#I hate the zonai

[mememan93]

Zonai? you mean walking retcons?

[pitchblackespresso]

I feel like I'm on r/OffMyChest, but there's something I've been meaning to say for some time

I dislike the Zonai

Their execution was lackluster (there's some interesting stuff, but the environmental storytelling is too sparse and inconsistent for any sort of coherent theory-crafting), but what I despise the most is how they're retroactively shoehorned into botw's worldbuilding

The Sheikah tech ? Heavily implied to be a derivative of the Much Superior Zonai tech

Hyrule Castle? Was built to honour Rauru's sacrifice

Calamity Ganon? Leaked gloom-turned-malice from dehydrated Ganondorf's seal

Temple of Time? The ~original~ was Zonai-made

Typhlo Ruins? Actually Hylian made, but to honour the great King Rauru (again)

Rauru himself is Zelda's ancestor (and implied source of her sealing powers, retconning the Triforce)

The Forgotten Temple? Also Zonai and used by King Rauru to hide the Secret Stones

Ancient Hero? Some kinda Zonai hybrid creature

This narrative of "everything was the Zonai/Rauru all along" is one I don't vibe with, because not only does it give inconsistent backstory to things that didn't need it, but they then left us with more questions than answers due to just how little we actually know about the Zonai.

I also wanna mention how much I dislike the Gacha machines that dispense the complete eyesore that are the Zonai devices. They're a fun enough gameplay concept (tho I don't personally like it), but it makes no sense how you get functioning hydrants or rockets out of gachapons. The Sheikah tech was given ample backstory, and clashed with Hyrule's otherwise rugged wilderness for thematic reasons. The Zonai tech is just kind of an ugly reminder that this is a videogame, and that you get these pre-made devices because the devs wanted to make a sandbox, regardless of whether it fits in this medieval high fantasy setting with serious undertones and environmental storytelling. And since they're branded as Zonai-made, they add to my discontent with the Zonai

I love this game, and it's done so much right (even tho some people might say otherwise), but I cannot bring myself to enjoy much of anything related to the Zonai, which, despite being barely in the game, play a huge role in the story, environment and worldbuilding

[mari3with3]

HAPPY late ANNIVERSARY TO THE GAME THAT CHANGED MY LIFE 💛💛💛

I remember perfectly the day that "the BotW sequel" was announced in the E3 from 2019, and the fact that it's been a whole year since the game was released 🥹

Throughout this year I've met many people and I went through very memorable experiences. My life also went through many changes, but it was easier to overcome them thanks to this game. Thank you nintendo and zelda's fandom 💛

[that-g3-artist]

A few facts to consider:

Zonai are canonically said to have been considered gods when they first descended from the skies

In Zelda lore there are 3 golden goddesses said to have descended from the heavens, created the world, then disappeared

Zonai know what draconification does, and the side-effects, meaning it has to have happened before

There are three dragons in BOTW named after and associated with the 3 golden goddesses

that is all

alt vers below the cut

not as atmospheric but you can see the colors a bit better

[toushindai]

totk spoilers but are we ACTUALLY meant to think it’s poetic or flattering or triumphant that Rauru was like “oh YEAH? Well in thousands of years this guy called Link is gonna kick your ass”

How much has he even heard about Link? He must have had at least one more conversation about him with Zelda because the Master Sword doesn’t come up in the Zelda and Sonia tear, and by the King’s Duty tear Rauru’s just like oh don’t worry, if we don’t finish Ganondorf off I’m sure your bf can handle him. As I’ve said before, his “We rely on your knight” line rubbed me the wrong way starting with its appearance in the trailer, and it really does not feel less entitled after watching said knight (and that legendary sword he carries) very very VERY nearly get one-shotted by Ganondorf at the beginning of the game. And Zelda knows this! What does she feel watching her Better Dad Substitute sacrifice himself and simultaneously sic the evil bad guy on Link—a siccing which explicitly shapes Ganondorf’s attitude towards Link at the beginning of the game? At what point did she have the emotion of “welp. I know why Ganondorf knew Link’s name now.” The musical blending of the LOZ theme/hero’s theme with Rauru’s theme seems to suggest that it’s not an emotion meant to be had at exactly that moment, but I cannot watch Rauru sneer “remember that name” without yelling HE DOESN’T NEED THAT INFORMATION at the screen.

I played through the GSI in Japanese recently and Rauru did seem a touch less entitled to Link than I’ve been reading him—mostly because of the formal, polite, outgroup-equal language he used with him—but I still can’t get over the extent to which Rauru heard about Link a few times and decided, sight unseen, that he was going to clean up Rauru’s mess. My man what made you think that. What gave you the right to decide that. And how frightening to be Zelda and watch Rauru pin all the world’s hope on her beloved knight who Ganondorf absolutely fucking wiped the floor with. We see this worry in her in the Master Sword in Time cutscene! To what extent can Zelda’s transformation and before that her petition to the other tribes of Hyrule for Link’s sake be understood as a forced action due to Rauru’s conviction that Link could do this no sweat? Almost entirely, I feel—but does the game know that?

