#botw lore

[l1ve-l4ugh-lov3craft]

HI, CAN I TELL YOU ABOUT THE AKKALA CITADEL?????

Yes? Wonderful. Come, friend, have a seat. I have...a lot to say lol

Eight years later and I am STILL not over how absolutely genius this fortress is, like are you kidding me????? Everything from location to design to its inside defenses is just *chef's kiss* PHENOMINAL, and so because I have no filter, I am going to barf all my thoughts I've had on it in the past many many years.

Before we begin, shoutout to the WONDERFUL video by Zeltik that touches on this a bit and gave me a wonderful basis for my brainrot in the first place. Definitely go and watch it it's fabulous NOW! Let's get into the madness shall we? First let's talk about the location cos OHHHH MY GOSH. This was, hands down, THE best place they could have possibly put a fortress of this magnitude in Hyrule and I am going to tell you why. First of all, allllllll along the northern and northwestern border of Hyrule, there's those massive canyons

Passing over that in a way that would be effective military-wise is kind of impossible, so it provides a natural defense from invaders from those directions.

If you were to come from the South, you would hit the Gerudo desert and not only have to face the might of the Gerudo military, but also cross this EXPANSIVE, scorching desert before you can even make it to Hyrule field, and by that time, the royal leader could have very easily sent an army to intercept anyone trying to attack, so that's right out.

Which leaves coming from the Faron region next which is okay??? I guess??? but that's a LOT of swamp and forest you have to cross through, AND you go right past the Great Plateau where any army would have been seen and intercepted eventually. This takes us closer to the eastern coast of Hyrule, and you would be hard pressed to try and travel through Necluda, cos just l o o k at all these mountains you'd have to cross:

Horrible. And you probably don't want to go through Zora's Domain cos that's yet another heavily fortified and well prepared city in and of itself (please ask me about this one too I beg of you I love talking about Zora's Domain)

Any military leader with a brain isn't going to go through Death Mountain for obvious reasons, so really, all that leaves is this tiiiiiinnnyyy vulnerable spot in Akkala

And where did they put the citadel??? Right at the heart of that vulnerable spot >:D Like a boss.

AND SO! if invaders came in from that coastline, they have three options: They can take the path through the Akkala Highlands, they can go through the Torin Wetlands and up to the pass it connects to, or they can take the trail up to the Sokkala Bridges. All of these are TERRIBLE OPTIONS Akkala Highlands path: If they come up this way at the start

this will work allll the way until they get about here:

once they get here though, you are now not only bottlenecking an entire army meant to invade a kingdom (so probably roughly 1,000-1,300 people), but you're also directly under the shadow of the Akkala Citadel. There are archers there to fire on you, and they had a canon post on that side to potentially fire either at the incoming soldiers or fire at the opposite canyon wall to rain debris and rocks on them.

TERRIBLE for the other army.

And even if some did manage to survive, it would be painfully easy for the infantry at Akkala Citadel to send foot soldiers down below to cut them off.

SO THERE GOES THAT OPTION (and admittedly, I think it's probably the worst of the three)

Next option is to go through the Torin Wetlands and up into that same pass by the Citadel

this is ALSO a bad idea because the Torin Wetlands are a DELIGHTFUL tactical advantage for Hyrule. Once you get to that pass, you have the same problems as option one, but now you first have to pass through this wide marshland to get there. This will immediately slow down your army, and if that wasn't bad enough it's also in clear freakin view of the citadel and so they would be able to send their entire militia of archers and potentially even cannoneers to fire on the advancing army and take a bunch of them out before they could even make it to that pass.

So a smart general may say the best option is to go around the long way.

now this eliminates the pass and also slowing down at the marsh, and you could even make it almost all the way to the citadel without hardly any losses probably BUT! The first hurdle is those bridges. Wonderful for Hyrule, terrible for the opposing army. The three Sokkala bridges are SMALL, even smaller than the pass an army would have to go through with the other two options. This military leader would basically have to send their soldiers single file unless they have a way to expand the bridges to make them wider (which, admittedly, could be possible with a bit of foresight, but for now for simplicity's sake let's just assume they didn't think that far ahead).

This brings in an EXTREMELY slowly advancing army right to the heart of the Akkala Citadel's battery.

There are three locations with canons we see in BOTW that cover pretty much the entire open area the opposing army would come in on. And when you look at the amount of space each post covered

There is not a SINGLE spot in that valley a cannoneer couldn't easily reach. And, of course they would continue to have archers to pick off individual soldiers as well.

And if SOMEHOW

BY SOME MIRACLE

enough soldiers make it through that hell to be enough of a problem, there are plenty more soldiers in the citadel to cut them off as they come up the hill AND IF THAT'S NOT ENOUGH! there was this:

by the time we get to botw, it has been destroyed, but that is ANOTHER smaller stronghold that was probably pretty well manned in and of itself.

AND WHAT'S MORE

There's even this long cliff road with very little room to operate, so it would be extremely easy for the citadel to send over some soldiers to post up there and cut off anyone who tried to make it past. And with so little room to operate, it would not go well.

