Ok Ok Ok, It's Been A Minute But I'm Playing Thru Breath Of The Wild Again And Thinking About It And

ok ok ok, it's been a minute but i'm playing thru Breath of the Wild again and thinking about it and the Tears of the Kingdom timeline and going mental about how I perceive the timeline.

So we have BotW, with the guardians and the Sheikah tech and all that jazz, and the hero from 10,000 years ago. We have it all nicely laid out for us and go through the game. We get Kass' song and the history from Impa and all that.

Then we get to TotK. We get clammy Ganon underneath the castle, then we jump forward an indeterminate length of time and Link has a new arm and the world is changed. And Zelda has been teleported back in time.

My whole theory comes from Zelda going back in time. We know she talks to Rauru and Sonia about what happened in her time and Link. She tells them of the Guardians and Ganon and all the things that went wrong. So they set out to make sure they don't happen. They don't team up with the Sheikah to create the Guardians or Divine Beasts. The people that would have been their pilots instead become the Sages.

And this affects the present in the same way of that the Calamity happened, but in the way that they never found the Secret Stones as they didn't have the descendants of the Sages, or didn't find them in time. Instead of the Guardians Hyrule was killed by the spread of Gloom. Link and Zelda managed to push it back after 100 years, but we never get too many details on that. Because the Link we play as and the Zelda we see still only remember their Calamity, the BotW Calamity.

With this timeline divergence we see more emphasis on the Zonai. While they existed in small bits in BotW, their ruins are everywhere in TotK, whereas the Shiekah presence is much much smaller. They essentially swap importance.

As well, in TotK, it's implied that Link never failed the first time he fought Ganon. There is no Shrine of Resurrection. Instead there's simply a pool of water with some healing powers, the same as a hot spring.

Anyway, I feel like Tears of the Kingdom is such an existential horror of a game from Link's perspective. He has all these memories that don't match up with the world around him. There's all these people who he knows that don't have the same memories. Zelda, the only person who might possibly understand is trapped in the form of a dragon flying through the sky endlessly for years.

And as for the hero 10,000 years ago? Whoever that was, if it was another Link or just another hero, they don't seem to exist in the new TotK timeline. Instead Rauru takes their place at the forefront of fighting Ganon.

I know its been a while since Tears of the Kingdom came out, I just have a lot of thoughts about it.