#goldpoisoned again

[toushindai]

This is me yelling about the game teaching you to think like a Zonai again. Because here is the thing. We have no reason not to think that the Zonai, like Link--like the player--occasionally found themselves in situations where there's an uneven ceiling above them that's just a little too high for ascend but if they walk around taking little half-steps under the lowest part eventually the light will turn from red to green (back to red--no--gr--red again--still red--come on--GREEN OK LET'S GO). I am telling you that there were absolutely Zonai memes about that experience. There were memes about making yourself some kind of shitty scaffolding so that you could get higher than Ascend will take you. There were memes about longbridge, I GUARANTEE there were memes about longbridge. I say this with certainty because there are instant bridge and instant scaffolding schema stones. If the Zonai knew anything it was how to cheese things with their powers.

And Link experiences all of this throughout the game, he learns to use these powers he's been granted that were a natural part of this dead species' everyday life. He discovers how to think about them and he is taught, by the shrines, how to think about them. How to interact with the world around him like the Zonai would have.

And then that's taken away from him!!! And I insist that that has got to feel awful!!!

[toushindai]

speaking as someone who's repeatedly described herself as "just a girl trying to be an encyclopedia," I really wish we got more of Mineru

(headcanon/character analysis below)

My headcanon for the Zonai is that they just kind of. declined. Something about life in the sky made there be less and less of them until they dwindled to an unsustainable population level. This may be related to how much zonaite they can access--the idea of zonaite being scarce in the sky is introduced really early on[1]. And in terms of "the Zonai and scarcity" I also want to point at the description for the hydrant device, which says that the Zonai were experiencing water shortages until they invented the hydrant, which is an absolutely batshit thing to say, by the way. But anyway: scarcity. Something unsustainable about the way they lived. That's the general vibe for me.

So we have just Mineru and Rauru, now, and I think that that solitude sat differently on each of them. I think it drove Rauru to the surface, out of curiosity but also out of this horror of loneliness. We feel that loneliness when we explore the sky islands: that beautiful, lowing horn music--the cries of the birds--the gold during sunset that eats into your eyes and makes it hard to believe that you exist. A beauty that doesn't need you there. I think Rauru needed to escape that.

Mineru, I think, didn't feel that loneliness in the same way because upon realizing how little was left she buried herself in learning everything she could about the Zonai. This is after all (most likely) the first thing we learn about her: that she knows the most about the Zonai out of anyone. We know also from the tablets in the sky that she would often bury herself in her studies to the extent that she would forget to eat or sleep. And, we know the nature of her research: building a construct that would house her spirit after her body passed. There is not a doubt in my mind that she intended to make herself into the last of the Zonai, everlasting. A preserving tomb for her heritage. When she saw that she and Rauru were the last ones left--all that there would ever be--she put aside any desire to be her own person and instead intended to contain all her people's knowledge and legacy in her spirit and in the construct she crafted for it.

(But to some extent, this necessitated holding on to her sense of self. I already had this impression from thinking about the English, but the no-subject-needed nature of Japanese sentences made it even more certain in my mind: Mineru considered draconification for herself but decided that the ego death it entailed did not serve her purposes. This is why she knows of it; this is why her more heartfelt argument against it is not merely its forbidden nature but the loss of self that comes with it. What was it like, then, to see Zelda elect this course of action that Mineru had set aside for quite literally selfish reasons?)

I've seen meta before that suspects Mineru was subject to parentification, to the need to be both sister and parent to Rauru--I think that is very likely--my opinion differs from the analysis I've seen in that I do not think that was a role she fulfilled with much warmth or attention. She does not strike me as someone with much capacity for that to begin with, and once she set herself on the frankly dehumanizing path of carrying on her people's legacy I think warmth becomes a distantly tertiary concern. She has already ceased to wholly think of herself as a person, in service to the preservation of her people; she forgets or foregoes her own physical needs; it takes a mental shift, then, to ground herself enough to be present for Rauru. I would be surprised if it occurred to her to do this anywhere near as often as Rauru needed it.

