#zelda thoughts

Sometimes you’ve just got to doodle your own version of The Legend of Zelda. I’ve made up a cast of characters that live at the castle. It’s… not actually for anything.

has it really been all that long? yes and also no. the lines are so blurred. the zora are birds and the kokiri are koroks and they had time to Get That Way but everywhere you look the old Hyrule, the Hero of Time himself, they're both all over the place. the deku tree is implied to be the sprout from the adult timeline but honestly who knows. the golden goddesses are statues on islands somewhere and there was a tower built to test who came after but…who and how and why? what was the tower of the gods even for? how did they know they’d need it? at what point did they accept the hero of time was never coming back so they’d probably need to train a new one? 

and oh my god, that outset island tradition. “dress your kids in green and give ‘em a sword and pray to the gods they’ll have the courage to cast down evil.” link rolls his eyes at it but he wears them to appease grandma. the revered clothes of the hero have had time to pass into “stupid traditional getup” territory. how many “failed Links” were there before Aryll’s brother? what evil could those children have possibly stricken down? the monsters in the woods?

“what became of that kingdom? none remain who know” like goddamn. say what you want about the hero’s shade in twilight princess. but at least the traumatized ghost got to meet one of his descendants and pass on his songs and his knowledge, even if that knowledge was only of war and death and combat. in the wind waker he’s a statue. an element of a legend mentioned once or twice by the last remaining holdouts of the past—holdouts who so badly want him to return, view him as the solution over all else, that they never pause to consider any other option. there are stained glass windows of the seven sages in the master sword’s chamber that are never mentioned. there is so much that is never mentioned.

nobody knows what the fuck anybody is talking about. link doesn’t know old hylian. tetra is running around the high seas (as a pirate. she and her retainers are now pirates. how did things get that way) with a piece of the damn triforce around her neck and she doesn’t know who ‘princess zelda’ even is. the juxtaposition between ganondorf, older and tired and wiser but still hell-bent on ruling hyrule even if it is a dead land full of nothing and no one, and tetra, a zelda that knows nothing, asking why he’s laughing and calling him insane. because hyrule’s dead. she has no frame of reference for his longing, or what he found so great about this sunken kingdom.

and this is framed as a good thing. the king of red lions thinks it’s better not to let either of the kids in on the loop until tetra nearly dies for lack of knowledge. daphnes nolhansen hyrule brought “the hero” back just to end ganon, and hyrule with him. was the plan always to let the sea fall in on him? maybe. i don’t know. but he rejects zelda’s plea with him to take him with them to the land that will be the new hyrule, because “it will not be hyrule. it will be your land” and that still gets me. he thinks the best thing to do with his kingdom, Hyrule, the kingdom of a whole hell of a lot of irl people’s childhoods, is for it to wash away. he wants the kids to live for the future and they do and they will and they name it hyrule anyway in his honor but he never gets to see it.

Honestly this post is just 🤌✨

I’m a ganondorf fan but I’m aware people think that I believe the hylian monarchy did nothing wrong. That is 100% false! I don’t think rauru did anything wrong but the hylian monarchy throughout the games? Omg they’re awful.

Ain’t nobody talking about how the gerudo got the short end of the stick, tf they get the desert?!? The only race that’s all brown people?!?! Like hello?!?

So watching the cutscenes for Tears of the Kingdom as I find like, the different Dragon Tears locations and unlocking the different regions, I'm hit with this sense of like... it's both nostalgia and uncanny valley.

We've known for a while that the development team for Zelda set Breath of the Wild in an undetermined distant future of Hyrule - so far into the future that all the stories of the past games have become legend. There were a lot of hints in Breath of the Wild, easter eggs if you will, that certain past game events PROBABLY happened in this timeline. Hell, there's an entire video (two?) on Game Theory about where BOTW fits in the timeline, and how the OG Hyrule Warriors should be canon because that game being canon to the timeline would explain a lot of the inconsistencies in BOTW (like the Rito and Zora existing at the same time, and multiple geographic and item references from all three timelines, yadda yadda).

Anyway, the point is, that now in Tears of the Kingdom, we're getting serious confirmation about known past game events...

But it's got that uncanny valley vibe because they changed the story.

I'm kind of just braindumping here so I'll likely hash these thoughts out more in depth later (when I finish the game), but there are a lot of references to both Ocarina of Time and Skyward Sword in this game that are insanely obvious.

Going back to the very first king of Hyrule and his wife is crazy for me, because they just released the HD Skyward Sword not that long ago where new players got to experience the original version of the story there. This new version of Hyrule's first king and queen seems to combine the Skyward Sword lore with the Ocarina of Time lore. The references to the people from the sky, how the royal family was descended from "gods" (the Zonai, in this version), and then the origins of Ganondorf, his role as king of the Gerudo and his pledge of fealty to the King of Hyrule, leading into the Imprisoning War which, up until now, most Zelda players would recognize as being the plot of Ocarina.

It's just so crazy to me to play this and have all these similarities, these clear plot callbacks, and have them be the same, but different.

One question I’ve begun to think about (and that we’ll likely never find out) is just when and how BotW-Link specifically discovered he was The Chosen Hero 100 years ago. 

Did he have a previous adventure that required him to find the Master Sword, and so that proved it? Or was it discovered because King Rhoam was just so into the prophecy that they just figured out Link was the reincarnation of the Chosen Hero’s spirit, and so he went to go get Master Sword to confirm it? I half suspect that it was the latter and not the former, given just how far back King Rhoam seemed to know about Ganon’s phophsised return, and decidng to try and reinact that 10,000 year old plan. 

Though it’s kinda morbid to think about the King sending Knight after Knight into the Lost Woods to try to pull out the Master Sword, and them failing, given what the requirement in-game is to pull out that sword.