#saeruk

Ganondorf's bio mom no longer exists! While I think he has some kind of mother, like he must certainly come from somewhere, I just didn't have room to explore that in Thralls in a way that wouldn't needlessly complicate things, especially without easy access to his internal thought process, and would rather focus on his relationship with the Twinrova and the rest of the gerudos. .

Ganondorf is Super Ace now! To me, Ganondorf has always been and always will be aspec, even while he was in the middle of having relationships in Vespers. In Descant, I made the somewhat bold decision to fully lean into this "harem" idea that gets thrown around in fandom quite a lot, especially as a way to think of Ganondorf as an evil evil man who's very misogynistic, and instead just, kind of get into the extreme mess of how... profoundly dehumanizing and strange and offputting it would be, to grow into that kind of expectation, and be groomed into it by people you genuinely feel close to and have bonds with, but are expected to think of as resources to manage. People at large just don't really want to think about how invasive of a concept that is for everyone involved, and not just for gerudo women. I ddddon't regret having explored that in Descant?? Maybe?? I have gone back and forth on this, and tbh I would absolutely get if that's a dealbreaker to some people, but ultimately I think there's something to be said for loving and championing your culture, even while some expectations of that culture are hurting you and pushing you away from other people and quietly, covertly, unknowingly traumatizing you --especially when those expectations are mostly there because of the pressures and dangers of colonization and the way it can shape people in ugly ways when they feel backed against the wall. Also, I was just done working on a 7 year long project with an ace protagonist that was forced to reckon with being perceived sexually, and I was like no!!! let me out!! let me out!! I can write people who want to fuck and aren't weird about it pinky swear!! and ultimately I failed at that completely and I now accept my fate at telling One Kind Of Story Forever u_u Besides that, it's definitively the kind of plot point you don't want to illustrate!! Internal PoV does a lot here to explore ideas that are a bit extreme if fully represented! I am already pushing the boundaries on some stuff in the script right now, some I'm not entirely sure I will pull off tbh, but it was just extremely obvious to me that this wouldn't work in a visual format (especially one meant for a slightly more general crowd than Vespers ever was), and I don't trust the "wider fandom" to be capable of handling ideas like this (which are inherently deeply reliant on subtext and tolerating the concept that Ganondorf is a complex person capable of not being the evil cackling perpetrator of every situation, and that power and violence and victimhood and abuse as a wider system full of well meaning people can all coexist in extremely complicated ways) in a manner that would be normal and not horrifying. And a fully reclusive, averse Ganondorf who does not want to deal with people's weird projections onto him (while still being frustratingly affected and harmed by them) is definitively one of my favorite Ganondorf flavors, and so I decided to focus on that instead. That also means that his relationship to Saeruk is somewhat affected, even if the underlying dynamic stays roughly the same. .

Timeline stuff shifted around! I'm not going to get too deep into the weeds of what I decided to keep the same and what I decided to change because it's quite minute and even spoilery at times, but one example I'll give is that in Vespers, Ganondorf got crowned at 16. It made sense in that story and aligned with his character progression of needing to prove himself after feeling like he had failed to do so when he was younger, and then doubling down on being indestructible and never letting go of that façade afterward. In Thralls... I decided to swap some events around, and I decided to crown him when he's 9-10. The reason for this is because Thralls is a visual medium, and subtext needs to be visual first. The visual subtext of a child being crowned a boy-king is just far more spontaneously obvious than a scene where a cool buff sixteen years old decide it's time to get even cooler. My goal with Thralls is to make a couple of cases, and one of them is to convince the audience of Ganondorf's internal complexity --which, you know, tall fucking order!! I need all the opportunities I can get, and this one was too meaningful to pass on. Many other choices have been made because of this.