Robert Piazza and Christa Slayton of Honesdale, PA got married recently, which probably would not be news except for the fact that they did it dressed as Link and Zelda, and they tied the knot in a GameStop. I know people close to me who will see this story and share it with me and say, "Look at this! This is totally in your wheelhouse! Isn't this cool?" To which I must respond, no. No, it is not. For a number of reasons.
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| Get a load of the shit-eating grin on this guy. Eat it up, dude, this is your 15. |
Not least of which is: of all the places to have a wedding, a GameStop? Really?? Isn't the standing-room capacity of a GameStop, like, twenty? And presumably people will be sitting, so getting chairs in there? I hate going to GameStop to buy games. I can't imagine sitting through a whole wedding in one (though I have to admit, a Smash Bros. tournament at the reception is some tasty bait). The only upshot is that having a wedding in a place as typically cozy as GameStop makes it necessarily an intimate affair, so the number of people who would be willing to continue showing their faces in public after attending an event like this probably came nowhere close to maximum occupancy.
Number two: they made their family and friends dress up too. Do whatever you want, it's a free country, but don't subject your loved ones to your psychotic machinations. Dig how thrilled they all look to be wearing blankets and blond wigs:
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| Although, as we can see, the person on the right brought a baby to a wedding, so this is probably better than they deserve. |
Also, things like this never fail to spur the always painful phenomenon of journalists trying to use 80s video game lingo in a "clever" fashion, and when that happens, nobody wins.
On the bright side, Nintendo themselves very generously provided swag bags for the guests, which, according to the afore-linked Daily Mail article, contained "Zelda playing card decks, Master Sword sour candies, paper Majora's Masks and Wii U lanyards", though when Nintendo implies that an event is cool by endorsing it in this way, that's a sure sign that it is very much not cool at all. Nintendo performs at their best when they keep their heads down and just do the things they do that no one else can do as well as they can. Keep your nose to the grindstone, Nintendo, and out of cheaply cosplayed theme weddings.
On a more general level though, I get weird about this stuff because it's really hard to get it right without coming off as extremely basic. My friends David and Valerie[1] had this amazing cake at their wedding, but that's just it. It was just a cake. They didn't make their enjoyment of video games the focal point of their entire day of matrimony. It was one part of a rich tapestry. And they had their day out in the beauty of nature, not in some scuzzy den of surface-level gaming wares that probably refused to run its air conditioner.
To be fair, I'm really bad about sneering at other people's various degrees of nerdery without fully copping to my own. After all, I am the guy who owns—among other pieces of game-related clothing—a "Sonic the Screwdriver" shirt. But I think what chafes me about the whole business is that it seems like an inappropriate time for the expression of fandom. The occasion is supposed to be about how much you love each other, not video games. Stuff like this kind of scrambles the signal, so to speak.
Incidentally, one wonders how many pre-owned games they had to trade in to get the newlywed package.
Okay, I'll stop picking on them now. Your wedding may have been basic as all get-out, Robert and Christa; nevertheless, married life is a beautiful thing, and Cheese & Pixels wishes you nothing but the best of wedded bliss.
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[1] No relation.
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