#squido rambles

[sky-squido]

i, like every other fic author in existence, love getting comments from people who enjoyed my work. i don't care if your comment is "late" (that's so weird to me like it's literature—do you apologize to homer for being late to reading the odyssey?) or "unintelligible" (late night commenters, english language learners, people who feel like they "just aren't that good with words", believe me, i entirely understand what you mean and appreciate it immensely), or anything else that you feel might make your comment 'not good enough'. i love all of the comments i receive and i am eternally grateful to all of you for your continued support.

and yeah, i've read fics where i felt like adding a comment would be doing the fic a disservice because there was nothing that could be said that wouldn't cheapen or patronize the magnum opus i'd just witnessed. in instances like this, that is exactly what i say in the comment: "there's nothing i can say that doesn't do this work of art a disservice. thank you for writing this."

actually, now that i think about it, there are a bunch of ao3 comments i've gotten that i still haven't replied to because i felt any thanks i could give would be inadequate. i should really get around to replying because i want them to know how spellbound they left me. i love you all, have i ever mentioned that?

all of that being said, i would like to make a public service announcement!

at least under default settings, ao3 authors do get notified every time you edit a comment. i've accidentally hit send too early before, or realized i forgot something i wanted to say, i get it, i really do. i have edited many comments in my day.

but you don't have to do this. really, it's okay. most of the time i honestly can't tell what the difference is. i'm not going to think worse of you for having typos in your comments because i guarantee that there were more in the fic you just read sfkljghsl

also these edits were over the course of twenty full minutes. i got another email while writing this post and had to update the image. please do not spend 20 minutes agonizing over your comment and changing the capitalization and adding a few words. it's okay, i promise. i love your comment, and i'm very very grateful for it, regardless of how "polished" it is. i'm not your english teacher in disguise.

tl;dr, i love you all and i hope you don't feel anxiety or a compulsion towards perfectionism in my ao3 comments section. i won't judge you, i promise <3

[squidos-goodies]

Hey Guys I Found Hyrule!

Kinda. Usually I keep nonsense analyses on my main (@sky-squido) and just post fanfic and fanart over here, but considering that I spent literal months on this and it ended up being like five thousand words, you guys might like to know about it, too.

In short, I did Celestial Navigation to the 3D Zelda games and figured out when and where most of them take place: Ocarina of Time: 47°N, Summer Solstice (June 21st) Wind Waker: 44°N, early April Twilight Princess: 35°N, late September Breath of the Wild: 63°S, November or February Majora’s Mask: 0°N (maybe), mid April or August Skyward Sword: Who Freaking Knows. Termina, maybe.

If you want more details about how the heck I figured any of this out and why I said Skyward Sword might actually take place in Termina, you can check out the full post here. It’s part two of a series, but the first one consists mostly (read: entirely) of me screaming about cartography, so you can just read the post I linked and be fine.

Okidoki, I love you all, and remember to take meds, hydrate, stretch, and go the HECK to sleep or so HELP me I will smash your window open with a crowbar and climb across your ceiling and drop to your floor and gently ply you with sleepytime tea and blankets and stuffed animals until you finally give in and pass out—you deserve to rest.

[mctwilight-mcd]

So, happy birthday to Laura and happy belated birthday to Sophie. I literally just realized this while I was checking facts for the fic I’m writing. 

Happy birthday, I’m writing about you two being gay.  

[needfantasticstories]

Sky *nod nod*

SKYYYYYYYYY!

I’m going to use this space to ramble about (Skyloftian? Skylartian?) …sports in Skyloft.

We know there’s a bunch of knights, and they have sword training. We know they’ve got birds they ride like horses, but they can’t carry much weight, so no big spears for air-jousting. They’ve got archery too, and maybe slingshots. But what about lightweight spears with throwers like atlatls? Too deadly… They also have bamboo. I dunno why, but they have it.

How about a mashup of Pato + Horseball + lightweight jousting? Let’s say…a pato-style ball (big leather and rubber ball with 6 handles) and thin, long and flexible poles with crook ends to grab the ball.

A ball can only be “possessed” if hooked by one of these “claws” (cannot touch players body). Others fly around and try to steal it. They can have shields to protect themselves and their birds from the other “claws”

A big 6 foot closed-net hoop in each corner, 2 for each team, face the field at a 45 degree angle. There are 6 players per team. The ball has to be passed at least once before scoring (horseball).

Each team’s hoop is surrounded by 4 smaller hoops of the opposing team. If the player scores in their own goal, they get two points. If they miss, and the ball goes into one of those small goals, the opposing team scores one point.

5 ten-minute rounds, 5 minute breaks between. Team with the most points at the end wins.

How could shields be utilized?

How to keep the birds safe?

Want to take a stab at it? Go for it and tag me!

Please tag everyone you know that writes LU fics who might like this idea. It’s free to whoever wants it!

@skyloftian-nutcase @margindoodles2407 @sky-squido @skyward-floored @arecaceae175

[kate-m-art]

Hmm if your still waiting how did you discover LU? What was your initial impressions of the boys and how have your opinions changed? What’s your favorite LU page? And if you have any chronic illness Legend tidbits you want to drop I am all ears XD

Okay, I didnt see this before the last post so I'll go ahead and answer it before I log off ♡

So first, I discovered LU on pinterest... almost 2 years ago now. I had been looking through all kinds of LoZ content, and especially enjoyed seeing arcs of the links meeting (Like TP Link chilling in BotW or the connection between the heroes shade and Twilight Princess!) Pinterest's algorithm started giving me more and more LU pages and then I got curious and began my quest finding the beginning of the story lol

I really loved the comic, but Twi stood out to me the most at first! I loved his game, his connection with Wild and Time, his animal-loving big brother nature, and his quiet attitude and big heart 🥺💕 I suppose the biggest change since then has been how much Legend has grown on me. I really didnt care for him at first, but the more I learned about him and his games the more I started to love him. @sky-squido 's fic What Hyrule Hadn't Seen really sealed the deal though in making him my favorite (and he has been for over a year now lol) The way she so perfectly captured his snark, his vulnerabilities, his giving and caring nature under everything, and his amazing adaptability and capability just made me completely fall in love with his character. I could ramble about him and that fic for hours if you let me.

Favorite LU page? The one where the master sword transforms Legend back from bunny form and hes just standing there smiling down at it with fondness and awe has my whole heart (skys quips and Legends reactions on that page always get me too XD)

And hmm... for the chronic illness headcanon I do have something in the works, basically my friend Arin had a theory how both his sickness as a kid and pink hair could be connected. It's pretty brilliant and that's all I'll say for now but yeah, hopefully you guys will find it interesting too. Arin's a freaking genius

[youknowwhoyouaremeep]

YOU’RE SUPER FUNNY AND ENTHUSIASTIC AND IT’S SO CUTE WATCHING YOU RAMBLE CUZ YOU GET SO EXCITED!!!

@sky-squido I KNOW THIS IS YOU, ALSO THAMK YOU! YOU KEEP TELLING ME THIS AAAAAAAAAAAAA

[sky-squido]

HI I'M DOING INCREDIBLY JANKY PSYCH RESEARCH ON TUMBLR WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG

basically i'm doing a paper and trying to really dissect and understand the experience of having and coping with depression. while i've thought about this, i've sort of been extrapolating off my own experiences, but i just realized i have no idea if anyone other than me has had this experience:

do you ever feel depressed emotionally and physically, but not cognitively and like, morale-wise? like you have no energy, and are really sad, and nothing seems interesting or can hold your attention, and you're just kind of a lump who wants to curl up in a ball under a desk somewhere and melt into the floor.

but at the same time, you're not like,,, deeply existential or mentally spiraling or having self-hating thoughts about it. like your internal monologue isn't depressed, too. somewhere in the back of your mind, you're sitting there like "hey, man, i know it's rough right now. just hang in there, okay?" maybe your brain produces the thought "what's the point?" and you go "dude. no. there are so many points. don't talk like that."

i'm sort of imagining an army that's been losing a war but still has high morale, if that helps at all. like you're not winning. you're not okay. but in a sense, some part of you is okay, because you still have hope. in short:

i couldn't have as much specificity/put as many options as i would have liked so please feel free to elaborate in the notes/tags if you want, but i know it's personal so no pressure. also don't worry about if you're Officially Diagnosed or not—if you have a reasonably strong suspicion, go with it for this.

THANK YOU EVERYONE ILY!!

[sky-squido]

i will extol the benefits of donating blood to my dying days but by far the funniest is that, after my fourth time donating blood yesterday (meaning i've lost a half gallon in the past half a year :0) i've noticed that i'm feeling the aftereffects of it less and less every time, which then means that THIS interaction is now possible:

friends on the sidelines of the fight: "oh no! they've lost too much blood!! there's no way they can fight on in this state!"

anime protagonist covered in blood, spitting yet more blood out of their mouth, gritting their teeth: "you're forgetting one thing"

villain standing over protagonist, sure they've won: "and what is that"

anime protagonist, grinning, and there's a spark in their eye: "i'm a blood donor"

villain, gasping, and stumbling backwards: "no! it can't be!"

protagonist, standing up: "i shrug off far worse than this every other month. it's going to take more than that to keep me down!!!"

villain, getting stabbed by protagonist: "noooooo!!!"

