I Wanna Destroy You
I. The Dark Genie Cometh
I want to destroy you. Yes, you – the reader. You’re judgmental, self-righteous, and vain. You style your hair and groom your face like anyone gives a shit. You do nasty stuff when no one is looking, and you know what I’m talking about; just reading this brought to mind that nasty thing you will neverever confess to because you care a whole hell of a lot about what people think of you. You lie outright and through omission. You will pretend to read this article then comment something like “this really made me think” or “very well written” when you only skimmed the first two paragraphs and thought the writing was pretentious. You’re corrupt, ugly, and no fun to be around. You fake-nice to climb the social ladder while your mind is full of dark clouds and envy. You secretly hate it when your friends become successful. You trash-talk and gossip to suck people into your vortex of misery because you can’t stand to bathe alone in the acid bath that you drew yourself. You disown anyone who questions your motivations. You smirk when someone drinks your venom. You fear that people can see through your facade, so you double down on the pretenses, becoming a grotesque caricature of what you think a decent human being should be. You have the smile of Ned Flanders but the mind of Mr. Burns. You’re a know-it-all. Whenever someone shares one of their interests with you, you subtly interject with obscure trivia about that same interest to demonstrate your superior knowledge; you then suggest twelve similar things, not as a genuine suggestion, but as further showcase of your superior knowledge. You’re shallow. You believe that extensive knowledge of television series, computer games, and music makes you interesting when it only goes to show how little you go outside. Your personality doesn’t extend beyond what you’re wearing and what media you’re consuming at the moment. You have curated a sycophantic following of weak-willed people who are too meek to challenge you and these people lubricate your fragile ego like white lithium grease. You’re transparent. You say you don’t care when a person criticizes you but you never speak to that person again so you obviously care a whole hell of a lot. All your favors come with invisible strings attached, and if those strings aren’t pulled you become very upset, but you will never vocalize why you’re upset because this would be an admission of your duplicitous nature; and you can’t have that, because you’re perfect and nothing is ever your fault. You deflect blame like bulletproof glass. You brand yourself with every trendy subcultural label because there’s nothing else going on up there. You self-diagnose mental illness like a fashion statement and wear complicated-psychological-diagnoses like a badge of honor, all the while delegitimizing those illnesses and harming those who actually suffer from them. You’re starving for validation and this oozes from every atom of your being. You splurge on the newest things – phones, computers, clothes, cars – even when you don’t need them. You unwittingly keep up with the Kardashians. You’re a full-blown consumerist yet claim to hate consumerism. You advocate theft then wonder why all the stores are closing down around you. You haven’t a clue but pretend that you do. You’re a faker. I can’t stand you. I want to destroy you. And when I have destroyed you, I will pick at your bones until you don’t have an atom left to call your own.#1
You make me physically ill.
*moments before I completely destroy you
I want to destroy you. Yes, you – the lobotomite. You fester in your little echo chambers after ostracizing everyone around you with your dogmatism, and you pretend that you’re just-asking-questions whenever someone challenges your bullshit. Your intolerance reverberates so loudly that it vibrates into the ears of everyone around you like a vitriolic dog whistle, and those who resist are otherized and pushed into their own extremist echo chambers. It’s not turtles all the way down – it’s echo chambers all the way down. You perpetuate cycles of extremism. You’re scared of people who are different from you. You think skin color dictates behavior and that sex organs decide what I’m allowed to wear and who I’m allowed to have sex with. You assign labels like you’re still in high school, both to yourself and to others, so that you can easily identify who to hate and who to tolerate. You believe in a firm right and wrong with no room for debate and you talk down to anyone who believes otherwise, and then you wonder why people can’t stand to be around you. You say you love your fellow countrymen yet vote for politicians who disembowel those same countrymen and then make them pay extra for the stitches, and you’re OK with this because you think healthcare is not a human right until the day comes when you’re the one coughing up blood on a hospital bill for sixty-thousand dollars that you don’t have. You think that small redistributions of wealth are true communism and that social safety nets are spider webs spun by the most potent of black widows. You have no principles. You hated electric cars because “battery manufacturing is even worse for the climate than gasoline-powered cars” until your favorite political-talking-head endorsed electric cars and now you have two electric cars parked in your driveway, and when your family asks about it you say something like, “I’ve always liked electric cars!” You then complain about having to drive your new electric car to your grandma’s house three-hundred-miles away without realizing that the creation of the car led to the creation of the highways which led to the mass dispersion of families which led to grandma living three-hundred-miles away to begin with. You perpetuate systems that tear us apart. You question the water’s surface without peering underneath. You believe the only thing wrong with your country is the people coming over the border. You believe the mainstream media is corrupt from capital influences yet parrot alternative-media networks which are subject to the very same capital influences. You see the mass instead of the molecule. You make excuses for bombing children and then beheading their parents in land disputes that amount to arbitrary lines on a map whilst not even pretending to offer a peaceful solution; and you vote for more of this every four years. You think madmen and nuclear codes are a good mix. You claim to support freedom but continuously vote authoritative-populist-goons into public office. You really mean it when you say, “we should glass the entire Middle East,” while you and your idiot friends have a good laugh. You advocate killing each other over petty differences and then advocate killing each other for killing each other, thus perpetuating endless cycles of killing each other. And you don’t care.