I think Rauru and Sonia coaxing her down to the surface probably helped with all of this detachment a little, but not much. She really does not seem to me like a very present person. I think that if she saw Rauru's own attempts to preserve Zonai culture (teaching the Hylians to use Zonai technology, creating the shrines to encourage Zonai-style thought), it did not supersede or lessen the urgency of her own mission.

I think about the construct and her spirit--and Rauru's shrines for that matter--being converted from their original purpose of maintaining Zonai presence and legacy in Hyrule to being locked away for millennia in order to empower the hero of the future; I think about Mineru's spirit finally passing at the end of the game, Link's arm returned to his natural one instead of Rauru's, the Zonai finally and truly laid to rest. This letting go of trying to preserve one's culture forever, is it a relief or a tragedy or both?

Also I think she suffers from chronic pain and limited mobility, that's just the vibe I get from her, and that makes another reason for her to be interested in housing her spirit in a construct beyond the limits of her body, yes I know the one tablet says she dances, how nice it is that she has some low-pain days but some days I think moving is very hard and tiring for her. My mind will not be changed.

---

[1] though we should note, we are told this in a zonaite-mining cave on the Great Sky Island, which was not only not originally in the sky, it was not originally in the depths, now was it? introducing at least one location where zonaite could once be found on the surface

[toushindai]

a warmth the size of our palms

Link has saved the kingdom once more, and Zelda is herself again. But she notices a persistent grief in her knight, whenever he looks at his right arm...

Post-TOTK, 2.4k, rated G. I will leave it up to your preference whether Zelink is romantic or not but they care about each other deeply.

[ Read on AO3 ]

*

The cries of triumph and relief that greet Zelda and Link’s arrival at Lookout Landing almost bring Zelda to tears. They cheer for her like she’s real royalty—all except for Purah, who foregoes such formality and instead sweeps her and Link both into a crushing hug.

“Oh, thank the goddess. I knew you’d bring her back to us, Linky—hm?” Purah pulls back and takes a good look at Link. “Your arm, it’s… back to normal?”

“Your arm?” Zelda looks at her knight with a sudden sharp sting of concern. She remembers what Ganondorf did to it, but she knows so little of what Link has done since then, and it hadn’t occurred to her to ask—

But she sees at a glance that the question puts Link on the spot. He lifts his right arm and makes a vague gesture before signing, “After what Ganondorf did to me, Rauru gave me his arm. But when…” He waffles over his words. “Before I caught you, he healed it.”

Save for that moment of hesitation, he signs evenly and impassively. Zelda’s brow furrows, just slightly. He glances once at her face, and then turns his gaze away. Zelda’s stomach plunges. She has never seen a clearer sign of his discomfort.

Purah doesn’t notice it. “Caught her? What do you mean, caught her? Where was she, Link?”

Link’s posture becomes even stiffer, and in an instant, Zelda knows: he hasn’t told Purah what she did. Has he told anyone? Or has he carried it sealed in his heart alone? A slow-dawning horror sinks into Zelda’s chest.

But she doesn’t let it show. Instead she breaks into a smile—she feels herself doing it, feels how deliberate it is—and says, “Honestly, Purah, I’m still exhausted, and I can’t even begin to imagine how Link must feel. Is there somewhere quiet where the two of us could rest?”

With a few brusque words, Purah clears out the emergency shelter beneath Lookout Landing for their sake. As the door grinds into place, shutting out the happy bustle of the fort’s inhabitants beginning to realize that the worst of their problems are behind them, Zelda sees Link relax slightly. But not entirely.

“Would you like a cake?” he offers, and Zelda knows that this is how he shows his care. She smiles and nods, and she does not let herself stare at him too much as he sits down in front of the pot and begins to ready his ingredients.