[sky-squido]

hi hello let’s talk about legend and the master sword!!!

this newest update got me thinking. legend never seemed super attached to the blade before, but the way he defends it against both wind and four so vehemently? well, let’s look into it!!

this is so INTERESTING you guys, because like, yes, it’s LU canon that legend is grumpy and quippy

but he never actually like,,, explicitly hates his adventures themselves and especially not this one specifically!

the way he says “I’ve just been traveling the world to train but...maybe it hasn’t been all that good for me” in divine dark reflections implies that this is the FIRST time legend’s admitting that his experiences haven’t been unilaterally positive. and i mean.... look at him!!

let us not delude ourselves into seriously believing that this young man is not having at least a little bit of a good time.

most importantly, though:

this is after koholint!! this is post-koholint legend!! this is after his “bad experiences” and his “maybe it wasn’t all god for me.” and still!! he is like “aw heck no i’m not settling down—i want to adventure forever.”

*cough* maybe it was an adventure, is all i’m saying. like maybe legend had an adventure out there, on his travels, and they weren’t such a burden on him as one may think. but i have other posts on that. this is about the master sword and so now that we have this appropriate framing of legend’s character and how our boy feels about adventure, let’s explore his feelings about the Blade of Evil’s Bane!

so—and this is funny—legend wields the “Tempered Sword” (which is just a mild upgrade of the Master Sword, so it’s still technically the master sword, just not The Master Sword, because Sky’s is all squeaky clean and fresh off the Sacred Flame). But we don’t actually see the tempered sword for a while! It’s usually not drawn on his back like Twi and Sky’s sword are, until it pops into existence for the first time on his back in mipha’s journal.

but then again, legend doesn’t have a proper sword-holding-strappy-thing and it just kind of magically floats back there but we’re not gonna question it because i’m going to assume the master sword has the same magical disappearing-reappearing properties its sheath does (WHERE DOES IT GO WHEN THE SWORD IS IN THE PEDESTAL WAITING FOR THE NEXT HERO? WHERE DOES IT COME FROM ONCE THEY HAVE IT??) anyway, now that our boy has the darned thing, he barely uses it! i mean look at this!

so legend’s GOT the master sword, but he’s not quite so reliant on it as sky is. he’ll use whichever of his items he thinks is most useful, and if that’s not the sword, he doesn’t mind one bit. it’s just another tool in his toolbox, is my point.

but he’s very good at using it! oh, look at him go! let’s just appreciate it for a moment. gosh i love him. anyway, that panel in the top left is the first time he draws it, prepared to back warriors up as he duels the shadow for the first time.

cool! so legend’s master sword is just another item at his disposal. not too special, but not too shabby, either. so what does he think about sky’s master sword?

well, he greets her like an old friend (literally, he talks to her and calls her “old girl”), is appropriately mortified when wild “breaks” her, smiles fondly at her, enthusiastically suggests they upgrade her further, yet, when se sees Sky’s Skyward Strike, he doesn’t assume it’s from the Master Sword (“whoever sent that sword beam...”). he recognized sky’s master sword as his own, as as such, assumes he already knows everything about it.

he’s convinced it’s not gonna help because his didn’t help, and even when twilight gives his explanation, he’s still not buying it. he’s still assuming he knows this blade inside and out (”yeah, yeah, but—”). speaking of, he’s dubious the master sword will work like a moon pearl. he thinks there’s any item more adept at magic-purging than the master sword, and he’s used the darned thing. this shows that his master sword is definitely far weaker than sky’s. not that he believe that yet, but still, he’d rather hunt down sky on a chance than have twi run back to camp and grab his moon pearl for him because he’s willing to test twi’s theory that their swords are different (and maybe there’s just the slightest inkling of academic curiosity in play here, too, let’s be real).

he also, i shall note, doesn’t seem surprised or upset by time’s bitterness towards the blade, evidently finding it at least somewhat understandable. neither does he resent twilight’s implication that his master sword is somehow worse than sky’s or twi’s. still, though, that expression on his face when he senses Fi’s presence in there, and the warm grin when he holds her blade as a hylian again, and the way HIS SWORD IS GLOWING TOO WHAT IS UP WITH THAT JOJO EXPLAIN PLEASE

so legend’s not quite so emotionally attached to it as sky is, though he thinks of it as an old friend—albeit one he’s known for long enough to know everything about. then he’s confronted with the fact that there’s still a substantial amount he doesn’t know about this sword, uses sky’s, and then we see him slide full-tilt into the Master Sword Fan Club

before, he was dubious the sword could solve his problem. now, he’s convinced that the sword can solve this problem. he also says things like “you don’t get it“ and “you’ve never used the master sword“ and “i can’t believe you! you’ve used the master sword! don’t you remember how powerful it–“. he’s not trying to use logic or reason, he’s just going off the overwhelming power of the blade that he encountered before. he’s held her before, twice, as we’ve mentioned, but the way she was glowing in the forest, the way she purged the shadows from his form while he was wearing his own master sword, changed his opinion so drastically that he will fight both four AND wind over this. and look at him, look how familiar he is with his own blade, how used to it he is, how many times he’s used it, how he “yea, yeah,”’s twi’s “blade of evil’s bane” speech. to be so overwhelmed by the power of sky’s version that he can’t properly articulate it but will try anyway really shows how these two blades are in whole different leagues from each other. keep in mind, also, that legend’s has been upgraded. no wonder he called a hypothetical upgrading of sky’s version an “unspeakably powerful blade.”

and that’s something neat! both legend and four had experience with dark worlds and they were both FURIOUS when they found out that that was how twi was turning into wolfie. legend was dubious that the master sword outranked his moon pearl in terms of evil-banishing and he knew how evil-banishy his evil-banishing sword was. once he used sky’s, he had no doubt that it could handle this easily. four, who’s never used either variation of this particular evil-banishing sword, is utterly unconvinced that it’s going to do anything to help (yet he’s perfectly content to hold it with a moon pearl). while legend was open to the idea, having had experience with the blade before, four shoots it down immediately (and judging by the way the four sword and its pieces get tossed around and, it doesn’t have the same gravitas as the master sword).

in fact, legend is so gung-ho about his defense of the master sword now that it takes sky himself coming in and putting a hand on his shoulder to calm him down! legend was clearly willing to accept that the sword wouldn’t solve Everything at This Exact Moment (he did run around the forest with sky cleaning out all the monsters for a while instead of rushing the sword to twilight), but it’s The Principle Of The Thing.

anyway, that’s the story of how legend, connoisseur of magical artifacts and old friend of the master sword, found his awe and respect for the Blade of Evil’s Bane rekindled quite explosively and ALSO HE AND SKY ARE PALS HAVE I MENTIONED THAT (i have actually it’s right here)

okay i have to go now bye

[sky-squido]

USING CELESTIAL NAVIGATION TO LOCATE THE KINGDOM OF HYRULE

PART TWO: The Part With Actual Celestial Navigation In It

*part one is here*

oh yeah, quick heads-up that I’m a LinkedUniverse fan, so I do make a casual reference or two to the comic and characters, but this analysis is about—and solely based on evidence present in—the games themselves. so, general LoZ fans who have no knowledge of or interest in LinkedUniverse whatsoever, this analysis is for you, too! go wild, friends!

Okay, SO! In part one, we came to one conclusion: Hyrule does in fact, slide around gratuitously between games. This is good! Because that lines up exquisitely with my celestial results. Ah jeez, now I have to figure out how to explain what I even did to get these results. Here goes!

Section Three: Explaining How, Mechanically, This Is All Going To Work

Let’s break it down into only the essential basics, the stuff I did in like the first half of the semester (this checks out, because the second half involved using the moon, stars, and planets, the motions of which are… interpreted creatively in the 3D Zeldas released thus far). Basically, it’s time to talk about the noon reduction.

(You can just skip to section four if you want the answers, but I have an excuse to ramble about my hyperfixation and I will take that, thank you very much.)

*long inhale* okay so if you drew a line from any celestial body to the center of the Earth, that line would pass through some point on the Earth’s surface. If you were to stand on that point, your object of choice would be directly over your head. The spot in which you’re standing is called the object’s geographic position. We only care about the latitude of this position (or how far north or south it is from the equator), also known as the object’s declination. On the equinoxes, the sun’s declination is zero—at noon, it passes overhead on the equator. If you were in the northern hemisphere, you could see the sun by looking in the southern sky. If you were in the southern hemisphere, you could see the sun by looking in the northern sky. Does this make sense? If it doesn’t, shout at me in the notes and I’ll draw diagrams. But yeah, this is important: If you’re north of the equator and the sun’s over the equator, you have to look south to see the sun. This is why, if you’re in the northern hemisphere, the northern sides of buildings never see sun—the sun’s always in your southern sky.

