So Tears of the Kingdom has an oroborous as a symbol. It has floating islands. It has a great evil threat from underground.
Am I crazy to think that it’s going to establish that the entire Zelda timeline is a time loop?
Hey tumblr user stylish-suidae, I’ve been thinking about this nonstop for the past 24 hours and I’d like to share some thoughts.
At first I was like “haha that’d be so silly goofy insane of nintendo to do that! could you imagine!” But then. I kept thinking about it. And thinking about it. And the more I thought about it, the more insane I became.
Delve with me into this madness for a second.
Here is the official Legend of Zelda timeline, published in Hyrule Historia 2013:
We have three major timelines (with Ocarina of Time being the point at which the timelines diverge) across the Zelda series as a whole. There’s the Hero Is Defeated timeline, and two timelines that branch off from if the Hero Is Successful. I haven’t played a lot of games in the Hero Is Defeated timeline so I will mainly be focusing on the timelines that happened after the Hero Is Successful.
Within the Hero Is Successful timelines, we have the Child Era timeline and the Adult Era timeline. These timelines are displayed as separate, but botw sort of throws a wrench in that belief for reasons I’ll explain soon.
A final point of establishment: I will not be treating the amiibo items in botw as canon. This analysis will only deal with things that are undeniably botw canon.
So. The most glaring logical issue with botw is trying to place it within the timeline. The official timeline in Hyrule Historia was published before botw was released, so that’s why botw isn’t included in it. This has lead to a lot of speculation on when exactly botw takes place.
One theory I remember seeing thrown around was that botw is at the end of ALL timelines. That somewhere there was a convergence, and all three routes inevitably lead to botw.
Another theory I remember seeing was that botw takes place BEFORE Skyward Sword. This one was more easily dismissed because there are direct references to other Zelda games in botw, meaning that botw must be happening after these games in order for them to be referenced.
(We’ll come back to this theory in a moment, because I don’t think it’s as easily dismissible now with the theory that stylish-suidae has put forward.)
What other games are referenced in botw, and what timelines are they from?
There are a fair bit of pre-Ocarina of Time references, but I would like to focus on the post-Ocarina references we see in botw, particularly ones from the Child Era and Adult Era timelines (branching off from the Hero Is Successful in oot).
The Child Era includes Twilight Princess, and at first I thought that maybe botw would be in this timeline because of something Zelda says during Link’s Champion ceremony (ft. Revali’s bitch face):
This quote seems to be referencing the events (and heroes) of Skyward Sword, Ocarina of Time, and Twilight Princess in that order. Boom! Botw is in the Child Era!
But it’s not that simple.
Here is the description of an item commonly found on botw:
The part that’s interesting about this is the mention of an “ancient sea.” There is no large sea in existence anywhere (known) in the Child Era, but there IS in the Adult Era.
Wind Waker, a game from the Adult Era, is centered around traveling an expansive sea after Hyrule was flooded. It’s the most ocean-centric game in the series, so the rock salt description definitely brings it to mind.
Maybe that’s too much of a stretch though. There could have been a great sea somewhere in the Child Era that we just don’t know about yet.
But there are two other things that only appear in the Adult Era that also appear in botw: the Koroks and the Rito.
According to Zelda wikis, the Koroks evolved from the Kokiri after the flood devastated Hyrule. And the Rito evolved from the Zora for the same reason. So, their only known evolutions are after Hyrule was flooded, which only happened in the Adult Era. Boom! Botw must be in the Adult Era!
But wait. No, we have the mentioning of the hero from Twilight Princess in botw. And that Link lived in the Child Era.
How can things from both the Child Era and the Adult Era exist in botw??
A convergence could explain this. However.
Let’s remember one of the earlier trailers we got of Tears of the Kingdom (then “botw 2”):
Towards the end of this trailer, we see a chunk of land being sent into the sky.
And something that happened before Skyward Sword, the very first game displayed in the timeline, was that the Goddess Hylia sent a plot of land into the sky with her surviving subjects on it to keep them safe while she did battle with a great evil on the land below.
And here we return to the “botw is before Skyward Sword theory.”
Who knows? Maybe that plot of land at the end of the botw trailer isn’t Skyloft. But what if it is?
How could we have events before Skyward Sword, after Twilight Princess, AND after Wind Waker all within botw/totk?
The timeline is a loop. IF all these things are true, then it has to be a loop.
What if every time a new hero was born, the choices they made affected the events of the greater loop as a whole? With each new Link and each new adventure, perhaps the decisions being made caused the timelines to twist and collapse and bleed into themselves. And that’s how we have things from multiple timelines existing together, and how the current events of botw/totk have potentially happened before AND after other games.
Maybe time is a flat circle and Hyrule has been eating its own tail for eons.
