User:Ice Medallion@legacy41965084

Hi there! I'm pretty new here, but I've been noticing places where I could help out, so here I am. I've played every Zelda game except A Link to the Past, the Oracle Series, Four Swords Adventures, and Phantom Hourglass, so I potentially have a lot to do here.

I'm currently using the space below to air thoughts I've had about this series. The sections are in order of increasing likelihood to be flame bait, so you can start reading at the top and go as far into the controversial stuff as you wish.

Trivia that's a bit too trivial for any of the main articles

 * I'm not sure how much of this was deliberate, but although it is a prequel to A Link to the Past and much of its design reflects that, Ocarina of Time also reuses a hell of a lot of elements from The Adventure of Link, especially in the adult section of the plot:
 * First and most obviously, it brings back an "adult" (meaning, as it usually does in this series, an older teenager) Link for the first time since that game.
 * By the same token, it brings back a visibly "adult" Zelda. (The Zeldas in The Legend of Zelda and A Link to the Past have ambiguous sprites and as far as I can tell don't have a canon age.)
 * As many fans know, all but one of the towns in The Adventure of Link have names that are reused for characters in Ocarina of Time, and all but one of these names are used for Sages in Ocarina of Time. Of course, in the internal chronology the towns are named for these people.
 * The adult phase of the game has six Sage Medallions, like the six crystals in The Adventure of Link.
 * The game reuses a number of enemies and bosses that hadn't been seen since The Adventure of Link, such as Dark Link, Volvagia, and the Iron Knuckle. (To be fair, the Iron Knuckles seen in The Adventure of Link look and act more like Darknuts, and the Japanese names of the Iron Knuckle and the Darknut imply that they are subtypes of the same enemy rather than entirely different enemies, but hey, they're hardly the only enemy to get a major redesign over the course of the series.)  Also, although it has a different name (in Japanese as well as in English), the Lizalfos is very similar to the Geru.
 * On the subject of enemies generally, both games have a significant number of "swordsman" enemies that can execute weapon techniques beyond just holding a weapon out and can actively block or parry Link's attacks, as opposed to their closest counterparts in A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening which behave somewhat more like their counterparts from The Legend of Zelda. Link himself is also able to fence to a much greater extent than he can in A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening.  Of course, 3D and a side-scrolling perspective both lend themselves to this more than a top-down perspective does.
 * The spells in Ocarina of Time have more in common with the spells in The Adventure of Link (a fire spell, a defense spell, and a mobility spell) than with the spells in A Link to the Past (similar number, and one of them is a fire spell, but they're all elemental offensive spells, although one of Quake's effects is similar to an effect of the Spell spell).
 * This was the first time that specific parts of the Triforce were mentioned since The Adventure of Link, and therefore the second time in the series that the Triforce of Courage appeared as a distinct entity and was associated with Link.
 * All of the main dungeons in the second phase of the game are called "temples", as were the dungeons in The Adventure of Link in Japanese.
 * Ocarina of Time featured the largest overworld that had been seen since The Adventure of Link a game that itself has a large overworld by this series's standards.
 * The Hover Boots and the Iron Boots both have a similar function to the Boots in different ways. The former allows one to walk over obstacles (pits in the case of the Hover Boots, water in the case of the Boots), while the latter grants access to areas blocked off by water (underwater in the case of the Iron Boots, across water in the case of the Boots).
 * Horses appear in Ocarina of Time for the first time since The Adventure of Link, although in the latter they only appeared as mounted or horselike enemies (Rebonakku and Horsehead).
 * The Carpenters introduced in Ocarina of Time look a lot like one of the generic male NPC sprites (the type used for Error) in The Adventure of Link.

My headcanon and speculative gap-filling, not that anyone cares
This is, of course, all in fun. I recognize that I'm probably thinking about a lot of this stuff to an even greater extent than the creators did and that these things were not actually what they intended. But I figure that as long as they aren't actually contradicted by canon, I may as well fill in the empty spaces in canon with ideas of my own.