On the solstice in June (the summer solstice for all you northern-hemisphere-dwellers), the sun’s declination is 23.5°N. It’s because of the Earth’s tilt, whatever, don’t worry about it. If you’re at 23.5°N (also known as the Tropic of Cancer), the sun is directly over your head at noon, now. Equator-dwellers (and everyone else south of the tropic) have to look to their north to see the sun, everyone north of the tropic has to look south to see it. You’ll notice that when the sun is in the northern hemisphere, it makes it nice and toasty and that thing we call summer. The southern hemisphere is, at that moment, missing their sun rather fiercely and would like to not be so cold anymore. On the December solstice, (winter solstice for the northern hemisphere), the sun’s at a declination of 23.5°S, ditching the north, baking the south, equator-dwellers have to look south to see it, Tropic of Capricorn dwellers can see it directly overhead at noon, etc. etc.

So, as you’ll notice if you’re one of those clever observant types, the height of the sun at Local Apparent Noon (LAN) varies by your latitude and by the declination of the sun. What’s LAN? Great question. Basically, thanks to time zones and the sun’s inability to hold itself to a decent schedule, it doesn’t always hit its peak for the day at 12:00pm by your watch. LAN is what we call whatever time it is when the sun does hit its peak for the day. But we don’t care about times right now, just the sun’s altitude at LAN.

That’s another thing—altitude. Everything in celestial navigation is measured as an angle (even distances; ever wonder why latitude and longitude come in degrees?) which makes doing math and measurements really freaking convenient. Because of this, the height of the sun above the horizon, or its altitude, is measured as an angle: 0° means it’s on the horizon, 90° means its directly overhead, and 45° means its halfway between the two.

So, the sun’s declination varies over the course of the year between the range of 23.5°N and 23.5°S. If you know where in the world the sun is overhead (that’s declination) and you know how far the sun is from being over your head (that’s altitude), you can figure out how far you are from that place where the sun is overhead (that’s gonna give you your latitude). Clever, right? Don’t worry if you’re not retaining any of this—this is tumblr, not a textbook. I just think it’s neat.

So, if you’re following my train of logic (quite a feat, as I’m notoriously convoluted), this all means that if you know how high the sun is in the sky in a Zelda game, you can figure out at what latitude the game takes place! Kind of. We also need to know the time of year, which will tell us what the sun’s declination is. If the sun in a given game passes directly overhead at noon, we could fall anywhere in that 47° band between the tropics, depending on the time of year.

There are two problems here: firstly, how do we measure the altitude of the sun—Zelda items are very cool but none of them are sextants (sextants are basically just really fancy protractors for measuring angles in the sky) and secondly, how do we account for the fact that we don’t know what the declination of the sun is?

The first solution is honestly rather simple. We use shadows. Sun hits Link, sun hits ground, line from Link’s shadow’s head to Link’s head points to sun. You’ll see plenty of these diagrams later, so I won’t bother explaining all of it here.

The second solution is more finicky, took me weeks to figure out, and I’m still not entirely sure how it works, but I brute-forced it with my Nautical Almanac, Excel, and several hours of tedious number-wrangling. Because, while 3D Zelda games understandably make no attempt to accurately model the movement of the moon and stars (and don’t even include planets), the sun gives us another clue.

I don’t know how many people know this, but “the sun rises in the east and sets in the west” is actually an approximation. Contrary to what the 3D Zeldas would have you believe, the sun does not, in fact, rise at 090°T (directly due east) and set at 270°T (directly due west) every single day of the year. It varies, sometimes rising north of east, sometimes rising south of east. There’s an equation that takes your latitude and the declination of the sun and calculates how far away from east and west your sunrise and sunset are, but that’s not actually useful here, because, as I alluded to previously, Zelda games don’t account for this. Fortunately, there’s another clue! I wonder if any of you are mentally shouting it at me right now. Spoiler alert: It’s the length of day and night! Is day longer than night? The sun’s closer to you (northern declination, which means northern hemisphere summer). Is night longer than day? The sun’s farther away from you (southern declination, which means northern hemisphere winter).

The really really nice thing about using the sun’s altitude at LAN and the length of the day and night is that between the two of them, we have almost all the information we need to get a solid fix on when and where these games take place. And the second nice thing about this is that, unlike the sun always rising and setting exactly due east and west, the sun’s noon height and day length vary appreciably and reasonably between games! …mostly.

To compile all this nonsense into something practical, here’s the plan: we crack open a 3D Zelda game, wait for the sun to rise and then we start a timer. See if the sun, after rising in the east, scoots to the north or the south or heads straight overhead. Now we know what hemisphere we’re in (give or take). Wait until LAN (the sun is always either directly due north or due south during LAN, because it rises in the east and sets in the west and it’s all symmetric and stuff) and then we snap a picture of our boy and his shadow. Wait until sunset and then lap the timer. Spend the night cycle screaming over how screwed up the moon and constellations are, then bop the timer once the sun rises. Now we know how long the day/night cycle is and what fraction of that day is spent in the sunlight. We do math to figure out how many hours long the day and night would be if the day/night cycle were actually 24 hours long. Then we grab that picture we snapped at LAN, literally just measure the angle with a digital protractor because trying to take the distances and do trig is way too much work and honestly probably less accurate, and then BAM, we’ve got everything we need to massively narrow down our game to a specific latitude and one of two possible dates. I say two possible dates because the sun hits a given declination twice a year—once between the equinox and the solstice, and then again when it doubles back to head to the next equinox. If that doesn’t make sense, think about the fact that the day before the solstice and the day after the solstice are both the same length. Cool? Cool.

Alright, let’s see what happens when we actually try this!

 Part Four: Finally Getting to the Gosh Darn Freaking Point of All This

Sorry Leg, Four, and Rulie, but your games aren’t going to be very helpful here cuz we get to see neither the sky nor any pronounced shadows cast by stuff in the sky, so you’re off the hook.

Of the remaining Zelda games, Termina doesn’t actually take place in this dimension, but hey, maybe it’s somewhere neat! We might as well.

Okay, so we’ve got six canon 3D Zeldas. (Yeah, sorry both Hyrule Warriors’s (even though one of you is apparently canon), I couldn’t be bothered to actually boot you up and start measuring angles—doing these ones was enough work already and you don’t even have day/night cycles).

Of the six Zeldas I am using, all of them have day/night cycles except for one, Skyward Sword. As much as I’d like to slap it on the pole and say the entire game takes place near the solstice, celestial nights do in fact demonstrably exist, they’re just not looped into the gameplay, so we’ll have to figure something out.

Of the five remaining Zelda games, two of them feature in-universe clocks—which isn’t actually all that useful anyway, since longitude is way more arbitrary than latitude and I don’t know where Hyrule keeps its prime meridian—and those are Breath of the Wild and Majora’s Mask. The final three Zeldas—Wind Waker, Ocarina of Time, and Twilight Princess—have day/night cycles that just loop evenly along time spent in the overworld, which is handy.

Okay, so let’s do this!

Ocarina of Time: Our day lasts 2 minutes and 40 seconds and our night lasts 1 minute and 20 seconds. The full day/night cycle takes 4 minutes. 2 minutes and 40 seconds is actually exactly two-thirds of 4 minutes, so we can just apply that to 24 hours and BAM, we get a 16-hour day and 8-hour night. Those of you living in Canada, Northern Europe, and Patagonia are familiar with this phenomenon. And, when Link is both a child and when he’s an adult, the sun’s altitude at LAN is 70°. 

Now let’s plug these two data points into the chart I bruteforced! Isn’t she pretty? I love her

Okay, so it’s kind of just outside the range of what’s possible—for a day that long to happen, you have to be pretty far from the equator. But, when you get that close to a pole, the sun doesn’t get all too high in the sky. We can give Nintendo a few degrees of wiggle room, though, and put Ocarina of Time on the summer solstice (June 21st) at 47°N. Wow! And those seven years he’s asleep for are exactly seven years because it’s still the solstice when he wakes up. 47°N is, for context, about the latitude of Seattle (Washington, USA), Munich (Germany), and Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia).

This is the most straightforward of all the Zelda games we’re going to cover. Majora’s Mask is exciting because Termina is a hellhole so we’ll skip to…

Wind Waker: Day: 5.5 minutes. Night: 4.5 minutes. Full cycle: 10 minutes. If 10 minutes became 24 hours, 5.5 minutes would become 13 hours and 12 minutes! The sun at LAN gets up to 54°

 Now let’s plug that bad boy in—I’ll just use the version of the chart with all the games already on it to save space (sorry for the spoilers, I know you must be heartbroken).

