Your Children Will Turn into Doves and Fly Away: On “Stardew Valley”
This is the first essay in a three-part series on Game-World-Literature(s), commissioned by Joseph Earl Thomas.
I.
My boyfriend won’t join me on Stardew Valley multiplayer. Instead Harvey, the mustachioed village doctor, dates me, marries me, and asks me one night if I would like to have children when I’m able to maintain a ten-heart relationship with him for longer than a week. If I say no, there’s a five-percent chance he will ask me the next night, and the next, and the next, until I remember to head to Robin’s, the local carpenter, to have her remove the crib from my farmhouse. Without the crib, no new children can be had, and the children’s bedroom that comes with my latest house upgrade can instead be treated as a two-bed guest room.
A long-running joke among Stardew Valley players is that children are useless. They don’t help you water crops, or chop trees, or collect eggs from the coop. You can increase friendship with your children on the same heart-based relationship system you have with other NPCs in the game by interacting with them, you can make them wear the hats you purchase from the Hat Mouse, and your spouse can take them to Pelican Town’s seasonal festivals, but the choice of having them or making them happy does not actually count towards the late-game end-goal of “Perfection.” Mostly, once they’ve been alive for a 28-day season, they crawl and run around your house, getting in the way when you’re trying to turn the TV on to check the weather. It’s a joke because why would anyone expect anything different from children?
“What did you say, and who were you saying it to?” My boyfriend asks from across the room. I’m slicing a bell pepper for dinner and the word “useless” rolls out of me. It’s the summer of 2023, nearly two years since I estranged myself from my entire family. I remember that the kitchen that I’m standing in doesn’t have a stone tile floor with a window that faces a numb gathering of suburban lawns. I’m on hardwood and if I look up past the cutting board, there are endlessly tall Upper East Side apartments with rows of windows pressed into them, a little alley pinched between them that leads to the street. The only loud voice around is mine. My boyfriend knows who I’m talking to. He reminds me to be kind to myself, so after dinner, I finish restoring the Community Center. Pelican Town makes me their local hero and gives me a trophy.
II.
Stardew Valley was released in February 2016. Its first update, version 1.1, was released about seven months later, introducing the Witch’s Hut as a new location. Inside it are three shrines. If a player wishes to “dismiss” their children, they can bring a Prismatic Shard, a precious in-game mineral, to the Dark Shrine of Selfishness. There, they can offer the Shard in exchange for turning their children into doves, which burst out of the top of the shrine from a puff of smoke and fly away.
The choice to rid yourself of children in this way is both bizarre and thrillingly clean. None of the NPCs mention the disappearance of your children. Your spouse no longer provides dialogue that includes your kids’ names when you greet them in the morning. There is no trace of them left. Any other real-world method—giving your children up for adoption, sending them to boarding school, or having them simply grow up and leave—would betray the cozy and safe world of the game. And, to children, what better way to be disposed of than to be turned into a bird, left to fly and be free of human needs and demands? Why stay with parents who no longer want you?
So, the Stardew method of “dove-ing” your kids seems sensible enough for all involved. And if we look at the history of fairy tales, we’ve imagined turning children into birds since at least the seventeenth century, per Giambattista Basile’s “The Seven Doves.” Others may be more familiar with “The Six Swans,” collected by the Brothers Grimm, and folklorists throughout the years have recorded hundreds of variants of the same general tale in which children, often a large number of brothers, are turned into birds of various species, across Europe, the Middle East, India, and Japan.
There are any number of reasons one could proffer as to why all these societies have collectively created stories around this trope of children transforming into birds. A fear of abandonment or abduction, some association with empty nests. A line of patrilineal successors wiped out through a single curse. An omnipresent concern about dwindling resources in a time of scarcity while there are so many mouths to feed. All fairy tales have an origin in a societal trauma, Kelly Link tells me and her other students at the 2019 Tin House Summer Workshop. I keep the workshop a secret from my family. They don’t need to know that I’m in Portland, that I spent thousands of dollars to fly across the country to get there, and that I’m doing it all for the sake of my unread, unpublished stories. Instead, I tell my parents that I’m too busy with my job, being productive, thinking about the future, to call home. These are acceptable reasons.
III.
In January 2023, popular Stardew speedrunner BlaDe uploads a YouTube video titled “Finally Making Children Useful in Stardew Valley.” He’d been challenged by Stardew content creator SeanieDew to see if it’s possible to max out one’s combat skills in a single in-game day, going from zero experience points all the way up to Level 10. BlaDe had failed this challenge in a previous attempt by killing a high density of difficult monsters before realizing the weapon he was using was illegal for the run, so he decides to get more creative with his plan.
