[A quick note: if this email lands in your “Promotions” tab on Gmail, simply drag it into the “Primary” tab to ensure you get each issue in your main inbox!]

I spent many evenings growing up at the bottom of the basement stairs, watching my brother and his half-dozen closest friends play video games. Their titles of choice were often sepia-toned, blood-spattered shoot-em-up games like the original Halo trilogy. Those never held much interest for me, but he owned one game that did entrance me: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

Wind Waker was highly controversial upon its release in 2002. When Nintendo released its first glimpse of combat back in 2000, Zelda fans were elated with the demo footage’s gritty, neo-noir graphics style, which marked a major step up in quality from previous games such as Ocarina of Time (1998) and Majora’s Mask (2000).

When the company released the first beta trailer for Wind Waker a year later, however, the game looked nothing like the footage from 2000. In the immediately spawned “***Official Zelda Bitch Thread***” on IGN’s gaming forum, commenters offered sentiments such as “I hope this is a cruel joke,” and “WHAT THE HELL WAS NINTENDO THINKING?,” as well as circulating petitions to game designer Shigeru Miyamoto to change the graphics in time for the upcoming release. After the promise of a darker, mature Zelda game, the colorful graphics and playful design felt like a slap in the face to a demographic convinced that their needs were the only ones Nintendo should notice. Wind Waker, the hate-commenters opined, had committed the cardinal sin of being cartoony. It looked like a game made for children, a game that teenage boys would be embarrassed to play (or, at least, be seen playing).

Wind Waker looks like a game made for children because it is, at its core, a game about childhood. It begins on a fabular note, recounting the tale of a hero who defeats a great evil in the land of Hyrule, only to disappear when the evil spirit returns in full force, damning the kingdom to total destruction.

In the next scene, you, Link, receive a telescope as a birthday present, with which you glimpse a giant, demonic bird flying overhead. The bird grabs your little sister and heads for the open sea, far from the tiny island where you have spent your entire life. This is your call to action – aided by a band of pirates and a mysterious, anthropomorphic boat named The King of Red Lions, you head out on a quest to retrieve your sister and defeat Ganondorf, an evil being who has re-entered the world after being sealed away for generations.

As you journey across the Great Sea with The King of Red Lions, the vastness of Wind Waker’s world becomes apparent. There are dozens of islands to travel to, some inhabited by people, others abandoned landscapes containing hidden treasure. When a magical doorway opens in the middle of the Great Sea, the game gets larger still, leading you to a hidden world at the bottom of the ocean, one that appears to be frozen in time. This is Hyrule, the doomed kingdom from the prologue, abandoned by its people and left to crumble with its king, Daphnes Nohansen Hyrule, alone inside as the gods flooded it up to the highest mountaintops. The game’s joyful soundtrack and colorful character designs have hidden the truth in plain sight: you have spent your whole life living in a post-apocalyptic ruin.

People on the internet are upset about Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old girl who doesn’t want the world to end. Much of the criticism finds a convenient target in her age: A Twitter search for “Greta” will uncover endless speculation as to whose agenda she’s a mindless puppet for, be it that of her parents, media conglomerates, or some PR machine. That she is open and nonchalant about being autistic and spares no detail in describing just how distressing the prospect of a dying planet is for her only emboldens skeptics who believe she must be a pawn.

This is especially ironic because Thunberg has been loathe to accept praise from the powerful among her supposed fans. In an address at the United Nations climate action summit, she scowled into the microphone, her voice shaking: “You all come to us young people for hope? How dare you! … We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth!” The audience applauded dutifully, seemingly unaware that they were the target of Thunberg’s ire, as if all of the polite nodding in the world could absolve them of the moral imperative made plain by a member of one of the generations they have fucked over.

Is this what childhood looks like at the end of the world? Judging by the number of young people who showed up for the worldwide climate school strike on September 20th, it seems that today’s kids know better than to put trust in the willingness of the wealthy and powerful. They also bring the quintessentially Gen-Z abstract humor and extremely online irreverence with them when they march in the meat world; notable signs from the climate strike included “Leonardo DiCaprio’s Girlfriends Deserve a Future” and the incredibly doom-metal “I want to die, but the earth doesn’t.”

If these children are the heroes of our present calamity, they’re distinctly Wind Waker-ian ones. Brash and self-assured, they’ve been roped into their hero’s journey from a sense of obligation, one built into the subtext of most of the games they grew up playing: If not you, then who? They march with directness, energy, and, in spite of everything, enough optimism to consider it possible and worthwhile to save the world.

Perhaps Thunberg’s mission sparks cynical theories of exploitation because her confidence and righteousness are the stuff of fantasy archetypes, the characteristics of a child who picks up a sword and shield and sets sail to root out evil from the land. In the realm of fiction, safely insulated by the suspension of disbelief, we can imagine myriad ways in which the world might be reconstructed for the better. In the real world, imagining such profound change being within our power seems far more difficult.

While Wind Waker is not without its problems, the vast majority of what it has to offer is breathtaking, funny, and heartfelt. The expressiveness of the characters’ cartoon faces brings a deep, emotive quality to the game, and scenes like that in which the pirates attempt to bring you to Ganondorf’s lair by launching you out of a canon have a hilarious charm; it’s hard not to be endeared by Link’s sheer panic and bafflement at having ended up in this situation. Rendered through a child’s eyes, the visual world of the game appears bright and kinetic, with even the smaller islands grandiose in layout. With such an endless field of possibilities, the will to overcome this unspeakable impossible evil feels both essential and entirely reasonable.

As you enter the final battle, Ganondorf finally reveals his intentions. He wants to reverse the great flood that scattered all living things in Hyrule, and recreate the kingdom so that he may rule over the land whose vitality he has coveted but also destroyed. “Gods!,” he says, “hear that which I desire! Expose this land to the rays of the sun once more!”

As soon as Ganondorf declares his wish, King Daphnes appears with an appeal of his own. “I desire hope for these children!” he shouts as the flood begins to reverse itself. “Give them a future! Wash away this ancient land of Hyrule! Let a ray of hope shine on the future of the world!!!”

One boss battle later, it’s all over. The blade of your Master Sword pierces Ganondorf’s mighty skull, and he turns to stone. As you stumble in the deluge, drained of all strength, King Daphnes joins you. “Not a day of my life has gone by without my thoughts turning to my kingdom of old,” he tells you. “I have lived bound to Hyrule. In that sense, I was the same as Ganondorf. But you…I want you to live for the future.” He bids you farewell as the castle fills with water again, and you begin to float up towards the surface. You reach out to King Daphnes, who remains firmly planted on the ground. He does not take your hand, resolving himself to his fate as the water rushes in around him. The screen fades to black with the King’s final words: “I have scattered the seeds of the future.”

Wind Waker is a story about climate change in both its literal and metaphorical sense, though it’s hardly a perfect analog for our current predicament. The necessary solution to Hyrule’s collapse is to build a new kingdom; we, on the other hand, have scaled our destruction far beyond that possibility. There is no Planet B, despite the promises made by Elon Musk and his ilk.

Where we lack the opportunity to build a new physical world, however, we are presented with an opportunity to build a new political one. The most fantastical and radical aspect of Wind Waker is not that a child could defeat a great evil, but that those in power might choose to let the world they’ve built fall away so that their children can build a new one. For as certainly as there can be love and beauty and humor at the end of the world, it can only live on if the seeds of the past are scattered for the sake of the future.

Rachel Hawley is a writer, graphic designer, and aspiring college graduate. She has previously written for The Baffler, The Outline, The Chicago Reader, Smithsonian, and AIGA Eye on Design.