So, that puts Wind Waker at a comfy 44°N in either early April or September. Wondering where those dates came from? Every little dot on this chart is a data point, and every one of those is from the 21st of a month, either March (the spring equinox), April, May, or June (the summer solstice (in the northern hemisphere)). Then you can just interpolate between them. So if Wind Waker lands between my solstice dot and the one next to it, it’s near the solstice, but on the summery side, so very early September or early-mid April. No Zelda games have nights longer than days, but if that were the case, you’d just read the X-axis’ “Length of Day” as length of night and the points to the far right would represent the winter solstice instead of the summer one. Don’t worry if this doesn’t make sense to you—this barely makes sense to me and I’m the one who made it.

But now we’ve gotten ourselves in a little pickle—is it April or September? You could use whatever in-game clues you’d like to try and figure this out, or research the prevailing winds and ideal sailing seasons at the relevant latitude, but I’ll be going off of celestial cues to the best of my ability, so here goes!

April. It’s April. Wind’s birthday is probably like April 9th or something and I like that a lot. Fits his vibes. How did I figure this? Well, let’s start by taking a look at the night sky:

Yeah, okay, it’s fricked. I’m not gonna get into into why the moon is so bad in every Zelda game, but this article does a good job of explaining it. All the nonsense that happens in there applies to Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, too—Ocarina of Time doesn’t have any moon phases, which is probably a good thing. Skyward Sword has its own issues and you don’t need me to tell you that the moon in Majora’s Mask is a problem.

Orion, however, offers us a clue. This little lad pops up in Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, and for some reason, Majora’s Mask. I couldn’t find him in Ocarina of Time’s sky, but I think I found Cassiopeia and the Summer Triangle. It’s not like any of this matters that much, cuz the stars are fricked in all the games and positioned in direct contradiction to the sun and also each other, but if we have two dates and we’re just trying to pick between them, we might as well give Orion his time in the spotlight.

Again, I’m not sure how many people know this, but the stars move over the course of a year and over the course of a night. They move a lot every night (about sixteen degrees an hour—just a little faster than the sun), and, since they’re speedy little fellas, they get just a little further along their path every night. This means—and I’m really sorry to all the fanfic authors who use this as a plot device in their fics—that you can’t just look up and know where and when you are. If you know when you are (exactly, like in time to the minute), you can guesstimate the where, and vice versa. My final project for this class was actually trying to see if I could figure out both when I knew neither, and the answer is yes, but it takes a lot of work and finagling and also you need to know what year it is and have a lot of celestial information about that year in particular. If any of you suddenly have a hankering for a fic in which the LinkedUniverse boys freak out over being celestially disoriented from both the time and location changes, stay tuned ;)

Okay, so my point is that if the stars are just up there, frozen in the sky, like they are in all the 3D Zeldas, it gets tricky to figure out what time of year it is. I mean, we could just… assume these are their midnight positions? Spoiler: it doesn’t actually matter because the stars are all fricked to heck anyway. We just need one little pointer to try and figure out which of the two possible dates we ended up with.

Slight tangent, but of all the constellations, why do they insist on putting Orion of all people in all their games. He’s a winter constellation! All the Zelda games take place in or near summer! I mean, yes, he’s a summer constellation for the southern hemisphere, but most games don’t take place down there! Does Nintendo have some sort of personal beef with Altair, Vega, and Deneb that I don’t know about? Are they a joke to you??

*cough* Anyway. Orion in Wind Waker is visible in the southwestern sky. Were it September, Orion would rise pretty late in the night, coming up in the east, and he’d scoot his way through the southern sky, but just after he crosses the meridian (due south) and is about to head into the southwestern sky, the sun rises and we can’t see him anymore. That’s no good! How about April? Well, yeah actually! The sun sets, and, blinking into view on the meridian is Orion, scooting through the southwestern sky before eventually setting at about midnight. So, Wind Waker probably takes place in early April at a latitude of 44°N!

But Squido! I hear you shouting, doesn’t the game take time for Wind to beat? And isn’t Hyrule big enough to span multiple lines of latitude? You were just talking about how big it was in part one of this post series! You can’t seriously be suggesting that the entire game takes place on a single day at a single latitude! And to that I say, you are, indeed, correct. This measurement can’t possibly apply to all of Wind Waker, just as my previous assessment can’t possibly apply to all of Ocarina of Time.

My solution? Hand-wave it. Seriously, Nintendo is not programming a fully accurate year-long celestial cycle that tracks the number of in-game days since you started and changes the positions of the stars and everything by your latitude. That would be badass, but hardware limitations are a thing and Nintendo has its priorities (somewhat) straight. We can say my calculation represents the starting point in time because I still like Wind having an early April birthday and this gives him the whole summer to adventure around while the daylight hours are long. We can say the latitude in question is, I dunno, towards the top of the map. There’s palm trees around, so I hesitate to put us any further north than the 44°N I calculated. That is about the latitude of Toronto (Canada), Milan (Italy), and Sapporo (Japan) after all. Maybe that’s the upper bound of the map. I honestly don’t think it’s that important.

Twilight Princess: We’re old hats at this by now! Day: 8 minutes. Night: also 8 minutes. We’ve got ourselves an equinox—12 hours of each! LAN altitude is 55°, so that puts us at a lovely 35°N in either late March or September. 

Orion is in the southeastern sky so, as I said in the Wind Waker portion, that would make sense in September. So it’s September 21st! It find it fitting that a game about the balance between light and dark takes place at the time of year when light and dark are perfectly balanced. This latitude, for context, is about the same as Charlotte (North Carolina, USA), Albuquerque (New Mexico, USA), Tehran (Iran), and Osaka (Japan). I always knew he was a southern boy.

Breath of the Wild: Yeah, I was going in chronological order by release date, but Skyward Sword doesn’t have a day/night cycle and that complicates things, so I’ll just do Breath of the Wild now while we’re in the groove and—hey, isn’t that spunky! The sun and moon pass through the northern sky, did you ever notice that? That means this game takes place in the southern hemisphere! And not just any ol’ southern hemisphere latitude, it freaking commits. I mean, you ever notice how long those sunrises and sunsets always seem to last? How the game seems to draw out dawn and dusk as much as possible to minimize how much time you spend trying to find your way around in the dark? Well, that’s because Breath of the Wild has a seventeen hour day! How exciting! The sun rises at 0400 (4am) and sets at 2100 (9pm). Its LAN altitude is a groovy little 43°, leaving us at a latitude of 63°S in early either February or November (this is the southern hemisphere, so these are summery months now).

(oh yeah, my Switch is modded so I can play as Zelda instead of Link—it’s called Zelda’s Ballad and it’s pretty sick. My awesome little sister set it up for me :3)

And wow, if 63°S isn’t an exciting latitude. That’s level with *checks notes* Ross Island, Antarctica!! Wait, what? Yeah, Breath of the Wild takes place in Antarctica, apparently. I wonder if the Sheikah tech holding the moon in place is also responsible for the climate control.

But yeah, I looked real hard, and found something that I thought might be Orion, but I’m honestly not convinced. If it were him, he’d be in the western sky, which would check out for February but not November. The trees in Akkala have red leaves, which could mean fall (which, in the south, would make it February), but then again, I hesitate to take ecological cues from trees that are apparently growing in Antarctica. A spring month fits with the themes of the game—rebirth, life rising from desolation—and that would mean November. I dunno, this one’s up to the Zelda Lore Afficionados.

Majora’s Mask: Yeah, you know it’s all going to hjeck when I put Skyward Sword off because the alternate dimension in which the moon is crashing into the planet and you’re forced into a time loop is easier to do celestial navigation to than Skyward Sword is. Here’s the scoop:

Sun rises and sets at 0600 and 1800 (6 am and pm) so that’s another 12 hour day. But the sun is really overhead-y. Like, 80° overhead. That puts us in the tropics, so there’s actually a few latitudes and dates we could be at. We could be at 10°N on the equinoxes—in late March or September—or we could on the equator, 0°N, in mid April or August. This is pure conjecture, but I feel like the equator is oddly fitting for this game. A liminal space between hemispheres, where the normal rules don’t always apply…

But, when I was looking for other clues, I found something very fun. Okay, so you know how I said the sky is fricked, right?

Like, okay, we have some familiar friends, but you can see that they’re all screwy. The angle between the Big Dipper’s pointer stars towards Polaris and Orion are an acute angle in Majora’s Mask and an obtuse angle in real life. And why are they so close to each other?! It’s just… so weird. But anyway, here’s where it gets funky. The sun passed to our south at LAN, so we know we have to be north of it, though just barely. We’re either on the equator or north of it but then… Orion is to our north. Orion is directly over the celestial equator, which means he’s like the sun on the equinox—if you have to look north to see him, you’re in the southern hemisphere. So we must be in the southern hemisphere, even though I just said we were in either in the northern hemisphere or on the equator. As if that wasn’t bad enough, if you look at the Big Dipper’s orientation, the pointer stars that point towards Polaris are pointing over our head! Even if the star I circled isn’t actually Polaris, the real Polaris would have to be somewhere around there. Which means, since Polaris is the pole star and the whole point of it is that it’s directly over the north pole, to have Polaris directly over our head means we’re on the north pole. We are in the southern hemisphere and on the equator and on the North Pole. No wonder the moon got sick of us and wanted us gone.

