So, where's everyone else from Hyrule? · 7:50am May 18th, 2017
For reasons known only to themselves, Nintendo doesn't really go in for creating new characters; in the Legend of Zelda games at least, once a character's been added, we're stuck with them for the next thirty years...
Except that, when I started working on a list, this turned out not to be true. I've played too much Hyrule Warriors.
... And then I worked out a really long list anyways. Now I understand why Nintendo keeps doing this -- to the extent that they even do it at all.
(Spoilers below for Breath of the Wild, including the best memory in the game. Mild spoilers for a bunch of other stuff, too.)
For anyone just now joining us due to the wider set of tags, my previous post lays out a case that Sunset Shimmer is the reincarnation of Ganondorf Dragmire, unimaginably long after the end of the Legend of Zelda series. It's a really creepy thought when you first notice it, but surprisingly heartwarming when you think it through:
Given that premise, who's who in My Little Pony?
* Link tends to live in obscurity when he's not needed to save the world -- adventurous obscurity, to be sure, but still. His personality fits really well with Rainbow Dash (go back and watch Rainbow Rocks with the previous identities of those two characters in mind), but I think it's likeliest that he's literally Quarter Hearts, which makes this the maximally awkward ship. (But also, as FanOfMostEverything points out, the maximally unlikely ship. Quarter Hearts is obviously Button's Dad -- who else could have wooed Button's Mom -- so it would require a whole lot of incredibly unlikely coincidences for him to even meet Sunset before her falling-out with Princess Celestia. Still, it's easy to imagine their personalities clicking; the author's description isn't pulled out of thin air.)
* Princess Zelda is a sweet, romantic, all-loving royal of the adventure-compatible variety: she's Princess Cadance. Canterlot Castle has never felt as small and crowded as it did in the ten long years when Sunset Shimmer and Princess Cadance lived in the same castle, with the same mentor, going to the same classes. But on the rare occasions when they worked together, they were unstoppable.
Breath of the Wild's Princess Zelda feels more like Twilight Sparkle (although she cries instead of freaking out), but Early Zelda was definitely Cadance. BotW Zelda also has a Mid-Atlantic accent, which is her actual native accent and doesn't slip when she gets excited, with hilarious results when you cover up the subtitles:
I like the idea of Rarity as the reincarnation of Princess Zelda, due to the way she and Sunset clashed so bitterly (and how Rarity then took the lead in forgiving Sunset, a bit like Zelda praying for Ganondorf's soul in the final credits of Twilight Princess), but it doesn't quite seem to be defensible. Still, the above video is not completely un-Rarity-like.
* Tirek and his people are Lynels. (Breath of the Wild pretty much establishes this, as mentioned in my previous post.) Tirek's Fiendship is Magic can be read in a way that says that the wizard Sendak knew all about Ganon; he taught Tirek about him, and Tirek concluded that someone more cruel and pitiless could succeed where Ganon had failed. Did Sendak not see this coming, or did he think Tirek really could win, or was he encouraging Tirek to run off and get killed?
* Impa: Generations of Inkwells have served the royal family, for longer than anyone can remember.
Adagio Dazzle and Flash Sentry have no Zelda counterparts, and are all the stronger for it. Adagio cared intensely about identifying the Elements of Harmony but didn't really care about anything else that might be going on. What are the cold ashes of an ancient sorcery when there's real, living power, available today? She's been bitten by this mentality in the past, and she'll be bitten by it again in the future, but that's not what sank her in Rainbow Rocks; her psychology's pretty interesting.
As for Flash, Sunset has already declared that she used to be a small magical unicorn the color and flavor of Red Hots. If she ever discovers, and tells him, that before then she used to be Livestock Cthulhu, and before then she was a petty king with a giant grudge, Flash might ask if, before she was a petty king, she maybe used to be a rasher of bacon. They could have met in that one movie. (See how many names you recognize in the cast list.)
The rest is a swamp of practical jokes and lavishly exaggerated coincidences:
* Koume and Kotake: one's yellowish, one's blueish. They're comical at first glance, surprisingly dangerous when considered more seriously, and instinctively loyal to Ganondorf. They tend to embarrass themselves when left to their own devices:
* Fi: blue, purple, control freak, likes teenage human boys, defeats Ganondorf. (This came completely out of the blue but I think it's kind of funny.)
* Great Deku Tree: Fi, sleeping in the Master Sword, lives directly in front of the Great Deku Tree in Breath of the Wild.
* Phantom Ganon: taciturn glowing-eyed spirit of evil, shadows, and doing extremely strange things with stairs. (Except that Good King Sombra was not a supernatural being, as near as I can tell. But the Forest Temple really was full of staircase- and passage-related craziness.)
* Princess Ruto feels a bit like Rarity. Groose was a little like Trixie. No one like Tingle is likely to sneak into a TV-Y series, unless MLP starts pulling off the old Zelda trick of being rated one age-grouping more permissive than they should be. But I'm rambling.
This theory's attracting a lot of positive attention, to my delighted surprise, so I have four questions for my readers:
* Is Shining Armor recognizably similar to anyone in Hyrule? (I don't know much about the middle parts of the series.)
* Applejack and Sunset Shimmer are tight as thieves, but it just boils down to having compatible personalities and not currently being at war with each other. Does this sound about right?
* Can we dragoon Spike into this somehow?
* And just how worried should we be that Sunset Shimmer is Sweetie Belle's favorite substitute big sister?
(Sorry for the repeated edits; this just isn't a very strong post...)
I always figured Quarter Hearts was Button Mash's father. Who better?
As for the rest, I'm afraid I'm not well enough versed in Zelda lore to offer many possibilities.
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YES, yes, a thousand times yes. Who else would be Button Mash's father? Who else could hope to woo Button's Mom? So the Maximally Awkward Ship must be consigned to an even-more-alternate alternate universe, much to everyone's relief.