So, I got the Nintendo Switch: A little bit about Breath of the Wild · 9:35pm Dec 25th, 2017
Early XMas present, yay!
Anyway, I've been playing Breath of the Wild for a bit, and I've got to say this: Princess Zelda's life freakin' sucked. Want an example?
Well, lemme get the obligatory spaces out of the way to hide spoilers, real quick...
...There we go. Okay, example: There's a flashback scene at the Fountain of Power where Zelda is praying to the goddess Hylia to give her some kind of assistance in tapping into the holy power that Zelda needed to save the world. Hylia doesn't respond. She doesn't say or do jack, even when Zelda breaks down and cries. Because of this lack of power, things go badly for all parties involved, save Calamity Ganon. Fast forward to 100 years later. Link goes to a goddess statue and gets an immediate response. LITERALLY ANY GODDESS STATUE ANYWHERE, HYLIA WON'T HESITATE TO RESPOND TO LINK!!! Where was this kind of service when Zelda was crying, weeping, and begging for any kind of guidance before the calamity began? Is it just because Hylia has a thing for Link? Did Hylia WANT Hyrule to be destroyed by Ganon?
Seriously, if Hylia had been that responsive to Zelda 100 years ago, then this entire calamity might have been averted. But instead, Hylia was silent, and by the end of the game, thousands are dead, the kingdom is in ruins, and even if the calamity is stopped, Hyrule is done, with little to no hope of it being restored. After all, all that Zelda has left is the ruins of a castle, and one knight sworn to her service. That's it. She and Link will have to spend their entire lifetimes working to try and rebuild the kingdom, now that they've saved the world from a world-ending calamity. That's their reward for saving the world. Everyone Zelda knew, barring Link, is dead. Everything she had is dust. And it's doubtful that anyone is really going to acknowledge her authority as a leader when there's nothing but ruins where a kingdom once stood. That's your happy ending: You just finished an impossible mission slaying a demon of hate, evil, and bacon. Now, you get the even tougher job of building a kingdom back from literally nothing!
There's another facet I can't help but notice, too: In a flashback, Zelda mentions her father saying that 'She should stop playing at being a scholar'. There's no real context, but that can be taken one of two ways: Either it means that he wants her to stop lolly-gagging and get the divine power she's supposed to have (Which is unlikely, given all the effort that she puts into it), or it means 'stop reading, studying, or anything else not directly related to your preordained role as world-saving princess, as you have absolutely no purpose beyond that'. Zelda's own wants, desires, hopes, and dreams are treated as irrelevant by her own father: Her only living family member treated her solely as a tool for saving the kingdom. Her destiny is all that mattered to the one living family member that she had. Poor girl. This is what she grew up dealing with. No wonder so many of the scenes featuring Zelda involve her crying or looking sad.
So, ironically, while it's kind of a crap reward, in the end, Zelda is finally out from under that horrible burden of a destiny. She can live the rest of her life as an ordinary girl, something that cutscenes indicate she'd wanted more than anything else.
Sometimes, being the chosen one sucks: Link was the chosen hero, so he got to go around slaying monsters, going on adventures, preparing and eating fancy dinners, and gaining the adoration of women everywhere (Seriously, Link has more potential love interests in this game than ever before, even if it doesn't go anywhere in-game and one of them died one hundred years ago). Zelda is the chosen princess, so she gets pressured to try and unleash a holy power that literally no one understands and no one can teach her how to access, while the goddess who should have her back remains silent (Seriously, I think that during the scene at the Fountain of Power, Hylia was spending all her time checking out Link's butt instead of listening to Zelda). And when the calamity comes about, and the kingdom is massacred, all Zelda can do is seal Ganon, and herself, inside the castle for 100 years. For a literal century, Zelda spent every second of every day struggling against a version of Ganon that was practically Cthulhu. That was her destiny: To fail nearly everyone she loved, and then spend a century playing prison warden to an eldritch entity made of hate and evil while Link gets a magical spa treatment, and when he wakes up, he runs around surfing on shields, flying around on a paraglider, and all around just having a fantastic time doing everything except saving the princess.
Makes me pine for the days when Zelda was just kidnapped and did nothing the entire story It may not have been very empowering to women, but at least it didn't put the poor girl through the f*cking wringer and leave her with nothing but a long, difficult uphill climb to try and put back together the shattered wreckage of her kingdom and her life.
(thinks about it) ...Yeah, that sounds about right.
Depends what larger plan was at play. Maybe what Hyrule needed was a clean slate and this was the only way to get it, I don’t know.
That’s kind of the point though, isn’t it? That being the Chosen One sucks? Oh sure, everyone will always point to Ganon and say, “He’s the Chosen Evil One, and he’s having a grand time!”
Is he?
Is he having a grand time?
Or is he just lashing out to try and alleviate — however temporarily — his anger and frustration and hate because of the three Chosen, he’s the only one who’s put together that no matter what he wants to be, Hyrule’s destructor is the only thing he can be?
Being the Chosen One sucks, because no matter what you want, what you want doesn’t matter: Destiny has already written the role you will play.
Perhaps Ganon is not evil, but has simply discovered that free will is a delusion, and has decided that if this is the role he must play, then he will play it better than anyone could ever imagine.
Anyway, food for thought.
I kinda got the impression that Hylia was upset with the Ancients... somehow, and looked at Zelda as mimicing them too far to respect Hylia... Or something, which was why the divine power was only provided after the last possible second.
Hylia literally cannot ignore Link, because of the bloody Master Sword destiny overrides everything.
4759200
Inside Hyrule castle, in the library, there's a secret door behind a bookshelf. Through that is the King's Study, which includes a diary by the King of Red Lions, AKA Zelda's papa. It has... context. It describes some of the feelings and stuff that was going through his head, knowing that basically The Devil is coming up to destroy him and all that he knows, and that his daughter is one of the only beings in the entire world that stands a chance at stopping it. He knows he's pushing her hard, putting way too much pressure on her, but he also feels like he has to, otherwise she'll die, horribly. It doesn't excuse how he treated her, but... he wasn't unfeeling.
As far as Hylia, it's entirely possible that Ganon was blocking her attempts to communicate, and it was only once the bulk of his power was trapped within the castle that she could reach the humans. Alternatively, Zelda couldn't awaken her power at all until Ganon revived, because he (or whoever the big bad is) has always been the impetus to Zelda activating her shard of the triforce. Before that, Hylia couldn't hear her, or Zelda couldn't hear Hylia, because the power hadn't awakened. In other words, Zelda's divine power, the triforce, needs all of it's shards free from where they rest before any of them will work. Ganon, possessing a third of the triforce, would prevent both her and Link's awakening until he was freed.