Speaking of the Big Dipper and Polaris real quick, Wind Waker actually has a refreshingly accurate depiction of them. The Big Dipper is angled a little funny for this time of year, but eh, it all works out. You can see that the direction that the pointer stars are indicating that Polaris is in is actually to the north! That’s pretty neat! Polaris is also at about the right height, give or take, that it should be for the latitude we calculated. So hooray for Wind Waker!

  Skyward Sword: So. Uh. This went downhill very quickly. I was like “hey, maybe the sun is just frozen in its LAN position cuz it doesn’t move, right?” WRONG. If it were LAN, the sun would be directly due north or due south. But NOPE, it’s to the southeast. That means its still morning. At least, when we’re in Skyloft. When we go to Faron, the sun’s due west. Eldin? Southwest! Lanayru? North of west. But wait, you may be thinking, this is handy! We get a few snapshots over the course of a day, and we can put them together to get a feel for what a day looks like here, right? WRONG!

I tried that. You know what I got?

THAT’S NOT HOW THE SUN WORKS!!!! That looks nothing like either a sine wave or a parabola. But I was like, you know what, maybe it’s okay, maybe my puny mortal mind cannot comprehend this. Let’s let Excel work its magic and give me a parabola.

Okay, that’s not too terrible, we’ve got an LAN height of like 55°, which is workable. Hey, now that I think about it, what if we extended this parabola to find out where the altitude is zero! We’d basically get the compass directions in which the sun rises and sets, and I mentioned earlier that I can use that to calculate latitude and declination! So let’s just extend this little parabola here…

nOPE! Here, let me try to explain why this is so bad. You could make a chart where you graphed the sun’s altitude on the Y-axis and the sun’s azimuth, or the compass direction you’d have to face to stare straight at it, on the X-axis. You’d have a graph that intersects the X-axis twice, once at near 090°T and another at somewhere around 270°T. When it gets to the meridian, or 180°T, that’s where your peak, or LAN, would be. This graph does not do that. The sun is modestly in the sky to your north. The sun climbs, passing to your east, and then to your south. It hits its peak just after passing the meridian (that’s not how the sun works?? That’s not how any of this works?!??) and then begins to fall a little as it slopes to the west. It passes west, though, scooting through the northwestern sky before passing north again and continuing to circle towards the east, gradually making its way down to the horizon just before completing its second full rotation around the entire sky.

I joked briefly before about Skyward Sword being at the north pole in the summer so the sun never sets, but that actually seems to be the case?? At latitudes like that in the summer months, the sun can do a lap or two around the sky before touching the horizon. This wouldn’t be a huge problem, if for the fact that you can sleep until nightfall. Which could mean Link passes out for anywhere from a full day to a number of months. Does daytime come back around again? We’ve returned to another one of these strange infinite days, which means that Link has slept for approximately ONE ENTIRE YEAR. I know everyone calls him a sleepyhead, but that’s a bit much, don’t you think?

Furthering my hypothesis that Skyward Sword takes place uncomfortably close to the North Pole, there’s Polaris! Nice and high in the sky, so we must be close to the place where it is overhead—the North Pole. BUT WAIT! What direction is Polaris in? It couldn’t possibly be to the north, could it? No, the north star? In the north?? No, Skyward Sword got it right when it put Polaris IN the SOUTHEAST?!!??!!

Orion is just vibing up there at if we’re comfortably close to the equator, but no, that can’t be the case.

ALSO! I’ve been ignoring the moons cuz they’re all wonky, but THE MOON IN SKYWARD SWORD IS DIRECTLY DUE NORTH!

WE ARE NEAR THE NORTH POLE AND THE MOON IS TO OUR NORTH. For those of you unaware, the moon tends to stick to the same path as the sun, just that what the sun does in a year, the moon does in a month. The sun is never, ever, ever overhead at the North Pole, SO NEITHER SHOULD THE MOON BE!

The only possible explanation?

SKYWARD SWORD TAKES PLACE IN TERMINA.

You ever notice just how big the moon is in Skyward Sword? Yeah. Yeah, me too.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

To summarize: Ocarina of Time: 47°N, Summer Solstice (June 21st) Wind Waker: 44°N, early April Twilight Princess: 35°N, late September Breath of the Wild: 63°S, November or February Majora’s Mask: 0°N (maybe), mid April or August Skyward Sword: Who Freaking Knows

[sky-squido]

hey important question:

would people actually be interested in reading a fic where wind and legend bond very wholesomely (literally starting out hating each other but then they get really close and it’s adorable) but also i shamelessly explain the entirety of how to celestially navigate in extreme detail?

cuz i just wanted to just have a fun fic where the two bond over both knowing how to navigate, but also each of them gets super disoriented and panicked by one thing they’re not familiar with (time travel, new hemisphere, etc.) and then the other helps them out, and it was gonna be short and simple and straightforward, but that would be incredibly self-indulgent because literally nobody would be able to read it!

like. i want to write this fic. but i could go about this in two ways. one is the inaccessibly self-indulgent way where legend would be like “hey, you can’t get your longitude when you don’t know universal time, and you don’t, because we’ve just time AND space traveled, so our chronometers are completely desynced and the prime meridian is arbitrarily located” and wind would be like “bish, you don’t know ANYTHING—watch me do this lunar distance calculation” and legend would be like “whaaaat? i didn’t know that was a thing” and wind would be like “yeah it’s super hot and sexy but it also requires you having an estimation of your longitude to at least fifteen degrees, and we don’t“ and then legend would be like “so if we just had an estimate of our longitude to fifteen degrees, you’d be good?” and wind would be like “yeah.” and legend would go and figure some stuff out and then come back like “WIND DUDE I GOT IT!!! i did manage to estimate our longitude by taking the magnetic azimuth of rigel during its meridian passage and then using that to calculate the local magnetic variation and cross-referencing THAT against this global variation chart, and by using the latitude we calculated during the noon reduction, we can narrow it down to an area—a relatively broad area, but one we can dramatically narrow down with the lunar distance calculation“ and then wind would be like “woah that’s so clever legend you’re such a genius“ and legend would be like “aw, but i couldn’t have done it without your insane book filled with logarithms that terrifies me to the bone but that you somehow actually know how to use” and wind would be like “dude it’s literally just basic arithmetic, chill,” but legend is hissing like a feral cat and it would be so so fun!!

right, like i think this stuff is SO COOL and it makes me SUPER HAPPY and i wanted to share it in fic form, but that meant making sure people could actually understand what these nerds were talking about without needing to consult a massive explanatory tumblr post, so i was trying to naturally integrate the background information into the dialogue and narration and now i’m thirteen thousand words in and i’m still like “wait, i want to talk about—but first i have to explain—and have i seriously not explained what declination is yet??”

like, i don’t care about this fic being Objectively Good or whatever—there’s a story i want to tell, but i want to tell it in a way people can understand, and that involves explaining my hyperfixation in tons of detail. believe me, i love doing it, i’m just beginning to seriously doubt that anyone is actually going to be able to suffer through this fic and i don’t want to keep going through the effort to explain everything if nobody is actually going to read it except for me, who already knows everything. it’s also really really hard for me to figure out if i’m explaining this stuff well or not because i already understand it and everyone else in my life has had me scream at them about this stuff enough that they know the basics and the terminology.

so, help please!! if you’d wanna read this, please tell me so in the tags (or i guess you could just like the post if you’re shy). if you’d read it, but you don’t actually care if i explain everything and you’d prefer i sacrifice giving you literally any idea what wind and legend are talking about in favor of not wrecking the pacing entirely, please let me know in the notes. if you wanna try beta-reading this thing for comprehensibility, hit me up on discord (@Sky-Squido#4521) and i’ll smack whatever the most recent version of the word doc is and the associated 26d12 psychic damange into your dms.

thanks, guys, and happy new year! i’ll be updating my annual new years fic tonight ^^

[sky-squido]

Where in the World is the Kindgom of Hyrule?  PART ONE

Alright buckle up, friends—this one’s gonna get absolutely, utterly, wildly out of hand very quickly.

 Section One: The Dream

So recently, someone made the mistake of teaching me how to navigate celestially and we were talking about all the differences between how the sky behaves in the northern and southern hemispheres and I, proudly having absolutely nothing inside of my brain except for LinkedUniverse for almost two and a half years now, thought to myself: hey! Wouldn’t it be funny if one of the LU boys was from the southern hemisphere and all the others had never left the northern hemisphere? The first boy to pop into my head for this was Wind because he, being a sailor, would almost definitely have the best grasp on celestial out of the whole gang and that way he could use a bunch of nautical navigation terms when he freaks out and nobody would have any idea what he’s saying.

