[TotK] [Spoilers] Temporal Mechanics
So before I get into this new game, I have to start by first going over some fundamental time travel explanation because a lot of people don't think it all the way through and just expect all stories to conform to whatever they expect time travel should act like. Then I'm going to examine time travel in other games in this series to establish a baseline for what we should reasonably expect. Then I'll examine the time travel rules of the newest game. Finally, I'm going to get into reckless speculation, throw some temporal spaghetti at the wall. I'll separate these with line breaks and section titles so skip ahead if you want.
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#What Even Are the Options?
There are two fundamental ways time travel can function in an internally consistent way. (There are subcategories within them but we're not going to stress too much about that, we're going to focus on the two main categories.)
Option 1: You can change the past. I will call this Grandfather time travel, as it makes possible what is known as the Grandfather Paradox. It should be logically impossible to go back in time and kill your own grandfather before your parent on that side is conceived, the paradox claims, but in this mode of temporal mechanics you simply can.
Option 2: You cannot change the past. I will call this Bootstrap time travel, as it makes possible what is known as the Bootstrap Paradox. It should be logically impossible an event or object or information to exist no actual point of origin and simply exist in an infinite loop, the paradox claims, but in this mode of temporal mechanics they simply can.
Option 3: Your time travel rules are not internally consistent. I will call this Stupid time travel, as it makes your story's plot stupid. It should be logically impossible for both option 1 and option 2 to exist, says two seconds of thought, but in this mode of temporal mechanics they simply can.
An example of a story that falls under Grandfather rules is Back to the Future. Marty McFly and Doc Brown constantly change the past. (The bit about you getting erased for having prevented your own birth is not a necessary feature of this mode, that's just the subcategory this specific story belongs to.)
An example of a story that falls under Bootstrap rules is Interstellar. The main character travels to space because of a communication that we will later learn had been sent by his future self, so that message has no actual point of origin in a causal sense.
An example of a story that falls under Stupid rules is the Legacy of Kain series, wherein Boostrap rules are in effect until two versions of the same entity interact with each other and then it switches to Grandfather rules. This is directly stated in the game's exposition, they fully understood what they were doing and did it anyways.
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#Examining The Series So Far
Ocarina of Time: Stupid. The Song of Storms is famously a Bootstrap Paradox, the split timeline ending is famously a Grandfather Paradox.
Majora's Mask: Grandfather. Every time you restart the loop you're changing the past.
Oracle of Ages: Grandfather. Fascinatingly, everybody is able able to observe the changes happening to the present. I can think of zero other time travel stories where regular people are shown to notice that. Usually awareness is reserved for the time traveler(s) or people with some sort of extra-sensory perception.
Twilight Princess: Unclear. We appear to travel to the past at one point but it's so small in scope that we're not able to observe whether anything changed or not.
Skyward Sword: Stupid. The Tree of Life and the resurrection of Demise are Grandfather Paradoxes, Zelda's crystallization and the blue bracelet are Bootstrap Paradoxes. (Timeshift fields resemble a Grandfather Paradox but are not actually time travel, as their inhabitants are aware that it's the present day and that the stones are just reverting them to their past state.)
(I am ignoring Hyrule Warriors as the first is non-canon and the second is dubiously canon.)
So the series taken as a whole is Stupid but leans toward Grandfather, having never had a story before that is explicitly Bootstrap. So, going into this new game, we should reasonably expect as an audience that the rules will be either Grandfather or Stupid.
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#Examining TotK's Time Travel
Time travel in this new game is presented at first as a mystery. We start the game seeing a series of murals depicting a story of the ancient past but some of them are obscured from us. Then Ganondorf reanimates and recognizes Zelda and deduces the identity of Link. Then Zelda travels to the past. When we return to the murals, we can uncover the hidden ones to find that they depict Zelda after she traveled back in time. This information all points toward a Bootstrap story.
In the ancient past that Zelda travels to, Rauru tells her that she came from a future where she never came back in time. Sharper players than me have made the observation that Zelda in Light Dragon form appears to not be carrying the Master Sword before the point in time where you as a player send it to past Zelda. And more immediately thoughtful players than me have asked why it is that the Deku Tree never noticed that there were two Master Swords during the events of Breath of the Wild if he's able to detect them. This information all points toward a Grandfather story. *EDIT: A detail I forgot on this list is the geoglyphs. We see in the memory cutscene where Zelda turns into a dragon that the dragon tears containing these memories were spread at that time and we find an ancient room full of drawings of the glyphs themselves and their locations, indicating they should have been there all along.*
I do have to bring up that some of these things are technically ambiguous. We don't know for sure what was on those last murals before Zelda traveled back. We don't know for sure that Rauru was right about the future Zelda came from, since she's the likely source of information he's drawing from and she never saw those last two murals. We don't know for sure that the Deku Tree hadn't always detected the second Master Sword but just never pursued that as a question, or whether it was simply out of his range until the Light Dragon descended closer to the surface world. These are all perfectly reasonable explanations where we're not stretching credibility by ignoring them. *EDIT: Another plausible thing to explain away is that maybe the geoglyphs from my previous edit only light up when the Light Dragon is nearby, so they had been identified in ancient the past when the room was made and again in the present but invisible in between.*
Also there's significant ouroboros imagery which conventionally refers to an infinite loop, but also it unusually depicts two serpents so it *might* just represent the fact that the climax is two dragons fighting. My gut tells me it's an iconographic double entendre.
