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skyloftian-nutcase · 6 months

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TotK DLC idea!

The screen is black. You don’t hear anything for a long time. Then, faintly, in the distance, you can hear it.

Link. Link. Open your eyes.

While the line echoes familiarity, the voice does not.

Or. Well. It does. Because while it isn’t Zelda, it’s a familiar man’s voice speaking gently, so gently you almost don’t recognize it because there’s no way he ever spoke like this in the main game.

But he is now. And instead of a golden light being the first image you see before the screen shows Link awakening… you see gloom floating in the air. The image cuts to a Hylian waking up who… doesn’t look like Link from TotK?? He’s different, still small in stature, with slightly tanner skin, platinum light blonde hair, and red eyes. But… something’s wrong with his forehead. There’s a weird line on it.

This new character you apparently are gonna be playing in the DLC blearily blinks his eyes open, clearly groggy and too weak to really move. But then that line on his forehead moves a hair, it splits apart, and you realize it’s a freaking eye, red and yellow and it’s like the ones on gloom hands and oh gosh what the hell is it doing on his forehead—

Link realizes something is off and his eyes blow wide, his hands reach for his forehead and he screams in agony and terror, only for someone to scoop him into a hug to soothe him.

And suddenly you realize why that voice was eerily familiar.

It’s Ganondorf. He resurrected you from the era of the Imprisoning War. You, who have a history with him and his family. You, who he wants to protect, who he views as his kid, who he calls a prince and says he’ll keep you safe by controlling your body with his dark magic if he has to.

Welcome to Tears of the Kingdom: Hero’s Shadow.

You have to play a long gone Hero who was resurrected. Ganondorf, who is still recovering his strength in preparation for killing the current Hero, tasks you with finding your betrothed, his daughter, as well as his wife. They’re buried somewhere in the Depths like you were. He wants you to find their burial sites so he can use his secret stone to resurrect them like he did you, and control them as well. Which is doubly bad when you realize his wife was the original Sage of Lightning. He gives you free reign to wander once you go through a tutorial (he tests you to see if you’ve recovered enough strength), because he knows you love wandering and collecting things. Your own personal objective, however, is trying to help Hyrule from the Depths, to break free from Ganondorf’s control, because Link would rather set himself on fire than let Ganondorf resurrect and control the love of his life and his mother-in-law. Your best hope is to find shards of the shattered Master Sword to try and stab the eye on Dark Link’s forehead and break the control Ganondorf has on you. Until you can, though, the monsters are your allies, you can teleport across the Depths by manifesting out of the gloom created by gloom hands (just like what Phantom Ganon does), and the world below is your oyster. If you get too close to sword shards when gloom hands are nearby, Ganondorf can see your attempt and immediately takes control of your body, and no matter what button you press Link just walks back to Ganondorf’s location and stays there until you get a chance to try again.

You start with three hearts, all empty looking like when gloom hurts you, and if you get injured they just shatter. Whenever they all shatter, you respawn at Ganondorf’s location because his gloom hands came and rescued you from dying. The only way you can get more hearts is by collecting poes and offering them to the statues in the Depths. You can communicate with the spirits of soldiers, who may give you combat tips or info about the area. If you gain enough of Ganondorf’s trust, he’ll let you command monsters, and he might even let you wander the Surface (under his supervision) during a blood moon.

You learn of Link’s and Ganondorf’s history through discovering ancient relics/texts that trigger memories. This connection between you and Ganondorf stems back to time before the war, well over ten thousand years ago. Link was engaged to Ganondorf’s daughter, but during the Imprisoning War the family fought against the demon king. Ganondorf did love his family, but he loved power more. Link sacrificed himself, letting himself get mortally wounded to save Rauru from a killing blow. Gan held him as he died, and it allowed Link to both beg him to stop and stab him in the heart with a light shard. The shard didn’t kill him, but it was what Rauru connected with when he hit him in the chest, allowing him to seal Ganondorf away. Ganondorf still wants the world, but his love for his family is still present, though now twisted, so he thinks he can control Link and everyone else with his dark magic in order to keep them safe and in line. Once the threat of the current Hero is eliminated, the world will be his, and his family will be safe. As such, he treats you, Link, the player, like a stubborn child, reeling you in, but does so in a horrific way, torturing Link by controlling him.

