aikoiya:
getvalentined:
aikoiya:
getvalentined:
Now I’m thinking about the “Save The Gerudo, Save The World” AU again.
Twinrova kills Nabooru in front of Link, and that’s when he finally realizes that all the Sages are dead. They’re all dead. He didn’t know—his body may be an adult’s but he is still a child, he didn’t understand, and nobody had the heart to tell him outright in the very limited time they got to meet him after he defeated the monsters that killed them. In Ocarina of Time, in order for a Sage to fully awaken to their power, they have to die.
Link knows that Ganondorf’s main motivation, prior to all this, was the safety of his people. He’s off the deep end by the time Link is an adult, but it’s possible that in the past, seven years ago, there’s still enough Gerudo King in there to be swayed.
Navi says this is the worst idea ever. Link says he has to try.
So Link makes the decision to go back in time and offer himself—his allegiance, his Triforce, his life—in exchange for Nabooru’s safety. Hero of Time or not, champion of Farore or not, Link is just one person; he knows he can’t defeat the monster Ganondorf will eventually become while on his own and crippled with the knowledge that everyone he loves is dead. That isn’t the future he’s fighting for.
So he turns himself in to the Gerudo. He’s brought before Ganondorf—and now he’s a child, but he acts like an adult, he carries himself like someone who’s been through every bit as much war as Ganondorf has—and makes his offer. Ganondorf can have whatever Link can offer him, if he saves Nabooru.
Ganondorf responds, “…What happened to Nabooru?”
And just like that, the horrible future Link was thrown into against his will is smashed to bits.
Oooo… The fact that he isn’t aware suggests that Kōme & Kotake might be the true villains here…
Correct! Ganondorf has no idea what Twinrova is doing in his name prior to the timeskip; he may not even know after, since “Nabooru” apparently directs their people entirely from the Desert Colossus under Twinrova’s suggestion. There’s no reason for Kotake and Koume to hide the fact that they’re the ones in control there, since they raised their people’s current king and should be more than respected enough to have the support of those people—but they do hide it, pretending that it’s Nabooru in control, which implies that the entire situation at the Spirit Temple was their doing, not Ganondorf’s. Implying that it was hidden from Ganondorf as well.
Ganondorf’s original goal in allying with Hyrule, even after the war between them drove the Gerudo into a wasteland, was to help his people not die in that wasteland. His “mothers” using those same people as magical war slaves is…not something he would be comfortable with, at least pre-timeskip. (I’m not even sure he’d be okay with it after the fact, given the implications of some of the things he does literally over a thousand years later in Hyrule Warriors.)
As a result of Link’s actions in this AU, Ganondorf discovers that Twinrova has been using him this entire time to try to revive their patron god, Demise, the last vestiges of which they hosted in him as a newborn. There’s no way to get it out of him now, but he was also blessed by one of the Three Goddesses at birth in an (ultimately futile in-canon) attempt to keep Demise from taking over, and once he’s aware of that he’s able to maintain a kind of equilibrium that he couldn’t when he didn’t know the truth. The first step to keeping a Fugitive Rage God From Somewhere Beyond Space from twisting your goals and values into something unrecognizable is knowing that it’s in your head in the first place, after all!
The Triforce is still split, of course, but the other Sages are safe and alive, not even aware that they’re meant to be Sages at all—save for Impa. She doesn’t take what she sees as Link allying himself with the side of “evil” particularly well. Link eventually realizes that none of this would have happened in the first place if Zelda hadn’t been so rash (a conclusion that Zelda herself reaches and admits in-canon), but even though Impa knows this is true, she outright refuses to concede such a thing openly. They’ll have to cross that bridge when they come to it. (There may or may not be an Impa vs. Nabooru sage-on-sage violence throwdown over it.)
Mmm… My only problem with this is that in-game, despite the 7 years between, the Gerudo still hadn’t been moved into Hyrule.
Like, why weren’t they the new ruling class?
This also implies that it’s not possible to thrive in the desert, but real life proves this to not be the case.
