#explanation: the palace of the four sword was not in the original link to the past game but added in the later release of

[pocketramblr]

Thing is it's got to be about equality- if you add the fs dungeon to Legend's story you gotta add the realm of memory to Four's, which would actually mean he's previously time traveled to two other eras- and would thus recognize the downfall duo's worlds

[gust-jar-simulator]

I think it would be fun to try writing an LU fic more closely based on the canon characterization plus the FSA game canon Shadow, even if half the reason I’m so violently obsessed with Four is him being system coded. It feels like a missed opportunity to not utilize that. BUT.

I am compelled by what the difference in Four and Shadow’s dynamic would be, especially because (as far as I know) we don’t really know who or what the black lizalfos is in canon. I’ve been assuming it’s everyone’s favorite from OoT for fanfic reasons, but there’s no reason it has to be that particular shadow.

Timeline wise, I don’t know how Four works, considering two of his games are set before Time and FSA is set after Twilight Princess. Time Travel? Is Jojo putting FSA before OoT? Hard to say. If she is, though, then that opens up an interesting possibility.

Of the darks I know about in the games, we have:

Hyrule’s final trial of worthiness before obtaining the Triforce

Time’s duel in the Water Temple™️

Four’s major low level opponent Shadow, serving as Vaati’s (actually Ganon’s) second a la Ghirahim in SkSw and implied by Hyrule Historia to be Ganon’s creation, a combination of Link’s shadow and Ganon’s emotions pulled from a mirror that may or may not be a reference to Twilight Princess

Warriors’ three shadows, his animated faults sumoned by Cia

Legend in the Palace of the Four Sword, a gimmick dungeon in LttP in reference to the attached original Four Swords game

And if we really squint, Twilight’s fucked up nightmare where dark versions of himself are used as stand-ins to illustrate the Interlopers, traitors who became the Twili people

The black lizalfos actually being kind of lame in LU and put on the run by Twilight fits very well with the idea that the iconic Dark from OoT is kind of a pushover if you use the Biggoron Sword. But I wanted to point out a pattern in the canon shadows/darks I’ve mentioned.

They’re usually meant as a test, and/or a method for the videogame narrative to have the hero confront his own flaws. With something like the original Zelda game it could be hard to apply much depth, but that shadow is very explicitly a test by the forces of good to see if Hyrule is worthy.

In OoT, we don’t get an explanation for why the shadow is there, and the place you fight him in vanishes like an illusion. It’s not even connected to the main boss room. You get Navi saying “conquer yourself!”, and the only environmental clues are perhaps the temple structures, the lone tree, and the fact that you are fighting while walking on water. I have a lot of theories about that fight, that incorporate everything from the Bodhi Tree to Chinese proverbs, but I think the biggest clue is Nayru’s thematic significance as the goddess of water and wisdom/justice as well as possibly time in that game. Ganondorf has no connection to water and wouldn’t want you to conquer yourself- but Nayru would. Also, the Sacred Realm fight against Demise in SkSw looks like a visual callback to me.

I think the use of Dark Links in the Twilight Princess cutscene is specifically to drive the point home that the Interlopers could be anyone, your neighbor, even people like you, who gave in to the allure of power. This vision was given by a Spirit of Light.

Warriors’ fight might be a reference to the multiple darks in Twilight Princess, but also the thematic significance of the darks in OoT and the original LOZ. He needed to fight the avatars of the faults that prevented him from being a real hero, get an ego check, though for a change of pace they were created by a villain this time.

Legend’s fight against four darks, even if they looked like him, was specifically a reference to the original Four Swords game that was released on the exact same card. Four Swords wasn’t sold separately, it originally came with LttP. Your job in the Palace of the Four Sword is to purify the blade by collecting all four and then defeating the darks, and you can only do this after beating both games. It’s the ultimate challenge as well as ultimately a cool reference, but I think an argument could be made that the darks in the swords aren’t really connected to Legend. They don’t split from him- he has to exorcise them.

Which leads me to Shadow from Four Swords Adventures.

