#Zelda's agency

[carrotsnake]

Zelda and the Tale of Melusine

I'll be looking at the parallels between Zelda's arc and some Medieval tropes of female metamorphosis, using Melusine: Or the Noble History of Lusignan as an example. Specificially a translated copy of Jean d'Arras's version, since that's the most well known one.

To start, a run down of Melusine:

She's a half human, half fairy woman cursed by her mother for imprisoning her mortal father in a mountain. The curse dictates every Saturday she turns into a serpent from the naval down. She must marry a human man for a long time to slowly undo the curse and become fully human, but he must never see her monstrous form beforehand.

If he does, she'll lose her humanity forever and transform into a dragon.

She meets a knight in the woods, he suspects her otherworldly knowledge comes from "some phantasm or diabolical power", to which she goes don't worry about it kitten. But he likes her so he's like ok! ^_^ yay!

She keeps giving him cool fairy advice, and with it his life magically becomes a whole lot better - he gains wealth, power, and not just him but other people listen to her advice: crops flourish, castles are built. The kingdom is thriving! They love her just as much as he does, so it's no surprise they get married. But there's just one condition, she hides in the bathhouse every Saturday, and he's never to visit or peep at her.

He breaks his promise and discovers her secret. She says he's cursed both of them, and now he's lost her forever: "Be sure that as long as you live I shall always find pleasure in seeing you; but [...] never again shall you see me in female form."

The next passage is as follows:

'Melusine, uttering a very doleful cry and then a heavy sigh, leapt from the window into the void, and as she swept across the orchards she metamorphosed into a massive dragon some fifteen feet in length. [...] In her dragon form she circled the fortress three times, and each time she flew past the window she uttered such an excruciating, desolate cry that everyone wept for pity, knowing that she was leaving under constraint and against her will. Then she disappeared in the direction of Lusignan, letting out such rueful shrieking and strident cries that wherever she passed it seemed as if lightning and thunder were about to split the sky.'

He never sees her again after that. But phantoms of her start appearing in the castle, secretly visiting her children at night and generally just spooking people by standing there menacingly. And that's how the myth is born.

I've already drawn connections through the images above, but what's the point of this?

Like lots of other fans I was irked by the whole 'zelda jesus' thing in totk, yeah it is a little odd that everyone follows her advice without question, and it's never wrong.

I'm curious, if the team was drawing from Western myths, that this was supposed to echo the fae. Especially since most of the quests keep you on your toes on whether this was the real Zelda giving advice, or a fake - a phantom(!) - deliberately sabotaging them. It mirrors how opinions on Melusine were split between a benevolent fae or a demon. Splitting them into two entities though, I can see how that would defang it.

The og text wasn't exactly that nuanced either. I remember my prof joking the message amounted to "always listen to your weird snake wife!" Maybe we SHOULD listen to our weird snake wives.

It's interesting Melusine only interacts with children after the curse - botw+totk imply only young children who are pure of heart can see dragons.

I recommend reading the whole thing if you can find it! Then you can look for more parallels, and read riveting pieces of dialogue such as this:

[zelda-of-hyrule-tloz]

Echoes of Wisdom Headcanon Countdown

༺ Day 24▪︎ 77 Left

Zelda maintains scars from her time as Puppet Zelda, but they only appear when she is near a source of "dark magic" or at the hours of twilight. She did not initially remember the event but began to recall it in dreams or in visions sparked by flashing lights. It is a cruel reminder of the sacrifices Zelda made to save Hyrule and Midna - but she would never change a thing. When her spirit was with Midna, it was only proven to her that the Twilight Princess was worth saving just as any of her subjects.

[ganondoodle]

some die hard totk fans can be so annoying

you can like a game without jumping through hoops to justify why its bad writing and questionable choices are good actually, its ok to like things that arent the bestest most perfect thing

you can have your opinion and thats all well and fine but im tired of some people taking my posts as ground to debate me on bc they are 'objectively' more right than me despite their opinion too being based on their own interpretation and bias

i love ww and botw but im not acting like either is perfect, tetra/zelda being whitewashed suddendly when shes revealed to be royalty? bad, very bad actually; ganondorf only having a few lines right before you kill him to hint at there perhaps being more in his head than EVIL EVIL I AM EVIL ARGAGRGAHGHS? disappointing; (and so on and so forth) botw locking zelda away to be rescued yet again in the castle? not the greatest thing but at least it worked with the story and themes better than it did in totk; botw having that orientalist gerudo outfit that to this day is used to sexualize whatever chaarcter is put into it? not cool (as far as i know totk did away with that one at least); the gerudo design as a whole still being on the same level of not cool in botw as they were in oot- you get the point

[scopophobia-polaris]

Honestly could we throw out the idea that totk's story issue is that it isn't consistent with the lore of the older games but instead drops intresting world building from botw because it might have gotten actually dark

[qualiacumque]

broke: zelda should have stayed a dragon in totk

woke: zelda shouldn't have been made a dragon in the first place

[blackstarchanx3new]

This idea for a later part in Four Swords Returns floats around in my head and I find it hilarious:

So you get to see it. X"D

Vaati (Still being lose) is completely enamored with the lovely princess Zelda, so he kidnaps her to be his bride.