I just. Isn't it intentional? Doesn't it have to be? The fact that Rauru already needs the correction, once, that he cannot and should not face the Demon King alone. Then his melodramatic claim that Link has got this on lock. Then Zelda being like 😬 not sure about this actually and going through the whole process of talking to the ancient sages + draconifying for the sake of the Master Sword. Because Rauru absolutely set Link up to fail and Zelda is the one making sure Link has the resources, including the support of others, he needs to succeed. And the game is so much about community, about not doing things on your own.

And yet the way the scene is scored and animated and the way all the other characters talk about Rauru's sacrifice seems to treat this as a a moment of culmination, of triumph. I am getting such mixed messages here.

Understand, I’m saying all of this with an aching fondness for this poor self-deluded hypocrite. And also teeth-grinding frustration. I think he deserves to feel suffocatingly humiliated when Link almost didn’t survive Ganondorf’s attack and I also have tremendous sympathy for the shame and terror that it might be far too late to correct his mistake that he must have felt as he waited for Link to wake up. Both of those things. Hopelessly lonely man who found people to love him and built himself into a role he was never adequate for. I wish the game looked at this a little more. I wish I could tell if the game intended this at all.

(This is not the most intelligently written post but I assure you I mean every word of it.)

[ezlo-x]

Just found out that totk Ganondorf’s motives was butchered in the English translation!! 😁

[figofswords]

hm

[autumnoakes]

hi im ranting (positively! this game kills me but in a good way) about breath of the wild again

i know it's controversial but i love the way the story of the game is told. because you start the game in the middle, perhaps near the end, of the story. the game is entirely through link's perspective and he wakes up knowing and remembering nothing. in turn, the player starts off knowing nothing. the past is revealed as the story goes along, and the player learns about the past and about the land as link does. there are little tidbits about hyrule and about the calamity scattered across the land. an old woman in hateno village tells you of an age of desolation that she grew up in. the travellers you see on the road are younger people because they're described by older characters as more bold, whereas the older characters grew up being told to never leave the village, it's too dangerous outside (compare this even to tears of the kingdom, where travellers are more common because the land has been safer. even older characters have left their home to travel elsewhere (not including the lurelin villagers)). battlefields are still strewn with old rusty weapons and deactivated guardians that no one but monsters will go near. myths and legends about the princess and hero have been passed down, to the point where their legitmacy is questioned and everyone has a different opinion on them.

it's environmental storytelling. it's things like seeing drawings and a bow in zelda's study and seeing a child reading a storybook with a hero that wears a blue tunic similar to link's. it's the stories that the villagers share about old myths that turn out to be true. it's the ruins scattered across the land, long since overtaken by monster camps but still unmistakably being houses that people once lived in. it's the utter lack of civilization anywhere remotely near the castle and the feeling of dread in the ruins of the town that surrounds it. it's a kingdom entrenched in its past, with no ability to move away from it until the calamity is finally defeated.

[verflares]

ohsorry for not drawing all of the weird zonai knickknacks on zelda's dress btw (forgot to say this in the notes). but to be so so honest with all of you.i kinda dont care ^_^

[luckywolfsbane]

*takes psychic damage*

Well, well, well. If it isn't the consequences of my own actions.

The zonai are evolved remlits theory post has caused unexpected ripples and now someone has commented casually mentioning it ON THE FANFICTION I WAS WORKING ON FIGURING OUT THE TIMELINE FOR THAT SPURRED THE FRUSTRATION THAT LEAD TO THE POST IN THE FIRST PLACE. HISTORY IS A CIRCLE.

[iturbide]

*reads tags on the last post*

...ok but now I'm actually curious about your issues with TOTK👀

okay so to be per, fectly clear: Tears of the Kingdom is a really fun game. I've been playing a lot of it, aimlessly wandering around, exploring the Depths, finding shrines, doing side quests, and so on. At this point I've cleared the four regional quests, a bonus mainline quest I wasn't supposed to know about yet I found the shrine early and had enough hearts to open the door, what can I say, I'm curious, I have the Master Sword, and I think most of what's left is armor upgrades and wrapping up the main story.

But also I have been spoiled since the game came out about what's in store and boy do I see a lot of similar narrative issues to my gripes with Fire Emblem.

