Ƙίtt

1. this next chapter is gonna be fairly long, but I’m not gonna split it up like I did with Chapter 7/8. It’ll be ~6K I think.

I’ve seen a lot of talk and discussion about why Zelda didn’t show Link the Sheikah slate and have him try to open the shrines. However, recently I went back to talk to Purah about the guidance stones and I discovered this:

So what I THINK this means is that the shrines wouldn’t have worked no matter who tried to open it, because the shrines were connected to the towers.

Upon the tower’s activation on the Great Plateu, all of the shrines lit up and became active, as well as the towers. Masterworks states that all of the Guidance Stones are connected too, through the main one in Hyrule Castle. So, Link’s awakening led to him finding the King’s ghost, who led him to the Sheikah Tower, which he could unlock and revive with the slate Link already had.

Unfortunately, because Zelda, Impa, Purah and Robbie had no idea that the towers even existed, they had no clear idea of how to activate the shrines. Purah also states that she couldn’t properly study the Sheikah slate’s connection to the shrines (if there had been any), because Link had the slate with him in the Shrine of Resurrection.

Now, the two questions remaining are:

Not knowing about the towers, did Zelda still never get Link to try and open the shrines with just the slate?

How did the scientists not know about the towers, when they were threaded into the tapestry along with the Devine Beasts?

Here’s what I think:

First of all, I think it’s entirely possible that Zelda did show Link the shrines, and that we, with Link’s fractured memories, never saw it.

At the same time, though, it’s possible that Zelda never wanted Link anywhere near her research, and that by the time she actually warmed up to him, she arrived back at the castle just in time to get banned from her studies by her father. At the very least, Link would have known that the shrines has something to do with him - the story of the Ancient Hero wasn’t a secret.

Continuing with this. As for the towers, I think that it could have been taken as a representation of the ancient columns, the ones supposedly hidden under the castle.

This would be...well, almost a good conclusion. The tapestry shows 6 towers near the castle, not to mention the other 3 towers at the bottom of the tapestry. For Zelda (or the other scientists) to assume that these structures were representative of the ancient columns would be a bit of a stretch.

“But, Kitt, are you saying that there was no record of any towers in any of the texts recording the events of the ancient Calamity??”

I hear you ask.

And yeah, I mean. Theoretically there should have been, just like there should have been records of how the shrines worked in the first place, by being connected to the Sheikah towers. But clearly...there weren’t. I mean. We’re talking about 3 Sheikah scientists and fucking Princess Zelda, collectively the 4 of them probably read every book in the royal library. Besides, this ancient Calamity was 10,000 (ten-thousand!) years ago. That’s at least 500 generations of people between then and now. I’m guessing most of the records were long gone.

This is an actual thing that happens in history. I suspect that the only sources the kingdom had to go off of were art forms, such as bardic songs and poetic epics, and history volumes, which at this point would have been histories of histories of histories (because again, 500 generations, like. things are absolutely bound to get twisted around).

The Hunter / The Prowler / The Occultist / The Champion

4 character classes from The Hidden Isle.