Woops. He kidnapped Vio instead...However did that happen...

So Zelda dons the Vio persona and helps the other 4 (including Shadow Link) save the real Vio before he and Vaati are married.

Hilarity ensues.

[metanarrates]

it's interesting to think about like conservative worldviews because they clearly don't think this role is demeaning to zelda. like if you don't believe in the feminist project and liberation and stuff it SEEMS empowering to say that zelda has to be kidnapped or depowered because she's too powerful, because she's so strong the game wouldn't happen if something didn't take her out of the plot or because ganon targets her first and ignores link because he's so weak as to be beneath his notice. this is clearly nonsense but i think that's the rationale that makes zelda function, that actually she IS powerful, just so long as it doesn't risk emasculating link

honestly i don't think empowering even enters into the equation 😭😭 its more that her power is a) in the domain of Womanly Things and b) honestly part of what makes her a desirable goal in the plot. she is a Cool Power Up and her power is an excuse to place her in the position of a contested object to be saved. like i don't actually think her character/personhood matters in the series, with a few exceptions 😭😭😭 she just really isn't thought about that much by the writers. demeanment or empowerment don't matter much when a character exists to be a plot device

[ladyrijus]

what i absolutely love about the tears of the kingdom trailers is that they do not give us too much to figure out the whole plot of the game, but enough to assure us that our doubts are unfounded and enough to get us thoroughly excited!

[glitterdoe]

i played deus ex for the first time like 2 and a half years ago and it literally ruined video games for me

it scratched an itch i hadn’t even realized was there..it was the closest a video game had ever gotten to feeling like a ttrpg campaign to me. it felt almost like there was a real back and forth happening between me and the game?? even though it was just smoke and mirrors

[miharuhebinata]

it is beyond frustrating to see the loz series so dedicated to going in such a new & innovative direction in regards to gameplay, yet still so stagnant in regards to the story. like, sorry to be that person but the fact that it's 2023 & you STILL can't play as zelda in any of the main games is mind-boggling to me. even in totk, a major part of the story still revolves around rescuing- sorry, finding her. she has such a deep meaningful story (which is a step in the right direction, for sure!), but the player can only experience it secondhand as link. she is allowed to be a companion character, but only for the first 5 minutes of the 100+ hours you can spend in the game, as a little teaser for the OTHER companions you get much later (who pretty much all suck except tulin & sort of yunobo, but that's another post). we see her sacrifice, but we only get small snippets of the experiences that led up to that sacrifice. she is put through so much trauma & has to make this impossible choice, & we don't even get to grieve her properly or tell anyone what became of her. & by the end of the game, it doesn't matter because she's back to her regular old self, same as she was before she swallowed the stone, with no lasting physical or mental effects whatsoever, because why should her sacrifice actually have any meaning outside of how it served link? & before anyone argues with me for saying that, yes obviously it did have meaning outside of how it served link. but the way she is restored in the most ridiculous deus ex machina i've ever seen in a zelda game cheapens it severely. everything magically gets fixed by rauru & sonia, & just like link's arm, zelda is left no worse for wear, because of course we can't possibly have our main characters permanently changed by any of these horrific events they've lived through, oh no nothing like that.

link saves the day & gets rewarded with the beautiful princess.

this IS the basic story of almost every single zelda game & you can split hairs all you want, but it's the same with totk as well & i'm just so beyond sick of it. i think zelda (the character AND the series as a whole) deserves so much better than that.

[ganondoodle]

is it too much of a reach to say that zelda being reduced to basically an object to farm items from in totk just kinda adds more salt to the wound of how badly shes treated?

[thebreathofthewild]

the zelda amiibo is, of course, absolutely beautiful... but i wish she didnt look sad in it. because THIS is how i remember the scene its referencing. THIS face. an expression of sheer power and determination. she accepts her duty not with sadness, but with courage. this is the face of sheer will that echoes through time.

[golvio]

This video about the set design for Phantom of the Opera has me thinking about design engineering, and how it contrasts with regular engineering, and how that demonstrates the contrast in design philosophies between the Sheikah/Princess Zelda and Ganondorf himself.

