botwstoriesandsuch

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do NOT trust your own thoughts that everyone hates you. the curse of the blood moon is imminent. it's not you. it's ganondorf

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knowledge long forgotten

got really into reading item descriptions on this playthrough. anyway did you know the silent princess is one of the only raw materials with a cooking effect to not explicitly list that effect in its description

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If Age of Imprisonment is truly following the canonical events of Tears of the Kingdom, I hope that the developers didn't forget things established in BotW like the East Reservoir Lake being built 10,000 years ago during the Sheikah technological age because it wouldn't have existed during the time Zelda went to in TotK which is significantly farther than 10,000 years.

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I finally got started writing the Gloom!Link AU wooo!!

Read on AO3

I compiled all the art that I drew for this AU so far below as well. Please feel free to check it out~

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Soft Graves - A Botw Piece

Thank you to fandom for hacking apart my brain irreversibly. My obsession with writing and Breath of the Wild afforded me the opportunity to read this allowed at a NY Film and Arts fest!!!! It was very cool and uncanny in the idea that I basically read aloud fanfiction to a bunch of professional artists and writers...but if we wanna glaze it, we can just call this an "intertextual piece alluding to the atmosphere of a greater work" or something.

Anyhow! I wanted to regurgitate this into the fandom that birthed the inspiration so here we are! Let me know what you think! And pardon the artiness, I suppose...

Soft Graves

There is metal buried in the earth. There are wounds and epitaphs carved by great fire and war. These places where our old world died, where burning winds seared the cities—they were once great monuments. And today the world is littered with these monuments, these graveyards, the evidence of our downfall to Calamity. 

Yet now the graveyards are too soft for comfort. We do not like them as we once did. They are the wrong color. They emit a strange smell. Some say they are almost not there at all—but they certainly are there. We can see the graveyards, and we can see how they are all wrong.

There are those in the village that enjoy these graveyards, mistaking them for other things. They are too young to remember the Calamity. They've only known the skies to darken at night. And they only know tears from lifting their face to the rain.

But we know the truth of this world. We remember how the graveyards were, and the way they were before they were. When we enter these graveyards, we notice how the moon shines too gently. We know the wind’s song is too sweet. We notice that the grass grows too quickly. This is not as graves should be. This is not as things are.

The hill, by the edge of the village—this hill is one of our great graves. The land here was once flat, toiled from generations of old farming. But when the Calamity arrived, it carved the earth into a jagged and sharper shape. The bricks that made our houses, the cobble that covered our paths, what bone that was left of our brethren—it all was crushed into the earth like eggshells. And when the earth became damp from the blood and the rain, the rubble settled into the ground as new soil. And so the hill, among other graveyards, was born from this silt of salt and stone. 

A painter came today. He had come with an odd box canvas and made quick paintings of this hill. We went to him and asked what he was doing. 

—Pictures, he said. I’m capturing the serenity of your village.

—This hill is unpleasant, we replied. You surely cannot find such peace here. 

—Why not? His canvas clicked as he painted with his index finger, the speed wickedly swift. This perhaps might be the most beautiful place I have ever seen. Surely you shall want a picture from me, so that you can frame this hill on your walls or tablesides, keeping it close to your home? 

And when we looked at the small paintings he had made, we were disgusted to see that he had colored the hill with vibrant hues. Rich and plentiful pastel greens arched across the glossy painting like a verdant rainbow. It was speckled with small star-like dots that reminded us of flowers. The colors seemed to braid into one another, for no single blade of grass was without the gold sun’s luster, nor was any blot of blue sky without the lace of ivory clouds. 

—This is not our hill. You mock us with this painting. 

The man looked puzzled for a moment. He stared at us with a smile wreathed in unwanted pity.

—This looks like your hill to me. Perhaps I should take another picture to your liking? Do you prefer an angle facing the morning sun? Or perhaps you would like to capture your own image here, preserve the state of your old youth and being?

—No! we cried out in chorus. You will paint the hill no longer! This place where we have died and mourned is sacred and infernal. You must leave it to rot! You must leave us!

And so the painter left, taking the small paintings with him. 

It is clear that he is a forgetful one. He, like the other outsiders, does not see the truth of these places. They all exaggerate, sometimes lie. The hill, as we know it, is clearly the color of greyed hair, for it was born of salt and stone. Certainly, as time has passed since the Calamity, the hill has undergone changes that we aren’t blind to. There is grass. There are flowers. There are bugs and birds that crawl and flutter in and around it. But it is not enough to cover all the silt. We can still feel it in our throats, still remember the way it caked our skin, along with the ash that rained with Calamity. We can still, quite clearly, see the salt and stone. 