She has plenty else to look at: papers and reports scattered across the tables, maps tacked up on the wall. A “Missing!” poster with her portrait and Link’s. A goddess statue, of course, and she does not feel as much of a guilty, panicked twinge as she used to when she sees it. But as she flips idly through a copy of the Lucky Clover Gazette that tells of a convoluted Yiga plot involving a talking cucco, her attention does keep getting drawn back towards her knight. For a moment, he seems almost at ease; he really does love to cook. But as she watches, he reaches out his right hand in the vague direction of the egg he’d set aside. There is a strange pause, and then she sees him turn his head to look at his arm. His face is expressionless. He leans to the right, picks up the egg, and cracks it into the bowl. He is not as relaxed now as he was before.

“Link…” Zelda says. He looks her way, eyes attentive. Zelda shakes her head minutely. It’s not that she needs something from him. Something in his face pulls closed at that realization, and then she sees his lips press together in the barest hint of a suppressed frown. She comes to sit to his left, pulling her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. She says, “I left a lot on your shoulders.”

He hesitates, then puts his cooking utensils down so he can sign. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I… can’t, right now. Talk about it, I mean. But it isn’t because of anything you did.” Another pause. He reaches for the bowl, but before he picks it up, he stops. “It’s gotten harder for me again,” he confesses, and Zelda’s heart breaks for him.

“I’m home,” she promises him, and his eyes soften with affection and relief.

The cake he bakes for her is delicious.

*

Mineru’s passing is harder on Zelda than she expected. So she is glad when Riju formulates some excuse that pulls the sages and Purah away to explore the Great Sky Island, leaving Zelda alone with Link. He opens his arms to her and lets her weep for as long as she needs to.

“Thank you,” she says, when at last she can dry her eyes.

Link’s hand hesitates on her arm, and then he signs, “The three of them were like a family to you.”

“They were.” She gives a weak smile. “You can imagine how complicated that felt.”

“I have imagined it,” he answers seriously. And then, “Is there a way up to the roof?”

There is, of course. Zelda leads him up there, to the sand garden. The construct stationed there remembers her and greets her as though perhaps only a month has passed since she last spoke to it. Rauru had said that most of them were created long before he was born. And here they are, persisting long after his death. This one glides quietly away to give them their space, and Link walks towards the edge of the roof to look out across what was once the Garden of Time. Zelda approaches him and stands as silently as he does.

He gazes over the golden island, then looks down at his right hand, opening and closing a fist. Then he cranes his neck back and shades his eyes to look at an island that must be half a kilometer above this one.

“When I woke up,” he says, his hands moving haltingly, “my arm had been replaced.”

She looks at him. He looks down at his hand, running his thumb across his own palm, over his fingers. “It didn’t feel as weird as it should have. That hand responded like it should, I could still sign, I could still fight. It…” But he cuts himself off there, waving away the rest of the thought. “You gave up your body and mind,” he says.

She can see the self-recrimination in the movement of his hands and the set of his shoulders. She says, “I made the choice to do so, of my own free will.”

Link’s brow furrows. He signs, “Understand, it wasn’t bad. Especially once I started understanding the powers of the Zonai. Did you ever see Rauru or Mineru use those?” Zelda nods. “I learned to use them. And then it was like they had always been a part of me. Because they were a part of me. Or, I was…” He trails off once more and lets his hands fall to his sides. Closing his eyes, he inhales deeply of the cool air for a silent, serene minute. Then, “I’m sorry that Mineru left, too.”

The pain squeezes Zelda’s heart again. But she says, “It was her time. I think… she may have lived through those thousands of years, in a way that I didn’t.”

Link glances at her and nods. He must have gotten the same impression.

Zelda thinks about Mineru as she was: thinks of that dark and dusty library/workshop and Mineru’s focus on her work. Mineru had already been working on those constructs, Zelda knows. Mineru had already intended to outlive her body, even before Ganondorf’s treachery. And she had been kind to Zelda, and interested in her, but she had never been warm. Her gaze had always been directed somewhere else, until that moment when Zelda had confessed her plan to her.