Through the act of dove-ing your kids, Stardew Valley provides a fairy tale decision for the player, but it’s clear that the game’s creator, Eric Barone (“ConcernedApe”), isn’t super happy with the ethics behind this decision, and makes sure there are consequences down the road. There is a chance that your phone rings and an “otherworldly voice” says, “Y-O-U H-A-V-E F-O-R-S-A-K-E-N U-S,” before the line goes dead. The day before Spirit’s Eve, Stardew’s version of Halloween, your TV displays a new channel titled “???.” If you watch the channel, you receive the message “You've brought this upon yourself... now I'm free... Hee hee hee!” Also, a doll jumps out of your TV screen at you, The Ring-style. The next time you head to the Witch’s Hut, you’ll encounter a cursed doll (or dolls plural, should you dove more than one child) that flies and attacks you. If you defeat it, the doll turns into a black bird and flies off. You gain twenty-two Combat XP from each doll you slay.
BlaDe dives into the game’s code and edits his current save file to make sure this will work, explaining to his Twitch chat (the YouTube video is a lightly edited upload of a past Twitch stream) how many cursed bird-children he needs to defeat to hit the maximum combat level. Six hundred and eighty-two. The Witch’s Hut fills with cursed dolls, hovering above the shrines.
“I do have kids. I have two very lovely kids that I have not turned into doves,” BlaDe says of his real-world life. It would take centuries of in-game years to have and dove that many children, but yes, BlaDe demonstrates that maxing out your combat skills from nothing in a single day is possible. It takes the power of a curse, but children can, in this way, be useful in the game. BlaDe throws his head back and laughs at the horror of what he’s been able to prove.
The general pattern in these boys-to-birds fairy tales is that a ton of brothers are cursed and thrown out of their home, not necessarily in that order. Their sister is spared this transformation, often due to an evil witch-queen-stepmother’s oversight, a strange pact with a magical creature, or the fortune (sometimes misfortune) of not being born as yet another boy. This sister then undergoes impossible trials to break her brothers’ curse and turn them back from birds to humans, often enduring years of silence, hard work, schemes against her, and sacrifice. The bird-brothers usually swoop down and save their sister from undeserved punishment in dramatic, last-minute fashion, before being turned back into humans and exposing some jealous haters who wanted to kill their sister. For all she’s been through, she’s generally rewarded with a kingdom, a noble husband, and, at the very least, a happily ever after.
The birds, no matter the tale, are described as beautiful. It’s not made clear what exactly they do in all the years that their sister is working and suffering. The expectation, I assume, is that they just spend their time as birds.
IV.
I start playing Stardew Valley in 2017, and it feels like a transgression. My parents thought video games would turn me lazy, and violent, and rot my brain, so my siblings and I didn’t have a console until the Nintendo Wii, which my parents said we could only use to play Wii Fit. In my first couple weeks of Stardew gameplay, I barely sleep or eat when I get home from the office, once taking a sick day when I play through the night and don’t check the clock until it’s seven in the morning. I revel in this feral and sloven state, the discipline I had built up for years of work-sleep-repeat vanquished by a farm life role-playing game.
On my laptop, I milk my cows and make cheese. I clear my land of weeds. A villager has asked for a pale ale, so after harvesting my crops, I add hops to my keg, wait a couple days for them to process, and then find the villager in town to gift them the booze. In essence, I am doing chores. In lieu of the productivity I am supposed to work toward in my real life, I’ve decided that the in-game rewards are much greater. It is both more comforting and exhilarating to keep this virtual life in order in a way that my real one isn’t and could never be.
Stardew Valley, at the end of the day, mirrors the values of efficiency and hustle of our world, but without its same exhaustion and limits. I absolutely hate weeding and never want to do it again in my life, ever since my parents yelled themselves red at me every summer as I tried to keep up with them, until I eventually uprooted a row of decorative grasses that did honestly look exactly like the weeds they wanted me to rid their garden of. In Stardew, a button click lets me scythe weeds away without destroying my nearby flowers. That Stardew allows this idyllic dream of absolute orderliness and efficiency makes children and their lack of utility even more anomalous in the game. Why have children if they can’t do anything for you? Why have them at all?
