#when objectively nothing has consequences and nobody (except maybe rauru and that's weak af) learns anything about their own flaws

[rawliverandgoronspice]

I think what chronically upsets me about TotK is that. So much of it could have been so good with so little change.

I am into Zelda as a sacrificial, wondrous and silenced creature who must literally carry the blade of the hero as a wound inside her forehead and silently wait to be humanized again --and the injustice of a kingdom built on such a premice doomed to repeat itself, especially if the kingdom was founded on such dubious grounds to begin with. I am into Ganondorf forcing the present to reckon with the past through the most violent clash, forsaking everything that made him a person while sinking down into petty vindictiveness until no connection and no humanity remains, even though independance was what he was trying to protect in the first place. I am into Link as somebody trying to hold onto his most important connection to the world he once knew being used to force him into a conflict that has ultimately nothing to do with him (sure that's SS again but, it could have been explored even further). I am into Rauru as this self-important, self-made king who used his own association to godhood to live out a power fantasy that refuses to ever be acknowledge as such, maybe compounded by the fact he is one of the last of his species and feel, himself, the crushing weight of their fading heritage?

I don't know, the Tears of the Kingdom or something????

But, it all tragically depends on one crucial thing, which is to allow hylians to be wrong sometimes.

And it's wild to me how all of this incredible potential to comment on the series' history and the characters' role in it is just. Flattened into nothing, because Good must be Good and Evil must be Evil, and Hyrule must be righteous at literally every cost --even if it means nervously rewriting their own history through convoluted logic that rejects conflict and depth and vulnerability at every turn.