So we might as well start off small with how TotK actively rewrites its history in ways that are even more extreme than Skyward Sword. Skyward Sword introduced Hylia and Demise as concepts, with Hylia inheriting the Triforce from the Golden Goddesses of Din, Nayru, and Farore and tasked with protecting it, while Demise appeared as a demonic entity intent on taking that power for himself. As of Skyward Sword, Zelda was written as the mortal reincarnation of Hylia, thereby retroactively contextualizing her powers. The Triforce has been a power source sought after and fought over through every prior entry in the series, and even though BotW didn't make outright reference to it, the Triforce was clearly present on Zelda's hand when her powers awakened and appeared in full when she sealed Calamity Ganon at the end of the game.

And Tears of the Kingdom does away with it completely.

Hylia is mentioned as the only goddess. The Golden Goddesses aren't referred to at all. There is no Triforce at all, it's instead been replaced by the Zonai 'Secret Stones' even in the ancient past, despite the fact that we saw the Triforce at the end of the last game. It was right there. Zelda is also no longer the reincarnation of the goddess: instead her powers are re-explained as being the product of the historic marriage between the Zonai Sage of Light and the Hylian Sage of Time, giving her command over both (but she's considered only the Sage of Time for some reason?).

Also, BotW pretty heavily implied that Hyrule was a matriarchy: it's the queens and princesses who have the sacred power, so it stands to reason that Zelda's mother was actually the one in charge of Hyrule before her death, and the king only stepped into the leadership role on a temporary basis until Zelda came into her powers (hence that pointed "heir to a throne of nothing but failure" remark in one of the memories). But despite there being a Hylian queen right there in the ancient past, the game firmly establishes that Rauru is the one with the power, and Sonia is just his consort, a priestess who he chose to marry.

And then there's the Shiekah. Throughout all of BotW we were surrounded by these amazing machines, ancient technology crafted by the Shiekah and unearthed in working condition after a myriad in the ground which are still running and wreaking havoc a hundred years after the Calamity. We start the game in a Shiekah Shrine that literally saved Link's life and allowed him to recover from what should have been fatal wounds, though it did take a hundred years to do so.

And all of that is gone in TotK. Not a trace of it remains: the shrines have all been wiped from the face of the earth, the Divine Beasts are nowhere to be found, the Shiekah Towers have evaporated into thin air -- and the shrine that saved our lives is completely gone, replaced by a hot spring. It still bears the name of the Shrine of Awakening, but none of the miraculous technology remains.

Personally, the idea that either Purah or Zelda would consider the Skyview Towers worthy of dismantling that Shrine completely shatters my suspension of disbelief. They're both scientists: they should want to study all of that in detail to understand how it works, not destroy it for glitchy impersonations of the old towers I hate the Skyview Tower miniquests so much.

(Let me tell you, it was absolutely chilling for me to get to Rito Village and see an empty place where I clearly remembered there being a shrine. The Shiekah presence in history has basically been wiped out in TotK outside of Kakariko Village, and I don't like what that says considering that the Shiekah were also victims of a genocide by the ancient king of Hyrule.)

And then there's the imperialism. I have my issues with Three Houses and every ending needing Fodlan to be united under a single banner, though it's most egregious in CF where Edelgard's stated purpose is returning Fodlan to its proper state unified under the Imperial Standard. TotK is worse. There have been some excellent breakdowns of the narrative implications, touching on everything from the loaded imagery and black-and-white narrative purpose of Ganondorf and the Gerudo (dark-skinned evil desert dwellers who oppose the good and glorious worshipers of the goddess...where have I heard that before...) to the game showing outright that the other races of Hyrule were treated as lesser vassals in the ancient past (the Sages being masked and therefore erasing their individual identities, receiving the Secret Stones that Rauru had been hoarding only when Rauru needed help to fight Ganondorf and thereupon swearing their very lives and the lives of their people to him and his empire???). They're great analyses, they've been living in my brain for weeks.

But I think the thing that I'm most mad about is that the narrative bends over backwards to keep anything from changing. At the start of the game, Link's arm is so badly damaged by the Gloom that he nearly dies and he spends the rest of the game with Rauru's arm in place of his own...but then, in the end, he magically gets his original arm back no worse for the wear. Zelda, in an attempt to empower and restore the Master Sword, turns herself into a dragon, a process that we are told outright in the narrative will cause her to lose herself and is therefore irreversible...but then, in the end, she magically returns to her human form thanks to her ghost ancestors somehow reversing this supposedly irreversible process. And on top of all that, Hyrule itself is exactly the same when all is said and done: there's no change to the power structures, no independence for the other races who choose to come together in the spirit of cooperation like we saw at Tarrey Town -- instead, the four Sages once again swear their support and fealty to the Princess of Hyrule.

