#ttye meta

There are a lot of narratives around healing in TTYE, and how it can go forwards, backwards, sideways, and completely awry. To some extent I'm interested in this aspect of every character, but probably the most relevant are Anzu, Yuugi, Kaiba, Ganondorf, and Hyrule itself.

Anzu is both the most straightforward and the least straightforward. She is the group's 'healer.' That's her role in the most technical sense. The problem is that Anzu's personality doesn't map well to a typical fantasy healer archetype! There was an early draft where I actually considered switching her and Honda, and having Anzu in the Knight Protector role. But in the end, it proved more interesting to ask: what is healing? Does it really have to be gentle? Can it be forceful, temperamental, and deeply, deeply kind even as it can be abrasive - like Anzu herself?

So TTYE takes on different aspects of healing, and in a way the healing mechanics & narratives around it are reverse-engineered to Anzu specifically. Anzu talks a big game about prioritizing your friends, doing the right thing, protecting the people you love; so I wanted to be in dialogue with her, and ask her questions about that. What happens when you're given a choice of two friends, gravely injured, and you can't save them both - you have to make a choice that will hurt or kill someone? What if you can only save a friend's life in an imperfect way that leaves them with permanent injury? What if sacrificing yourself turns out to be the easy way out, because you get your big heroic moment and don't have to deal with the aftermath of a group deprived of its healer? What if it's actually harder to say 'enough, this is all I can do,' even when there's still suffering around you, and even if you're the type of person who believes anything can be overcome with enough persistence?

(What if part of your job extends to stewardship of the dead, and their spirits don't always want to be stewarded in the way you think is best? Can you listen to the people you're trying to help, and accept what they actually want and need from you?)

Imma blow the dust off the ask box in place of a sin bin 🤪

Is there a piece of research you found interesting or a plot point or even a funny one line that you stumbled across fixing Plot Horrors that you're excited about and willing to share?

OH HELLOOOO (≧◡≦) ♡

I think the most fun thing overall with the research/plot coalescing has been tying the Gerudo and Ancient Egypt together. INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH, this is not just me inventing connections for crossovers' sake; canonically it's pretty clear that the BotW team did actually take some architectural and costume influence from AE in designing Gerudo Town! (Among many other historical influences, from Al-Andalus to the Nabateans.)

For example, Riju wears a piece of jewelry that looks quite a bit like the usekh/wesekh collar:

The statues of the Seven Heroines, with their headdress and cartouches:

The Gerudo Ruins outside of town have distinct visual similarities to Thebes, and some architectural features in common with Dendera temple and Hatshepsut's mortuary temple:

In previous games, the influence is even more striking, stuff I somehow didn't pick up as a kid even during my initial Egypt-obsessed YGO phase 🤣

Anyways, it led down a bunch of other really interesting pathways; Gerudo mythology is either sparse (Spirit Temple?! Hello?! What was going ON in there!?) or clumsily handled (do not get me started on the Eighth Heroine quest in TotK........)

So I thought of ways to incorporate Egypt a bit more to create and enrich connections with the YGO cast - and that led to deeper character work, like what would each YGO character have absorbed about Egypt and why. Yuugi is a pretty obvious choice for knowing Egyptology Things, obviously; but what might Kaiba have absorbed, either unwillingly through his own dreams or passively through an enduring friendship with Isis? What might have stuck with Jounouchi, who has actually faced down a god, or Honda, who watched everything happen? What might Anzu have learned proactively, in order to deepen her connection with Atem? It was fun mapping out which parts of their experiences in the Gerudo Desert might have surfaced different memories or feelings, and brought up some unexpected directions for all of them.

Something that hasn't really been touched on in Ten Thousand Year Elegy yet (it's mentioned passingly in the upcoming section, but isn't story-relevant enough to devote much time to) is how the humans and Hyruleans perceive each other.

There's a little bit in the Akkala chapters about Ganondorf meeting a Hylian Stable worker for the first time:

Ganondorf had grown, in his second life, used to uncanny pulchritude; the golden glow of Link and Zelda, the…otherworldliness of Hiroto and his friends, the various leaders and renowned warriors he’d kept company with over the past month. This Hylian was none of those things. She had a broad face with close-set eyes, and the sturdy build of a farmer. Thoroughly ordinary. She looked so like the sort of commonfolk he might have encountered in his first life that it was almost jarring.

Often in Zelda games, Link, Zelda and Ganondorf are quite visually set apart from other characters. (Sometimes a given Link will look quite ordinary before the Goddesses slam dunk him into a green tunic.) In Elegy I attribute this to something that isn't quite attractiveness, but more a sense that something is different about them. A divinity or power or strangeness that would be hard to pin down and name, but is unquestionably present.

However, Ganondorf here also remarks on the "otherworldliness" of Honda & co. I lead with Honda on purpose here - first off, obviously, he's Ganondorf's favourite of the humans and thus his main frame of reference. Second, because Honda is the least remarkable-looking of the main human cast. It's easy enough to say that Yuugi seems otherworldly, or even Kaiba (he of the unremarkable bowl cut and highly remarkable Presence), but Ganondorf finding the "Just A Dude" of the entourage worthy of note tells you that there's something about humans as a baseline.

Here's a little preview snippet of an upcoming chapter that touches on the same phenomenon:

“They’re curious about us?” Eri said. “Don’t they see plenty of Hylian women?” “You’re not Hylian,” Riju pointed out. “You and Anzu are very…different. Almost like Hylians, but not quite. It’s hard not to stare.” “Huh?” Eri frowned, tugging at her ears. “Do people really find the ear thing that gross?” Riju smiled and shook her head. “No, no, not just your ears being far too short. You’re all just so…” She tapped her lip, thinking. “Tall, and angular. The way you move is very interesting. Your accents are strange.”

Again important that Riju is talking to Eri here, who, in comparison to the rest of the humans, is markedly not tall or angular. She and Yuugi are the shortest in the group. And compared to Yuugi, Eri doesn't have a particularly interesting character design; she'd do a serviceable job as an extra in either Yu-Gi-Oh! or Breath of the Wild.

Of course the second thing to note here is that Riju is part of the Gerudo, a notably tall race. So what she's saying here isn't really a comment on the objective height of the humans, so much as their proportions and kinesics. There's something about it that registers as "off" to her, although she can't quite put words to it.