If we're to say all the stuff that could reasonably be explained away should be ignored, the remaining things largely point toward Bootstrap which is where I've sat so far on the issue and, from what I've read around here, y'all are in the same boat.
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#Reckless Speculation ^^^\(Reculation?)
But maybe we shouldn't write all those technically ambiguous things off. Stupid time travel is in this series's DNA, whether we like that or not. A strictly Bootstrap story would be highly uncharacteristic. So I'm going to point out some oddities of this game's story and environment and ask "What if this is because history changed?"
1. **Debris is suddenly falling from the sky.** All these sky islands have been up there since *around* the time of the Imprisoning War if not longer, suddenly now that they became relevant they started falling apart and dropping chunks on us. Why in the world has that not been happening until exactly the time Hyrule Castle got upheaved? In the game's writing about how the sky islands came to be, found on [the Ancient Hyrulean tablets you can get more or less translated](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c1w5ULtnHabBwiz48FX6a1tP7jKCBpKb6uZMo7aNdw8/edit), Zelda's accounts of the future she came from seem to have been the inspiration for lifting at least some of these things to the sky to begin with. Maybe the reason their ruins weren't bombarding us in Breath of the Wild is because they didn't *exist* during the events of that game but the world of Tears of the Kingdom overwrote that with one where they've existed the entire time. 2. **The Bottomless Swamp becoming the Bottomless Pond.** I was recently in [another thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/truezelda/comments/14f5p4z/totk_the_breach_of_demise_is_literal/) pooh-poohing another user who was discussing a possible retcon that I'm now coming around on, albeit not as a possible retcon in the usual sense. That user had pointed out a detail of Breath of the Wild I'd never noticed: the giant skull in the Bottomless Swamp has a striking resemblance to the head of Ganon's monster form in Ocarina of Time, many times bigger but a strikingly similar shape and unique in the game's world unlike other giant skulls. Maybe the reason that skull isn't there anymore is because it came from a history where the Imprisoning War that put Ganondorf in the depths never happened, and in this new history he never turned into that giant monster and never got killed. 3. **The new zonai ruins.** This is another one I learned from another user but I forgot what thread it was. There are some ground-level zonai ruins in this new game that were not present in Breath of the Wild and were not the sort that had fallen out of the sky. An NPC actually points this out, that they've never been there before, so it's definitely not a retcon. Maybe the reason they weren't there before is that, like the sky islands, Zelda's presence in the ancient past contributed to their being built or at least preserved. 4. **The missing Sheikah tech.** Perhaps, with the new history being one where Ganondorf was imprisoned by Rauru in the Depths instead of his original fate, the recurring Calamity from Breath of the Wild and its backstory never happened. The reason that the Sheikah Shrines and the Sheikah Slate and the Guardians and the Divine Beasts don't exist anymore *might be* that they were retroactively never built because they had nothing to fight against. 5. **The missing Triforce.** This is a point of confusion for a lot of us. Most interpret the end of Breath of the Wild to mean that Zelda's unnamed evil-sealing power had actually been the Triforce all along, as its symbol appears when she defeats the Calamity. Ganondorf in this new game, however, seems to have neither stolen or even really sought the Triforce. The Imprisoning War, a name that in Link to the Past referred to his stealing of the Triforce as seen in Ocarina of Time, is now fought over the secret stones instead of the Triforce. Maybe the reason for that incongruity with the series's usual lore is that Zelda coming back to the past *changed* the object of his desire. In the sixth memory, Rauru uses his secret stone to laser the ever-loving shit out of a molduga stampede in view of Ganondorf, which causes Ganon to fixate on Rauru's stone. When Rauru used this attack, we can see that he was performing beyond his usual potential because Sonia and Zelda were feeding their energies into him to power up his magic. Maybe that means in the original version of this event, without Zelda being present to boost his power up from 200% to 300%, Rauru didn't muster an impressive enough attack that Ganondorf envied the royal family's secret stones and focused on the Triforce instead and, because of that, TotK takes place in a new timeline where the Hyrulean royal family kept the Triforce and it never became a significant source of conflict.
I'm not saying I'm happy about it, especially because some of these bank on that weird OoA thing where everybody remembers the original past and is surprised by the altered one even though it's logically been the world they've known for their whole lives, but I think this is shaping up to be a pretty clean fit.