I mean, imagine, right, he gets to another Hyrule and he’s got this navigation stuff down pat and while you could do celestial navigation without knowing the earth is round (as far as I can tell, we have no indication the Mayans or Polynesians knew the earth was round, but they were epic celestial navigators), knowing the earth is round is really very handy and we’ve known the darned thing’s circumference for literal millennia. So, since Wind clearly has latitude and longitude lines on his map and those are defined by angles around the earth’s curvature (none of those lines are curved though, so smh my head Wind uses the Mercator projection (to be fair, most navigators do, too, because it makes drawing rhumb lines really easy, but I digress)), homeboy knows the earth is round. And also, I mean, have you seen the Wii U box art?

Anyway, my point is that a southern hemisphere Wind would know that a northern hemisphere exists he and could totally logically deduce how stuff would behave there, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t freak him the FRICK out, especially before he fully figured out what was going on, because supposedly, he’s still in Hyrule, just an earlier one, and he was right above Hyrule, so how the heck could this be in a different hemisphere?

It was at this point that I realized why my fun little idea wouldn’t work—they’re all from Hyrule. It’s the same place, just at different times, and so, if the Kingdom of Hyrule has any internal logic or consistency, it’s all just gonna be the same place so my silly joke wouldn’t make sense.

But then, I realized, the Kingdom of Hyrule doesn’t have any internal logic or consistency! Not only does the map’s basic geography change quite dramatically between games, but it’s full of locations that are quite explicitly meant to be the same ones from prior games, yet their relative positions to each other vary wildly (believe me, we are going to get to this).

Fortunately, we know a truly, insanely, staggeringly massive amount of time has passed between games. I mean, Wild’s Hyrule has lore that, ten thousand years ago, Calamity Ganon got yeeted by tech we don’t even remotely recognize from any of the earlier games, meaning all the other eras are far older than that. For context, 10,000 years from today humans were just starting to figure out how farming worked. If Nintendo is going to casually throw a ten thousand year long timeskip into their silly little timeline, then maybe we can account for all this wacky location shifting with some clever geographical wrangling. I mean, the kingdom of Hyrule is and always has been a big hot mess and if magic exists, ten thousand years is an acceptable amount of time to toss around between games, and *stares pointedly at Tears of the Kingdom trailers* then maybe we can reconcile all of this.

 Section Two: The Little Adventure

I really like that phrase, “little adventure.” I’ve started using it whenever something mundane goes wrong or unexpectedly somehow, like “I’m going to have to walk a whole mile to get back home and it’s raining and I forgot my umbrella? Welp, guess it’s time for a little adventure!”

Yeah, that’s an apt phrase to use here, I think.

Because, like, okay, I know 10k years is like no time at all, geologically, so mountain ranges aren’t popping up and scooting away willy nilly, but we’ve gotta account for canon-typical shenaniganery. So generally, we have Hyrule castle in the middle, a volcanoes somewhere up, a sand somewhere left, and a woods somewhere right (I refrain from using such terms as north, east, south, and west because while the maps all have little compass roses on them and there are compasses in the games, magnetic-true variation is a very big deal, the magnetic poles wiggle around and even fully reverse sometimes, and I have my reservations about trusting Hyrule’s royal cartographers too much. Very soon, you will too). Because even that basic outline of Hyrule is subject to change. Take Twilight Princess, for example. Even if you use the GameCube version, where Gerudo Desert is to the left of the castle, like it should be, Death Mountain is to the right of the castle, not up. Since the forest is straight down, though, we could just be like “oh lol whoops guess the magnetic pole took a hike, let’s just rotate the map an entire forty-five degrees because the Kingdom of Hyrule decides to make all of its maps using magnetic north for some unholy reason.” And I mean, that’s fair game, right? Sure.

This strategy doesn’t hold up for very long.

I mean, I’m looking at broad trends here, right. I’m already assuming nothing is drawn to scale (and they clearly aren’t to scale even when the maps are literally rips of the world like for Legend’s games because I refuse to believe that Hyrule Castle and Kakariko village account for one-quarter of Hyrule’s land area). We’ve all seen those ridiculously inaccurate old maps from ages ago in our own history—there’s a lot of room for error here. I’m already assuming every distance and position and landform is an artistic abstraction and I’m also generously overcompensating for hardware limitations and the fact that Nintendo did not know they were going to try and connect all of these games decades later and was just focused on making fun, interesting, stand-alone adventures. You can keep building your one town in different locations with completely different architectural styles but give it the same name every time just to be cute. You can rebuild your castle regularly in all sorts of different spots without leaving any trace of the original. The Lost Woods can just grow legs and run around wherever they want to because the whole point of the Lost Woods is that the rules of space and object permanence don’t apply to them. We can throw around ten thousand years like it’s nothing. I’m trying to be as charitable as humanly possible. I literally do not care about the minutiae I literally just want the barest, vaguest outline of what the heck this landmass is doing on only the broadest of scales. I want this to work. I’m ignoring virtually everything about the terrain at this point, only using the locations that are canonically the same ones as from other games and allowing for incredible amounts of drift in where these things physically are.

But like—Breath of the Wild insisted on being cute and having that statue of Hylia that ended up in the Sealed Grounds in Skyward Sword be buried in the Forgotten Temple. Nice! Why is it in the top-left corner of the map?! What’s that, Hyrule just expanded out in a different direction and most of Skyward Sword takes place farther to the left than this map shows? Cute, but the Sacred Springs, clearly designed specifically to be the same ones from Skyward Sword, are all along the right side of the map! Like, sure, maybe the Skyview Spring being the Spring of Courage in Faron Woods all checks out and the second spring is in Eldin and Akkala is pretty close to Eldin, so fine, Spring of Power gets a free pass. And, again, we can fudge stuff—Skyward Sword’s map is for artistic purposes, not navigation, so maybe it’s only vaguely accurate. There’s some nebulous unmapped space between Faron and Eldin and we can just… assume there’s mountains there and that whatever pre-Skyward Sword civilization was kicking around building these things tossed a spring up there and Zelda just ~didn’t have to go there~ to get her Goddess powers back because we never saw the Spring of Wisdom in Skyward Sword. Fine.

Maybe the massive Goddess Statue and Sealed-Grounds-looking temple up in Tabantha are just a different temple in a similar style. Fine, okay, and Breath of the Wild and Skyward Sword are the most incomprehensively far apart of any of these games—clearly the only reason the springs survived this long was the fact that they’re sacred.

[Digression time! It’s time for a little adventure where I ramble about the Sacred Springs! It’s not really relevant, but it sure is neat!]

Because if the same springs are in both Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild, that then implies that they were lurking around in every other era but, acknowledging real life chronology issues, obviously these springs weren’t in the previous games. If we’re willing to ignore cold hard canon to pretend this is a world that really exists, though, which is way more fun, then those springs should still exist and that would be a really fun thing to have the boys stumble upon! Just in case any enterprising fic authors were looking for neat ideas I can tell you where they are, but where they all fall depends on how you decide to line up the maps. As previously established, there’s buckets of drift and inaccuracy, and I’ll get into my own mega-compilation-map after this digression is over, but if you want to just vibe and just stick to the general area and biome (like Nintendo themselves) here’s how you do it:

Courage goes in any forest in the bottom or right, power goes in any hot mountain at the top or the right, and the center of the rightmost part of a Zelda map—the part between the volcano and the forest—is always either unmapped somehow or contains at least one significant area of higher elevation, so just slap the Spring of Wisdom there. It even works for Minish Cap! If you wanna play really fast and loose with exact locations of things and the border of the kingdom and also completely ignore the castle, as I’ve been doing, Minish Cap’s map is just the righthand side of Hyrule rotated like forty-five degrees. Hot mountain up, water to the right, green in the middle and the bottom right. Works out nicely with Skyward Sword to have Lake Hylia there in the forest on the right instead of at the center bottom, and Veil Falls and the Cloud Tops could fall right in that unmapped space between Eldin and Faron, so that’s totally a valid spot to put the Spring of Widsom. (there’s actually a lot of unmapped space in Zelda games once you start looking for it and having fics take place in those areas where the boys can then stumble upon relics of older eras would actually be so badass I’d actually love to see that happen in fics).

For Ocarina of Time, the Spring of Courage would be in the Kokiri Forest or Lost Woods, up to you, Power goes up on Death Mountain, and Wisdom’s in Zora’s River/Domain. For Wind Waker, you can put Courage in the Forest Haven, Power in either Dragon Roost or Fire Mountain, and Wisdom can go on any island between the two or just end up underwater for a hot minute (it’s not like that’s gonna ruin it—it’s supposed to be wet). For aLttP/ALBW, Courage goes down by Lake Hylia, Power’s up on Death Mountain again, and if you don’t want to use Zora’s Domain, we can retcon that the Spring of Wisdom wasn’t in Zora’s Domain in Time’s era, it was in that little unmapped sliver between Zora’s Domain and the foresty area, so now we can slap the spring of Wisdom somewhere around or just past the right side of the Eastern Palace/Eastern Ruins. Isn’t this fun? For Twilight Princess, we already have sacred springs, but these are different ones—by now it’s probably been a few geological epochs since Skyward Sword, so they’re allowed to make some new springs. The old ones still have to be kicking around, though, and Twilight Princess’ map has a delightful amount of uncharted territory so we can toss them in Faron, Eldin, and that mysterious space directly between the two of them.