And how could anyone not? When the Calamity had come, it brought with it beasts of metal and war. The war beasts crawled upon the carved crooks of the earth like spiders, and spat scorching stars that wished only for death. And Calamity hovered over these droves like a divine storm. It seemed to cast the sky in bronze and swing the heavens at us like a curved blade which cut the dawn apart and set the world into a deep and ashen night. And within this night we died, and our lovers died, and our children died. 

We can see their bloodshot eyes peeking through the cracks of the graves. We can see the bruises still blossoming on their skin, their bones splintering like dry wood under the weight of toppled homes. We can also see, like anyone else, that these graveyards can look like hills and forests and fields of grass…but we swear, it is not all grass. 

It is not all grass. 

And it still grows far too quickly. 

A soldier came today. She came and marched around the riverbend, which, like the hill, was truly a graveyard. She marched like she was trying to escape the wind, for her feet left the ground at strange intervals. Her head swiveled back and forth in the breeze like a weathervane, guiding to the point of most ease. Each flip of her hair was a bold declaration of her skill of movement, surely trained from the trials of warfare and survival. We went and asked the soldier where she was going.

—I go nowhere. I am simply dancing by this river.

—You should not march here, we replied. You may fall into the river.

—What ill would that truly be? she hummed. With a warm morning sun like this, I should go and dance within the shallows and cool my sweltering form.

We were shocked to see her start to splash in the river, her feet kicking up bursts of water that were the wrong color. The sunlight that streamed through riverwhite was twisted into bright fragments of color. The spectrum arched and glittered like the pieces of a stained glass portrait, present only for the moments of climax within the woman’s strange march. As the soldier spun and leaped through the shallows, the soles of their ribbon-tied shoes became worn against the grains of rounded sand. And it was not clear whether the dulled gloss finish of her once crimson shoes was due only to this single mesmerizing display, or from the marks of a thousand other marches.

—Will you not join me? the soldier asked. You look in need of the river’s freedom.

—Your shoes, we said. They are blemished from your march across the graves. 

—Yes, the sandbed is abrasive, she mused. And this we agreed with, for every graveyard was stiff and rough to the touch, if not sticky like tar. Yet, she continued.  

—All the same, I love to dance here. And I only have these shoes. So I simply mend the soles when needed.

—Mend the soul? We shook our heads in disbelief. Such a waste of time when you could simply not march here, such effort must take hours upon hours, wasting weeks of days upon your years. We could never.

—Perhaps. But the time will pass anyway. 

And we were left by the riverbend, as her feet guided her away.  

What great strength she possesses, to comb her figure lightly through the graveyard. The graveyard, of course, is a heavy and murky thing. It is a monument of Calamity which carves through the ill-green hills like a scar, trickling towards a horizon we refuse to follow. Though the mindless find it clear and crystal, we know that the false river hides blood, heated and rounded by the current into small dark stones that make the grave’s bed. The babbling of the grave is that of the breathless souls, still drowning and struggling to speak against the fire spat by metal beasts. 

—How could one dance in the river? we dared to ask each other quietly in the whispers of the night. We knew our feet would surely get stuck in the water, in the thick, tar memories of sorrow and rage. —How can one dare to smell the flowers on the hill, or smile for pictures? We knew the bodies of our beloved would never know the spring’s embrace again. So how could our minds know these things, even now?

For when Calamity was here, it possessed a violent determination. It promised us destruction, and our homes were torn asunder. It promised us strife, and our bodies struggled against the weight of metallic war. It promised us death, and we died and live lifelessly. It promised that nothing good would ever grow again. And it only ended, as we all ended, for Calamity was a destiny prophesied for all time, again and again and again. This was a promise of nearly a century—!

—But the grass is growing now, one of us muttered. And quickly.

This evening, we went to the graveyards. The earth is soft. The air is crisp and clear. Our feet patter lightly, like droplets of rain, upon the paths through the hills, or to the river, or to our homes, which were graves for the oldest among us. 

We could sense the metal beasts buried below us. We could sense the stars bickering playfully amongst themselves to catch the light of our gaze. Lightning bugs seemed to drunkenly bump into our arms and back as we knelt and prayed and held our breaths. We knew there was a wonder of the night, a feeling we never forgot but refused to seek through our piously sealed eyes. 

