malvasia bianca

I was recently talking with some friends about To a T and Wanderstop, and I ended up going through both games again (via let’s plays rather than replaying them, admittedly) to get my thoughts in order. So here’s another set of thoughts about the two games; if you’re spoiler-averse, there are spoilers for To a T in here. (Though I’d think the game would hold up just fine with that advance knowledge.)

The reason that I wanted to talk about the two games together is that they both relate about the notion of perfection. The word “perfect” is right there in To a T’s theme song, but actually that sort of sentiment (you’re perfect just the way you are, basically) isn’t what I’m talking about. Instead, I’m talking more about the beginning and the end of To a T: at the beginning, where Teen gets bullied because his shape is weird (which I’ll gloss as being particularly far from perfect), and at the end where an alien comes to town and turns everybody and everything into box shapes, because that’s the perfect shape.

That’s perfection as an externally imposed straitjacket, but Wanderstop shows a character putting the straitjacket of perfection on herself. That game’s protagonist, Alta, has a very strong conception of herself as not just a warrior but as the best warrior, and is somebody who shapes all of her life around that goal. So perfection is the only option for her; except that she burns out quite dramatically and finds that she doesn’t have a choice but to put her perfection on hold.

Perfection in To a T is a little more of a cartoonish bad than in Wanderstop, but To a T does also have its thoughtful moments in its discussion of perfection. Giraffe in particular does a good job of giving concrete examples of pros and cons; food not spoiling has real advantages, and maybe you really do like the looks of cube-shaped food. But cube-shaped popcorn doesn’t fly through the air properly, ice cream should melt, and taste is much more important for food than shape. So the question of goodness in food has many variables, and a focus on perfection, especially a narrow-minded vision of perfection, is going to cause problems with some of those.

With Wanderstop, the message is more complex. At the end of To a T, even the right-angle-loving alien agrees that “there is no point in trying to be perfect if we can’t enjoy things like delicious food.” Which is a statement that most of us would agree with, but Alta clearly wouldn’t, at least at the beginning of Wanderstop.

One of the things I like about Wanderstop is that, on the one hand, it puts front and center the case that it’s good to enjoy the richness of life; but, on the other hand, it doesn’t actually insist that you agree with that sentiment. Boro’s pitch to Alta isn’t “stopping to smell the roses cup of tea is a wonderful thing that everybody should enjoy”, it’s more “you can’t do what you want to do right now, and you seem to be the sort of person who needs something to do, so how about you help me with the tea shop? (And maybe enjoy drinking tea, but you don’t have to.)”

The whole game is full of characters who are strangely focused on one thing or another; Alta is perhaps the most extreme such character, and the game doesn’t ask or expect you to agree with those characters’ fixations. But it also isn’t mean towards those fixations, the characters generally end up being lovable, and to the extent that their fixations lead to damage, I usually ended up sympathetic to that tradeoff.

Acknowledging the problems with striving for perfection does not mean that you have to give up the goal of doing a good job, or even that you shouldn’t work hard to do a quite good job. In Wanderstop, for example, Boro unquestionably wants to do a good job: a good job of making tea, a good job of caring for the building and grounds, a good job of looking after his customers. And, as we see with Alta, he’ll go to quite some lengths to look after people who wander into his shop, and to try to understand what they really need!

With To a T, it’s a little more subtle. The main character is just a kid, after all, and not a weirdly driven one, so he’s mostly just trying to make it through life in a decently pleasant way. And the teachers are, honestly, a little odd in ways that I can’t map so clearly towards trying to do a good job? (Not that they’re doing a bad job, it’s just that they’re about something else.)

The store owners, on the other hand, each have a reason why they’re running their stores, and a vision of what’s good is part of that. (Though, admittedly, the way Teen’s aunt’s ideology leads her to have her guests walk through water to get to her cafe is maybe a bit of a warning about the perfection direction.) The characters training to be ninjas are certainly odd, but they’re also clearly putting in the work, figuring out where their gaps are and trying to tackle those directly.

And then there’s Giraffe. I liked Giraffe from the beginning; and To a T has two songs that it plays every chapter, both of which are great. Great enough that I’d find myself just wandering over to YouTube to rewatch them over the next few weeks.

After doing that enough times, I started actually paying attention to the lyrics of Giraffe Song. And now I’ve come to the opinion that, in its own way, those lyrics are awesome?

Giraffe is looking for the good: “Cooking is so amazing! / I think it’s really magical”. Giraffe is willing to go to quite some lengths in pursuit of the good: “I went to a school / So I could learn how to cook”. But this isn’t a situation of wanting to be the best: their reason is “Because I love to eat and share food”.

And then, returning to the theme of working hard in the striving for the good: “I wake up at 3 every morning / To bake the bread for sandwiches / Then I go to my tiny garden / To pick the ripest vegetables”. This is important, Giraffe repeats it, but their joy in food comes out at the end, because the repeat changes that last line to “I really love my radishes”.

This all comes together in the last verse:

When I get home I cook

Oh, it’s so tasty

Let’s not be hasty

This is amazing!

I’m asleep by 7

Dreaming of new recipes

Can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings

It’s all there: putting in work, but the work is worth it because food is amazing, and Giraffe can’t wait to see how that will unfold.

There are a lot of people in the world these days who have strict standards of perfection that they’re measuring others or themselves against. And, most of the time, that sucks. But that doesn’t mean that we should instead go all the way to a banal relativism, where quality doesn’t matter. Appreciate the good! If something calls out to you, try to be good at it! Appreciate the Giraffes around you; nurture bits of your own inner Giraffe.