[TotK] [SPOILERS] Taking things in this game at face value.
Everybody's knee-jerk reaction to this game on here seems to be trying to fix it by saying a bunch of stuff isn't what it says it is so that the stories they're familiar with are set in stone.
Instead, I want to try saying the things in this game are what it says they are: Rauru is Rauru, Ganondorf is Ganondorf, the Imprisoning War is the Imprisoning War.
There is frankly a lot of material in this game that lines up with a straightforward interpretation. [Landmarks of the past have a conspicuous resemblance to Ocarina of Time's landmarks.](https://www.reddit.com/r/truezelda/comments/13vssgo/totk_we_have_a_weirdly_conspicuous_visual_clue/) [Events have a conspicuous resemblance to its events.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shxl83I_swY&t=953s)
There are differences, too, but I think analyzing those differences is far more compelling than simply pointing at them and announcing that they are different. Retellings of stories often change details, add or remove things at the teller's whim. So instead of the conventional fandom idea of canon where each new story is truer than the last if they ever contradict, we could treat this series of self-proclaimed legends like there's possibly an underlying *truer* version of events that we can identify through parallels; our understanding of the "truth" (or at least "original story") is then fuzzier where things contradict between stories and clear where they align and there's a lot of room for personal interpretation in between.
That feels, to me, like what this newest game is asking us to do when it so deliberately invokes past game's stories in altered forms.
For example: In [the first telling](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7YRz0EJY1k&t=60s) of the Imprisoning War, the seven sages were seven human men, one of them oddly short. In [the second telling](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VlrzZg1l-w&t=793s), they were a diverse group of fantasy races of varying ages and genders. And now in this third telling, the composition of the group is different once again. So the particulars of who was in this group are fuzzy, the particulars that there were some humans and a goron and a zora feel more solid than whether there were zonai or kokiri mixed in, but the number seven is very solid, as is their imprisoning of Ganon.
So let's ask some questions that this game raises.
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Let's look at a big difference between the first and third tellings to start with: the location of Ganon's imprisonment. (The second is also different but doesn't matter in the context of this conversation because it's explicitly an alternate resolution rather than a different interpretation of the same resolution.)
In the first telling, Ganon was sealed in the Sacred Realm, the alternate dimension which is the home of the Triforce, which he had corrupted into the Dark World by the time the game begins. The Dark World as seen in the game is an darker version of the regular world the hero comes from, geographically largely identical (right down to the location of the only known populated village in each world) but all-around less friendly to traverse and populated with stronger monsters. Ganon has human followers that live there. Though Ganon isn't yet able to escape the Dark World, he is entirely able to send a out a puppet being called Agahnim to the home world to further his goals and, generally speaking, his evil is said to be seeping into the home world from the Dark World. Many portals in the home world exist that can transport one to the Dark World but they only work one way and it can only be re-exited by the hero due to a magic mirror he luckily happens to own.
In this third telling, Ganondorf is trapped in the Depths, a giant cave system underneath Hyrule. The depths are almost entirely pitch black, geographically near identical to the surface (but with verticality of surfaces inverted so mountains become canyons and vice versa), there are ruins of ancient settlements in the same relative location as contemporary above-ground settlements, the terrain is much more hostile than above, and the monsters that live there are empowered by Ganondorf's magical bad vibes. The humans you find down there are a roguish cult dedicated to supporting Ganondorf. Though Ganondorf does not yet seem able to escape the depths, he is entirely able to send out a puppet version of Zelda (and clones of himself) to the surface world to further his goals, all the while his potent gloom is seeping into the surface more and more. The Depths are entered by jumping into a chasm you can never climb back out of, and the only way to exit the Depths is the hero's unique ability to teleport out or use a magical ability to tunnel up through columns to the ceiling.
It's entirely possible that these two settings are two interpretations of the same place. Is it actually an alternate dimension? Is it actually a cave? Are they both kinda right? Both kinda wrong?
Perhaps the story told before had conflated the Sacred Realm and the Dark World into a singular location when they're actually two separate but related locations. What world is darker than the Depths? What land is more golden than the islands in the sky with their yellow grass and tree leaves? According to Skyward Sword, the Triforce's home was found in the sky, so the sky being what LttP's backstory called the Sacred Realm could track.
