Let Things Go

Free yourself.

Let go.

Another year, another remake. Another husk dragged from the closet for one more trip around carousel. Another game made for the “fans” whom you are convinced at this point will gladly lap up whatever ideas you left on the cutting room floor. Something you are absolutely convinced it’s what everyone wants, so you forge ahead with grand plans that suspiciously like old plans with WAY too much eyeshadow.

Our obsession with the past is stymieing our development for the future. Things will never be as good as you remember them to be. That summer is never coming back. Those friends are gone. Lightning was never meant to be kept in bottle. Why should it? A flash of awesome brilliance then it’s gone.

Our adherence to how good things were back then not only betrays how we have changed now, but betrays every hard fought step we have taken to get there. If we are constantly looking back, how are we supposed to move forward?

Remember the past. Cherish it. But do not let it weigh you down so much you can not or will not try new things; have fresh ideas. Nostalgia is the thief of joy, and whatever soulless corpse you think you can parade around under the guise of “the good old days” will not have the same effect.

Something will be off. Something will always be off. We can see through it. It isn’t difficult, because we remember what it was like and it isn’t…quite the same. The pieces are all there, but they just don’t fit together like they used to. I am going to have to take it completely apart to see what you did wrong. Why it doesn’t feel the same. Why I can see what you were going for, but where you went wrong.

Ah, you know what it is? It’s the happiness I felt seeing it for the first time. This is a copy. A very good and manicured copy, but still a copy that doesn’t stand on it’s own as something new, nor live up to what came before. This will not survive the testament of time. That won’t be our fault. It will be yours.

“But the fans,” the fans wanted you to remind them what it was like when mom and dad were still together. When Spot was still around. When the neighbor kid you used to play with everyday before they went away. Do you really think you are up to that challenge? Do you really think you are capable of doing a Part 1: Part 2 so well that we remember what it was like to be happy?

It’s arrogance pure and simply. Instead of spending that time making something new, something divisive and thought provoking; you went back to a well that not only has been poisoned by the passage of time, but has run completely dry. There is nothing there for you, and certainly nothing there for me. Just the same old fantasized idea of how it used to be, completely ignoring how things are, and agency that comes with it.

Let. Go.