#and has not done any evil yet

[ganymedesclock]

Curious what do you think of a Veteran Link ( in late 30s or early 40s) going up againast a Teenage/Young Ganondorf ( Late Teens or early 20s) ?

My knee-jerk answer, which may seem a little weird to you, is that you've successfully uncovered one of the central conceits of my original project, Chiaroscuro, which is in no small part inspired by Legend of Zelda itself, though certainly its own beast.

The longer answer which is more in the spirit of your direct question is, that would get... interesting. Because switching Link and Ganondorf's age brackets around does not merely suggest to me a 40-year-old Link, but a Link who has done this song and dance before- who has faced a previous Ganondorf- vs. a Ganondorf to whom this is all new.

And once you get there... it becomes very difficult to view Link's actions as those of an unambiguous hero.

Because in every game, Link's starting aspirations are more or less the same- he is worried about his loved ones. Be that his family, or friends, or community- he is basically always motivated by that someone else is in danger or has already been hurt and he wants to stop it from happening. Motives that are imminently understandable and that we have easy compassion for.

But like... ok. Either we have sixteen year old Ganondorf burning villages down enough that a whole adult man who surfs hinoxes downriver for fun is clenching himself about the idea- which verges into the silly and absurd- or... Link starts to look like a bad guy here, if an understandable one. A tragic, sympathetic figure who was traumatized by a previous conflict but cannot avoid seeing this past conflict in a new, uninvolved person who never hurt him and may never have intended to be his enemy.

We've seen Ganondorf as a child all of once, in a spinoff game (Cadence of Hyrule) where he is surly and introverted but also does not appear to have any particular ill will towards anyone, just lurking inside tinkering with a homemade instrument. Every depiction of him being violent or aggressive towards others suggests this behavior started when he was at least a grown man, if a young one (he certainly doesn't seem particularly wizened in the young timeline segments of Ocarina of Time) so it's fair to say a young Ganondorf would be living a fairly ordinary life, albeit one presumably being groomed by his culture to eventually take the mantle of king.

At that point, it would imply Link himself would become the inciting incident, so to speak.