#My thought process for their appearances here was sort of an average between their incarnations

[nipuni]

THE DOCTOR We had a pact, him and me. Every star in the universe, we were going to see them all.

My version of The Master and The Doctor in their Academy days 😊

A speedpaint video of this will be available at my Patreon on april 1st!

[ganymedesclock]

How do you think Zant and Ghirahim would interact? Likewise, how do you think Ganon would treat the two in a setting where we could explore such a relationship?

My particular read on Zant is he’s not wild about social interaction unless he’s already decided the person is okay; I interpret him as the specific flavor of autistic where he’s only really comfortable in a social situation by shadowing a particular person for comfort’s sake. In which case I think he’d have a lot of sideways interactions with other people, but, not a lot of super direct engagement.

Ghirahim superficially is much more polite, but, given his particular complex relationship with his master and his childhood (a friend of mine, @golvio draws a lot of comparisons between how they imagine Ghirahim’s treatment under Demise and the Pearls in Steven Universe) it’s just that- superficial. He wants to be well-mannered because he feels keeping up aristocratic airs is an imperative he has to justify avoiding, but unless something really catches his intellectual curiosity, he, scientifically speaking, tends to not give a shit.

So I feel like you could have Ghirahim and Zant cohabiting in the same area and just sort of operating with a mutual regard to not say anything to each other unless the other’s hair is on fire and someone else isn’t already intervening. They could absolutely take more interest in each other, but, they’d need to at least get shoved into some kind of buddy cop adventure story to shake the topic loose. Just leaving them around each other, they’d never get anywhere. They would politely ignore each other. You would ask Ghirahim what he thought of Zant and after asking you to clarify who you’re talking about, he would make an idle note of “So that’s what his name is.”

With regards to Ganon and Zant, I sort of like the vein that Hyrule Warriors took with it in the sense that Ganon seems to regard Zant as a protege and student- not something as warm as “like a son” but that’s because Ganon’s not exactly the type to hand out familial affection very easily if at all. I imagine him taking a sort of scholarly, educational angle; Zant is his apprentice. Even if the guy lives for centuries, he’s significantly younger than Ganon himself, so there would be a certain degree to which Ganon looks towards Zant as someone in need of guidance, rather than a peer and equal.

That’s not to say Zant doesn’t impress him, or ever surprise him; Ganon might have a certain compassion for the downtrodden but he doesn’t seem the type to have patience for slackers or the talentless in his inner circle. But there’s definitely a distance between them, that would be altogether reinforced by the overly-reverent pedestal Zant puts Ganon on, though I think as time goes by and they had more time to interact with each other, or even just Zant operating on his own for a time because Ganon hasn’t been resurrected yet, he’d become a little less starstruck by Ganon, for the better- creating an environment where they can actually talk to each other and Zant isn’t fountaining the glories of his god, because Ganon might be cocky but I think the last thing he’d want to be is someone’s deity.

That would also affect Ghirahim; not the mentorship, because Ghirahim is one person who can not only match Ganon in age but actually surpass him- though I think this would average to them seeing each other as peers because the gaps in Ghirahim’s resurrections are much larger and they’re both at a certain level of time abyss where what’s a century give or take, actually- but the thing where Ganon has no particular desire to be regarded as a god. Distant reverence is fine on paper- it certainly flatters his ego- but in practice it just means people project a lot of expectations and perceptions onto him and that would make him shift a little uneasily in his skin considering the whole situation he had as king of the Gerudo.

It also doesn’t help that the person Ghirahim would be reminded of looking at Ganon is Demise- there’s no way to ignore that Ghirahim would be comparing Ganon to Demise. And the thing about Demise is, they are, in brief, an abusive tyrant; Ghirahim is someone deeply marked by the fact that he was raised from the cradle to disregard his personhood and feelings for Demise’s benefit.

This is completely counter to how Ganon operates, and would be a wall he would inevitably run into hard, dealing with Ghirahim- Ganon’s nice and cozy with Zant as a protege because Zant has all of his hopes and desires right there on the surface. All Ganon has to do is play the genie in the bottle, feed those hopes, encourage them, and, when Zant becomes more of a favored student than a useful tool, he can still use them to prop Zant up. Zant wants to feel powerful, Zant wants to feel valued, heard, supported- Ganon knows exactly what words to cook up to feed a flagging spirit.

Ganon operates selfishly on a certain level, and, he also works best with others who are also operating selfishly- not necessarily maliciously, but, what do they want? They want something for themselves.