So perhaps the Dark World never was the Sacred Realm exactly but it was, instead, the other half of the same overall territory, historically populated by the same god-like beings but having always been dark, though still corrupted by Ganon's presence.
And could the Depths be more places, yet? Could they be Termina, accessed by falling into a horrifically deep chasm, Link rushing past floating lights in a black void on his way down? Could they be Lorule, a dark and hostile parallel world accessed through cracks in the earth?
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On that subject, Lorule had its own separate Triforce set from Hyrule meaning Link Between Worlds's two titular worlds have six Triforces between them. I didn't mention this before but another difference between this telling and prior ones is the relic Ganon is fighting for: in prior tellings it was the Triforce and in this new story it's the Secret Stones. Are the Secret Stones a new interpretation of Triforces, then? There are six Secret Stones in Tears of the Kingdom (technically seven but one is a time-travel duplicate of another so it doesn't count), just as there are six Triforces in Link Between Worlds.
Zonai fashion shows an interest in similarly aligned triangles in their clothes that Link can wear; each ceremonial dragon-themed outfit as well as the archaic tunic has nine triangles arranged in two rows. Why nine when I've been talking about the number six, you ask? Those who consume a Zonai Secret Stone become an immortal dragon. Despite that all six of the Secret Stones are accounted for in Tears of the Kingdom's present day, there are also three immortal dragons. Seemingly, then, there were nine original Secret Stones, neatly matching the recurring motif of nine triangles to represent them.
Perhaps the Enneaforce is real, or perhaps these two stories just disagree about which of multiple separate types of magical relic Ganondorf was after and we're meant to interpret the world as having both Triforces and Secret Stones. Because, like, they're not *not* Sage Medallions, either: there's also known to be six of those and they're even linked directly to the Sages.
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If Rauru is indeed a Zonai as this game portrays him, making the royal family in all post-Rauru stories part Zonai, this makes the subject of ears worth examining in some other games.
According to Link to the Past, the Hylian people are said to have magic-infused blood and abnormally long and pointed ears, said to make them better able to communicate with the gods. In the game itself, some human characters have long, pointed ears and some have more rounded ears like real people do. Also in the game itself, some long-eared characters are shown to be capable of telepathy.
And the series continues for a long time in this vein, games consistently have a mix of characters with pointy elf ears and roundy human ears that are presumably Hylian and non-Hylian, respectively.
The only time after Link to the Past it's called to attention, though, is Wind Waker: Ganondorf, searching for Hyrule's princess, has instructed his giant bird to abduct girls with long, pointed ears.
As of Breath of the Wild, suddenly all non-Gerudo humans are called Hylians and all humans, including Gerudo, have elf ears. Also as of Breath of the Wild, there's an indication that Hylians these days are no longer capable of telepathy: if offering to use your "brain powers" to signal Yunobo during the Death Mountain ascent, he'll comment that he heard that used to be a thing but didn't think Hylians could do that anymore. If we look in terms of difference from the general population rather than just the visual, this indicates that Hylians have lost the trait of having bigger and pointier ears and also lost the ears' associated magic.
But now in Tears, the first thing Zelda says when she sees a depiction of a Zonai is "holy fuck, look at their giant ears".
I think the clear takeaway of this is that what earlier games called Hylian is different from what Breath and Tears call Hylian: in older stories the "Hylians" were human/zonai hybrids but in these newer ones the name is basically synonymous with Hyrulean and there's just not enough zonai DNA left in their hybrid descendants to have any observable effect anymore.
That Ancient Hero you can morph into after completing all the shrines who "saved Hyrule in the past" and doesn't appear to be any known character? Maybe people who looked like him are what "Hylian" used to mean. Maybe he's this game's interpretation of another game's Link, when he's being displayed in a story where zonai are depicted as dragon-people instead of how Rauru looked in Ocarina of Time.
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I have more thoughts I could ramble about but eventually I have to sleep so I'll shut up for now.
Interrogate my shit, share your own shit, whatever you're into. I'm just desperate to see any actual discussion of this game's lore instead of reflexive attempts to dismiss it.