On the Imprisoning War and Bootstrap Paradoxes
Okay so, disclaimer: Massive Tears of the Kingdom, Age of Imprisonment, and Ocarina of Time Spoilers. And some Breath of the Wild, Age of Calamity, and other general Zelda stuff. Honestly I don't know why you'd be reading this if you weren't either finished with recent releases or just don't mind.
We have, now, two separate depictions of an event called "The Imprisoning War" in the Zelda franchise. Well, actually we've got three, but yeah.
1) Link to the Past's backstory, where we're being related a tale of the Seal War/Imprisoning War from several generations later. Ocarina of Time was then explicitly said to be those events.
2) Four Swords Adventures, which was stated in dev interviews to go in between Ocarina of Time and Link to the Past and was meant to better fit the events depicted in LttP's backstory. Perhaps, over time, the sealing of the two different Ganons was conflated into one single event. But that's neither here nor there.
3) The events depicted in the dragon tears in Tears of the Kingdom, which are now fleshed out in Age of Imprisonment.
We're going to disregard Four Swords Adventures for the time being, because TotK/AoI is clearly meant to parallel OoT. Koume and Kotake, the seven sages, Rauru, the Temple of Time, The Imprisoning War... yeah.
Obviously not everything lines up. The Sages have different names, and not all of the races line up nicely. Rito aren't even in Ocarina of Time. There's Koroks instead of Kokiri, etc.
But, there's one, big, glaring difference that I posit can explain all that away: the presence of the BotW era's Princess Zelda, and by extension the Mysterious and Forbidden Constructs, who only participate in events because Zelda is there.
Those of you who have played TotK know that there is a bootstrap paradox in play. Link & Zelda explore beneath Hyrule Castle and find the imprisoned Ganondorf, who wakes up and recognizes Zelda and attacks, resulting in her being flung into the past... which is where he remembers her from in the first place, and she contributes to events that lead to him being imprisoned beneath the castle. Repeat.
There's some glaring issues there though. For one, the area beneath the castle doesn't match what was in Breath of the Wild. We fought The Calamity Ganon down there, remember? It's a grandiose astral observatory made of Shiekah tech.
And it's nowhere to be found in Tears of the Kingdom. That room just doesn't exist anymore. These aren't the only inconsistencies of course. The handwaved absence of the Divine Beasts. Divine Beasts that are named after Sages from Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker, in a setting that also acknowledges peoples and events from Twilight Princess and Majora's Mask. Additionally, various people around Hyrule not remembering Link when they should, and so on. Obviously, something has changed.
For now, I think that we can firmly state that Hyrule as it stands in Tears of the Kingdom is firmly within the grips of the bootstrap paradox loop, and that includes the Hyrule of the past, and the version of the Imprisoning War we see play out in these recent releases.
But there must have been a version of said events that played out before the paradox was started, and there was, it's Ocarina of Time.
A major divergence in TotK/AoI is the fact that there's actually another war prior to the the seven year Imprisoning War in OoT, a war of unification that saw the Gorons, Zora, and Hylian nations combine into one kingdom and fend off attacks from the Gerudo to the Southwest lead by Ganondorf. It is from this war that a woman flees after the death of her husband, a Knight of Hyrule who was defending the royal family, into the forest and entreat The Great Deku Tree to look after her infant son, Link. And it's not until around a decade later, when Link turns 10, that that war formally comes to an end and Ganondorf journeys to Hyrule castle with a envoy to bend the knee to the king as part of his plan to gain access to a source of potential power, the Triforce.
In Tears of the Kingdom/Age of Imprisonment however, we see Ganondorf launch his initial assault... and witness its failure in the face of the combined might of Rauru, Sonia, and Zelda, and Ganondorf, intrigued by the power on display, which he attributes to the Secret Stones, calls off the war and goes to bend the knee immediately in an effort to get a Stone for himself, saving Hyrule years of civil war and kicking off the Imprisoning War ten years early.
And I think this explains the disparity in cast, in the demographics of Hyrule, in everything, really.
Let's break this down by demographics:
The Gerudo - Age of Imprisonment shows us that Ganondorf had intended to do away with Ardi during that initial assault. Koume & Kotake have been told to take care of her and her close allies, presumably in the event that they didn't perish during the fighting. Without the intervention of Zelda and the Mysterious Construct, Ardi & co were meant to meet their ends, and therefor she would not have been around to become a Sage, and Nabooru would have still been a child. Without Ardi around she grows up to be a leader and Sage, and gets a town in Adventure of Link and later a Divine Beast named after her.