Ghirahim is a standout among many Zelda antagonists in that he really doesn’t want anything. His resurrection of Demise is because he sees it as his responsibility. If he attaches emotions to it, it’s that he’s pleased to feel like he belongs, like the world makes sense, like he’s filling his role, and then, slowly, that he’s actually a bit curious about this person who’s so good at thwarting him.

But that’s one selfish desire, and it’s clear Ghirahim writes it off as a petty and ridiculous thing. Him, wanting things for himself, even if it’s something as simple as having the pleasure of figuring out who the hell this twerp in his way is.

And I think Ghirahim’s sense of self-denial would logically be a lot harsher any context in which he’s interacting with Ganon- because Ghirahim would have to deal with the keen awareness that Demise threw him away. He is not alive now because of Demise’s grace, but as an oversight, in a world Demise may well be incapable of returning to, and the sense is that this is just fine to them; they don’t need him or want him back.

I can see Ghirahim falling into step behind Ganon if he’s at a particularly low point and just needs to feel like someone actually wants him to be here, whoever that is, but I also feel like Ganon would galvanize Ghirahim in interesting directions- because coming from someone who is inevitably going to superficially remind Ghirahim of Demise, Ganon’s entire stance is going to be “but you’re a person, you’re made of metal and you’re a sword, that’s great, I’m largely made of meat slime that grows eyes, physiological construction is completely irrelevant here, the point is, you think, you have opinions, and no matter how hard you’re trying to pretend you don’t, you want something.”

Ganon focuses on the idea that people want things. He himself is so driven by this you could argue that his less-corporeal forms are basically one big grudge spirit. While textually, Ganon’s dying words in Ocarina of Time and Demise’s curse intend to mirror each other, it’s worth noting how Ganon’s words are basically pure spite- while Demise’s curse is methodically, systematically worded, functionally aloof; it’s the patient explanation of an adult to someone they perceive as a none-to-bright child that no, actually, you haven’t won anything of meaning. You’ve inconvenienced them. And they will not forget that you did that.

So Ghirahim would inevitably initially see Ganon as an entity similar to Demise, and that perception would inevitably come utterly torn down around the edges because Ganon and Demise are such fundamentally different people.

Frankly, my perception of Ganon and Demise is their relationship is comparable to that between Hylia and Zelda- the first Zelda was bodily born out of Hylia, making her a sort of mortal-incarnated demigod, but, the more Zelda became aware of Hylia, the less she was able to stand Hylia and was repulsed by Hylia’s thought process and the way she viewed Link. That’s continued through all of her descendants; Breath of the Wild Zelda suffers a huge amount of misery trying to connect with Hylia only to be given a repeated cold shoulder, and even awakening her powers, it’s only to be a pawn in the face of Hylia’s scheme.

Hylia is, in short, Zelda’s sort-of removed divine mother, and, she’s also an incredibly cold, neglectful parent.

I think the same goes for Demise and Ganon- they in a sort of abstracted manner had a hand in Ganon’s origin, but, this isn’t a family that could so much as sit through a very uncomfortable holiday dinner. And this is relevant to Ghirahim, because Demise’s treatment of Ghirahim obviously aligns with a lot of Demise’s attitude as a creator and towards the world in general- an attitude they actually share with their sworn enemy, Hylia. (both Fi and Ghirahim are ultimately discarded once they’ve “served their purpose” in the eyes of their respective creators)

Ganon, conversely, is heavily drawn towards the suffering outcast, and, as I talked about in my long post about what Ganon’s healing power means about him, that draw isn’t “I can exploit this” nearly as much as it appears to be genuine compassion. A lot of his narratives and behavior suggest that he feels that way himself- that as someone who has spent much of his life marked as a pariah, he has a certain visceral empathy for the discarded.

More than Ganon would not want to treat Ghirahim the way that Demise did, he would be loath to tolerate someone who treats fully loyal servants like Demise does. If Ganon stabs someone in the back, it’s because he’s either sure they would do the same in a heartbeat or because from his perspective they’ve already put a dagger in him. He’s not the kind of person who gets rid of someone he knows would never betray him, or has no reason to believe they’d do so.

If anything, this makes me wonder if Ghirahim would initially find Zant revoltingly whiny and needy- he can’t imagine why Zant would utterly humiliate himself and Ganon both by drawing Ganon’s attention to his needs and wants, or even just openly expressing distress in front of Ganon. 

And then after a while Ghirahim starts to feel a little weird watching them interact because the fact that Ganon actually responds to Zant and encourages him, or even just, irritably orders someone to see Zant to his bed after the latter’s magically overworked himself, would just sort of start to contextualize for Ghirahim the gaping void of affection or even basic care that he received in his own development.