#this works with light dragon/fi too. fi is there for zelda in the thousands of years they wait

[casiavium]

friendship ended with Sidlink I'm exclusively a Zelink shipper only now

[anniefelis]

Tears of the Kingdom is a year old now, and I keep seeing posts about it, about how there are already fond memories, of how people want the special merch that's come out...

...meanwhile I'm still here thinking of how I'd do a fix-it fic to rectify that mess of a plot. I did it for Twilight Princess (which I am still turning into final drafts), but TP can't hold a candle to Tears of the Kingdom, which is a sequel that ignored most of the canon from the first game. I may have posted this somewhere already, but I ought to post it again in case I forget everything. I apologize if I posted this before.

First fix: Link and Zelda are a couple, a would-be-married-if-Hateno-had-common-law couple, a sexually active couple to the point where Zelda had to take steps to avoid having children too early.

Second fix: Rauru, Sonya and Ganondorf are from an alternative Hyrule where Hylia never came to help the humans, so their population was absolutely decimated by the demon tribe, and they were saved from extinction by the Zonai (hence the shrines where Rauru sealed demons). Zelda is not descended from Rauru and Sonya any more than the other Hylians, because thousands of years is a long ass time to trace bloodlines. There's a lot of multiverse BS mixed in with the time travel BS. The reason nobody knows who Link is, is because Link does not exist in this alternative Hyrule. That Link died 100 years ago, the Shrine of Resurrection was never discovered, and this Zelda eventually sealed Calamity Ganon by herself.

Third fix: ...except, some people do know Link, and remember his timeline. It's two parallel universes mashed together, so people like Sidon, the Deku Tree and Purah remember it, but others do not. Something happened to the Zelda of this universe, which is why people are looking for her. Meanwhile, the alternative universe characters do not know some familiar characters like Kass.

Fourth fix: Link's hand talks, and Rauru is an annoying companion. Imagine having a king in your hand, giving unwanted advice all the time. At least Fi was polite about it. Rauru does not realize who Link is at first, and then is baffled by the changes to the world.

Fifth fix: the Master Sword itself tells Link to plunk it in that temporal whatsahoosit in the Temple of Time, thinking it would fix it, and bang boom it zips back into time. Meanwhile, the Sheikah slate always stays with Link, and gets corrupted and broken by Ganondorf's gross purple haze.

Sixth fix: There are no Dragon Tears littered around the world that have been there for thousands of years. There are two: the one you first encounter with Impa, which gives a vague point of view of Ganondorf and his Gerudo army attacking Hyrule (the memories are first-person), and then the second one where Link sees a bunch of images from the past and Zelda's dragonification, all from her point of view. He knows it's her because he hears her speaking and sees her hands. They are shed at two moments in the game where Link gets close enough to the Light Dragon to see that it's not like Dinraal, Naydra or Farosh.

Seventh fix: The three dragons of the golden goddesses are not from the alternative Hyrule, and think everything is messed up. They insist that the Zonai ruins Link keeps finding are nothing like the Zonai they know. They're the same race, but the technology is completely different, like something advanced the Zonai rapidly in the one timeline.

Eighth fix: The Sheikah tech is there mixed in with Zonai ruins. It confuses the fuck out of both universes. For some reason, the Sheikah stuff does not work anymore, which confounds the hell out of Purah and Robbie.

Ninth fix: Some of the Sheikah are from either universe, but all of the Yiga are from Link's universe.

Tenth fix: The ancient sage spirits are not still around, and they do not explain what happened in the past (Rauru does). We just get new sages in the form of the New Champions, and the Spirit Stones (not Secret Stones, fuck that name) choose them. The new sages use their new powers to help Link get through the mass of Malice (not Gloom!) that blocks him from getting to Ganondorf.

Eleventh fix: Link and Zelda aren't fixed by the Recall spell, because that's kind of out of left field and Sonya's spirit is long gone anyway (and I do not like using game mechanics as plot points). They're fixed by Link's innate time magic, the time magic he always had as his Champion's Power, and they are returned to their proper timeline (as well as the alt Zelda) as well. This is all done with some help from the Spirit Stone of Time, but also due to the Triforce of Courage, which awakens. And that brings us to the final point...

Final fix: the Triforce is in this story. You can't tell me that the crest of the Hyrulean Kingdom survived all this time along with the Hyrule dynasty, yet nobody understands it's symbolism. You can't tell me that Zelda's "sacred power" wasn't just the Triforce of Wisdom. Sorry, I don't buy it.