#instead of meekly obeying her father and trying to shape herself into the image of the ghost of the daughter he wished he’d had

[golvio]

New Gonzo Plot Guess time: the reason Ganondorf got buried underground was because he was stuck playing a variation of Dumuzid having to spend 6 months in the Underworld in Inanna’s stead.

We know Zonai tech is powered by some kind of ghost juice, and the Sheikah tech may have had something similar going on, given that the Divine Beasts need pilots with powerful souls in order to function. But surely there weren’t enough dead people to power all the machines in the world, and it’s not like you can expect people to be dedicated pilots of, say, the local electricity grid 24/7/365, right?

So my guess is, in order to power all this wondrous technology, a particularly powerful soul had to be sacrificed. Not killed, necessarily, but converted into a dedicated battery in a facility somewhere underground that powered all tech on the surface and in the sky.

My other guess is, originally the ancient Zelda was chosen to be the sacrificial maiden, because her super special Goddess blood gave her latent magical powers. However, her dad was aghast at having to sacrifice his only child, and the people were heartbroken at the idea of having to sacrifice their precious, beautiful princess (not enough to abandon the system of luxury that required regular human sacrifice entirely, of course).

But then, a miracle happened. Another child was found who possessed just as powerful of a soul, if not even moreso. The type of magical gift that could keep the islands floating for a millennium without requiring another sacrifice. He was kidnapped by the powerful kingdom, raised to accept his place as the sacrifice who would stand in Her Grace’s stead, and then, when the time came, he was taken underground and harvested.

Maybe the process itself was agony no human could possibly bear. Maybe shortly before he was sent to be sacrificed, he finally made a friend, found some reason to live beyond serving the Holy Child destined to rule Hyrule, and began to have second thoughts about this whole “dying to save someone More Important, Precious, Beautiful, Pure, and Deserving of Protection Than Him” thing. Whatever happened before then wasn’t remembered. What mattered to those people who sent him down there was what came after.

Like Dumuzid and Persephone, he eventually returned. Unlike those two, of course, the “spring” he brought with him wasn’t the cherished promise of new life after a long, gloomy winter. It was the thawing and unearthing of Hyrule’s sins, the unearthing of his own agony they tried to hide to preserve their sunny stories of a utopian kingdom, the arrival of their karmic punishment, the sort of April that T.S. Elliot would call “the cruelest month.”

And, of course, the people who put him down there were so eager to preserve their good standing that they simply “forgot” to tell their children what had happened, why Hyrule fell from grace, their role in their own suffering. The children knew only of the Perfect, Precious Princess menaced by the Evil, Brutish, Purely Destructive Calamity who just randomly popped out of the ground to attack her for no reason other than being mean and bad.

Is it any wonder why, when confronted with Hyrule’s optimism that first time he emerged, when they were prepared like they knew he was coming, Ganon was so “incensed?” And is it any wonder that his ire would be laser-focused on whichever poor girl the Princess of Old dressed up in her pure white ceremonial gown and offered up in her own stead, this endless parade of descendants with her face who still profited from his eternal imprisonment despite having no idea who he was or what the mechanism keeping him trapping down there even did?