[Okay, digression over!]

I mean, this is fun, and if the vague suggestion of similar biomes is all we needed to line up all these maps into one cohesive Hyrule, that would be great. But it’s not. There are a few locations that absolutely must line up across games, and they ruin everything. Like, okay, I’m going to start sounding completely feral with rage, but I’m not actually mad at Nintendo. They’re making good games and I’m trying to do something very silly to their games and I knew it wouldn’t work out before I even started. I’m just so incredibly theatrically frustrated by how close it is to actually working until some random detail gets thrown in and it’s always exactly the one thing that would break everything.

Let’s start with some neat ones that do kind of work, though. Positivity! We know that, in Wind Waker, Hyrule Castle and the Deku Tree are the same ones as in Ocarina of Time. If we overlay the maps so these two points line up, we see that Wind Waker is so much bigger than Ocarina of Time and I love that. The ocean should be huge, way bigger than the kingdom, and that means we can end up playing with some navigational stuff, it’s just that Wind won’t be the one freaking out, everyone else will be, because if they go to the right spot in his era, they’ll be dealing with weird latitudes they’re not used to (yeah, remember when this essay was about celestial navigation? Me neither). The only problem here is that to get them to line up, you have to rotate them. So yeah, magnetic north can just trek forty-five degrees to the right and everyone will ignore this fact and continue to make maps in magnetic north for some reason. This is fine.

Honestly, the most consistent feature of Hyrule is the volcanic hotspot. There’s always one there, it’s almost always in a comparable spot, and unlike deserts, which can totally change over pretty short periods of time, hotspots are very reliable and locationally stable irl. I mean, even as the continental plates shift, the hotspot doesn’t. That’s why Hawai’i is shaped the way it is—the hotspot sprouts a volcano, the plates move, it sprouts another, rinse and repeat until you’ve drawn a little line of lava across the ocean. So if we line up all the volcanic areas over the Hylian Hot Spot and do only the minimal amount of rotation necessary to get everything else to roughly align, we can draw some cool connections.

For example, we established how Wind Waker and Ocarina of Time’s Hyrules align. But then in Wind Waker there’s a side quest where you plant a bunch of new Deku sprouts to help spread the forest. If we line up the volcanic hotspots between Breath of the Wild’s map and Wind Waker’s, we can scoot and pivot around and match up all the seedlings to see which one most likely started the line that Breath of the Wild’s Deku Tree comes from (because again, ten thousand years). It’s the Deku Sprout on Eastern Fairy Island! That… actually works out shockingly well. North is the same between Wind Waker and Breath of the Wild and even Hyrule castle is in the right spot! I also love how Breath of the Wild’s world is only a little bigger than Ocarina of Time’s and Wind Waker dwarfs the both of them—that’s absolutely correct; you cover so much more ground sailing than on foot. Why the magnetic pole shifted more in the few centuries between Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker (so much of Old Hyrule is still alive so I refuse to believe it’s been more than a thousand years between the two of them) than it did in the canonical OVER TEN THOUSAND YEARS between Wind Waker and Breath of the Wild baffles me, but hey, maybe the magnetic pole yeeting across the earth’s surface is a side-effect of Ganon taking power, however briefly. But wait, then shouldn’t it have shifted again in Breath of the Wild, since he won for a minute there? Augh whatever.

Okay, you may be wondering why I’m making such a fuss about where north is on these maps. After all, directions are relative and constructs and it was convention to put south at the tops of maps for a lot of people at different times and places. Yes, that’s all correct and I really wouldn’t have the slightest problem with any which orientation if they didn’t say north ON THE MAP!! And locations have names like “east” and “west” and they’ll say “go south of—” and these are not abstractions! North means closer to one of the axes around which the earth turns, around which the stars and sun and planets revolve. Moving up and down along a given line between these two poles means you’re on a given line of longitude so the sun always reaches its highest point at the same time, east and west mean along lines of constant latitude, where the sun’s highest point on any given day is the same—these directions are not arbitrarily defined!! You can’t just decide to put north somewhere else! You can have true north (the direction to the geographic north pole, the place where all lines of longitude converge and the sun goes around the horizon in a circle on the equinoxes, making a 24 hour sunset, and the pole star stands still overhead) and magnetic north (the place where magnetic compasses point, which is different than true north and moves kind of a surprising amount, but is only really relevant because compasses point there and also the auroras are centered on them too, which is cool), and that’s it! Those are the norths!! Don’t make up new norths!!!

And I said magnetic north moves, and it does, like 25 miles a year, and if we’re dealing with the timescale of thousands of years, that’s gonna add up.

SO WHY ARE YOU MAKING YOUR MAPS USING MAGNETIC NORTH?! NOBODY USES MAGNETIC NORTH TO DRAW MAPS—magnetic north, as previously established, moves a lot and you don’t want to have to redraw all your maps every year! Why would you do that instead of using the permanent geographical constant that’s easier to calculate because you can use the definite motion of the stars that can be measured to a fraction of a minute (up to a half mile of accuracy anywhere in the globe!) and not a wibbly, imprecise compass needle that’s only ever accurate to about half a degree—which translates to thirty nautical miles when you start trying to figure out where you are with it (nautical miles are bigger than normal miles).

But anyway. Hylian royal cartographers clearly have no idea what they’re doing.

And this is when things start making even less sense.

Because why, why on earth do the two eras who are the most insistent on being canonical neighbors have the least compatible maps?! Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess want me dead in a ditch. The Temple of Time in Twilight Princess goes to great lengths to Be The One From Ocarina of Time. Great! Why the frick is it at the bottom of the map?! The Temple of Time couldn’t be any farther up on Ocarina of Time’s map. We could try just rotating the map because maybe it was that time of the geological epoch and the magnetic poles reversed, but now the desert’s on the right side and it’s always on the left side! If anything, the right side is either mountains or ocean! Definitely not a desert. Not allowed. But what if we used the other version of Twilight Princess’ map—the mirror image flippy one from the Wii version!!! Because this makes sense!!!—and pretend the magnetic pole just happened to invert between these two games and that Hyrule’s cartography division is smoking crack and convinced that orienting all your maps towards magnetic north with no indication that true north even exists is the best way of doing things. Fine. Now Kokiri forest ends up in either Zora’s Domain or Snowpeak and the Hidden Village, which is supposedly the Kakariko from Ocarina of Time, turns out to have once been Zora’s Domain.

And that’s not even the worst offender! I’m already ignoring the frick out of the Four Swords games, but the first two Zelda games?

Like, look, I know I said I was giving a pass for hardware limitations and the irl game chronology but come on—it’s the same guy, it’s the same kingdom, and you didn’t even try to make them match up! Like maybe Zelda 1 can be given a pass because it has that same basic scaffold of mountain up, desert left, forest right, but then Zelda 2’s map is just the biggest pile of mayhem and I wouldn’t be bothered if it wasn’t explicitly the same kingdom just a little while later! Like what?! And there’s no way to reconcile any of this even remotely with that volcanic hotspot location, which has been our one and only constant in this labyrinthine hellscape!

Look, guys, I tried. I tried to come up with a way to make any of this remotely make sense.

This was about how far I’d gotten before realizing I might not be using the right approach, here.

Because the whole point of this silly project is to make celestial navigation jokes! Maybe the Kingdom of Hyrule is on the back of a big massive turtle that crawls all around the world and bumps into other turtles sometimes! It doesn’t actually matter! What matters is how the sky behaves.

So why don’t we just do celestial navigation and see if we can’t figure out what latitudes these absolutely zooted turtles are at.

 But this post is long enough and also I haven’t finished collecting all my data from the various 3D zelda games so i’ll see you all in part two! (don’t hold your breath)

edit: part two is out, baby!!

[sky-squido]

#maybe it was an adventure is getting SCIENCE’D now, baybe!!!

no i am not putting this below the cut. this stuff is REALLY FREAKING COOL YOU GUYS! let characters grow from their hardships! spread hope that we are more than the difficulties we encounter in life!

This isn’t even just about the characters!! Studies (quoted below) show that viewing your own life as an adventure, that accepting that challenge is a part of growth, that assigning meaning to your hardships helps you to overcome them better and emerge stronger!

We cannot control what happens to us, but we can decide what stories we are going to use our beaten, bloodied lives to tell the world.

Don’t let this break you.

(all bolding is mine)

“consequently, it is not the environment per se but the meaning that people attach to their experiences in that environment that is the determining factor […] Positive effects have been noted in exceptional, extreme and tortuous environments including submarines, polar research stations, space missions, and even amongst survivors of genocide and persecution including the Holocaust” (Leach 2016, 12).

“when the moment of turning finally came, it was attended by a strong sensation of choice. That sensation of choice indicates a reversal of mental defeat and the reimposition of some personal control over the situation which is a key factor in recovery” (Leach 2016, 20).