We tried to grieve. We tried to find our comforting Calamity in the fragile night.

—Weeping.

—Weeping.

—Weeping.

The hours seem sticky. The flow of time always cruel, and yet different for every tear among us. But when the sun rises against our wishes and promises, it is the brilliant north wind that brushes these tears into the morning dew. The water that licked the river shore forces our knees to shift up  and our eyes to flutter around. And the flowers we had laid on the graves do not wilt, but grow into the earth with pastel petals that blend with the soft grass. The old metal and stone here that would call our soft grief an intrusion is now nothing the makings of a meadow. 

[botwstoriesandsuch]

Hello I haven’t been in the fandom for a bit—what’s the consensus on Tears of the Kingdom’s story? Feel free to reply/reblog/tag with explanations

EDIT: Please let the fourth option also represent an opinion of the game being bad/FLAWED overall. “Bad” in this sense just encompasses any bigger senses of disappointment or dislike, not irredeemable or horrible.

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lotr x zelda au content? in our Lords year of 2025? more likely than u think

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If your still taking art requests, could you please draw a yiga clan footsoldier? <3

they’re talking~

bonus bg pic under the cut bc i was rly happy with how it looked

actually so proud of myself for keeping the bg loose & not taking too much time on it

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Do you think TOTK will be end the final part of Wild!Link and Zelda!Story or do you think that there will be another game having them after this?

Hello anon from March 8th, 2023. I think they're probably gonna milk this shit for two Hyrule Warrior's spin off, a $90 remake, a live-action movie inspired by the Botw setting, and probably a capstone trilogy piece to cement the world in the public consciousness long enough to commodify the nostalgia for a generation or three.

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Into battle

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Thank you!

Here are the symbols, as I know them:

Λ (lambda, phonetic symbo, Ll; ʎ used in math), ʃ ("esh" & integral; phonetic symbol, formerly used to represent ‘sh’) or ⎎ (technical symbol, hysteresis symbol, correlates to f), ǁ (math, parallel to; phonetic symbol, aveolar lateral consonant), : (ratios or scales), ❜ (phonetic symbol), o (phonetic symbol) or O (math, Landau's symbol, describes the asymptotic behavior of functions or represents the null matrix where all elements are zero), last is the drop-looking symbol that I'm struggling with.

And the lineup of powers as we first hear about them in BotW was from Rotana, who said that they were: "skill, spirit, endurance, knowledge, flight, motion, & gentleness."

However, the Stelae themselves write it out as "heart, skill, fortitude, wisdom, flight, mobility, & compassion."

Remember that this was supposedly left by the Heroines themselves, making it akin to a first hand account, I believe?

And, luckily, the difference is easily explained by the legend having been told multiple times over generations. As they can be condensed like this:

Heart/spirit, skill, fortitude/endurance, wisdom/knowledge, flight, mobility/motion, & compassion/gentleness.

I also looked up what kanji were used in the original text just in-case & this is ultimately my conclusion to it all with the order of both the Stelaes' list of powers, the symbols at both the ruins & in the shelter, & the gifts left at the underground altar:

Heart; Shin (心; means heart, spirit, or mind) = ❜ = Gerudo Shield

Skill; Gi (技; means skill or technique) = Λ = Golden Claymore

Fortitude; Tai (耐; means endure or resist) = O = Ruby

Wisdom; Chi (知; means knowledge or wisdom) = : = Sapphire

Flight; Hi (飛; means flight) = ⎎ = Topaz

Mobility; Dō (動; means motion) = Drop Sign = Gerudo Scimitar

Compassion; Jū (柔; means gentleness or softness) = ǁ = Gerudo Spear

Though, I noticed that the weapon missing from this line-up is the Golden Bow. But, then again, it's possible that one of the Heroines that gave a gem might've used one. Possibly the Heroine of Flight. I mean, Hi (飛) is evidently used in verbs referring to “letting something fly,” so that might well be it.

Similarly, I believe that the kanji that I paired with the fortitide also is correct as the kanji is used in the term taika (耐火) which means “fire-proof.” Ergo, the ruby. Similarly, jū (柔) is the kanji used for jūdō. So, if I'm right, then I think it suggests that the Heroine of Compassion might've been a master of Sōjutsu (the art of the spear). Or whatever the Gerudo equivalent of such might be.

And part of the reason why I believe that Misko might be related to the Heroines is due to their name in all other countries:

Japanese: Ramuda (ラムダ)

Dutch: Lambda

French: Lambda

German: Ramda

As in, their actual name is Lambda & their symbol is a Lambda.

So, yeah! That's what I have so far! :D

(At least, that's what my research has told me.)

Fucking sick as shit man!

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You have got to be FUCKING kidding me!! Holyshit bro... these motherfuckers are too comfortable with price increases...

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ooo i love a little tumblr poll with little paragraphs of vote justification in the tags. it's like a workshop/analysis class but with an ADHD friendly summary page. so good so good big fan of it

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The Divine Beasts! [Zelda Proxy Project]

Artist Credit: Chroma Zebra

Next up, the Divine Beasts! The biggest creatures in the all-proxy Zelda-themed commander deck I made for my wife are of course the Divine Beasts from Breath of the Wild!

I find these 4 huge artifact creatures, Platinum Angel, Platinum Emperion, Metalwork Colossus, and Ancient Stone Idol, to be some of the best in magic, and just like in the game, with one on your side you are already at a significant advantage, but with all four? You should be unstoppable!

Additionally, to help bring these high cost artifacts out we have a cameo from this guy from Hyrule Warriors:

Artist Credit: Denn18art

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Hello I haven’t been in the fandom for a bit—what’s the consensus on Tears of the Kingdom’s story? Feel free to reply/reblog/tag with explanations

EDIT: Please let the fourth option also represent an opinion of the game being bad/FLAWED overall. “Bad” in this sense just encompasses any bigger senses of disappointment or dislike, not irredeemable or horrible.

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My apologies, I just wanted to bring up that I think that I might know what the red flowers from your Eldin Volcano analysis might be.

'Ohi'a Lehua flowers. They look a lot like those & the lore behind them is actually very cool. Evidently, they're one of the first things that can grow back after a volcanic eruption.

And, I actually wanted to ask about your thougjts on the 7 Heroines, the Eighth, as well as Misko as I believe that they're somehow related. I noticed that Misko's symbol is a Lambda, which just so happens to also be the symbol of one of the Heroines.

In fact, I believe that I know which symbol goes to which Heroine & may even have an idea of what their weapons are.

Notice the order that the Stelae lists the Heroines, then look at how the symbols are arranged both at the East Gerudo Ruins & in the underground shelter of Gerudo Town. I think the game actually just outright shows you which is which. Not only that, but all except for one of the symbols are in some way, shape, or form, a reference to some sort of math/equation or linguistic symbol. (The only one I couldn't figure out was the blue drop one & it's getting on my nerves.)

And if you go down to the altar in the sinkholes where the Heroines left treasures for the Eighth & recall the arrangement there as well, I think that the gifts they left may also be a clue.

Then, because of all this, I actually think that Misko may have been a Gerudo, possibly one of the 8th's followers, & that the Firebrand Claymore you find in the cave at Squabble River may have been their personal weapon as the Heroine of Skill (the one corresponding to the Lambda) left a Gerudo Claymore at the altar. Another reason is that the Firebrand was left there in a very different manner from most of the other weapons that Misko stashed.

This would make a degree of sense as the little shrines that Misko left a bunch of things in in TotK's caves are housed in mikoshi, which are a type of portable Japanese shrine that house shintai (items housing kami). And, if I'm right about all this other stuff, then it would make sense if Misko was a follower of the Eighth & a Gerudo, because it'd suggest that they might've put these items in those shrines because the Eighth was, in many ways, rejected by the Gerudo despite having come to their rescue. To them, it might've seemed like ingratitude & may have wished to ensure that no hero went improperly venerated.

But this is just my take. My appologies if I rattled off too much...

This is a really great theory!!!!!!! I actually was thinking recently that I might go back to the totk/botw worlds just to measure the ruins stratigraphically—because I’m dating a geologist now and am cursed with more knowledge, I think it’s possible to confirm or deny relations between different ruins/Misko’s mikoshis based on the sediment type and depth…

If you know more about the symbols I’d love to hear more!!! Thank you for your ramble this is the ramble theory blog!!!!!

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As an original hater, Nothing made me love Age of Calamity more than the incoherency of Tears of the Kingdom. I wish nothing but the best for Age of Imprisonment—begging on my hands and knees for a similar level of writing and thematic execution to be given to this chapter of the Zelda world because it really needs it honest to god

i do not want to hear age of calamity slander all over again and honestly i hope age of imprisonment does something similar to improve the story of tears of the kingdom. because let's be honest tears of the kingdom is an incoherent mess and i want to see it become something better because it has potential regardless of how poorly written the story ended up being