Ain't NOTHING getting past the Akkala Citadel, guys.

And that isn't even touching on the fact that the whole thing is build of solid stone??? And carved into a mountain??? The entire reason it fell in the first place was because the Guardians had enough of fire power to destroy the citadel that they had never seen before (also they could climb walls but that's a side note). This implies that no one in Hyrule or the neighbouring kingdoms had even CLOSE to that level of destructive power, so to try and raze it to the ground would have been impossible.

AND!! it was the most heavily fortified fortress in Hyrule second to the castle itself, and to most likely their military personnel would have been equal too, if not slightly more than even Hyrule Castle. That's A LOT of people!! With most likely endless support and resources from the castle and villages nearby as well.

It was placed geniously, it had impenetrable defense, it had a potentially endless supply of resources and people to use said resources, it was just

argjfbdkjgbks You guys don't understand how much I THINK about this place aghhhhhhhhhh

[shellshooked]

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

[proxycrit]

LINKTOBER DAY 19! East Reservoir Lake

The Zora siblings gets that self sacrificing from somewhere, what can I say.

Anyways, the duo absconded with the crown prince. (Alchemist Yona, you’re going to stop them, right? RIGHT??)

This is a Totk au called Familiar Familiar, and it all started when Zelda didn’t get sent to the shadow realm (and everything fell apart from there). Here’s the masterlist!

Patreon here if you like my crimes and want to feed me a treat!

[gabelew]

It's been a while since I last drew Bazz's fancy captain getup...

[ghost-of-tk]

made this awhile ago but have since made several amendments.

[nolongerapileofashprobably]

But what happens if my world is falling to their doom?

[verflares]

say, what do you think ever happened to that boy from the forest? you think he ever found what he was looking for?

[theribbajack]

"Both of you, faithless fools who would dare to take up arms against the king of earth and sky!"

The words "Zonai Ganondorf" entered my head and I haven't been sane since. Perhaps in the Zonai version of the legend, the warlord "Gannon" sought after the secret stones, and the incarnation of Hylia draconified herself to stop him alongside the Ancient Hero.

[silverpsychedelic]

A lot of people seemed to like the design I did for Sidon and Mipha's buff mama, so I thought I'd add some things about her, and her relationship with Dorephan!

🌊 Her name was Solaile, which both follows the musical naming schemes of the Zora royal family (Do re, Mi fa, So la, Si do) and also is similar to the name Soleil in French, meaning the sun.

🌊 Dorephan married into her family and originally came from an oceanic Zora clan. You cannot look at that man's shapes and tell me he was originally built for land, he looks like he'd take one step and fall over. The name Dorephan is also one he adopted upon marrying into the family.

🌊 Queen Solaile was fearless and had a spitfire attitude, facing issues head on and even throwing herself into danger if it meant protecting her people. Where Dorephan is careful and calculated, she was proactive (and maybe a bit reckless). They balanced each other out extremely well. Dorephan misses that sense of balance she brought, and became even more cautious after she passed - esp over Mipha and Sidon.

🌊 She could 100% throw Dorephan around if she felt like it

[kamabokobun]

Fun-sized versions of these guys + lore (???)

[blueskittlesart]

*sigh* thoughts on Nintendo's botw/totk timeline shenanigans and tomfoolery?

tbh. my maybe-unpopular opinion is that the timeline is only important when a game's place on the timeline seriously informs the way their narrative progresses. the problem is that before botw we almost NEVER got games where it didn't matter. it matters for skyward sword because it's the beginning, and it matters for tp/ww/alttp (and their respective sequels) because the choices the hero of time makes explicitly inform the narrative of those games in one way or another. it matters which timeline we're in for those games because these cycles we're seeing are close enough to oot's cycle that they're still feeling the effects of his choices. botw, however, takes place at minimum 10 thousand years after oot, so its place on the timeline actually functionally means nothing. botw is completely divorced from the hero of time & his story, so what he does is a nonissue in the context of botw link and zelda's story. thus, which timeline botw happens in is a nonissue. honestly I kind of liked the idea that it happened in all of them. i think there's a cool idea of inevitability that can be played with there. but the point is that the timeline exists to enhance and fill in the lore of games that need it, and botw/totk don't really need it because the devs finally realized they could make a game without the hero of time in it.

[l1ve-l4ugh-lov3craft]

Thinking about icon monk twins Shee Venath and Shee Vaneer

Literally those two slayed SO hard as the First Calamity dynamic duo that they put their communal brain cell together and said “Yo yano what would be REALLY funny to do to the hero???”

and then went and designed their fuckass matchy matchy shrines for link 1,000 years later.

Baddie move fr fr I love them sm

[shellshooked]

they say that the world was built for two

[mochiobonio]

As the land continued to be ravaged by countless battles, the ground reeks of blood, the clashes of swords soon came to a halt, one thought came to Triton's mind; "

My lust for the spilling of blood has dwindled over the years, what then would bring joy to my dull existence?"

[whys-nosense]

me making a magical girl au of every media i ever liked:

[avenin7]

I cracked myself up repeatedly with this one xD I couldn’t stop laughing the entire time I was drawing it