THE LITTLE LEGENDS
This is a blog for sharing and spreading love for the smaller Zelda games in the fandom!
For everyone crying over Spirit Tracks being forgotten, to people who wish someone else remembered the struggle to find a fourth player for Four Swords or sobbing at the end of online co-op for Tri Force Heroes – this is a home to join others in that love. Mainline and third-party Zelda games are all included!
The criteria for which Zelda games count as “small” is hard to quantify. To make things easier, we went by the numbers posted to Archive of Our Own, which has the option to disambiguate which game you’re writing for and is the current best-known fanfiction site. From there, we removed some things to try and narrow it down to core game fics and picked everything that was under 1000 works.
The resulting list of Zelda games is as follows:
CDI games = 14
Zelda cartoon = 29
Cadence of Hyrule = 50
Tri Force Heroes = 51
Oracle of Seasons = 76
Oracle of Ages = 85
Zelda II: Adventure of Link = 93
Zelda (1986) = 180
Spirit Tracks = 183
Phantom Hourglass = 191
Link’s Awakening = 256
Link to the Past = 260
Minish Cap = 290
Four Swords = 359
Four Swords Adventures = 423
A Link Between Worlds = 587
Wind Waker = 739
Some of this will be a case of poor tagging, and things winding up in the wrong place. (eg. Four Swords has 1200 entries, but upon removing all Four Swords Adventures or Manga story tags it reduces to 359.) Others may not be here at all because nobody has posted it under it’s own name vs a related game or “& Related Fandoms.”
While this means these numbers are not absolute, they still represent the problem: it’s hard to find content for your favourite games if it's in the list above, and we want to fix that!
WHAT DOES THAT ENTAIL?
The event we’re planning is very chill, very low-stakes way of building up interest and knowledge, and then collecting and sharing fanworks produced.
The event month will be AUGUST, 2024.
Every few days in August we’ll make a post for each game on the list (and any bonus games that were highlighted alongside the main ones), which people can reblog with a link to the fanwork they created! You can also make your own posts and tag the blog plus the game of the day but we cannot promise to see and reblog everything.
In the lead-up to August, we will be doing round-up posts for each of the above games.
Some will be doubled up and treated as “bonuses” due to their small pool of fans (CDI, the Cartoon), and if there are some we don’t know about we may take them on as suggestions!
Each of these initial game posts will include basic stats about the game: when they were released, on what hardware, where you can find them now, and what their story was. It will also include links to a walkthrough or two, for those without access to the necessary hardware.
The purpose of these posts is to be shared!
Reblog them with your favourite artwork, current fanworks you love and adore, your favourite AU they’re featured in! Share the lore you wish everyone knew, and the characters who get forgotten!
Share prompts you’ve never gotten around to using, or ones you don’t feel competent to handle!
Do not feel bad about doing this! Every exchange or event I’ve been in, people desperately wanted prompts and ideas to spark their own imagination!
The goal is for people to learn more about games that they may have never heard of before, or not had the time or ability to engage with in full on their own. And from there we can push up those numbers on AO3 for everyone to enjoy!
The scheduled games to be “main” features of this event, and their respective introductory dates, are as follows:
May 5th = Minish Cap
May 12th = Zelda II: AoL
May 19th = Oracle of Ages / Oracle of Seasons
May 26th = Cadence of Hyrule
June 2nd = Phantom Hourglass
June 9th = Four Swords Adventures / Four Swords [Game]
June 16th = Link’s Awakening
June 23rd = Zelda (1986)
June 30th = Link to the Past
July 7th = Tri Force Heroes
July 14th = Spirit Tracks
July 21st = Link Between Worlds
July 28th = Wind Waker
Exact dates for the posting schedule of new fanworks in August will be released soon!
