![]() It’s saying that humans will kill animals indiscriminately to save themselves. You can read Shadow of the Colossus a number of ways. And then, suddenly, we are “protecting the ecosystem” by hunting overpopulated deer because they no longer have any natural predators. We are settling new lands and eliminating megafauna species. The game doesn’t actively acknowledge this, but that is representative of how we have always lived through this extinction event. How do we know that humans are responsible? Well, Holocene extinction didn’t reach islands like Hawaii and New Zealand until humans settled it.Īs I play through Monster Hunter: World, I can’t help but think about this history. Human activity is primarily responsible for this unfathomable loss of species, and yes - that means we are as destructive as whatever killed the dinosaurs. We are still in the Holocene extinction era, which the sixth mass-extinction event throughout the biological history of Earth. But that is faster than they can procreate, and in a few dozen generations, you have the Holocene extinction. We enter a land, and we kill a few giant mammals every couple of weeks or even months. Humans rarely are trying to eliminate a species entirely. If one of these creatures gets close to our settlements, we’ll have to kill it no matter how rare it is. Even when we enter a new ecosystem with the alleged goal of protecting the native species, we always leave a loophole open for ourselves. Monster Hunter is about how destructive humans are. And because I’m one of those storytelling primates desperate for patterns, it’s easy to see how Colossus and Monster Hunter are expressions of anxiety about our place in the world. ![]() In addition to these games, I’m also reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. One game seems to deal with its themes while the other pretends it doesn’t have any.īut now that I’ve spent some time thinking about it, that chasm in tonality has vanished, and now I see a pair of metaphors for our relationship with nature. natureīouncing from Shadow of the Colossus to Monster Hunter: World hit me with tonal whiplash - at least at first. In the face of the text of Monster Hunter, the wiki explanation comes across as an ad hoc diversionary tactic to avoid thinking about what the player is actually doing. You go out into the field not because the Great Jagras are eating too many Aptonoths, but because you want to make a new sword or a cute hunting skirt. You are clearly harvesting these beasts for their loot. That defense is absurd because the mechanics of Monster Hunter have nothing to do with protecting monster populations. Let’s also ignore that the hunters are clearly colonialists who value the security of their settlements over the lives of the natural inhabitants of the New World. I actually have a couple of issues with this explanation, but for now let’s ignore the idea of human-determined population culling. then hunters are allowed to hunt it to prevent destruction, even if the monster is rare, as long as the monster is at least repelled or slain.” However, if a monster threatens lives, towns, cities, etc. Due to this, the Hunter’s Guild keeps tabs on the monster populations in areas and prevents hunters from taking the same quest more than once, unless it is necessary to do so. This is so they can prevent other monster species from going extinct like some ancient species. “The primary goal of the Hunter’s Guild is to prevent further damage to the monster populations. Here’s a passage from the Monster Hunter wiki about the Hunter’s Guild that multiple people sent me: It turns out, they claim, that the humans in Monster Hunter are morally impugnable. Now, I brought this up on Twitter, and some Monster Hunter megafans took time out of their days to educate me about the series. Monster Hunter: World, meanwhile, doesn’t have any qualms about what you’re doing. The theme of Colossus is that humans are so addicted to extracting resources from nature that they will corrupt themselves. The difference between the two games is that Shadow of the Colossus understands the moral implications of your actions. Each game treats these creatures as monsters, and it is your explicit purpose to kill them because their deaths will provide something of value to the humans. ![]() These new continents are devoid of human presence, but they are brimming with megafauna. In both games, you play as a human who travels to a foreign land.
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