 * In the Child Timeline, the only timeline where Link continues to exist after the events of OoT (he leaves the Adult Timeline to change history, and he dies young in the timeline leading to ALttP), Link marries Malon. Saria probably is attracted to him, but since he's an aging mortal human and she's a non-aging and probably immortal forest spirit, it just wouldn't work.  The events leading to Link's engagement to Ruto never happen since he changed history.  Zelda is royalty and therefore not free to marry whomever she chooses, and besides that Link's having saved Hyrule and being the holder of the Ocarina of Time is presumably a state secret, so his importance as a protector of the kingdom can't be recognized in any way by, say, making him a member of the nobility.  Link probably never even meets Nabooru, age issue aside.  Meanwhile, Malon is obviously into Link, and her father likes him enough to (jokingly, but apparently only because he's still too young) offer Link Malon's hand in marriage.  Malon is the logical future spouse for Link.
 * Zelda removes the original "spirit of the hero" (i.e. the element of Link that keeps reincarnating into new Links) from the Adult Timeline when she sends Link back to change history. Rather than dying and thus making reincarnation possible, Link simply vanishes without a trace. This is why no Link appears when Ganon breaks free from the Sacred Realm between OoT and TWW.  This is also why multiple local deities and other savvy characters say that the Link in the TWW is not the chosen hero; he is not part of the original chain of Link reincarnations.  Instead, he earns his chosen hero status anew over the course of TWW.
 * The reason why various monsters (e.g. all the 'blins) follow Ghirahim and Ganon no matter how badly it seems to go for them is that, as the primordial source of monsters, Demise is their creator deity.
 * Unlike Hylia or the various local deities (e.g. the Great Deku Tree), the goddesses Din, Nayru, and Farore don't actually care who's running the world or what its residents do to each other, so long as it continues to exist. This is why the Triforce works the way it does.
 * Various bits of speculation concerning the Hyrulean Civil War and its relevance to the plot of OoT:
 * First, it was a war between Hylians, Gerudo, Zoras, and Gorons that the Hylians won after a very protracted and bloody struggle. Because why the hell not?  It would be the most epic conflict in the entire series.  Also, it makes sense, since the Gorons and Zoras both have kings of their own, are allied with the King of Hyrule, are treated as part of Hyrule and seem to treat him as supreme, and at the same time seem a bit suspicious of Hylians.  The Gerudo, on the other hand, kept fighting the Hylians for longer and sustained the heaviest casualties of all, and as a result got stripped to a sliver of their former numbers, got cut off from trade with other lands, and were possibly limited to a smaller, less hospitable area than what they once had (think Indian reservations in the USA).  At the time of OoT, they are (as far as anyone outside of Ganondorf's inner circle can tell) trying to make an uneasy peace treaty with Hyrule out of desperation due to lacking the resources (and male Hylians to breed with) to survive, thanks to their new isolation and the embargo.
 * The Kokiri were a neutral faction in the war because they're fairly isolated and they have no way to fight an army. Their area is also largely worthless to any of the factions involved thanks to its harmful magical phenomena.  This is also why Link's mother is driven there to avoid the fighting and abandons her child to the Deku Tree.
 * The Stalchildren in Hyrule Field are the restless spirits of innocents killed in the war, which at the beginning of OoT wasn't very long ago. They don't show up seven years later because time has eased their grudge, or alternatively because the Poes, the spirits of hatred generated by Ganondorf's rule, have frightened them into not manifesting anymore.
 * Relatedly, as one of the talking skull-walls loosely implies, the Shadow Temple is associated with some seriously vile atrocities that happened during the war, and possibly not just then. The Poes in the graveyard near the temple, the various undead in the well, the Royal Family's Tomb, and the Shadow Temple itself, and that thing that comes out of the well and presumably becomes Bongo Bongo are all derived from the concentrated evil (and vast body count) of said atrocities, since this place was apparently where the all the results of Hyrule's dirty work were hidden.
 * Why Ganondorf is the way he is in OoT:
 * As per Gerudo tradition, Ganondorf was told from birth that he was a chosen one destined to be a god-king. He was raised by 400-year-old witches (probably because he was to be the king) who had long memories of all that the Gerudo had suffered at Hylian hands.  During his childhood and adolescence, he saw his people slaughtered and driven back into the hellish desert, and forced to become a nation of thieves, stealing resources and abducting men in order to prevent themselves from dying out.  The brutal desert winds he refers to in TWW are both the tip of the iceberg and a symbol of the death, horror, and injustice the Gerudo endured when Ganondorf was growing up.  So by the time he's a young man, he is convinced that he is a chosen hero destined to bring justice to the kingdom that brutalized his people.  And as a chosen hero, clearly he should use the ultimate power granted by the gods to right history's wrongs.
 * And to be fair, he IS a chosen hero: Demise's.  Although he doesn't know it, he is a pawn whose life plays out the way it does in order to enact Demise's curse.  History, his upbringing, and his nature conspired to make him into a weapon of Demise's vengeance.
 * What happened during Ganondorf's seven-year rule:
 * Once Ganondorf had the powers granted to him by the Triforce of Power, the royal family were all assassinated or driven into hiding, Link was sealed away in the Sacred Realm, and Ganondorf could legitimately show that he held a piece of the will of the gods, there wasn't much hope of stopping the coup. Ganondorf seized power in the capital without too much struggle.  Honestly, given all those who probably hated the King and Ganondorf's visible possession of a holy artifact, there were probably a lot of people who initially welcomed the coup even though he was a Gerudo.
 * Ganondorf had had no experience in actually ruling anything of any complexity, though, least of all a huge country made of factions that didn't like each other much and had only recently stopped trying to kill each other. Relations between the factions broke down in fairly short order, and the Gerudo were still seen as invaders on top of that.  Small rebellions kept popping up all over the place, and getting increasingly desperate to preserve his rule and finish what he started, Ganondorf got increasingly paranoid and trigger-happy.  (This is probably where that lava moat came from.)  This eventually escalated to outright genocide against the species most suspected of harboring traitors.  He first cursed Zora's Domain with unnatural cold to kill off the Zoras (which reduced Zora's River to a trickle and caused ecological disaster and famine) and later on, when the Gorons and the Kokiri rebelled shortly before Link exits the Sacred Realm, he began to systematically kill them off (i.e. the huge monsters all over Kokiri Forest and feeding the Gorons to a revived Volvagia), saying that this was the reward traitors should expect.  The Hylians most likely to remain loyal to him during this period were those who hated the non-humans the most to begin with, while others lost faith in him more and more.  At some point before the Goron and Kokiri purges, he went overboard during an attempt to quell an uprising in Castle Town and left the town in ruins, with much of the population dead and the survivors having fled to Kakariko.  Rather than trying to rebuild, he decided to just raise the dead and use them as guards to keep any other rebels out.  At this point not much of the population saw him as the rightful ruler anymore, but there had been so much death that no one was willing to oppose him.
 * By the time Link appears, Ganondorf's kingly aspirations and resolve had turned to bitter hatred for the land he wanted to give to his people and the grim knowledge that if things continued as they were he was doomed to die the most despised tyrant in history. But he thought that if he were able to recover the full power of the gods, he could just make a wish and fix everything.  He could become the god he was raised to believe he was, poof away all the dissidents or make them love him, and end up the king of a paradise rather than a blood-stained, ruined kingdom.  Above all others he hated Zelda for disappearing and denying him this power.
 * When Ganondorf breaks out of the Sacred Realm in between OoT and TWW, he "rules" as an unstoppable ancient horror that everyone is too scared to fight, especially since the gods have apparently decided not to bring back the legendary hero that stopped him centuries ago. As much as he might want to be a good king, he is now an unholy monster from the history books, and as he discovers, the people of Hyrule would literally rather have Hyrule destroyed than surrender it to this devil.
 * This is the key difference between Ganondorf in the Adult Timeline and Ganondorf in the Child Timeline: In the Adult Timeline he has had to run a kingdom, failed, and gone from being a chosen hero worshipped by his people to an apocalyptic demon despised by all except Demise's spawn. By the time of TWW, he has also experienced considerably more subjective time in the Light World than he has in TP.  He is visibly much older in TWW, having risen again by some means years ago and having searched in vain for that era's Zelda for most of that time.  The Ganondorf of TWW is a world-weary, hardened, bitter man obsessed with the past and consumed by the idea of finally reuniting the Triforce and righting ancient mistakes, and he is losing hope that this can ever be done.  The "I suppose" in his conversation with Link and Zelda implies that he is starting to forget who he even was all those subjective decades and objective centuries ago.  When King Daphnes denies him the Triforce again after he finally completes it, and thus extinguishes his last flicker of hope to be something other than the monster he has become, Ganondorf snaps.  His insane laugh and the drawing of his swords herald the final crushing realization that Hyrule and all his dreams tied to it are lost forever and that he is doomed to die a demon, the enemy of the world.  His rage and spite fuel his final attempt to ensure that at least the ones who have caused him this final indignity will die with him.