The first chore I am taught that counts is washing the dishes. Making my bed, setting the table, clearing the table, cooking small meals, and putting my laundry away do not count. My parents and aunt and grandparents call me over from my third-grade homework to tell me it’s time that I finally see what they have to put up with. In the sink and stacked on the countertop are heavy pans that they made dinner in and plates that we ate off of. I twist the faucet open and squeeze soap onto a sponge. They all line up behind me, hunch over, and begin screaming into my ear almost as soon as the sponge touches a pan. Go faster. You’re doing it wrong. You missed a spot. You’re holding it like an idiot. Did we raise an idiot? What, did you forget the bottom of the pan? You scrubbed that spot already, you aren’t rinsing it correctly, there is still oil there, can’t you see it? Faster, I don’t want to watch you all night. How are you so bad at this? You’re being lazy. We do not raise lazy children. Oh, now you see it’s hard. We have to do so much for you, don’t you see? You play all day while we work so hard.
There is so much noise that my hands shake from panic. I think about school that day and how Miss Angela taught us multiplication tables with a smile on her face, even after she told Chris and Jimmy to stop stabbing each other with pencils, even when she kept calling on Ashley who got the answers wrong while I had my hand raised and knew the right ones. I have the best grades in class. I follow instructions well. I never get in trouble. I do not understand why I am such a burden to my family.
I finish the dishes after what feels like hours and my knees give. My parents call me useless for crying, then laugh in my face for being ungrateful. My grandparents joke every holiday about how I cried over such a simple task. I try to teach myself every other chore in the household before my parents can, but this simply allows them to bark my name whenever they want anything done. They are so excited to yell at something when they are angry at everything. They are terrified that their children will fail them.
It takes at least a decade from first learning how to be useful to be sure that my parents never wanted me, perhaps never wanted any of their three kids. Children are a thing that you’re supposed to have, even if you’re young immigrants in this country who wanted to return to your homeland after a few years of high American salaries and know that children will keep you stuck here for longer than you expected. At the very least, children are an investment in the future. I am four years old when my parents first command me that I will care for them when they are old, and that I will not put them in a nursing home like the patients they work with every day. It is not until I am well into adulthood when I learn of the Filipino concept of utang na loob, or one’s inner debt. That simply by existing and being cared for by one’s family, one is obligated to pay them back. I make friends with others in the Filipino diaspora who are cool with this, and have firm enough boundaries with their families to make the concept work healthily. It all feels just a little too Tom Nook from Animal Crossing to me.
It takes another decade after that to dove myself and fly away. I bring whatever curses already on me—my status as the unplanned firstborn daughter, a wasted economics degree, my paycheck-to-paycheck job, a hunger to write, and an inner debt that would’ve never been repaid or that I have repaid several times over, depending on how you look at it. I have no intention of letting my family defeat me.
V.
In July 2023, Nick White gives me and my Kenyon Review Writers Workshop cohort a day to write a page-long fairy tale retelling. The prompt is awash in opportunity. There are infinite iterations of young girls who exemplify the merits of hard work despite ever-increasing odds stacked against her. It is not a lesson I feel needs to be retold, and I look for others. While discussing another writer’s story, Nick references Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, a novel about a gay black boy from North Carolina who attempts to transform himself into a red-tailed hawk through dark magic. His ritual goes wrong and he summons a demon instead.
My summer had been filled with birds up through that point. My boyfriend and I had traveled to England the week before, where his father is from, and we visited a castle that boasts the UK’s largest birds of prey show. We went on short hikes around lakes and down rivers and watched geese and ducks drift by, boat-shaped swans so broad that their backs doubled as ferries for their cygnets. My first morning in Gambier, Ohio, I wake to a small crash and several urgent chirps. In the corner of my dorm room window is a house sparrow, fluffing itself in its nest and letting its buddies know that it made it home.
I think of the sister in the Brothers Grimm’s “The Six Swans,” and why in this and most other iterations of the tale, it’s her bird-brothers who instruct her on how to break their curse. They must be immensely foolish brothers. Brothers who, like me, were told that they needed to worry about being productive and having a future. I retell this fairy tale from their point of view, once they’ve turned back into princes, and learn that they miss flying. Their human responsibilities aren’t nearly as fun or wild or carefree as their time as animals. They find solace in turning children into doves in Stardew Valley, resetting the day so that they can do it over and over again, reversing a life choice that is otherwise impossible, thinking of possibilities for themselves outside of what is or isn’t useful.