#a rito npc mentions vah medoh too! where is she then!! where's the bird!!!!

[moinsbienquekaworu]

okay so your tag ramble on the tulin great eagle bow/revali's absence post was really interesting and I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on that tbh (like, you have the time/inclination of course!)

(for posterity: this is re: my tags on this post)

Thanks for actually asking me!! I'll just rewrite the gist of the tags that got cut, but in a more legible format.

I was talking about not liking that Tulin is descended from the original sage of wind, which, I understand why it's like that, but I dislike it. It feels 1) contradictory to the theme of the Rito "chosen one" being first and foremost a good warrior rather than the leader of their people and of their power being acquired rather than inherited (which is not bad, I liked what Yunobo had going on with struggling to live up to great grandpa Daruk, I just also liked seeing different stories with the different characters) and also 2) since Tulin's power is so similar to Revali, it kind of implies to me that Revali's power was lesser (and by extension the champions were less important than the sages as a group) ? In general this game feels like the story is bigger and more important than BotW's, and it comes out as replacing rather than supplementing it sometimes to me.

Plus, when the sage of wind said that Tulin was his descendant, it didn't feel like they were just tiptoeing around Revali, it felt like they were ignoring him completely. You can assume the lightning, fire and water powers were hereditary all along and the champions just showed them in their own different way, but for the Ritos it doesn't work, and it gives me vibes of discarding a plotpoint you mentioned in an earlier chapter because you realised halfway through that it wasn't relevant to the story you wanted to tell. Plus I don't like unnecessary familial ties when it would've worked fine without them.

I mentioned Revali making me think of Satine in one of the tags, which could be obscure if you're not also obsessed with the same guys as me, so I'll explain. Warning, I'm going to be a Star Wars nerd for the rest of the paragraph, but for real it did give me pause. Duchess Satine Kryze of Mandalore is a character introduced in a side show to be Obi-Wan's love interest (which is why she's named that). She's the pacifist leader of her people, but they have a history & culture of war and violence, so she struggles with that a fair bit. She dies because an old enemy of Obi-Wan wants to get to him by killing his love interest, and encourages unrest on her planet. In The Mandalorian's latest season, her sister Bo-Katan becomes an important character, and her arc is apparently (I'm not done with it so I'm basing this on what I've seen on here, ie all the important scenes giffed) about becoming the leader of her people and turning her back to her violent past. She does the thing her sister did decades ago, her sister who died in part because of her, her sister whom she disagreed with on pacifism, and not once is Satine's name said once in S3. There is a Satine shaped hole in that thing, it's all about her, she was the one trying to bring peace to her planet 30 years ago, but people didn't like her character much so she is ignored when it makes absolutely no sense to ignore her.

Okay I'm done with SW now but you see what I meant? There is a them shaped hole in a narrative that should by all means include them! The way they handled Mipha wasn't ideal but they could have given the same treatment to the other champions! The way they really wanted to separate TotK from BotW in terms of story doesn't work because it doesn't feel like you're really coming back to the same place. They couldn't have known if you'd already met the characters, but honestly I think it couldn't have hurt to have more mentions of what happened about 5-6 years ago in universe. Riju doesn't mention her dead mom or feeling like she lives up to Lady Urbosa now, Yunobo isn't even going to talk about Daruk when it would be a cool thing to have the old boss compliment his personal growth that way, and it would have been so easy to have Teba do that too, go "you showed the same prowess as Revali, the warrior of old, you're worthy of wielding his bow"!

It would have been easy and it wouldn't have stuck out if they'd mentioned it more! If people still made casual references to these old figures, to the warriors who fought Ganon the first time! It could have been a neat piece of background lore, the way the stone tablets of Zora's domain were in BotW!

Plus nobody says anything but the divine beasts were modelled after the sage's masks then?? Because the fact they reused the design means there IS a connection right??? I'm going crazy, that was a great opportunity to mention the divine beasts and the legacy of the sages and tie it all into the tapestry of this Hyrule's history! But no. The guy who wants to see a big horse can come back but Link's fellow champions aren't cool enough I guess. Same issue with the towers & Sheikah tech. I don't know why they did it that way, I suppose it was a way to delineate which game is which and create stronger boundaries?

My last grievance was extremely petty and not serious at all, it's just that when I saw Teba giving Tulin the bow my Link always kept on him I kind of lost my mind lol. Like the 28x3 easy to draw bow with a cool design and lore did not leave my inventory, you best believe that. I won't nitpick that Link lost his whole inventory to the point that his childhood BFF's cultural equivalent to a wedding ring went all the way back to Zora's domain, but I was kind of peeved haha. Like that is MY bow give it back if you're not even going to mention Revali's name!!

Anyway this was me losing my mind over a game I really really love! Thanks again for giving me an opportunity to ramble I love doing it.