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.
The fallen hero timeline was shoehorned in pretty sloppily but it’s just as valid in the developers eyes and I don’t think it’s getting enough credit/being brushed aside too easily.
In reality I think the “steeped in ember” thing could be a red herring. A lot of people think the mirror of twilight exists in other timelines, so it is entirely possible another timeline could have had an incident involving the twilight realm.
As much as I’m fairly certain it is in the child timeline, there are a few things that bug me. When they said botw is after OoT, they also said it was in a timeline where we’ve seen ganon MULTIPLE times. Twice is good and all, but he does appear more often in the fallen timeline. There’s also how the special edition box has writing that translates to “The hyrule fantasy”, the subtitle of the original Zelda release.
Idk man they keep talking about how much they love the original and how they wanted botw to feel like the original and how the original build of botw was a 2d game that played just like the original, it’s just nagging at me that it might have something to do with the timeline placement.
Fair enough point. The banishment of Ganondorf to the Twilight Realm happened in the Child Timeline in the middle of Ocarina of Time’s setting, so it stands to reason the Mirror has to exist before OoT. If we assume BotW is in the downfall timeline, then that implies a Twilight-based adventure had to happen. Otherwise the reference makes no chronological sense. The Dark World is notably different from the Twilight Realm as it’s the Sacred Realm corrupted by Ganon’s use of the full triforce. And Lorule is yet another alternate universe that seems to be based on an entirely different origin to Hyrule. Perhaps similar to Termina.
Much as there is a lack of evidence, there’s also no actual counterpoint to be made against it, either. So I guess we can’t rule out a downfall Breath of the Wild. Still it’s tens of thousands of years between the last game there and this one.
well there was still a hero of twilight mentioned in BOTW so it stands to reason the child timeline is most likely. Of course, if hyrule warriors was canon it could mean that the villain from that one collapsed all the timelines together though that’s a bit dubious.
This is the “free speech bus.” Run by a gaggle of homophobic religious groups, it kicked off a trip on the East Coast this week to try to convince the world that transgender people aren’t real.
Guess how long it took before it got vandalized: one day. Whoops.
It’s almost as if when you embark on a road trip specifically to harm and dehumanize other people, those people and their friends will push back! Some great observations from Twitter:
