Ganon's Mysterious Origins (Revisited)(thrillingtalesofoldvideogames.com) |
Ganon's Mysterious Origins (Revisited)(thrillingtalesofoldvideogames.com) |
There's not a lot that makes sense in the Zelda theming. Link is officially Christian somehow, at least through LttP. Gerudo Valley is like the Middle East in OoT, which I would say is just loose theming but the Fire Temple has literal Islamic chanting. First few games had King Harkinian of Hyrule which sounds a bit like he's Armenian. The game series is named after author Zelda Fitzgerald.
It's fine to just accept them as loosely connected standalone games
...had. Nintendo swapped it out in version 1.2 of OoT and all versions afterwards. It is of course relevant that they had it in there in the first place, but AIUI they didn't know it was Islamic chanting then, given they had a strict policy on not including such kinds of references and made the change for that reason.
Kind of reminds me of JK Rowling backfilling all of that stuff in the Harry Potter books (now there's Luna Love good!.) Or Nintendo retconning Bowser's sons and replacing them with Bowser Jr.
Sometimes there just isn't that much thought behind a character.
Some people are very invested in making sense of things that just don’t have a ton of intention and meaning behind them.
https://www.zeldadungeon.net/forum/threads/the-truth-behind-...
https://old.reddit.com/r/truezelda/comments/sejcwx/newly_tra...
https://old.reddit.com/r/zelda/comments/6866wt/addressing_th...
That's not to say that there is a capital C canon that constrains all subsequent installments to be 100% self consistent. They seem to enjoy the freedom of being able to change things to fit their vision for the next installment. I just don't think it's correct to say there's no thought at all put into the head revision of the canon.
The devs themselves put a ton of effort on making these games kinda fit with each other at the time they were making each new installment, it wasn't a retroactive thing. They just weren't super pedantic about it until the official timeline came out.
He didn't become Mario until there was a two player sewer themed game requiring names for the protagonist plumber brothers.
This doesn't get us closer to the origin, but speaking of German influence, Link also happens to be a German word. As a noun it shares the same meaning as the English word link.
Zelda seems to come from (ital.) Griselda which supposedly is rooted in the old high German word gris (grau) and hiltja (fight). But that's kind of a stretch.
It is fascinating just how much of Japanese pop culture carries deep (and shallow) references to Journey to the West.
I don't think either looks similar, at all. I don't get how you can look at a symbol of an eagle entwined with a snake and say, oh yeah, the skull pixel art they made for Zelda? Totally inspired by that. Not just a skull, you know, that symbol traditionally associated with evil. And Ganon looks like some kind of big pig man, not some vague crab-bat hybrid (e.g., he has no claws or wings). It then the article goes on to cite an Iwata Asks episode where the say the inspiration was a pig character from the Journey to the West, so I'm not sure why it's trying to seek some odd alternative explanation.
Didn't read the rest but did skim through that crab bat pic wondering what that was, didn't realize it's Ganon!
The same debates happen about early games made with far less intention and artistry. For those games I’d be surprised if there was much care about canon at all.
Especially when the studio which made game v1 was fired and a new studio was asked to take some random game in development and update the sprite to look like v1’s box art. And 40 years later people are arguing about timelines and character arcs?