I have come to undo you. I am the big bad final boss of the universe, released from my sealed urn to wipe the slate clean. I am destruction itself. I snort the ashes of ruin and savor the bittersweet nasal drip of death.
The Dark Genie cometh.
II. Wait, I Thought This Was About Dark Cloud?
Dear Reader,
You’re right – I went off the deep end there. I apologize. Let’s move onward to computer games.
Dark Cloud, released by Sony on December 14, 2000, in Japan and developed by the now-famed Japanese developer Level-5, is an action-adventure hack-and-slash mystery-dungeon city-builder role-playing game with light simulation elements. And while that arbitrary jumble of genre labels makes Dark Cloud sound like one of the most convoluted computer games ever created, it happens to be fairly straightforward and one of the most addictively-fun games on the PlayStation 2, with an idiosyncratic gameplay loop that has yet to be replicated by any computer game since.
Dark Cloud’s central themes are destruction and creation. You assume the role of a silent protagonist: a boy named Toan. His world – or at least most of it – has been destroyed by the Dark Genie. Toan, chosen by the Fairy King, is tasked with rebuilding the world; and to do this, he explores dungeons that change their shape, destroys hordes of monsters through basic button-mashing and the occasional quick-time event, drinks enough water to avoid succumbing to dehydration, upgrades his weapons to become stronger, and recruits new friends that help him overcome increasingly weird obstacles, all while collecting little balls that contain fragments of the destroyed world. These little balls, called Atla, are used to rebuild the world, starting with Toan’s own hometown of Norune Village.
Dark Cloud is like the Biblical flood myth, but instead of collecting animals, it’s collecting little balls of people and their homes and then arranging them in such a way that everything fits just perfectly. And, yes – in this analogy, the Dark Genie is Yahweh, Toan is Noah, and Toan’s large pockets are the Ark. In his rebuilding efforts, Toan spins the verdant plains like a diorama as he plops homes, rivers, shops, trees, huts, and roads down on the land beneath him. He even repopulates the towns with the appropriate villagers; some of these villagers have special requests, like “I don’t want to live near those misogynistic muscle builders who always hit on me” or “I hate everyone and want to live as isolated as possible,” and fulfilling these requests helps bring peace to the world and increases Toan’s rewards.
*collecting little balls of people and their homes
Amongst Toan’s laundry list of tasks, the most important is defeating the Dark Genie, and to do this he must travel the ruined world searching for tools to aid in his quest. The gameplay loop thus follows: come across a ruined town that holds a key to defeating the Dark Genie, there is a local dungeon nearby full of town balls, explore this dungeon, collect the town balls, return to the town and start rebuilding with the collected balls, repeat until the town is fully rebuilt, then move on to the next ruined town and start all over again. This gameplay loop is easy to slide into and even easier to get lost in, in the best way possible; this is partially driven by the down-tempo soundtrack that accompanies every zone; towns are chiming with soft guitars accompanied by melodic flutes and strings, while dungeons are trance-like in their psychedelic sitar melodies and groovy basslines. The soothing soundtrack, combined with the low-poly, earth-toned graphics, creates an experience that can only be described as Computer Game Zen; this, combined with the inclusion of a villager-request system, fishing, a day-and-night system, and randomly generated dungeons, makes Dark Cloud something akin to Mystery Dungeon: Animal Crossing Edition.
