#but they weren't alone in the forest!!! the deku had their own culture too!!!!!!! WHERE DID THEY GO; NINTENDO???

[waffliesinyoface]

thinking about Zelda Lore again and i’m annoyed with how so many concepts have been excised from the series as time has gone on

in OOT, the gerudo are presented as villains and thieves, and ganondorf’s actions are kind of blatantly Evil™ (a lot of what he does seems to be evil for evil’s sake)... but even so, there’s justification for it? They can’t really leave the desert (because hyrule won’t let them) and the desert is incredibly hostile to life. (Also hyrule literally has secret torture dungeons sitting around so it’s like. PROBABLY NOT GREAT.)

the events of OOT happen, Ganondorf goes a little off the deep end and becomes Ganon, and eventually time gets rewound and everything is undone. Sort of. Time breaks a little bit.

In the past timeline, zelda goes back and manages to convince the king that ganondorf will fuck shit over so... twilight princess happens! ...Which means that Ganondorf is set up to be executed without trial (technically, this version of him hasn’t actually done anything yet) and the gerudo tribe is treated similarly. The gerudo desert is, in the time of twilight princess, devoid of gerudo. But hey, there’s a big ol’ torture dungeon bearing the royal family’s seal, so it’s safe to assume that they were all universally killed and/or banished to the twilight realm!!! Great job, team. Sure, the twili in the future are mostly fine (until ganon returns, is pissed off, and is willing to fuck over his descendants in the name of revenge) but being banished to the twilight realm was essentially a death sentence in all but name. Swapping out one desert for another.

In the future timeline, ganondorf is sealed, link leaves... and then ganondorf breaks the seal, and link’s nowhere to be found. So, what does hyrule do? Rather than cede to him, they choose to destroy the world. They use the triforce to cause an apocalypse. Sure, some of the hylians are spared because they got enough advance warning to flee to the mountaintops, but hey, uh, fun fact? There aren’t any mountains in the desert. In the wind waker timeline, every gerudo is dead and at the bottom of the ocean. I’m sure nabooru was super happy with that outcome, right!!!? When ganondorf manages to (mostly) break his seal again, he’s devastated, and a bit more introspective. He's got depth, babey. But it’s all for naught because while he’s grown into the role of king and managed to distance himself from the urge to rampage as ganon... his people are all dead.

...and then in skyward sword, all of the complexity of the gerudo from TP is ignored, and all of ganondorf’s acquired depth is replaced with Demise, whose motivations begin and end with “Is Evil”. Ganon is evil because he’s the inheritor of Demise’s will, and Demise was evil therefore ganon does evil. Justification for ganon’s initial actions? Feelings of guilt and sorrow and rage? Nah, he’s just Evil™. (also the triforce is notably absent, and though power/wisdom/courage are brought up, din/nayru/farore aren’t, replaced by hylia. Was the kingdom of hyrule kind of shitty under the surface? Well it doesn’t matter, because they’ve now been retconned into literally ruling by divine right) 

We now have somehow less moral complexity than we started with. Good job.

Then in BotW, there’s even less going on. Ganon is no longer a man, is no longer even just the shadow of an angry demon, it’s just malice incarnate. It fucks things up because it’s a virus on the world. But hey, the gerudo are here! ...and they, uh. Don’t really have anything going on anymore. They live in the desert because they are The Desert People™ and they get along just fine. Most of their complexity got relegated to the sheikah/yiga clans, with the yiga being comically, mustache-twirlingly evil.

How are the gerudo alive, when the game clearly takes place after OOT (Urbosa references ganondorf in her speech, though she makes no distinction between the man and the writhing mass of malevolent energy that is The Calamity) and both timelines end with the hylians actually literally genociding them? Don’t worry about it. That’s in the past. It doesn’t matter anymore. Shut up. Stop thinking about it. Ganon is just The Thing You Kill now. The gerudo are very fond of hylians and their royal family, and the fact that male gerudo aren’t born is simply a fun quirk, don’t think about it.