#it is okay to include bad things in a narrative and muddy the ethical waters of heroes and villains alike

[lucky-clover-gazette]

For anyone reading this, totk spoilers! I assume that since you made that post, you've already watched the cutscene I'm talking about, but I WILL be actually typing this a few lines down just in case I managed to completely misread lmao

That's the thing though, you're right, it is just actual colonization on the part of the Zonai. There's two lines in particular that stick out to me, specifically from Ganondorf. The first is when he mentioned Hyrule's "repeated offers" to join them, which implies that they weren't planning to take no for an answer. The second is "protective embrace", which implies the Gerudo were being attacked, but... on all sides except for north, the Gerudo are surrounded by a sizeable desert (sizable when compared to the rest of the map anyway) which acts as a natural barrier against invasion. If anyone was attacking, it would have to be the Rito... who were already under Hyrule's command. The second one is a bit of a stretch, admittedly, but it's very possible that there were orchestrated attacks as a kind of coersion.

Sorry for the short ramble!! All this to say that you're absolutely right that something doesn't feel quite right, and I am Very Not Happy ab the way the story handles it

that memory did sour the zonai for me, for sure. i feel like a comparison between the zonai in this game and the twili in twilight princess would be a very interesting case study on colonization in fiction. i love the game to bits and i do think there’s a lot of beauty and value in zonai culture and the characters involved, but it is disappointing that the gerudo are framed as “evil” for being resistant to colonization. even if ganondorf is just evil all the way down, and using the the zonai’s attempts at colonization as a means to gain power, that doesn’t make the colonization itself any more justified