#botw environment

[proxycrit]

Linktober day 13, Skull Lake!

The trip to the lake’s thwarted by the weather. Oh well. We need more quiet moments of rest between action packed adventure, after all.

(Masterlist for this TOTK AU, Familiar Familiar!)

Plus patreon

[midomochitea]

Digital painting for a project over at GAIA on instagram! Our theme in March was "green landscapes" and thought this was the perfect opportunity to draw the rolling hills in botw <3

Close-ups of the tiny little swirls and details because that was honestly my favorite part of drawing this

Also available as a print now!

[phoenixcatch7]

Okay but it's super interesting how

Din = Power = Ganondorf

Naryu = Wisdom = Zelda

Farore = Courage = Link.

Because Din, in the hylian creation myth, created the physical world. Naryu then created the laws - gravity, time, etc. And Farore finally created life - plants and people.

Din created the body, naryu the mind, Farore the soul.

And the triforce and its wielders so perfectly reflect that.

Ganon is physical power, he is big and intimidating and he breaks things. He is cunning and determined, but that's not what he focuses on. He is might makes right.

Zelda is wisdom and cleverness. She is stall tactics and information and team work. She is a powerful mage with a spine of steel, but that's not how she'll win. She is the pen being mightier than the sword.

Link is courage and persistence. He is the wild card sneaking behind enemy ranks, always moving, plunging into terrifying situations head first. He's a phenomenal fighter with a keen wit, but that's not what will get him through his challenges. He is bravery not being the absence of fear but the triumph over it.

They sit in perfect parallels to each other.

And ganon is reborn through his body - his resurrection is immortality. No matter how low he is cast, as long as he has a body he can claw his way back. He can cling to his power, build it ever higher.

Zelda is reborn through the magic of her bloodline. It's the accumulated knowledge handed down for generations, the unique power she must master, the skills she must develop to survive and get her kingdom out the other side intact. Even her name, the knowledge of herself, is handed down from all the way from the very first. Her ancestors knowledge of her future presence, her stability, is what gives her the edge.

Link is reborn in spirit. He is not bound by flesh or blood. Just like his wanderlust soul he can reappear in any time or place. His variation, his unpredictability, is exactly how he fights. It's what makes him so hard to pin down.

Ganons need to build strength means he can't chase after link. Links impulsiveness means zelda can outwit him. Zeldas stationary predictability means she's an easy target for ganon.

But the other direction?

Fire melts ice, ice redirects lightning, lightning burns fire.

And that's the very essence of the triforce.

[uinferno]

I know the Zelda Timeline is hardly the most popular thing out there, but for me, it's always been endlessly fascinating. Everything is the same. It's all different. It's linear. It's cyclical. It branches and twists and comes back together. It disregards its predecessors. It can't let them go. It thrashes against change. It can't stay the same.

Every game is a reboot.

But they're also not.

I think the story of The Legend of Zelda is the epitome of narrative doublethink. In order to truly buy in, you must accept the simultaneous facets that none of the games matter to one another and that they all do. They're the same story. They're absolutely not.

The thing about the timeline, to me, by being both codified and nebulous, is what ties this cow tools of a narrative together. It's a puzzle without a box. It's total fucking nonsense, but so is reality. Things won't ever truly make sense, but what if they did. What if we took it from a new angle and... hmm. No. That won't work

Or maybe...

Ultimately, the Zelda Timeline is quite simply a farcical creative writing prompt. A dare. A challenge. To take these pieces not designed to fit together and give them order. Do the writers themselves care? Absolutely not. I do, though. So fuck it.

[noirandchocolate]

Itsy-bitsy headcanon before bed:

I’ve mentioned this in (very minor) passing before but in my lil’ AoC-verse, the Yiga Clan has been surreptitiously farming mighty bananas in Faron for centuries. I just think, that they have too many stockpiled (and in the other timeline, every member who pops up to kill Link has some) for their stores to come solely from theft and happenstance gathering.* And after all, bananas don’t grow in the desert or highlands of their home…

Anyway, they “farm” in a way that makes the groves look very natural, so nobody else would tend to notice they’re not just growing wild. Just as they’ve been looking after the apple trees on Satori Mountain as stated in my linked post up there. The thing is, that means the Clan can’t defend their crop too intensely, and they always lose some of it to passers-by. In the past, there have been some incidents where Hylians have thought they were farming bananas in the general area; these were dealt with by quickly grabbing as much of the crop as possible, laying natural-seeming traps, and putting illusions on the trees to make them look blighted until the Hylians gave up again for another while and moved their operations somewhere else in Faron.

Post-Calamity, Master Kohga made it known that it’d been his people tending a large amount of banana trees all this time and that they hoped to plant more and expand their operation. Princess Zelda, as one show of gratitude for his assistance (*cough saving her father’s life cough*) and to aid in her own push to legitimize Yiga participation in commerce, worked with Kohga to draw up formal documents to the effect that yes, that land and those trees/bananas belong to the Clan. Which Kohga privately thought was annoying political theater since why wouldn’t it be theirs, why should the Yiga have to make nice to ~earn~ a right to what their hard work had created, but…still, he saw it as a step in the right direction by the Princess, surely (since it seemed she was trying hard to make nice from her end, too <3).