“With their new awareness that the impossible might now be possible, [patients] harness their energy and allies for a final showdown with their dragon. [Patients] have gained a psychological “second wind” and almost come full circle with their cognitions concerning the problem, from “this is not a problem” to “this is my problem to resolve.” This awareness, coupled with their new sense of self-efficacy (“I can’t” to “I might just do this!”) makes for a more determined and motivated [patient]. The Road Back signals the [patient’s] final resolution to address the significant life problem. The fearful and avoidant person present at the beginning of their Hero’s Journey is no longer” (Williams 2019, 534).

“Taken together, these studies support the idea that missions in space and space-like environments on Earth can provide mental health benefits, even though the experiences may be fraught with danger, hard work, and isolation from family and friends” (Ritsher 2007, 339).

“Although recent research has taken greater notice of such variables as hardiness, resilience, and optimism, the majority of studies on stress still focus on sequelae such as PTSD, anti-social behaviour, low self-esteem, learned helplessness, and the feeling of permanent victimization” (Suedfeld 1998, 100).

“Even amidst the acknowledged dangers and deprivations of the early polar explorations, expeditioners frequently referred to the beauty and grandeur of the land, ice, and sea, the camaraderie and mutual support of the team, the admirable qualities of their leader, and the thrill of facing and overcoming the challenges of the environment. Those who study present-day polar sojourners report very similar positive reactions. Many studies have reported high emotional adjustment and positive feelings in expedition members in both summer and winter. […] An Australian survey of 104 Antarctic residents reported that although a greater range of negative reactions was listed, most of them were infrequent; positive events were much more frequent […] One important piece of evidence of the overall benefit of the polar experience is that so many people volunteer for repeated assignments and are perturbed when asked to consider never going back; as one researcher noted, “Almost every member of the winter party considered his Antarctic stay as one of the best experiences of his life.” (Palinkas & Suedfeld 2007, 158).

“Salutogenesis means not only the ability to cope with stress, but also the ability to come out of a stressful experience with increased psychological and perhaps physiological strength with which to face future stressors… well-known study of naval veterans of Antarctic service, whose subsequent lives demonstrated better health and greater career success” (Suedfeld 2005, B63).

“There may be a hint in a recent finding that, with increasing experience in polar regions, station crew members and scientists prefer to work in small field camps, which pose more difficulties and discomforts than do larger stations” (Suedfeld 1998, 100).

“The emphasis on positive psychology, and the benefits that may result from meeting [extreme] challenges, should be lauded. It reminds us that human beings are, in general, a remarkably tough and adaptable lot” (Steel 2005, B72).

[squidos-goodies]

SO I WAS THINKING ABOUT LINK’S AWAKENING— *record screech* WOW that got a lot longer than i thought it would so it’s under the cut now

tl;dr what if link’s awakening is actually the wind fish’s attempts to bring legend back from the brink of death and marin is, one way or another, a personification of the healing that he does on koholint so remembering her also becomes remembering that he can survive anything and even heal from it enough to move forward.

okay so idk what most people’s headcanons for why the wind fish yoinked legend are but i always assumed it was because legend had just been STRUCK BY LIGHTNING and was either dying from that or actively drowning. and then i started thinking about how you start with three hearts in link’s awakening and, like every other zelda game, get more hearts, better armor so you take less damage, and just generally grow stronger. while that is basic game design, i also like the narrative idea of the fact that legend is on the brink of death and this world that the wind fish built is half reminder of everything he still wants to do/has to live for (more adventures and falling in love, hopefully) and half metaphysical allegory for his recovery to help his barely-conscious brain keep track of what’s going on. right now i’m thinking that the nightmares are also a legitimate threat to the wind fish, being a creature of dreams and all, so it really does turn out to be a mutually beneficial relationship where they save each other’s lives. under this interpretation, as legend helps save the wind fish and protect mabe village, he’s also strengthening his spirit like those silent realms in skyward sword (his is less murdery because he’s half-dead okay give the kid a break) so by the time he’s gathered all the instruments of the sirens, he’s actually grown and healed and is now ready to wake the wind fish and face the real world.

anyway, this whole lens of looking at LA through made me think of marin as either like the manifestation of legend’s love/sense of adventure/optimism/anything he’s at risk of losing if he gets too jaded or as some persona the wind fish has kicking around (a character it made up? someone else whose life it tried to save but couldn’t so it did the next best thing and let them live on in its dreams? who knows) whose sole purpose at this point is to help heal any strays the wind fish happens to pick up. either way, marin becomes a manifestation/personification of the healing legend needs to do to survive this and her request to remember him is in part also a request to remember that he survived this so he can survive anything. marin becomes a symbol of hope and courage and someone he can think back to in his darkest hour to inspire him to move forward and i liked that interpretation a lot!! (total shocker, i know) and then these drawings were born!!! their goodbye becomes incredibly bittersweet (but more sweet than bitter) as marin fulfills her purpose and legend is now finally strong enough to wake up and return to the real world again. if we go under the first interpretation of what marin is, legend is also waking up with the knowledge that marin will always be with him as long as he never loses that spark of joy (though option two has her living on in his memories and that’s how she exists in the wind fish anyway so she’s still kind of always with him).

anyway that was my needlessly long ramble about link’s awakening headcanons to help explain this art i made. have a lovely whatever-time-it-is-for-you, friends!

[sky-squido]

I CAN’T GET OVER THIS

okay so in skyward sword, there’s the timeshift stones that take the area inside a given radius and transform it into the past. but like. there are sentient creatures (robots + bokoblins) in those areas so like. are they being brought into the future or is link being thrown into the past? like it would be okay if it were just time travel for sky, but it’s not? there’s a definite radius of where the timeshift effect clearly ends. this means that, from the bokoblin’s perspective, there’s two possibilities:

1. their little island of the past has been suddenly YEETED into a distant future they can’t comprehend. they can see exactly what we as the player sees and they are utterly confounded by this. when they stray outside of the radius, they immediately get like torn between times and die on the spot, leaving only a withered pile of ancient bones behind.

2. this possibility is somehow worse! if the past isn’t being brought into the future, but the timeshift radius is acting like a one-way portal into the past, link is just APPEARING out of THIN FREAKIGN AIR and stabbing these bokoblins and just VANISHING and if they stray too far from where they were standing or don’t move in the right direction when the timeshift stone does, they just freakign DIE ON THE SPOT like they do not move from that spot until the day they die and become a puddle of bones on the ground??? like either bokoblins are aware of the timeshift field in which case they can SUDDENLY SEE THE FUTURE ALL AROUND THEM and are trapped in this bubble and immediately die if they leave or they’re NOT aware of the field in which case link is just appearing and disappearing out of nowhere and this is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying to think about

[sky-squido]

I just realized a really good way to explain the aroace experience when watching media to allos.

you know how in the MCU there was the first avengers movie? the whole thing centered around the will-they-wont-they of the avengers teaming up. we had no idea if they would or not and even by the end of it, they didn’t work seamlessly. they admit that they don’t like each other and probably won’t cooperate, but their temporary alliance is sold decently well, they all team up, and the movie ends.

then we get the next avengers movie, age of ultron, and we see them mopping up hydra or whatever and like immediately they fall apart again. like there is SO MUCH domestic avengers found family fluff FANFIC but you look at the movies and they’re only allowed to be a functional unit at the beginning or end of a movie and all the screentime is spent with them being bickery, dysfunctional, or broken up. marvel is allergic to writing them in a healthy, stable group dynamic.

when we get to endgame, right, there was that weird thing they did where they tried to give natasha an arc about how the avengers were the family she never had and retconned it in with her movie but like, it felt really out of nowhere because every time we see the avengers on screen, they freaking HATE each other!

because our societal Found Family Detector isn’t on a hair-trigger, we need to see the cooperating regularly to make that kind of bond believable. with romance, on the other hand, natasha and bruce can make prolonged eye contact and immediately we’re expected to assume that they have something going on.

THIS is what it feels like to be aroace. and there are many, many instances in which the avengers fight together and build trust and even then their supposed status as “family” feels strained in canon. how many canon ships get HALF of this kind of backing? when you see the avengers professing to be found family and have to squint, read between lines, and read fanfic to make it at all believable to yourself, that is how i feel EVERY TIME I SEE ROMANCE. and THEN! once they actually GET to the found family or romance, the whole next movie is spent tearing them apart!! think about all of the sequels where the original ends with the main couple together and the sequel starts with them broken up. WHYYYY UGGGGH WHY ARE YOU ALLERGIC TO WRITING HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS and WHY DO ROMANTIC SUBPLOTS KEEP SPROUTING OUT OF NOWHERE AND THEN CAUSING PROBLEMS FOR NO REASON UGGGGH

*coughs politely and regains composure*

for those of you who, like me, are frustrated by dysfunctional found families and forced romantic subplots, https://comicaurora.com/ is a fantasy webcomic that i LOVE by a fellow confused ace with FIRE found family dynamics and no romantic subplots so far! it updates three times a week, too, and slaps in general this has been a shameless plug for aurora thank you and goodnight