#shigeru miyamoto i am in your fucking walls

[alethiometry]

what the fuck do you mean there is a FIFTH sage???

[thegeminisage]

my mom played the og zelda game in a week when she was sick once, so i set her up with an emulator recently :D i also gave her a copy of wind waker, so maybe she will play my favorite one <3 i still have the prima guide (but not the map it came with, rip)

which one's your favorite?

- dl anon

the og zelda!!! man, i could never do that in a week. i played it a few years ago all the way thru and even when i used a guide and a map AND save scumming it was hard as hell. that's fucking metal. i also have the wind waker prima guide!! i wonder if we still have our map...

also: uh-oh, you unlocked my secret backstory....the short answer is it's ocarina of time. the long answer which you DON'T have to read is ocarina of time is not only my favorite zelda game but my favorite game of all time and shaped who i am as a human being potentially saved my life and it's also the reason you and i are even talking right now.

i got a secondhand n64 for my 10th birthday, which came with ocarina of time (released about 8 months prior in the US) and mario 64...my brother and i opened ocarina, loaded up someone else's file (we did this a lot with rented games), found ourselves in devastated hyrule castle town, and got so scared we didn't touch it again for a long time. when we started a new file from the beginning, though...wow! we were both still learning to read, him more than me, so i read the text and the guidebook for him, and he was at the controls. gohma was such a scary boss we had to take the game to my aunt's house and get her to beat it for us even though she didn't know how to play the game, lol. i stood in the doorway of that room and hid behind the wall when things got too scary for me. (i can do gohma in 5 flat these days.) it took my brother and i months to beat it the first time...we were kids, so we just had fun poking around in the world. when we finally did, i was really shocked that it wasn't a disney-esque happy ending, since that was the only thing i'd ever really experienced before then (ocarina was also the first game i'd ever played that had a story - i didn't know games could do that!). my brother and i were so obsessed with it we learned to use the family computer to listen to zelda MIDIs and read stupid fake theories on message boards. as adults in fandom we're all really familiar with the feeling of finishing something and then going to ao3 for More or having a hundred ideas of how we might do it differently or wish for other people to explore this or that possibility, except i was like 10 years old and had no name for that feeling but it was still eating me alive 24/7.

we had this guidebook, which is maybe my favorite in all of existence because i owe so much to it. i still have our copy! because shigeru miyamoto, the creator of zelda, was skeptical about the idea of a strategy guide that gives away every secret, this guide is instead written storybook-style, providing very heavy hints. for example, rather than say, "shoot a switch on the ceiling to open the barred door," this book might say, "link couldn't see a way out...until he looked up at the ceiling." almost all of it is, in the most technical sense, prose. i was a really voracious reader as a kid, and this was almost like getting to read a zelda book. i read it cover to cover a hundred times, wishing every day that someone would write a ocarina of time book that was more book-y than this...if only it were possible...you see where this is going. one of the my favorite zelda sites, kasuto.net (it's still up, though rip the message boards), had a fanfiction section, which is how i 1. found out what fanfiction was and also that anybody could do that if they wanted to 2. started speaking to strangers online about things i was obsessed with (kind of like what we're doing now). which helped me make friends outside of the very tiny red state town i live in. who KNOWS how many more years it would've taken me to figure out i was gay without online friends, you know? it's a little silly but i genuinely don't know how i could have gotten through teenhood without fandom. like there's probably an alternative universe where i didn't play ocarina of time and didn't broaden my horizons via online friends from other walks of life and then grew up to be some tr*dwife r*publican or something.

anyway, it was actually really popular at the time to novelize ocarina of time, but no one ever really finished their novelizations, so i decided if i wanted to read a finished one i'd just have to do it myself. and i did! i actually finished it! it is sadly not online anymore, but it was about 150k of the most batshit, oc-filled, character death-y, bastardization of ocarina of time that ever existed. was it good? no, but it was FINISHED, and i think it wound up getting like 400 comments by the end, which is a lot when you consider FFN didn't have replies back then. and when i WAS finally finished with it, i had had so much fun that the idea of not working on it anymore was absolute fucking devastating to me. like, i started a majora's mask novelization that SAME DAY. you don't get a lot of moments of perfect clarity, especially when you're a teenager, but it clicked that this was easily the most fun i'd ever had doing anything and i wanted to keep doing it as much as possible for the rest of my entire life.

so, yeah, i'm only here - like, literally here, in fandom, on tumblr - because of ocarina of time. every fic i've ever written, every word of prose, every meta, every fanart or photoshop, every opinion on how stories should work, every shitpost i've ever made, every online friend i've ever made, every woke left political belief i've ever had, every tumblr ask i've ever answered, is ONLY because i played ocarina of time in 1999. butterfly effect shit. so anyway yeah that one's my favorite