seeing meaning in the numbers is pareidolia unless there's a lot more and the numbers are just a tiny bit of it.

Such as the old Ultima series, which invented an elaborate system of 3 core principles that combine into 8 virtues, and built the entire world and all the plot around it.

broken poetry formatting

In order to create a line break (such as between lines of a poetic stanza), you need to add two extra spaces at the end of each line.

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