Dark Cloud is not without aspects that I want to destroy, however. Dark Cloud utilizes weapon upgrading in lieu of a traditional leveling system. Weapons can be upgraded from meager rapiers to Excalibur-Caladbolg-Lion-Heart-Ultima-Weapon swords, but they can also be broken if you’re not careful; this is fine in theory but becomes problematic when you accidentally break your weapon because you drank one too many glasses of wine and weren’t paying attention. The stomach drop upon watching a weapon you painstakingly crafted shatter into little pieces is whale-weight in its profundity and something only Dark Cloud can deliver. And it’s easy to accidentally break a weapon, as a weapon’s durability decreases at a random increment with each attack, requiring you to pay close attention. On the one hand, this makes weapons seem more valuable, forcing you to cherish your weapon like the only gift your dad ever gave you – that one pocket knife upon his return from his Aspen skiing trip, for example – but on the other hand, it’s infuriating and only goes to promote, at best, abusing save-games when you accidentally break a weapon; and, at worst, artificially increasing the game’s playtime by forcing you to rebuild broken weapons from scratch. The moral is, Dark Cloud is not the type of game you want to play after three glasses of cheap Cabernet – unless you like broken weapons, screaming at television sets, and the feeling of existential dread that comes with the realization that you continue to waste your life playing computer games.
Dark Cloud hammers in the concept of destruction and creation through both its narrative and its gameplay mechanics: the destruction of Toan’s world, the destruction of Toan’s weapons; the rebuilding of that world, the rebuilding of those weapons. And while Dark Cloud is a joy to play and one of the most unique computer games on the PlayStation 2, when your weapons break, you will feel it coming on again – that feeling of wanting to destroy something.
III. I Wanna Destroy You Redux
The greatest positive change has been brought about by violence, and each violent event has been a response to another act of violence. It’s fire vs. fire – spy vs. spy – within the soul of humanity. The American Civil War, in which an estimated six hundred thousand people died, brought about the end of slavery in the United States; slavery itself being a form of existential violence. The French Revolution, in which an estimated two million people died, led to the death throes of feudalism’s hold on the peasantry in France; feudalism being a form of violent class-based oppression. The Haitian Revolution, in which an estimated three hundred thousand people perished, led to the first-ever country abolishing slavery and the establishment of the first black republic. Even events such as the American Revolution or the Mexican War of Independence brought about positive change, both leading to the establishment of new independent nations and increased rights for the citizens within those nations. Revolution and violence overlap, and in some cases become synonymous.
Historically, the truly oppressed have never liberated themselves with picket signs adorned with clever slogans. Imagine, in 1791, instead of Haitian slaves violently revolting against their French oppressors, they held signs reading, “Freedom is the New Black!” and marched outside their oppressors’ plantations; those signs would have been caked with blood in minutes. The reality was that the majority of slaves could not read or write, as their masters purposely refused to teach them so that even small forms of protest would be impossible. The slaves’ oppressors had taken the very tools needed to peacefully fight back; at that point, what tool is left other than violence? And while there have been forms of nonviolent protest that have led to change, such as the Women’s Suffrage Movement and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, these examples only succeeded because there was a serious threat of violence bubbling underneath the surface.
What this means is: to change you – I have to destroy you.
I want to destroy you, and once I have destroyed you, I will rebuild you into an even better version of yourself: stronger, happier, healthier, wiser, all the best -ers. And once I have rebuilt you, I will release you back into the world; then, I will be able to tolerate you. However, the time will come when you revert. You will become corrupt, ugly, self-righteous, vain – again. And when that happens, I will return to destroy you once more.
But do I have the right?
