Dreamlight Valley is a waking nightmare and Disney must be stopped

Much of the discussion around valley of dream light – the staggeringly blatant rip-off of Disney’s Stardew Valley – has been around how mechanically he resists his welcoming farming companions. Things like crop diversity, villager interaction, and the hoe-like feel of a game like this are certainly worth talking about… but no one seems to be addressing the uniqueness of Dreamlight. That at any moment, an evil cartoon lion inspired by Adolf Hitler could move into town.

A post about the game’s impending update shows Scar as the star of the show, the next big Disney character to be added to the game, posing peacefully alongside the Disney Adult player character. Our older readers will remember Scar’s demeanor in the 28-year-old film The Lion King as less than peaceful, his main hobbies including murdering kings in front of their children’s eyes and performing impassioned racial science musical numbers for his army of geese. -step of hyenas. Somewhere between regicide and being ripped apart by his own minions, Dreamlight offers up the possibility that perhaps Scar has taken a short sabbatical by moving to a peaceful rural town and offering a mining bonus and reward track filled with Lion King-themed furniture for the mayor.

The experience of playing this game is already deeply strange. Dreamlight is trying to tap into the warm, pastoral vibes of Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing, but that fantasy constantly bumps up against the messy, complex reality of characters with moralities so disparate that they’re treated identically from a mechanical standpoint.

You can cook delicious meals and give them to the hot-headed but harmless Donald Duck in exchange for Friendship Points, and you can do the exact same thing with the notorious child molester Mother Gothel. None of the other characters address this, nobody has a problem with anything. Interpersonal friction is the only crime in Dreamlight Valley. They are all there to be your best friend and help you harvest carrots. It’s like Fred West moving into your Animal Crossing town and joining the morning aerobics in front of City Hall. He slowly drives you crazy.

It will be fascinating to see how this game plays out, to see if there are any characters that are deemed simply too toxic to add. We can probably assume that none of the cartoon animals from the insanely racist musical Song of the South will make an appearance, if only for not residing in the nostalgia sweet spot of the game’s intended audience of blind millennials who love games about owning a home because they will never be able to experience it in reality. Beyond that, anything seems to be on the table when the game’s only Tangled character is currently the wicked witch with a penchant for kidnapping children.

Personally, I can’t wait for Judge Claude Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame to move into town, once I’ve assured him there are no Roma living nearby. He always wanted to share gardening tips with a guy who tried to drown a baby in a well. Maybe they’ll add Esmeralda as well, but don’t worry about any awkward animosity between the two. My valley is the home of Ariel and Úrsula, the evil witch of the sea who violently tore out Ariel’s voice, her houses are next to each other. The two can frequently be seen floating happily in the water at the beach, completely unaware of each other’s presence. Like ships in the night. But what else do you expect from the corporation that gave its own villains a line of specially branded merch, complete with their own logo?

You can’t sell a backpack with a real monster on it, so the various crimes and heinous deeds of Disney’s villains have been meticulously sanded down: these figures have been reduced to queer-coded female bosses for gentrified hipsters who love Hamilton can tattoo them. blameless Earlier this year, Disney released an ad for its doomed Star Wars hotel that featured a mother and her daughter enjoying their expensive vacation by dressing as space Nazis and talking about beloved revolutionary icon Chewbacca. The two smile as stormtroopers lead Han Solo’s furry best friend away in handcuffs, presumably to an execution or to be sent to a kyber mine as slave labor.

This deliberate minimization and commercialization of evil is essential to the existence of The Walt Disney Company. It is the fundamental contradiction that rots in the filthy heart of that empire. You can’t sell Scar the killer fascist throwaways, but you can sell Scar the cheeky lion throwaways! You can buy a cute official plush of Clayton, the poacher from Tarzan who planned to sell hundreds of gorillas on the black market. Of course he can. For Disney, a company built on hoarding IP and regurgitating it forever, there is no functional difference between a Clayton plush and a Stitch plush. He is a recognizable Disney character wrapped in fluff, ordered in bulk.

You can’t object to the presence of Ursula and Mother Gothel in Dreamlight Valley. You can’t banish them. You can’t sound the alarm, stand on a tribune in the town square and yell and scream about their crimes. The Valley represents an ideal world as imagined by Disney: a world where evil goes unpunished, where even discussing it is completely forbidden. You are there to smile pleasantly at the content you remember from the 90s and the farm, to plant pumpkins until your fingers bleed. It is the world they would like to see updated; a nightmarish EPCOT for the 21st century, where you’re not allowed to do anything but reminisce about your childhood and strive to improve an economy that will never give you anything back.

Anyway, I hope they add Stitch soon because he’s so cute and makes me happy.