Shadow is quite literally on your ass, laughing at you, killing your teammates, pranking, terrorizing villagers and kidnapping maidens from the second you start the game. He blows up the area to force you to retreat to another screen. He shapeshifts into your teammates, so you all accidentally stab the wrong guy. The person he mimics is the only one who can hurt him. He shifts between the Dark and Light worlds, forcing you to follow him. He clones himself to fight all of you at once. He shows up out of nowhere, laughing the whole time, wrecks shop, and just harries you throughout the course of the whole plot. I haven’t seen what his boss fight is like, but I am EXTREMELY curious to see if he has any dialogue. He steals people’s keys. He fucks up their bushes. He drops a whole village into the Dark World. He sets a whole village on fire. Unlike the others, notably the legendary OoT Dark and the original LOZ one, he’s not waiting for you at all. He’s playing with you.

Considering the connection between Four Swords shadows and LttP, and the fact that Shadow came from a mirror that is likely a Twilight Princess reference, that is very feasibly a lot of connections to make. On top of that, most of the previously listed darks are tests of character. Your test of character in the Four Swords games is very textually whether or not you become like Shadow, considering the voting mechanism where you can elect who was the most annoying during the chapter. Shadow himself, however, is not one of you.

He’s the only dark from a canon game to have been created by Ganon.

So that leaves me with two ideas. Either The Shadow™️ from LU is a test from Hylia/the gods, created by her, or it’s a demon created by Ganon/Demise/whatever is currently the big bad demon king. There is a third option of “it used to be a test but became corrupted somehow”, but we’ll see.

Then, as I said, there’s the timeline question. Either we use the Hyrule Historia timeline and have to explain why Four somehow jumped a few thousand years to post-Twilight, or FSA gets scooted up to exist before OoT. If that’s the case, that would make Shadow the first of the darks, as opposed to Dark Link, which opens up some interesting ideas.

Who is The Shadow™️? We honestly have no idea yet. I do think the black lizalfos could possibly be OoT Dark, considering it mostly functions as an observer, but the infectious miasma-like quality of the black blood (which might’ve been the venom that nearly took down Twilight) seems like a callout to BOTW malice and its ability to corrupt Guardians. It does textually empower monsters, so it might be some sort of Ganon juice.

But the only shadow entities that have anything to do with Ganon are Zant, the Twili usurper skilled in shadow magic who worshipped Ganon as a god, or Shadow, a literal actual shadow who may or may not be connected to the Mirror of Twilight but who was definitely a major villain and a major pain in the ass.

I just think it would be funny if OoT Dark is working for the smallest and most chaotic dark of them all. Shadow doesn’t have to be the ultimate villain, because as we all know it’s barely a Zelda game if the final boss isn’t a warmup for fighting the Demon King (plot relevant or not), but I do think there’s a chance that if we see Shadow in LU he might be very different from what manga fans are expecting.

[merimaatelegiac]

“The Hero of Men” Notes Pt. 2

The Prophecy of the Hero of Time - Like I mentioned in part 1, this prophecy is very important both in the series themselves, and for If Time Healed Wounds’ background. In Ocarina of Time, Sheik speaks of both this and the prophecy of the game’s seven temples. I wanted to put out there my theory on how they came to exist. Since they are temples, we can assume that they used to be places of worship before being corrupted by Ganondorf, and from some (such as the Shadow and Spirit temples) we actually learn a little of what they were used for, though nothing too specific. Now, thanks to the games that “canonically” go before OoT in terms of the chronology, it was very easy to take advantage of the fact that the Master Sword is not used again after the events of Skyward Sword. There’s also the fact that, even though those previous games have pretty serious events hidden in the background (such as the apparent genocide of the Wind Tribe---another post that will be!), they are still minor threats compared to all the sh*itshow going on leading to, during, and after the events in OoT. The Civil War, Hyrule finally being conquered by the bad guy and gone to waste (or semi-waste, considering the actual waste that is Hyrule in BotW), the timeline splitting up... All of that is, imo, much worse than anything that’s happened since the time of SS, even more so than the interlopers going wild. From all of these things I gave form and purpose to both prophecies.

And, insert here GoW Kratos’ voice saying “BOY”. All the bits and pieces I still had to make sense of for the Reader character’s story, put themselves into place once I had these events explained in my mind.

The thanking ceremony - When I was little, the Temple of Time creeped me out in a very weird way. I used to find it extremely weird that they’d built such an enormous building only to have it empty literally all the time. As I grew up I understood that the game’s capacity probably didn’t allow the devs to give more life to OoT’s Hyrule, but I was always left with that awkward feeling. Then, as I thought about all of those bits of lore that would be so fresh in the days of the Minish’ arrival from the time of the war against Demise, I figured that there’d be, necessarily, different holidays in Hyrule, one of which had to be some sort of celebration around his defeat. And what better place to hold it than the Temple of Time?? Let’s not forget that the Sealed Temple, placed on top of Demise’s original tomb, used to be where the Temple of Time now stands. I honestly loved the idea, and it’s even given me a different way of experiencing it when I replay any game where it appears. Which are, like, two xD.

