If that’s not a thing you want to touch then by all means stop reading. Also Breath of the Wild spoilers probably.
So it’s pretty obvious at this point that Breath of the Wild takes place after Twilight Princess. Not only that but it manages to take place a whopping 10,000+ years after Twilight Princess. Which is just a ridiculous amount of time for nothing to happen. But apparently that’s what’s going on.
If you’d like proof of these things, then look no farther than Memory 1. Zelda specifically references the Heroes of Skyward Sword, Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess. There’s basically no alternative here. Besides, in the Wind Waker timeline, the MasterSword is currently plunged into Ganon’s face at the bottom of the ocean.
Don’t talk to me about the Downfall Timeline. That was just hamfisted in to fit the first few games into it.
What kind of irks me though is the massive amount of time between Ganon incidents. 10,000 years is kind of ridiculous for a supposedly endless cycle of Demise vs Hylia. (which is another lore tidbit that I take massive issue with, but that’s neither here nor there) But that’s not all, we don’t have a clue how long it is between Twilight Princess and the incident 10,000 years prior that necessitated the creation of the Divine Beasts, Guardians, and Sheikah Temples.
Let’s look at the state of the kingdom during TP for a spell. Kakariko is nearly abandoned, the Sheikah are reduced to a single living member, the Gerudo are displaced from their homeland and possibly culturally subsumed into hylian society if Telma is any indication, and the Rito do not yet exist in this timeline.
Even if there are more Sheikah in hiding (Shadow people, afterall) they’re still quite a stone’s throw away from glowing hard-light blades, laser beams and water-based data transfer. There are hints that Sheikah technology was pretty advanced in the “Past” sections of Skyward Sword, but that clearly was lost for a long while and it would take time to perfect it to the extend that they have.
So several things had to have happened:
- The Sheikah would have to be restored to their position as trusted servants of Hyrule Castle
- Their numbers would need to increase a great deal, assuming Impaz (and possibly the fortune teller) is the last one.
- The Gerudo would need a massive cultural revival, and repopulation. Which is pretty monumental since they don’t have male children very often.
- The Rito would have to start exsiting. Notably, they are pretty different from the Rito in Wind Waker. They don’t need anything special to let them fly, and they’re a lot more birdlike. Which makes me think they’re a lot less of a forced evolution of Zora that WW implied. Perhaps they share a common ancestry with Zora or they popped up through some other means. Either way, a new race has to start existing. (Distantly related to Oocca or Loftwings maybe?)
- The technology for the Divine Beasts and Guardians would need to be developed in hopes of combatting Ganon. Possibly blindly unless he attacked once or twice in the interim or if they could see the frikken future. Speaking of:
- The ability to see the frikken future would need to be massively developed. There are hints of it now and then in canon and prophecies and such, but honestly some of the trials left by the monks could only possibly exist for the Link of BotW and are activated with such arbitrary actions with some pretty extreme accuracy. Especially since the monks die when they give up their spirit orb, so no one else could have gone through those trials. Heck at least one of them requires a blood moon, which only started 100 years before the game when Ganon first appeared.
All of this would take a catastrophic amount of time. And that’s even before the 10,000 years between Calamity Ganon and his (it’s?) first appearance. Even after that, there a severe loss of a fuckton of technological progress and historical knowledge. Hyrule’s royalty didn’t even know the divine beasts existed until they tried literally digging up the entire world. Plus, the technology of the Slate seems mostly mysterious to everyone, including the people researching it.
Granted 10k years is a fair amount of time to forget stuff, but one has to wonder why, and why the sheikah that can apparently foresee Ganon’s return in 10k years, couldn’t prevent such a catastrophic loss of progress. The current Sheikah also claim to have given up their technology, which must mean they were compelled to do so for some reason…. (which leads to the creation of the Yiga clan… who then immediately pledge allegiance to Ganon… for some reason. They never really seem to be clear on their motives for that. I guess they think ganondorf will let them keep their ipads? I dunno. They end up being pretty goofy for how threatening they seem to be meant to be.)
All in all this places Breath of the Wild not only in the Twilight Princess timeline, but practically an eon away from it. It’s almost ridiculous to think any sort of legend could be passed down so long, let alone the name of a famous Gerudo as quoted by best-character Urbosa. It’s pretty difficult to believe Hyrule itself lasted several millenia as it is. And thinking about it kind of makes me dislike the story even more than I already did.
Addendum: 4 Swords Adventures is also an indeterminate amount of time after TP. But it shows the Gerudo culture is alive and well, so perhaps they’re just absent from the area in Twilight Princess. Or it’s still an awful long time after TP.
i think that one thing that contributed to the extended gap between TP and BOTW is that ganondorf was actually killed at the end rather than sealed away. Ganondorf from WW and TP are the same Ganondorf from OoT, not just in spirit but body too. Like, at the end of the kid timeline he was arrested for conspiring against the kingdom and presumably, that’s why he was sentenced to be executed by the sages which had not been killed yet in the child timeline. In other games such as the oracle games and adventures of link, his minions were trying to resurect him after he had been killed in LTTP and LoZ respectively so it’s entirely possible that without resurection, it takes a long time for him to reform. also, side note, the fallen hero timeline is bullshit and makes it not even a timeline since in OoT there is only ONE link. the only way for there to be a timeline where link dies is if someone ELSE went back in time to stop his death. Alternatively, there can STILL be a third timeline split, though it would be at skyward sword in the timeline where demise was crushed with the temple of the goddess and never cursed tehm and would probably have the games without ganon like minish cap and four swords.
