The Right To Arm Bears and Orang-utans
Save the bears! (Save the world) is the message in Candy Crush Soda Saga, the latest diabetic nightmare of a cascading sugar high game.
This is a world where candy makes up 98% of the earth’s crust and chocolate invades like late stage cancer.
You are the world’s only hope – and for some reason you are in the form of a young girl, who in spite of the complete lack of any other nutrition source than refined sugar, seems to be doing okay.
Much like the first season of Heroes you find yourself compelled to move on to the next episode and find out what new challenges await.
Much like the later seasons of Heroes, you completely lose track of why you are doing this and wish it would all just stop.
So you keep lining up the candies, 3 or 4 or 5 at a time and hacking your way through acres of faux-dairy trans-fats and crystalline sucrose in a vain attempt to break green Gummy Bears out of the ice-pack.
Around Level 68 it occurred to me. What if the bears don’t want to be saved?
It seems possible that they have retreated from the constant onslaught of hyper-glycemia and diabetes by evolving into a species that can only survive if they remain in the nearly impenetrable environment of the frozen waste.
Evolution isn’t about organisms adapting and changing because they want to, it is about them adapting and changing to environmental conditions. This is why evolution doesn’t always make sense. It’s a hit and miss kind of thing. The successful adaptations are better suited to survival in their habitat and those genes are passed on to future generations.
Bears avoiding an early death by terminal acne, heart disease, rickets, scurvy and a lot of other terrible conditions (my god there are a lot of you) from eating far too much sugar – makes sense.
So why the hell are we digging them up?
Like most environmental disasters, it comes down to corporate greed.
King, the company behind Candy Saga and Candy Saga Soda Saga and the yet to be released, Captain Cavity’s Soft Food Saga, make so much money from these games that their founder has uploaded his entire brain into a prototype robot. This artificial person completes all the mundane activities, like attending shareholder meetings, executive board meetings, and floating face down in his candy themed swimming pool.
This leaves Mr King able to pursue other interests, like running weekend seminars in Las Vegas for Colombian drug lords on how to make their product really addictive.
What can we do about this? Well nothing really. Like most awareness raising cries for environmental oopsies, being aware ain’t gonna change shit.
It’s like Palm Oil in chocolate. I don’t buy palm oil based chocolate because it tastes nasty. I don’t think that my boycott will in any way help save the last few orang-utans though. My suggestion (declined by that other multinational money making corporation Greenpeace) was to provide the Orang-utans with weapons. Teach them to fire and maintain an AK47. Let Cadbury and Hersheys and all the others pry the palm nuts from their cold dead primate hands (and feet).
