Flutterby™! : Metamorphoses

In role playing games, whether person to person like D&D, or online in MMORPGs, you play the hero, wandering from town to town, engaging in combat to build skills to level up. This is all fun and games, until someone says "murder hoboes".

A teenager who has this realization probably giggles a little, and carries on. An adult may... start playing their character differently.

Back in 2016, a game called "Stardew Valley" was released. Building on the whole farming thing, the premise is that you, the player, inherit a farm from your grandfather, and over time restore it to its apparently former glory, all while building relationships with the local townspeople, and exploring the local mines. When you buy an animal (or when one is born on your farm), you're asked to name it, and there's no meat: the pigs dig truffles for you, the sheep and goats and cows are for milk (which, of course, you can process to cheese) and so forth.

It's a game that's kind-of impossible to lose. There are things to unlock, but if you stay out too late or run out of health, you're returned to your bed, perhaps wallet a little lighter, with a note on your mailbox saying that you overdid it and maybe don't do that again.

So it's all cozy and awesome and giving gifts to the non-player characters (NPCs) to get more hearts with them, until...

As one progresses downward in the mines, first the space is natural and the enemies are crab things, your first strikes (or explosives) de-shell them and they run and cower in the corner, or they're slime monsters, but then there's a level all carved stone, with bipedal skeletons, some wearing capes.

And I started wondering "wait, are these part of the civilization that built this space? Am I just a colonial, rampaging through this civilization for ore and gems?"

Another plot point in the game involves "Junimos". These are "forest spirits" who give tasks, and those tasks are fulfilled various parts of the town get repaired and the player gains more access and skills, and then at some point they're so grateful for the assistance that some of them come help on your farm.

So you build them little huts, and you get free harvesting labor. Okay, interesting...

And, oh, look, you can even ... wait ... change the color of them by placing gems inside their huts?

This is where I go from pondering colonialism to staring straight at the camera.

I don't know whether "Concerned Ape" (aka Eric Barone), the author of this game, did this intentionally. It could all just be a reflection of the culture around us, but that's the moment where I realized just how deeply the colonialism was embedded in my expectations.

Which brings me to this Partial Historians interview with Stephanie McCarter, translater of a version of Ovid's Metamorphoses, about deliberately trying to avoid gendered language in her translations when it wasn't in the original.

Which, of course, is reminding me of all sorts of places where the myths as I was originally taught them sure have some assumptions in them. Deep assumptions.