So where do the Yiga farm their bananas? Largely all along the stepped cliffs of Ubota Point, with a smaller reserve crop (looking even more wild and natural) on the higher areas around Bronas Forest and Kamah Plateau.** Post-Calamity, the Clan has been able to start building an open and permanent base of operations on the Point, as they’ll begin to sell and ship some of their crops to places besides their home in Karusa Valley (Urbosa and the Gerudo are among their first big customers, hehe). The Yiga’s once-small Faron Team has been bulked up considerably now that they don’t have to hide. Things are just getting underway with this, but it feels like a good start to their business relationship with Hyrule. Yay! :D

Okay goodnight everybody! <3 <3

*There’s turn-in quests in AoC where the Clan wants to buy up every mighty banana in Hyrule. This is to sustain them while they understandably are shorter-handed and all-hands-on-deck with the Calamity (thanks Astor) and haven’t been as able to tend their crops, which they haven’t been up front with Hyrule about anyway ofc.

**As I’ve also said before, I headcanon that locations on the BotW/TotK map are bigger in “real life” for lack of a better descriptor. So Faron in general is big enough for the Clan and Hylians to be farming bananas and other things too. But incidentally, Ubota Point’s environs are the area in BotW where you can find the most mighty bananas, just growing everywhere! …and personally I’ve also been attacked by a bunch (ha! I have made a banana pun!) of Yiga in Faron both before and even more after that timeline’s Kohga fell in a hole, so….

[mikahzuki]

Finally doodle something after a year of art stump 🥲

[pumpkinsouppe]

I’m so glad I’m replaying botw, the fandom and Totk really warped my perspective of it and I started to forget why I loved it in the first place

Is it my favorite Zelda game? No thats for OOT and mm, I also think tww is better too, but there’s so much potential and care to detail in this game that despite its flaws its still very enjoyable

I still have my criticisms, but I can give it the benefit of the doubt for being such an experimental Zelda game and I think it did a lot of things right, it was just inexperienced in this new format. It’s just a shame Totk, instead of improving on those flaws, made those flaws worse which harms botw a lot in retrospect knowing the potential was squandered.

I’m still on the great plateau but it is very masterfully designed, it slowly introduces the new world and designs and there’s so many little hints and secrets to find (such as if you zoom in on death mountain or hebra at the right time and place you can see the divine beasts), or how if you’ve played previous Zelda games you can recognize the lantern of the old man as a poe object or that his theme is the Hyrule castle theme, or how inert guardians are slowly littered in the environment until you’re forced to finally confront an active one at a shrine.

Also yeah now that I’m replayed botw, links hair is 10x better in this game. Give that boy a comb in Totk

[trixstriforce]

botw was a good story about coping w/ tragedy, the dangers of expectations and pedestals, and how to live after disaster

totk could have been such a good story about generational trauma, coming to terms w/ grief, and how to really on others after a life time of being alone but it just...wasnt. it had so much potential to build on the themes of botw and give a good thematic close to zelda and link's archs and it set all that up but just...did not

[brightmoontrigon]

love that Agro will just wander off and do her own thing if you let her. like girl where are you going

was delighted to see that she'll find water to drink from!

[artbyfrosty]

~Breath of the wild~

Finally done with this one! This has been sitting on my computer as a WIP for months now oof

Wanted to get it out before Tears of the Kingdom, as the guardian theme is obviously a bit outdated now, but I'm still happy it's (somewhat) finished now!

[mememan93]

The issue that arises when a game gets super popular is that other developers will try to make games in that style, by taking the basis of the game (ex. Open world, rougelike) without thinking about or realizing what the game does well that makes it popular

[niteshade925]

I can see how the regional phenomena in totk is basically totk's version of a modern 4 horsemen of the apocalypse: pollution (the sludge), addiction (marbled rock roast), climate change (the extreme blizzard; admittedly this one is a bit of a stretch), and pestilence/infectious disease (the giant mosquito boss and the undead gibdo). Which, hey, references to real life issues, great, but what I didn't like so much was how you can just solve puzzles and fight bosses--basically have a handful of big name heroes running around doing tasks--and the water will magically clear up, the addicts will magically become normal people again, the extreme storms will magically dissipate, and the pestilence will magically disappear. Real life does not work that way. I know, I know, it's a game why you taking it so seriously blah blah, but I'm just saying, we have to remember that for any of these problems to be solved, it takes a lot of effort and cooperation from a lot of people to accomplish, and that's definitely an understatement.

[marinecorvid]

listening to totk wind temple soundtrack and ouuuough im so sad we'll never get a botw-style guardian signs remake :(((( storming the sky fortress, esp with phase 2 4 and 5..... gamefreak i would kill a man. i would do it

[vox-off]

i have settled on why it's been so difficult for me to focus on totk. i played botw for AGES. a solid year, the only game i played was botw. i only finished the game once or twice and the rest of the time farted around the map. i took my time and explored everything i could get to the first couple of playthroughs, i knew that map inside out, but y'know. started zoomin after a while, i'd seen everything already

because they used the same map, it feels like i've already finished totk

[applesaucestar]

‼️ BLOOD WARNING ‼️

More of my Yiga ocs I'm not obsessed wdym???

More somewhat old art,

[hylian-photography]

little apple in the big village, Kakariko Village