Epic is talking a big game about its ever-shifting vision of the metaverse again, and as usual, it’s mostly word salad presumably meant to whet investors’ appetites. But one detail in a Verge interview with Epic Games EVP Saxs Persson about the company’s $1.5 billion partnership with Disney stood out to me. Specifically, this one:
But the partnership doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be able to run around the Fortnite battle royale island as Mickey Mouse with a gun. “Not every outfit will be able to do everything,” Persson says. “A [Lego] minifig doesn’t hold a gun. Brands should be able to enforce the brand guidelines to the degree that they’re comfortable with that brand being associated with particular ratings.”
For the moment, this is a presumption on The Verge’s part – not a statement of fact from Epic or Disney. Still, it certainly sounds plausible given the conditions Epic has laid out: Epic and Disney will offer separate “front doors” into the same interconnected, Epic-powered universe where different characters will play by different rules depending on family friendliness. “Some IPs are not teen IPs or mature IPs,” Persson told The Verge. “They are E for everyone IPs.”
This corporation-controlled, hyper-sanitized vision of the future is pretty par for the course as far as these things go, but I will nonetheless balk at one element of it: Mickey Mouse, specifically, should be allowed to wield a gun. The case for, as far as I’m concerned, is stronger than the case against. To begin, Epic has already put guns in the hands of numerous characters who’d never otherwise be caught dead – or in this case, killing – with them.
These include Aang from Avatar: The Last Airbender, who spent his series’ entire final arc searching for a way to avoid killing its biggest villain, and Spider-Man, who generally refuses to kill people, as well as Disney mainstays who feel, at best, out of character firing a gun, like Jack Skellington from A Nightmare Before Christmas and, technically, the Xenomorph from Alien, who simply does not need a gun. It’s also weird to see Naruto and his friends gun down all who oppose them, though I will acknowledge that guns exist in the Naruto universe despite rarely being seen outside early episodes.
More importantly, Mickey Mouse has held a gun in his iconic gloved hands on multiple occasions. For example, there’s “Two-Gun Mickey,” a 1934 cartoon in which both Mickey and Minnie use guns for their intended purpose: Wild West rootin’, tootin’, and shootin’. There’s also a 1938 cartoon called “Mickey’s Parrot” in which Mickey grabs a shotgun to fend off what he perceives to be a home invader (it’s actually a parrot). Much more recently, there is a level in the recently-remastered 2010 video game Epic Mickey – literally a combination of the words “Epic” and “Mickey,” though not developed by Epic Games – called “Great Guns” that’s set during World War I and sees Mickey platform his way through streams of gun- and cannon-fire. Relatedly, Mickey Mouse also appeared on real-life World War II war bonds.
It should be noted that I am not personally a fan of guns or the extent to which they permeate culture in the United States. Nonetheless, when it comes to nauseatingly corporate fictional settings, I believe in two things: fairness and unintentional comedy. If you’re going to force my sweet boy Goku – who refused to kill even Frieza, a confirmed genocider – to wave around cold, unfeeling steel instead of the beautiful and pure life energy of the Spirit Bomb, then Mickey deserves the same treatment. Anything less would be an insult to his legacy of sporadically packing heat. Let Mickey Mouse have a gun. It’s the right thing to do.