“I wish she could have stayed a little longer,” Zelda confesses. “But… I think it’s right for her to move on.”

Link looks down at his hand one more time. Then he nods, silently.

*

The rhythms of a peaceful life welcome them back, billowing them gently through the days like a breeze. They travel around Hyrule together as it heals from the Upheaval, and when they tire, they go home to Hateno. There may be a new home waiting for them outside Tarrey Town, but there is comfort in the familiar, for now.

And things are familiar. Sometimes—as has always been the case since they defeated Calamity Ganon—there are days when Link needs to clear his head. Sometimes he is struck with a strange, wandering restlessness, and he heads out alone and returns when he is ready.

Zelda knows the feeling, she thinks; there are still mornings when she wakes up thinking that she has to go, to do. Bearing the weight of the world is, it turns out, a hard habit to break. Even in the past, despite Sonia’s gentle admonishment, Zelda had not been able to shake the feeling that she needed to be the one to stop Ganondorf’s dark designs against the peace of the newborn Hyrule Kingdom.

(She had not quite been wrong about that, in the end.)

When Link returns one evening, Zelda asks, “Do you still go to spend time with the dragons, when you go out?”

That is what he’s done in past years, he’s told her. He has said that he finds serenity in their beautiful, implacable progression through the skies. When Zelda realized what she had to do, she remembered Link saying that, and truth be told it had brought her some peace.

But now she regrets asking it. A stricken expression shoots across his face before he composes himself, and for several long minutes, he does not speak. He only pulls off his boots, removes his leather armor and chainmail. Takes the hairtie from his hair and ruffles it loose. He wears it a little longer now than he used to.

Not looking at her, he signs, “Do you remember anything at all?”

Zelda swallows and gives a helpless shrug. It isn’t that she remembers. But sometimes, when the breeze comes through the window just so, she… slips. The way her mind works shifts, and she feels an unbounded, wide-open tranquility. And when Link touches her arm to bring her out of it, it doesn’t always work the first time, because sometimes that sliver of his familiar presence is part of it, too.

Link signs, “There was one time, I think I spent three days lying on your forehead, wishing you knew me.” And she opens her mouth to say—what can she say?—but he waves his hand and says, “The dragons don’t bring me peace anymore.”

Zelda says, “I’m sorry.”

“It isn’t your fault. And it may have always been selfish of me. They aren’t for me.”

I was, Zelda thinks, but she doesn’t say it aloud.

Again, Link’s hands fall still. He pulls the Purah Pad off his belt, hands it to her, and goes to the kitchen. There, he begins to chop the vegetables he’s brought home. Zelda sees carrots and a pumpkin from the village—but also skyshrooms and a stambulb. She flicks open the Purah Pad’s album and scrolls down to the newest pictures; they are full of golden foliage and clear blue sky.

When the vegetables have all been chopped and added to the pot to sizzle quietly, Link’s hands are left idle once more. He sees that Zelda is waiting for him. Indicating the Purah Pad as if to say you’ve figured this out already, he signs, “I go to the sky islands.”

Zelda nods. She looks down at one of the pictures he took, of a heron picking its way through golden grass. “Are they all this beautiful?”

He wiggles his hand. “Not all of them. There’s this one eyesore above Necluda…”

Zelda has seen it from the ground. “Those smokestacks?”

“It was a forge,” he says. For a moment, there is almost amusement on his face. Then something horrible happens. As Zelda watches, he grits his teeth and screws his eyes shut as though he’s in pain. Very abruptly, he pulls out one of the chairs from the table and sits down.

Zelda starts towards him. “Link, are you all right?”

He waves off her concern with a sharp movement. But his annoyance is for himself, not for her. Hands moving roughly, he says, “It was a forge, and that’s all I’ll ever know about it, and it won’t ever be a forge again.” He grips his right wrist with his left hand, clenching his right hand into a fist. “They’re gone,” he signs faintly.