You have to break free of this and stop him, and the only hope you have is the distant call of a sword spirit…

#tears of the kingdom #totk #I think it would be pretty neat to play someone who is “allies” with the bad guy #but you still have the objective of stopping evil #But you have to manipulate Ganondorf and work around his watch #So you get to play double agent #And possibly see a more complex Ganondorf #Like the dude is still being evil; he’s using his love for Link as an excuse to control him #He does care about him but he’s expressing it in the worst way #and he wants to do the same to his wife and daughter #So still a bad guy but a far more interesting one #One day you’re on the Surface with him and you see the Light Dragon and you’re not sure who it is #Because Link died before Zelda ate the secret stone #But Link can kind of guess #And Ganondorf almost noticed her so Link has to hug him or say something to get his attention #You have to manipulate Gan as best you can #idk how it would end #Like once you break free what do you do #But the idea tickled my mind so I wanted to write it down #Yes I’m just playing with my Imprisoning War blorbos #no I don’t care #legend of zelda #skye time travels through the queue #hero of shadow

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starcurtain · 3 months

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Some Speculation on Kaveh’s Father

I actually started this post right after the Parade of Providence event last year, but never got around to finishing it. However, in light of Kaveh still not appearing on a banner, I decided to dust this one off and get it finished, so that I’d have at least a little Kaveh content in my life after being so cruelly denied by Hoyo.

So, without further ado, some stuff about Kaveh’s father I did not see discussed elsewhere but which I think is especially interesting.

1) Kaveh’s father likely first became depressed/disillusioned with humanity after witnessing (or possibly being the victim of) a murder attempt.

Without knowing the full situation and reading all the additional text from the Parade of Providence event, I feel like this might have been easily missed, but the entire “Kaveh’s dad became disillusioned and depressed and retreated to the desert to help people” seems--at first--like it came out of nowhere. He had a lovely family, was the pride of his darshan, and was eager and excited to win the crown to bring it home to his son. Yet theoretically, he did not win the crown (and, in fact, the crown was stolen before the last event and may not have been there during the Avidya Forest fight, so when, as the non-winner, would Kaveh’s father have come into contact with it to encounter Sachin through it in the first place?) Why would Kaveh’s father’s personality take such a massive turn all the sudden? What would drive an excited, happy person to suddenly withdraw from everything he loved and everyone who loved him, if he didn’t actually win the diadem to be influenced by it in the first place?

The event implies there was a trigger:

Huvishka’s friend (who is described as “honest and kind but vulnerable and sensitive”--obviously Kaveh’s father) went into the Avidya Forest with the other contestants, where no one was watching, and we’re not told what happened except that the Akademiya responded to whatever occurred by shutting down the entire competition and banning any sort of events in the future that cause contestants to become so desperate they would “fight to the death.”

This is a pretty obvious implication that Kaveh’s father either witnessed two other contestants attempt to kill each other or was the victim of an attempted murder himself, which prevented him from winning the competition even though he was the favorite to win by a long-shot. This feat of betrayal, demonstrating the depths to which humanity would sink, likely shook the idealistic world views of a sensitive person such as Kaveh’s father. This brush with death and with humanity’s capacity for evil in the forest would have been the exact trigger needed to make Kaveh’s father particularly vulnerable to Sachin’s message of nihility and despair, leading to the downward spiral that sent Kaveh’s father into the desert.

2) Sachin may have way more culpability for Kaveh’s father’s death than Kaveh realizes.

For a while after the event, I was under the impression that Kaveh’s father must have met Sachin’s consciousness through the diadem and that’s where he got the idea to go into the desert. However, something was always a bit odd about the timeline, because...

Sachin was still alive when he gave the Akademiya his estate. This is why no one actually knew/believed he was fully dead, even to the present--because he willed the Akademiya the estate while he was alive and told them he was going to be personally watching over the contestants to award his estate to them if he deemed them worthy successors to himself.

So did Kaveh’s father run into a fragment of Sachin’s consciousness... or did he run into Sachin himself? The game doesn’t really clarify:

The fact that Sachin’s recording recognized Kaveh’s appearance as familiar makes me think it is much more likely that the consciousness preserved in the diadem already had knowledge of Kaveh’s father at the time it was preserved. Aka, Sachin actually met Kaveh’s father in person. This also makes sense of why, even though the diadem was stolen away during the last event and Kaveh’s father did not win it, he would still know about Sachin and Sachin’s research. (However, as a counterpoint, I guess we could say that the Diadem!Sachin had enough sentience to maybe have its own memory, separate from the real Sachin? And reached out to Kaveh’s father mentally even though he didn’t win the diadem? Maybe?)

Still, there’s one really notable aspect of the timeline that I think is important: Right after the Interdarshan Competition twenty years ago, the one which Kaveh’s father competed in, we know that Sachin went back out to the desert.

Who else went out to the desert exactly 20 years ago? Kaveh’s father, obviously.

This overlap in the timelines makes it seem very likely that Kaveh’s father, who failed to win the competition because of a murder attempt (and therefore never got the diadem), was nevertheless reached out to by the real Sachin, who saw in Kaveh’s father the kindred disillusioned idealist he was looking for to pass his research torch onto. From this connection, Kaveh’s father was driven to either directly accompany or at least pursue the still living Sachin into the desert. (This works even if we say it was only Sachin’s consciousness he was contacted by--in either case, he would have been driven go to out to the desert to meet the real, temporarily still living Sachin to join his quest to help the desert people.)