Personally? I like a narrative where the characters and the world change over the course of it. That's one of the things that I thought was so meaningful about BotW: while most of the gameplay takes place in the present, the true start of the game is 100 years in the past, allowing us to see how the Calamity affected Hyrule, the devastation it wrought and the continued struggles of those who survived through the century that followed. We end the game with Zelda once more free, where she had been locked in combat with the Calamity; with the spirits of the Champions at peace, where they had been trapped by the Blight within the Divine Beasts; and with Hyrule finally at peace and beginning to recover now that the Calamity has been sealed away. I still think it's ridiculous that they don't actually show any of Link's scars in the game (especially since we are at one point forced to strip to prove that we are who we say we are, and they say point blank I would recognize those scars anywhere when there are no fucking scars), but at least things have changed over the course of the narrative!

But nothing changes in TotK. The status quo remains untouched and unquestioned. And it just feels...bad to me. Insincere, maybe. Unrealistic, sterilized, manufactured. It's a narrative that says there's nothing to question, that everything going back to the way it always was is the right and proper way of things, because clearly the Hyrule Empire is the right and proper rule. And I just don't like that.

[blue-eli]

Ink October day twenty-nine: Wilder

To bewilder; to perplex.

Comparative form of wild: more wild.

[that-one-loz-nerd]

Hot take: Totk's story would've been 1000% better if the zonai were introduced more slowly

[shannonsketches]

also while I’m bleary and talking things I’m laying on the floor once again thinking about how Mineru was wasted as a character and really could’ve been complex if she was aiding Ganondorf by being puppet Zelda and then you could’ve either had a boss fight with her or let her redeem herself by helping you depending on a choice you make in the game but instead they were just like ‘what if this dope character design got overwritten to be a Gundam’

[ihavedonenothingright]

The more I see people trying to argue that the Zonai are actually the original founders of Hyrule, the more I wish TOTK never existed. Or the "oh the other games (especially OOT) are just false retellings of the "original history" which was Zonai." I genuinely can't imagine being so damn invested in the underdeveloped goat people you would rather retroactively turn your other game experiences into lies.

[phoenixcatch7]

Okay this WILL BE SPOILERS. For totk.

THE GREAT PLATEAU IS CURSED I DONT LIKE IT ToT.

Made it here fine! Easy cruising altitude got the map landed no problem. Minimal enemies. There's a YIGA camped in MY MFING SHRINE OF RESURRECTION. It's all overgrown, that's fine ig, but the YIGA?? Get tf. Out.

Go see the temple, a new message from hylia! Very ominous, but yes ma'am! Off we go to free her from the water under the stone gate. Which gate? Well my first thought was the main blocked off entrance that's now a pond. But let's get a shrine first.

Shrine?? Hello???!

So not only is each original shiekah shrine now a pit to tartarus, there's only one new shrine tucked in the back end of the plateau where a goblin camp used to be. Fine! I'll just run everywhere on foot with my +1 stamina, shall I??

No! It's time for a wtf to hunt you down! The air will turn red with racing clouds, the sky is dark, music is playing backwards, I'm launching myself up the nearest tree and it still isn't fast enough. This is literally the fifth or sixth time I've encountered these, at least two directly ending in my death. They don't even get a question mark from the camera unlike any other miasma monster (for example the depth enemies). I've filled them with bomb arrows and it's made a fraction of a dent in one of them. Hateful hydra eye arm things. They're FAST and TALL. It's like the spindly flesh monster from oot but a hundred times worse. They nearly managed to reach me in the tallest tree!

They eventually leave - whatever triggers their disappearance I truly cannot tell - and grab the dark shards they leave. Okay! Cool! Unappreciated! I go into the pit by the lake, it is VERY SCARY, I get some light roots and reveal a whole civilisation! Giant zelda statues point to an enormous building in the shadows, I pluck up my courage and go over. ???? It's a poe eater statue. Enormous. Full bodied. Stretching down below the bridge I'm on. It's got six sunken eyes and they're all looking at me. I'm absolutely begging this thing not to move, I'm literally inching closer. This isn't a zonai carving at all, this isn't even a zonai room. They've dug into the rock, they DISCOVERED it.

It says the same thing.

I'm terrified. I'm beginning to think that whatever talked to me through the hylia statue, in the temple of time, with her voice and her light, isn't hylia.

Still, I've come too far to back out. I don't think denying this thing is wise.

Up I go! Run all the way from the shrine, off the edge, detour to find a new type of cave goblin or two, blow up the blocked entrance to the plateau. Through the carvings I can make out sort of a face? Hope it's hylia!

It. It isn't. It's the six eyed triangle face that eats souls :). Tells me to go back to the temple. I run onto the plateau (!!! Botw me would be so excited), get ambushed by four black armoured Bokoblins in a row, see 'hylia'. It tells me to bring its body in the depths stones from the four ex shrine pits 'for a reward'.

Nintendo.

What did you do?