Post by SteveT on Mar 9, 2017 16:09:20 GMT
I'm branching this into its own thread.
In one of Link's memories, it's pretty flatly stated that Breath of the Wild is post-Twilight Princess, which puts it in the Child Timeline. Zelda is listing Link's accomplishments and says that he's an awesome hero whether he's in the sky, traveling through time, or wading through Twilight. So those are all referencing his role in Skyward Sword, Ocarina of Time, and Twilight Princess. Child timeline.
Now, there's the possibility that there was a translation error and she really meant to say "Darkness" in reference to Link to the Past, but I like to think that 2017 Nintendo isn't that sloppy when they know they have an obsessive fanbase.
That leaves us with two problems:
1. The Rito
2. The Koroks
The Koroks don't really bother me much. In Wind Waker, it's established that they are shapeshifters who cosplayed as Kokiri in Ocarina of Time, and switched to tree-people for Wind Waker. No big deal that they decided to be tree-people in Breath of the Wild, too. They're a whimsical race of forest spirits who do what they want. Probably only took human-like form in OoT to help Link fit in.
The Rito are a bigger deal. Aunuma has directly stated that the Rito evolved from the Zora. Medli's ancestor was a Zora. We're led to believe that the inhospitable floodwaters forced the Zora to evolve, so why would the Rito evolve in another timeline? Some thoughts.
Evolution doesn't work that fast. You don't evolve straight from fish to bird because of floodwaters anymore than I can evolve from ape to cockroach in response to a nuclear blast. The easiest answer is that it's less evolution and more Triforce magic. That or the very few Zora who could survive the water bred long enough to evolve into bird-people and escape, as is customary for natural selection. If that's the case, then Zora and Rito would have evolved in parallel. Maybe Fishmen were the other branch, or maybe there are something closer to Zoras in Wind Waker that Link never interacted with.
But we don't have a magical intervention excuse for the Rito in Breath of the Wild, which means they are either an independent species, or they branched from Zoras because of some other pressure. They had a huge redesign and are far more avian in BotW, plus they don't rely on a dragon's magic to fly, so it makes sense to me that these are a different breed of Rito than what we saw in WW. Or maybe the time scale is so much greater that they took on more birdlike features that the WW Rito would have also developed.
For now, I'm willing to believe that the BotW Rito evolved from Zoras due to some non-flood evolutionary pressure, and became far more birdlike. It's not clear to me what that pressure would be. It's a mystery.
In Discord, Masamune pointed out that there are bird knights in Zelda II, which means we have a Rito-like race in that timeline as well. Maybe in Hyrule, there's an element of destiny that controls the direction evolution takes. Certain species are bound to appear regardless of changes to the environment that would normally drive natural selection.
Of course, in that scenario, the Zoras are the luckiest race. The Gorons, Koroks, and Gerudo appear to have died out in the Decline timeline. Only the Hylians and Zoras managed to make it. Even then, the Zoras branched into two kinds of monsters.
And now that I'm thinking about it, the monster Zoras appeared in parallel to the OoT-style Zoras in the Decline timeline, since Oracles appear after LttP and had both kinds, openly considering them two subspecies of Zora. So in the Decline timeline, you have three breeds of Zora (OoT, monster, and bird) coexisting. Same goes for the Child Timeline, since monster Zoras appear in FSA.
In one of Link's memories, it's pretty flatly stated that Breath of the Wild is post-Twilight Princess, which puts it in the Child Timeline. Zelda is listing Link's accomplishments and says that he's an awesome hero whether he's in the sky, traveling through time, or wading through Twilight. So those are all referencing his role in Skyward Sword, Ocarina of Time, and Twilight Princess. Child timeline.
Now, there's the possibility that there was a translation error and she really meant to say "Darkness" in reference to Link to the Past, but I like to think that 2017 Nintendo isn't that sloppy when they know they have an obsessive fanbase.
That leaves us with two problems:
1. The Rito
2. The Koroks
The Koroks don't really bother me much. In Wind Waker, it's established that they are shapeshifters who cosplayed as Kokiri in Ocarina of Time, and switched to tree-people for Wind Waker. No big deal that they decided to be tree-people in Breath of the Wild, too. They're a whimsical race of forest spirits who do what they want. Probably only took human-like form in OoT to help Link fit in.
The Rito are a bigger deal. Aunuma has directly stated that the Rito evolved from the Zora. Medli's ancestor was a Zora. We're led to believe that the inhospitable floodwaters forced the Zora to evolve, so why would the Rito evolve in another timeline? Some thoughts.
Evolution doesn't work that fast. You don't evolve straight from fish to bird because of floodwaters anymore than I can evolve from ape to cockroach in response to a nuclear blast. The easiest answer is that it's less evolution and more Triforce magic. That or the very few Zora who could survive the water bred long enough to evolve into bird-people and escape, as is customary for natural selection. If that's the case, then Zora and Rito would have evolved in parallel. Maybe Fishmen were the other branch, or maybe there are something closer to Zoras in Wind Waker that Link never interacted with.
But we don't have a magical intervention excuse for the Rito in Breath of the Wild, which means they are either an independent species, or they branched from Zoras because of some other pressure. They had a huge redesign and are far more avian in BotW, plus they don't rely on a dragon's magic to fly, so it makes sense to me that these are a different breed of Rito than what we saw in WW. Or maybe the time scale is so much greater that they took on more birdlike features that the WW Rito would have also developed.
For now, I'm willing to believe that the BotW Rito evolved from Zoras due to some non-flood evolutionary pressure, and became far more birdlike. It's not clear to me what that pressure would be. It's a mystery.
In Discord, Masamune pointed out that there are bird knights in Zelda II, which means we have a Rito-like race in that timeline as well. Maybe in Hyrule, there's an element of destiny that controls the direction evolution takes. Certain species are bound to appear regardless of changes to the environment that would normally drive natural selection.
Of course, in that scenario, the Zoras are the luckiest race. The Gorons, Koroks, and Gerudo appear to have died out in the Decline timeline. Only the Hylians and Zoras managed to make it. Even then, the Zoras branched into two kinds of monsters.
And now that I'm thinking about it, the monster Zoras appeared in parallel to the OoT-style Zoras in the Decline timeline, since Oracles appear after LttP and had both kinds, openly considering them two subspecies of Zora. So in the Decline timeline, you have three breeds of Zora (OoT, monster, and bird) coexisting. Same goes for the Child Timeline, since monster Zoras appear in FSA.