My opinions

 * I really don't care whether Sheik in OoT is male or female under that outfit. And neither Super Smash Bros. nor the OoT manga constitutes anything resembling proof.
 * I very rarely care about shipping. (The statement about Link and Malon in the headcanon section is just because all of the other options can't realistically happen in canon.  This, of course, doesn't mean I mind seeing the others appear in fan works.)
 * Ganon's cool, but I love this series's alternate villains and would like to see more games with new non-Ganon antagonists, especially if they don't get hijacked by Ganon. Or another game with Vaati.
 * Link's Awakening is underappreciated. It is hands down the best original Game Boy game and one of the better games even in this all-star series.  For a whole bunch of little reasons.
 * The are no bad main-series Zelda games. None.  The worst game in this series is still a significantly above-average game overall.
 * I was surprised by the timeline unveiled in the Hyrule Historia (both that they ever officially stated a timeline, and that there were three timeline branches instead of two), but for the most part I like it. It honestly makes more sense than any two-branch scheme I'd come up with or seen from other people.  I'm still wondering why Four Swords Adventures is in the Child Timeline, but I suspect that will become clear when we get a more thorough translation of the HH or the book comes out in English.
 * Gannon-Banned is hilarious.
 * Currently jockeying for the title of coolest item in the series: the double Clawshots and the Beetle.
 * One of my pet peeves is distinctions or classifications fans make that are artifacts of the translation. There's nothing in particular that all of the dungeons in the Palace article have in common, for instance.  They just happened to end up with the same word in their names in English, often for very different reasons.  By the same token, the Desert Temple in FSA was probably originally intended to be the same place as the Desert Palace in ALttP.  (It might not be now, given FSA's timeline placement, depending on whether the Desert Temple is supposed to have existed during the era of OoT but just not been visited or whether it is supposed to have not existed during that era.)
 * Tingle gets a bad rap.
 * The Philips CD-i games appear to be genuinely awful (and no, it's not just the embarrassing cutscenes; from what I understand the gameplay is buggy as hell), and they certainly don't belong anywhere in canon, but at times I'm glad they exist. They give us something to laugh about as a community and they help to keep us from taking this stuff too seriously.

Contributions

 * Tadtone
 * Pumpkin
 * Goddess Crest
 * Water Fruit