The Rito - One of Ganondorf's opening salvos in Age of Imprisonment is to wipe the Rito homelands off the map. Their city is completely destroyed, and when The Mysterious Construct arrives on the scene they're in the process of being wiped out. I imagine this is what he was going to do during the Unification War anyway, and would explain the absence of Rito in Ocarina of Time. There's a small nomadic tribe of birdfolk in the Ocarina of Time manga who have set up atop Death Mountain temporarily but have no fixed home, and I would imagine that they are what's left of the Rito after Ganondorf's success in his schemes, leaving the powers that be to find another representative to be the Sage of Wind.
The Zora - Ganondorf doesn't actually initially do much against the Zora directly in Age of Imprisonment. He sends an archfiend, but only after the Forbidden Construct has killed the king, leaving his adult daughter Qia to take up the crown and fight back against the Demon King's monsters. I imagine that in Ocarina of Time's version of events, the king lived and Princess Qia was the one who fell in battle during the Unification War, with Ruto being born during the decade-long proceedings, growing up without her older sister present.
The Gorons - in both Age of Imprisonment and Ocarina of Time, Ganondorf sent a giant beast to seal off the depths of Death Mountain from the Gorons, cutting off their food supplies and parts of their home. Without the Mysterious Construct's presence, it's likely that Agraston passed away during the drawn out Unification War, paving the way for Darunia to become leader, and Sage, by the time the events of Ocarina of Time start playing out.
The Kingdom of Hyrule - Queen Sonia dies much earlier than she would have otherwise in Age of Imprisonment. She and Rauru haven't even had a child yet, making Zelda's very existence a paradox in and of itself, as we get explicit confirmation in AoI that she's their descendent. OoT's Rauru is known to have shapeshifting abilities, as he is confirmed to be the alter ego of the owl Kaepora Gaebora who travels Hyrule providing guidance to Link on his journey, so him appearing as a Hylian in OoT explains the racial disparity. We know that owls are the favored animal of his sister Mineru, who is absent in OoT, so perhaps he took on that form as a tribute to her after her passing during the war. Rauru is obviously still the Sage of Light, different Princess Zeldas are the respective Sages of Time, and while Mineru is a Sage in Age of Imprisonment, her absence indicates why that duty was passed to another in OoT.
The Forest - in Ocarina of Time, Link's mother flees into the depths of the forest and somehow gets to the Great Deku Tree, whom she begs to raise her child before passing away. We see in Age of Imprisonment that Koroks are, well, Koroks in this era a decade before when OoT should be. I posit that The Deku Tree transformed a number of Koroks into the Kokiri seen in Ocarina of Time in order for young Link to have children like himself to grow up around. We already know that these literal woodland beings have a loose grasp on the concepts of time and memory, as memories of Link are already hazy when he returns as an adult in OoT, and the series has shown us that their forms are just as ephemeral, as those races associated with the Deku Tree are ever shifting over the course of the franchise, from Deku to Boku, from Kokiri to Korok, the Kikwis, and even possibly the monkeys seen in various games in the series.
Now, that explains all the discrepancies / how things could play out to line up how they need to in each version of events, but there's still one major issue: Where did the bootstrap come from?
Well, actually, there IS something that happened in between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom involving a rather powerful entity with possibly the second most impressive ability to muck with the timelines that the we've yet seen in the series: Age of Calamity.
While deemed "non-canon" events, there's no real actual reason they need be. From the very opening seen, a little mini-Guardian built by Zelda dubbed Terrako leaps back in time during the fall of Hyrule Castle, and ends up altering the events of the The Calamity's reawakening, eventually bringing Yunobu, Sidon, Riju, and Teba from AFTER Breath of the Wild's events into the past in order to save their predecessors from death, creating a new polyp on the vine of the franchise's continuity. And when Terrako opens time portals, script in Twilight Princess era Hylian font reads "Gate of Time Open" around the edges. The Gate of Time, of course, being the giant gate that sent Zelda & Impa eons into the past during the events of Skyward Sword
Now, I'm not saying this little eggbot that would rip apart the very fabric of time to save its mama was involved in whatever origin inciting event started the loop that we find ourselves in in Tears of the Kingdom and Age of Imprisonment...
...but I haven't found anyone else offering a better explanation yet.