And Zelda’s grief wells up within her, never far away: Sonia’s loving smile, Rauru’s kind eyes, Mineru’s clever creations. They’re gone echoes in her mind and in the places where they made her life brighter, more expansive. She will never stop missing them.

But Link’s grief, she thinks, is of a different shape. Little by little, he has told her of his adventures across Hyrule after the Upheaval. He has taken her to the Shrines of Light to see the puzzles Rauru and Sonia built and shown her the vehicles Tarrey Town has begun to construct from Zonai devices. Wryly, he tells her that he isn’t as handy with these things as he once was, and his eyes say that he’s joking. But even so, even months later, there are moments when he reaches out for something as if he expects it to come to his hand rather than the other way around. There are moments when he offers to grab her something from upstairs and unthinkingly reaches upwards before realizing he’s going to have to take the stairs. Like any other person. Like any other Hylian must.

Zelda sits down beside Link and reaches for his clenched right hand. Gently, she unfolds his fingers and slips her own between them. She knows the shape of this hand; she knows the calluses on this palm. This is her Link, and she wants to know every part of him. If he aches with loneliness for a people he never really knew—a people he was too late to save, the last remnant of them slipping away from him even as she came back—then she will hold this loneliness with him. Even if he cannot shape it into words.

“Link,” she says, “will you bring me to the sky islands sometime?”

(He doesn’t know it, but Zelda does: Sonia asked this question of Rauru once, long, long ago.)

And Link looks into her face and sees all the understanding she can offer him, and she watches a little of the burden ease from his face. He nods, seriously, and squeezes her hand.

Then he stands to continue making their dinner.

[toushindai]

(totk endgame spoilers)

there is something I've been trying to put into words about how much of the game is spent learning to think like a Zonai. OK. Points:

Look me in the eye and tell me you've never tried to Ascend in another video game after spending a few hours in TOTK. You can't. I don't believe you if you do. I was looking for ascend-able spots in Pokemon the other day. I also saw a pile of just. random materials on the ground and went "what am I supposed to Ultrahand those into." And yes this is standard Tetris Effect nonsense, I'm not claiming it's unique, but in-world, think about Link, a Hylian, learning to rely so completely on these ancient powers. And his access to these powers not being technological a la the Sheikah Slate but being grafted onto his body.

The sheer number of shrines in the "A [Whatever] Device" pattern. Shrines designed very explicitly to teach you "here is the basic function of this Zonai device. Here are some more complex or novel ways to use that same device." I do wonder what purpose these shrines were intended to serve when they were created by Rauru before the Imprisoning War. Did he hope his children/descendants would inherit Zonai magic? Or just that Hyruleans would incorporate Zonai tech into their lives? We do see, for example in the "A King's Duty" tear, Hylians lugging around rockets...

And then there is the skydiving. The way that, at the beginning of the game, yes of course Link is willing to leap after Zelda no questions asked, but he can't catch her. But then you spend dozens of hours exploring the world, navigating the game's verticality. You maybe do the Zonai coming-of-age Diving Ceremonies. You maybe do the labyrinths and dive from the sky to the depths. It seems that these agile dives from high places were meaningful in Zonai culture--and they signified/demonstrated courage, so of course this is something for Link to become proficient in. And become proficient he does, such that at the end of the game he's able to dive and at last catch and save Zelda.

The Zonai are gone, at the end of the game. Rauru and Mineru join Sonia in whatever world beyond there is, and even Link's arm--the arm that allowed him to access this ancient culture, in ways both metaphorical and literal--is returned to normal. If ever Link felt a sense of disconnect, having this arm from another species grafted onto his body, I think he must feel that same sense of disconnect and displacement in having it removed. For a time, he was almost the last embodiment of this culture. And now he isn't anymore.