I had so much fun thinking of the little details on how the ceremony would be performed. I actually created the prayer recited by Princess Aryn based on an ancient Templar prayer that they used when they started being persecuted by the Church.

Also, remember how it is mentioned that something about that prayer makes the princess feel calm and secure? Well, it is dedicated to the Hero, after all. It works!

A little on the Geography of Hyrule, according to Reliable Me - This honestly deserves its own post, and I might just do that in the future. But I do want to touch some of that here. Naturally, the main map I was using as reference for the vast majority of the chapter was that from The Minish Cap. The one major change I made was the denomination of the Minish Woods, which in the story was refered to as the Southern Forests (continuing the naming pattern in TMC, with names such as Eastern Hills, Western Wood and North/South Hyrule Field). Naturally, the Minish Woods would be named as such after these events. Now, Lake Hylia does not appear in TMC, but it does in Four Swords, which, canonically, would go after TMC. In FS, Lake Hylia is more or less where the Zora Domain is located in Ocarina of Time. So! In my headcanon that is the original Lake Floria, which then was named Lake Hylia, until the Zora arrived. Then, with the years and the expansion of the Kingdom of Hyrule, the lake to the southeast was named as Lake Hylia instead. In my mind, Hyrule was not very big in these early years, and I think its very plausible that all of the areas in the center of TMC’s map are the middle areas in OoT’s map, including Castor Wilds, right east of the natural barrier of the hills leading to Gerudo Valley. I have a whole explanation of how the area of Mt. Crenel turned into the frozen wasteland that we see in Twilight Princess, along with a detailed outlining of the entirety of Hyrule’s western desert...

... But I’ll leave that for its own post. :D

The Minish and the Guardian Spirits... - Again, as is usual in the series, the origins of the Minish are left extremely vague. So, I filled some of those gaps, while not getting into too much detail. I made them the origins of the guardian spirits that we encounter in Ocarina of Time (the Great Deku Tree, Lord Jabu-Jabu, and, you guessed it! -?-, Volvagia ---yes, I like the theory of Volvagia being the Spiritual Guardian of Fire before being corrupted by Ganondorf---), along with a fourth, the Spiritual Guardian of Wind (who might it be? Perhaps the Wind Fish?? Who knows!!), whose fate we don’t know anything about, after the Wind Tribe was massacred. As years passed, I like the idea of the Hylians starting to call the Minish with the name of the sword they made, with only the Royal Family remembering their original name, for the average Hylian villager didn’t really know the details of that whole story. In contrast, as is usually the case with locations, the Minish Woods would retain that name.

As to what happened to them... let’s leave it open for speculation, like Nintendo did.

The Wind Tribe - These guys fascinate me so much. I think there’s a lot of potential for their origins and lore in general, and I tried to exploit that. I unfortunately took the easy route and assumed that all red-haired tribes in Hyrule come from the same peoples (so goddamned brilliant of me, I know), based also on the fact that most of them have origins in the west of Hyrule. My reasoning is that the original Dark Tribe developed the red hair trait, which remained after they were reinstated into Hylian society and during their rift, half of them becoming the Wind Tribe, the others what would be known as the Dark Interlopers. Now, we know that after the events of The Minish Cap, there came another Hero with a unique adventure, separate to that of the Four Sword Hero. In those times,Vaati is said to kidnap beautiful women and take them to his Palace in the sky. Since the Wind Tribe is never heard of again, many theorize that Vaati might have killed them after he escaped his first imprisonment, thus taking over their home from then on. I personally go for this theory as well in my headcanon, but I don’t think all of them were destroyed.

In TMC, the Ocarina of Winds works with music. That alone was my cue to link them to the Song of Healing (it makes more sense int he chapter, haha) as was implied in the chapter :D And if at this point you’re thinking something about the Happy Mask Salesman, you’re probably right. But more on this in another post!

I think that covers all general topics in the story. As I said in part one, I’ll make separate posts for the other, more complicated ones. Ask me for any doubts you have in regards to these!

Thanks for reading!