#mamep

blood in the chiliads, baby

Made a map of Ivalice in Final Fantasy Tactics. Took a few creative liberties here and there to make it feel like a more lived-in world, but I tried to stay accurate aside from that (with some few assumptions as to locations).

Well, I sure set myself up for this one, huh?  

Gorons are inorganic, sentient rock-like creatures who reproduce asexually!  When a Goron reaches adulthood, a piece of the rocky outer “shell” on their backs can be loosed, and - after being “incubated” in lava for a considerable amount of time - will form a whole new Goron, while the Goron who spawned the child becomes their parent (or “father,” as most Gorons throughout history present masculinely, despite having no biological sex) . @puppet-limbo also sent an ask about this, so here you go, dude!

The Oocca were Hylia’s first, and only attempt, at creating organic life, where before Farore had been the only one to do so.  The Golden Goddesses were rightfully horrified by them and forbade Hylia from trying to make anything else, but their direct connection to Her Grace combined with their extreme intellect secured their place in history as the “race closest to the gods.” (Credit to @kokiri for this one!)

She’s so gay she literally gave her life to a woman she met three times because she was that touch-starved.  That’s, like, peak lesbian pining, dude.

My favorite depiction of Hyrule is, strangely enough, the small glimpse of the forgotten once-great kingdom we catch in The Wind Waker.  It’s incredibly eerie stepping into this relic of the past that we, as the player, recognize, but just imagine how Link must feel upon seeing an entire country buried at the bottom of the ocean that he’s lived upon his entire life.  Also, the moment it “unfreezes” and comes to life is pretty sick.

Adult Timeline OoT Zelda with seven years of intense training and Sheikah abilities under her belt would decimate everyone else, easily.  But barring that...TP Zelda can shoot an arrow at a moving target from a hundred meters away while riding bareback on a horse, so she would absolutely be next in line as far as ass-kicking capabilities go.

Tingle’s existence is proof that the gods have abandoned us.

The last line of it was “the master sword to sleep forever” which, considering how much the master sword is tied with Link and his quest, it feels like basically a request to never be needed again. He is, as the Hero of Time is stated to do in Wind Waker, “separating himself from the elements that made him a Hero”

To me, that stands out because we generally don’t expect happy, fulfilled people to want to throw things that brought them strength away. It can happen, in the idea of people feeling they have grown past this and no longer need it as a crutch, but that doesn’t seem to be the way Link acts towards the master sword in the epilogue of ALTTP.

That, as you say, much of the wish is focused on the damage that individual people were afflicted by, would almost suggest that to Link, he focused heavily on how much this hurt others. And at the end of it, he doesn’t want to carry a weapon anymore- even a sacred weapon ostensibly wielded by the pure of heart. He wants it to never be needed again.

Which is interesting, because, as the many games since ALTTP would point to, this is a futile wish. The master sword is drawn again and again, by Link. Which casts an interesting shadow over that ALTTP epilogue.

Especially when this behavior, of separating himself from his ‘heroic regalia’ and leaving Hyrule, sometimes forever, sometimes abandoning family in the process (in Wind Waker, he leaves grandma and Aryll behind) repeats through many games- and I do not believe any game features legend or mention of the hero when he is anything but a young man or a child- there are no stories of adult heroes and there is rarely at best an implicit lineage of the hero. In Spirit Tracks, Niko mentions the new Link “looks like someone I knew when I was young” which does not suggest Wind Waker Link ever joined Niko in old age. Twilight Princess, a game that openly shows us a dead Hero, depicts his Shade wearing armor, overgrown with ivy- suggesting, potentially, a violent death and an unmarked grave.

THANKS MY DUDE I CAN’T WAIT TO RIP MY HAIR OUT TRYING TO MAKE A SOLID ANIMATED SHORT

Funny, I’ve never really given that much thought.  My gut instinct is to say the scene between Beast Ganon’s fight and the rest of the final battle, about which I’ve already written extensively–but I think that’s less of a Midlink moment and more of a Midna moment, so I’m gonna rule that one out.  If I had to pick… Hmm… I suppose it’d have to be the scene immediately after they enter the Gerudo Desert? Yes, that’s the one.

In particular, this moment, but the dialogue leading up to this is what really makes it.  This is the first time since they’ve known each other that Midna has actually opened up to Link in any way–about herself, her past, her motivations, anything like that–and then she places her hand gently on his cheek and asks him for his help.  And then–despite the knowledge that she’d only been using him for her own gain for a greater part of their time together–he smiles at her. Of course I’ll come with you.  I care about you, after all.