Yesterday’s Saturday Night Live featured an unexpected segment dedicated to Zelda and GTA 6. Though you’d think one of the most popular shows of all time casting the spotlight on the best pastime could only count as a net positive, well, SNL sure did have some surprises for us.
It’s a one-joke segment, as guest Jason from GTA6 just goes on about how badass and violent GTA is, with Link trying to compete by listing things about the Zelda universe that are naturally meant for a younger audience, and thus supposedly not as fun. It’s all very tired, and tiring.
It’s especially egregious to address two of the most groundbreaking and fun game series of all time in such a brutally linear and repetitive manner, but it gets worse. On top of featuring comedy boomer classics such as “people who play games are virgins”, it ignores all the really interesting issues surrounding these series, such as modern GTA’s bonkers fan community that seems to have learned all about human interaction from the actual games, and the new Zelda’s highly divisive looks. Like, SNL‘s take is so bafflingly empty that they even had to resort to “classics” such as the “Link dresses like a girl” joke. Weak, especially when the remake Link is so shiny he might really be posing some sort of radioactive danger to everyone around him.
The cherry on top is when the GTA guy shows off a rocket launcher, then the Link guy pulls up a fairy in a cup. That’s supposedly a joke because, you know, rockets are more powerful than fairies. That’s possibly true; I won’t argue, but if they knew anything about the games, they’d know how grim that entire fairy situation is. Like, no matter how cute it might look, Link has been imprisoning and enslaving fairies to work for him, something actually darker than anything you do in GTA.
Meaning that this fairy “belongs” to Toon Link, supposedly the most kid-friendly version of the character!
To give SNL some credit, even though this could be read as a segment heavily biased towards GTA 6—and I sadly do believe many GTA 6 fans will read it as a full-on endorsement—it does portray Jason as a highly misogynistic meathead. Also, I think the writers hope gamers watching know a game’s greatness doesn’t come from how much illegal stuff you can do in it. Cool, but it’s not that hard to come up with something actually funny in video game commentary, especially nowadays.