Only for Kaveh’s father to meet his end there while trying to aid a caravan that had fallen into trouble. What a tragic coincidence, a completely unpredictable twist of fate.

Or... was it?

How odd, in the same quest that Kaveh’s father’s connection to Sachin is discussed, that we’re given an account of a caravan that appears to have been deliberately sabotaged, where money was taken (from Sachin) and somehow sparked a betrayal, a “trial of human nature” that caused many people to die, with the takeaway being the exact belief Sachin wants to pass on and reinforce in others, that humans are horrific creatures who can only make the world a worse and worse place.

We know that Sachin’s “research” specifically consisted of doing this exact thing, manipulating situations to test humans’ moral character, conducting trials/experiments on “human nature” to reinforce his belief that humans were fundamentally selfish beings.

(It’s no accident the merchant ledger we receive uses the exact same words as Sachin does, “trial of human nature” and “experiments on human nature.” We’re supposed to assume what happened to the caravan in the note was deliberate sabotage on Sachin’s part, to create a scenario where he could observe the cruelties of humanity.)

Why would the game go out of its way to give us an account of a caravan being deliberately sabotaged and used as an experiment if there was no connection at all between what happened with this caravan and what happened to Kaveh’s father, who was also killed helping a floundering caravan?

It’s just too much of a coincidence to accidental. I think the implications of the ledger Dori gave us and the similarities in the language on that ledger to Sachin’s ideas was supposed to lead the audience to wonder:

Could Kaveh’s father have died in one of Sachin’s final “human nature experiments”?

Was the caravan Kaveh’s father tried to help one that Sachin deliberately sabotaged, expecting to observe humanity’s selfish, self-preserving nature?

I think there’s enough evidence in the story to suggest that we players are at least supposed to consider this a possibility. (There’s no reason to give us the ledger about the manipulated caravan otherwise.) And if you consider this a possibility, it would mean that Sachin didn’t just indirectly cause Kaveh’s father’s death--he would be the direct cause of Kaveh’s father’s death, an actual murder brought about by Sachin’s beliefs that humanity’s self-centered nature made everyone beyond saving.

This idea transforms Kaveh’s father’s sacrifice into the ultimate rejection of Sachin’s beliefs. This would mean that, even in a situation manipulated to bring out the worst in human beings on purpose, Kaveh’s father gave everything to protect the lives of others, for no gain at all of his own, doing everything he could just to desperately try to make the situation (the world) better.

SO yeah. I’m not saying we have hard evidence here, but I think the quest was trying to lead players to speculate very, very hard on the possibility that Kaveh’s father’s death was no accident.

3) Finally, a cuter piece of speculation to brighten things up after that despair bomb I just dropped: it’s highly likely that Kaveh’s father had more than one Aranara buddy!

During the Parade of Providence, we hear about an Aranara who learned to read from Kaveh’s father:

However, this is a bit confusing, because later in the event, we hear someone else say that Kaveh’s father taught an Aranara to write specifically when he was a child:

While of course it is possible that Kaveh’s father taught the first Aranara, Arakasyapa, to both read and write, I think there’s also another possible answer here about why Kaveh’s father would separately mention teaching an Aranara to write:

Because there is an entirely different Aranara in the story which was taught to write by a “good Nara” who was a child--Arashakun, from the quest “Courage is the Heart.”

In this sweet little world quest, the Traveler discovers a flower talisman that has been snatched by some hilichurls, and seeks to return it to its rightful owner, a timid and shy Aranara named Arashakun.

We learn that Arashakun once had a kind-hearted “good Nara” companion who taught him to write (sound familiar?), and who, in order to encourage the poor Aranara, gave him a single flower dubbed “courage.” In describing this child companion, Arashakun specifically states that his companion was no strong warrior like the Traveler’s twin, but instead a gentle, comforting presence who never teased the Aranara.

All of these descriptions line up particularly well with Kaveh’s father, who the game repeatedly describes as vulnerable, kind-hearted, and giving to others.

To drive home the possible connections to Kaveh’s family even further, this quest takes place very, very near to the Palace of Alkazarzaray.

Although we don’t have any guarantee, I think it is strongly implied that the “good Nara” mentioned by Arashakun is indeed Kaveh’s father, and the “courage of the heart” that he extended to Arashakun as a child is the very same courage, kindness, and generosity that drove him to reach out to the people of the desert, hoping to make a difference in their lives--even at the cost of his own.

The takeaway? Kaveh’s father was a truly good person who aided everyone he came across, from timid Aranara to people whose very lives were in danger. He never meant to leave his family, and especially not his son, but repeatedly fell afoul of the worst humanity had to offer and was driven into a situation in which all he could do was offer his very life to uphold the altruism that was central to his idealism--the same idealism and goodness that Kaveh carries as “courage” in his own heart.