*a better world is just a few hundred-thousand deaths away
Throughout history, every leader has believed that they were correct in their philosophy; they fought for their Greater Good. Alexander the Great spread his kingdom from Greece to India atop the corpses of hundreds of thousands of people. Genghis Khan spread his shamanistic beliefs through all of Asia and Eastern Europe, killing an estimated forty million people along the way. Adolf Hitler’s vision for the world was that of a racially pure society of “Aryan” people, and that this would elevate humanity to enlightenment; he saw Jews – and many others – as less-than-people who stood in the way of his Greater Good, which led to the systematic murder of over six million people. Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union Communist Party for over twenty years, believed that Soviet communism was the greatest socioeconomic system, which resulted in the deaths of over seven million people due to famine. Each of these leaders believed in their Greater Good – but history has recorded them as villains, and rightly so, for their efforts brought nothing but ruin.
But what if these leaders were successful in implementing their Greater Good? Suppose, for a moment, that Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union was successful, that communism spread throughout the world and that we are now living in a golden age; even if a few million people died along the way – would the history books see Stalin as a hero? European settlers slaughtered over fifty million indigenous people before the founding of the United States of America, and while this is sometimes criticized, it’s often overlooked due to the success of America after the fact. We even celebrate Thanksgiving yearly as if the violence never happened. The only difference between Joseph Stalin and the colonization of the Americas was that Stalin failed and the colonizers succeeded.
The truth is that we cannot know the future. And, most importantly, we cannot know at the moment if we are truly right or wrong in our beliefs; we especially cannot be so certain of our beliefs that we should then impose these shaky beliefs on everyone else. As such, we find ourselves in a conundrum. We know that violence can bring about positive long-term change, but we also know that violence can bring about terrible suffering and ruin. How do we know when to use violence and when to abstain? Fighting against slavery seems like a no-brainer; we can see the immediate harms of slavery on an individual level. But what about fighting against capitalism? Or fighting against a presidential candidate who might establish themself as a dictator? At what point do we flip the picket sign and plunge the stake into the heart of our oppressors? Must we wait for our oppressors to start mass murdering us before we can respond with violence? And who are our oppressors to begin with? In the case of our mindless consumerists and lobotomites in the first chapter, are those people at fault for their behavior – or are the media and politicians at fault for polluting their minds? Should we then stake the hearts of the owners of the media outlets – kill the politicians? And if we do, are we certain that our goals are any better than their goals and, most importantly, that our goals are actually achievable?
The Dark Genie lives inside me. He sits on my shoulder and tells me that I am correct in my beliefs. He tells me that the world is corrupt and that it should be destroyed. He says I can rebuild the world even better than it once was. But if this Dark Genie exists inside me, then surely I am corrupt, ugly, self-righteous, and vain too. If people like me continue to exist, the world will only return to its corrupted state. To destroy the world and rebuild it better than before, I would have to destroy the very notion of destruction. I would have to destroy myself. And knowing this, is someone with the notion to destroy fit to be the one to rebuild the world to begin with?
In the case of Dark Cloud, Toan is a bystander tasked by an outside force to rebuild the world. Toan is not the destroyer himself. He does not take it upon himself to rebuild the world; he is thrust into the rebuilding effort due to the actions of the Dark Genie. Compare this to our world: people take up the mantle of both the Dark Genie and Toan, but one cannot be both things. The Dark Genie is a destroyer. The destroyer does not create anything – he does not have the capacity to do so. The very urge to destroy is antithetical to creation. Even if the Dark Genie could create something, that thing would eventually need to be destroyed again because it was created by the same force that begets destruction.
It’s true; I want to destroy you. Yes, you – the reader. You’re judgmental, self-righteous, vain, corrupt, ugly, and no fun to be around. But I’m guilty of these things as well. I see the worst in you because I am the worst in you, too. And while I do want to destroy you – I don’t have the right. None of us have the right; and once we realize this, we won’t have to destroy anything – there would be no need.
Footnotes:
#1. This is an exact lyric from the song “I Wanna Destroy You” by The Soft Boys, which coincidentally has the same title as this article; it’s almost as if this article was inspired by the song. The song can be found here.
(Originally published on 7/14/2024)