The Sheikah design philosophy revolves around their spiritual idea that destiny governs everything, that everything was created with a purpose. To that end, the things they designed tended to be very pragmatic and illustrative. The Shrines themselves were designed with this ethos, each building being built for a specific purpose first and foremost. The decorations of their buildings were mostly focused on reproducing the world and cosmos in microcosm, not as something that distracts from the building’s intended purpose, but in order to explain to viewers in the know how this particular structure fits into Hylia’s Grand Design. Zelda herself is very pragmatically minded, attempting to reverse-engineer this ancient technology, or at least understand how it works well enough to reproduce it. She can be a very passionate, emotional person, but she’s not so hung up on aesthetics or trying to figure out “what it all means,” just “how does this work?” No frills, no artifice, just straightforward and to the point.

Contrast that with Ganon. After hearing a bunch of theorists describe Calamity Ganon as something akin to Puppet Ganon from Wind Waker, it clicked into place for me. Ganon is a set design engineer, rather than just a guy working in a workshop to build machines like the Royal Research Lab. His creations weren’t just built to fulfill a purpose, but to communicate something. The purpose his creations serve, while important, is secondary to that desire to communicate a concept, to produce a specific effect in his audience, even if the only thing he wanted to communicate was his contempt for Hyrule and its people.

“The Calamity” is a coup de theatre: this great big spectacle designed to produce a specific impression in the people of Hyrule. In this case, the desired impression was mass panic. Ganon purposefully obfuscated his methods in order to give the impression that “Calamity Ganon” was this vast, incomprehensible force of nature that could not be predicted or countered. Once you start seeing what he’s working with, as you start making connections between the Malice and whatever that ectoplasmic substance the Ultrahand is working with actually is, the actual mechanisms he used turn out to be relatively simple. He just relies on optical illusions and hiding his tricks in order to make things seem more vast and terrifying than they actually are, like how Bjornson used foreshortening to make the chandelier look like this perfect reproduction of the Garnier opera house’s chandelier when it was actually just a flat oval that could fit in the tiny theater and wasn’t as much of a pain for the stagehands to transport, raise, and lower as a perfect 1:1 scale reproduction would’ve been.

And then with Ganon’s takeover of the Guardian tech, he injects this design philosophy into the stuff he’s working with. A lot of what makes the Possessed Guardians so scary is the musical/sound cues associated with them, as well as their body language that suggests a cold, driven, purposeful hostility. Without that, they’re just big goofy buckets with legs. Just compare the Guardian you see in the castle flashback that’s unaccompanied by the iconic, anxiety inducing heartbeat of the “Guardian” music, being gently prodded along in a certain direction by soldiers with the Guardians you’d see patrolling Central Hyrule 100 years later. Ganon doesn’t just want an ambulatory robot that shoots lasers. He wants his war machines to intimidate, to terrify, to make their targets so scared that they freeze in fear (and coincidentally become much easier to hit). The Blights, too, were designed with this aesthetic of fear in mind. They’re also designed to suggest Ganon’s present, even if the artist himself is technically absent.

The desired effect is to establish the omnipresence and frightfulness of Ganon himself, to terrorize his targets, and to communicate his general contempt. He is concerned with the aesthetics of power, as opposed to just having impressive weapon specs. The Guardians by themselves are already potentially dangerous and destructive, as all weapons of war are, but Ganon needs to take it further, injecting his personality into each one he touches to turn them into a tool of communicating his will in addition to just weapons he tries to use to destroy Link/Zelda.

In summary, their general philosophies are like this:

The Sheikah: This is the world, this is how it works. Everything was made to serve a purpose, and this building, too, has a purpose. It was built to fit into this grand cosmic design we depict on its walls.

Ganondorf: I Want These Cretins To Pee Themselves In Terror When They Gaze Upon My Works. Let Them Hate Me, So Long As They Fear Me.

[scopophobia-polaris]

I think there are a lot of criticisms you can give to people who portray hylia as just evil especially when they project that onto any zelda, and end up sounding like complete misogynists. you can like evil women without sounding like textbook misogynist! not saying that you or your anons have done it I'm just venting at the tumblr fandom at large especially when they portray link as a man who can't do no wrong. plus the post was about morally GRAY hylia and not just Evil God Woman

Okay

[tigergendermoved2tigergender]

I'm ngl the longer it's been since I've played TOTK the less I like it I think

[sun-marie]

Out of the original four champions, Revali is the best character specifically because he doesn't think highly of Link and isn't convinced by a shiny relic saying he's special