At the end of TP, Ganondorf is killed, but he’s back in 4SA, as mentioned, in his LttP incarnation, with the trident and everything. He is then sealed again, so it’s kind of unclear what’s actually happening there. Unless they just retconned 4SA out of the timeline.
And technically, the rules of time travel are inconsistent across the zelda timelines. Ocarina represents time travel where a pivotal moment splits the timeline, while Skyward Sword’s time travel represents a stable time loop. So really just one more mark off for Skyward Sword’s lore. :P
And then there’s Majora’s Mask that has things you do in one loop affect things in the next one and generally doesn’t make much sense at all and probably happens in an alternate reality of some sort. Never really got an answer for that.
There’s also oracle of ages in which the events that happen 100 years in the past have a real time result in the present like they are synced 1:1
but yeah I think the reason why it took so long for ganon to reform after TP is because he was straight up killed.
remember being little and thinking dandelions were fun or a pretty color or something and every adult in an 80 mile radius wouldn’t let you say that without screaming ITS A WEED
also like:
dandelions are edible, easy to grow, and are rich in vitamins a, c, k, beta-carotene, calcium, iron, manganese, and potassium
dandelions can be made into wine, tea, soft drinks, and a coffee substitute
they are used in herbal remedies to treat liver and digestive problems and as a diuretic
they’re good for bees!
they make good companion plants for various herbs and tomatoes; their long taproot helps bring up nutrients in the soil and they release ethylene gas which ripens fruit
dandelions secrete latex which means they can be used to make natural rubber
they make great flower crowns
Why ARE they considered a weed? They’re a good flower? Who decided they were bad? =(
You can also make beautiful jelly from the blossoms!
They’re considered weeds because they were a poor person resource and not having them was a status symbol.
Let’s back up.
In Europe dating back to the 1500’s and even earlier, you could only have immaculate manicured lawns if you had just pots of money and were able to own land. So, rich nobility had swaths of land, and they demonstrated their wealth and power by hiring people to physically cut the grass and keep their gardens and dig weeds out of the turf by hand. It was a demonstration of money and power. It said “I can afford to have eight people employed full time just to dig things that aren’t grass out of my grass. I can afford to have all of this land doing nothing. It’s not producing food. People don’t farm it or live on it. I can afford to just grow grass, and have someone tend to that wholly useless crop.”
Fast forward a few hundred years. Europeans come to America. Many of them are from the poorer classes in Europe. Many have never owned land before, and now all of a sudden they can (because they stole it from the Native Americans but that’s a whole other rant.)
Now, at first you see little cottage gardens like the lower classes in Europe always had around their homes; places where they grew food and herbs and kept chickens or other livestock. Dandelions were welcome here; they were eaten and brewed into wine and used for medicine, just as they’d been for centuries.
But then people start making a little money, and we have the whole phenomenon of people who can demonstrate that they are Moving Up In The World by buying all of their food and medicine, just like the old landed gentry back in the Old Country. So they do. What goes in the place of those cottage gardens? Why, the same thing that went in the place of productive land back in the Earl of Chatsworth’s front lawn; a lawn.
So. Dandelions were a symbol. They were a throwback to the old days. They were a sign that you were somehow less prosperous than your neighbors, or lazier. (A Mortal Sin in America.) But, many Americans work, and can’t afford to hire a gardener just to grub dandelions out of the yard with a trowel all day.
Enter the lawn care industry, which began to market a dizzying array of poisons and fertilizers aimed at making your lawn a sterile moonscape where only grass grew with minimum effort from the homeowner. This continues to this day and is a multibillion dollar industry that has huge negative impacts on the environment and human health, but we can’t seem to shake that old ideal of a manicured lawn.
We pour water on deserts and poison on native wildflowers to attain it. We expose our children to poisons. We poison pollinators and pets. The days where we recognized a well kept lawn as a symbol of aristocratic leisure are gone, but we’ve been successfully fed a lie that some dandelions and chickweed are Bad by the lawn care industry in their ads for decades. They, obviously, want to keep it going because they’re making fat $$$$$$$ off of us.
THAT’S why dandelions are viewed as weeds.
Also yeah dandelions are really good for bees, and beloved by native bees and honeybees alike. So please, leave them blooming!! You can support bees and do your bit to smash capitalistic exploitation of the working class and the environment all in one go!
Lawns are terrible things, a redundant status symbol (‘I don’t need to grow food on my land’ is no longer a proud boast), boring verging on ugly and vastly consuming of water and labour. Let the dandelions grow!
