Historical novelist John Boyne accidentally added a dye recipe from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in his epic novel A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom. John Boyne is an Irish novelist best known for his Holocaust novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which was praised for its writing and morals but criticized for historical innaccuracy.
Boyne is no stranger to controversy over his work. In addition to the criticisms he received for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, he was also attacked for last year's work My Brother's Name Is Jessica, which many readers felt was a critical misrepresentation of transgender people. Boyne received so much backlash for My Brother's Name Is Jessica that he actually left Twitter, citing harassment, but he rejoined the social media platform some time later.
Boyne's latest novel, A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom, features flaws of a much different kind. The story is an epic novel that covers all of human history. Readers of the book were surprised and delighted to find a passage where a character describes the process of dyeing a dress, listing ingredients such as Octorok eyeball, red Lizalfos tail, and four Hylian shrooms. If these terms sound familiar to the reader, it's because they aren't actually used by dressmakers to dye their fabric. They're used by players of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to dye their armor in the game. Boyne clearly grabbed the entire recipe from a cursory Google search for a red dye recipe and failed to research the topic further. Unfortunately readers were denied an extended passage of the actual dyeing process which would have, per Boyne's source, involved wearing the clothes to be died and being dropped into a large vat of liquid while holding the ingredients in question.
Boyne's gaffe spread very quickly, thanks in large part to a tweet from author and journalist Dana Schwartz that provides a screenshot of the passage. Boyne, who has never actually played a video game in his life, owned up to it quickly and readily admitted that he had made a big mistake while doing research for his novel. He joked about the error with surprising good humor and even talked about adding Zelda to his acknowledgements page when the paperback edition of A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom is published. Boyne has also stated that he has no intention of correcting the error in later editions.
What John Boyne went through with his new novel is a constant nightmare for just about any writer in the world, and it very strongly highlights the inherent danger of not doing one's research. Still, it's heartening to see him take it in stride and let himself be laughed at. When compared to other flaws that have been pointed out in Boyne's writing, the accidental inclusion of ingredients from a beloved video game like Breath of the Wild is a rather benign one. While it serves well as a cautionary tale about the importance of thoroughness, it's also a hilarious story, and an unexpected and fun bridge between the worlds of literature and video games.
Source: USGamer
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