So long as one has ready access to water, you can grow a number of things there. You can thrive. Egypt was a desert-dwelling people & they weren’t just a kingdom. They were the greatest empire on earth for a time.
At OoT’s stage, the only thing holding the Gerudo back is water & access to men.
But I 100% agree with Kōme & Kotake being the villains. A. They’re canonical witches that use black magic to live as long as they have. B. They have zero issues brainwashing their own people.
Even if Ganondorf was unrepentantly evil, he had to learn to be that way from somewhere. And where else to look than a pair of witches who willingly brainwash people & possibly makes human sacrifices to their Daimaō deity.
It’s also very possible that they’re racist too. So, it would surprise me very little if they were just using Ganondorf.
There’s also the fact that they aren’t his actual mothers, which brings to mind who his mother was &, in fact, who his father could’ve been.
We never learn what happened to them &, in fact, for all we know, Kōme & Kotake could’ve killed them both.
It also makes you wonder if they groomed him specifically to become a tyrant. What sort of parental figures were they? How much did they manipulate him?
Either way. I like seeing the Gerudo & even Ganon portrayed as human, but also not blameless. I mean, Hyrule sure as hell ain’t blameless, so why should any of the other races be?
I’m not saying that it’s impossible to thrive in a desert (I literally live in a desert), I’m using the fact that the source material literally indicates that’s one of the reasons there are so few Gerudo as a launching point. This series also includes things like time travel, zombies made from the corpses of dead royalty, talking swords, islands in the sky, and gods that fell down from space, which aren’t accurate to life in any capacity. I don’t think “living in the desert sucks” is the thing that should break the suspension of disbelief. (Living in the desert, for the record, does genuinely kinda suck even IRL in this grand modern age of ours. A lot of people die out here. Not great. Lack of access to water kills people in fully industrialized cities here! It’s bonkers!)
The Gerudo still being in the desert post-timeskip is possibly because Ganondorf is Unrepentantly Evil by that stage, and clearly has very little direct interaction with his own people. He doesn’t even know that his literal nemesis has been given honorary membership to the clan and is allowed to just run around with his friends and sisters and probably his daughters—he seems to have left taking care of the people to “Nabooru” by then, while he tries to find Zelda and Link and reunite the Triforce so he can have complete control.
It reads to me less like Unrepentant Evil than like he’s moved his own goalposts: initially the goal was getting allies in Hyrule, then when that didn’t work out he took control by force, but that didn’t work out exactly how he wanted either because the Triforce was broken, he decided that he needed that control to be absolute before he’d move on his original goal, and it’s spiraled out of control for the most part. By the time seven years go by and Link finally reappears, Ganondorf has become a man obsessed not with the betterment of his people or even with his own comfort—this is obvious from the state of Castle Town and the construction of his tower, Ganondorf why do you live like this?—but with becoming the only living thing on the planet with enough power to do whatever he wants. The problem is that he’s not sure exactly what he wants anymore, except to get rid of anyone capable of challenging his rule.
It’s an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail: he wants absolute power so he can subjugate anyone capable of challenging him, he wants to subjugate anyone capable of challenging him in order to obtain absolute power, and on and on in the same cycle that Demise and Hylia have been spinning through since they first came to ground. (Honestly pitiful, but don’t tell him that. Evil is, at its core, pitiful.)
In this AU, Ganondorf’s biological mother* died at some vague point in the past, but Kotake and Koume took custody of Ganondorf at birth because they’re the clan’s only surviving magic users; there used to be others, but they were killed in the war with Hyrule, so Twinrova’s all that’s left. The duty “fell” to them because ruler of the Gerudo always has a level of inherent magic—we see that even in the most recent games in the series, both Urbosa and Riju have the same electricity magic we see from Ganondorf himself in OoT, as does Calamity Timeline Nabooru, the Sage of Lightning—so it’s traditional for the clan’s highest-ranking magic users to be responsible for their upbringing in order to keep them from killing anyone as that magical ability matures. (Although in my head they didn’t kill her directly, but did fail to provide her with medical attention in such a way that led to her passing. They were very calculated in how they handled all things early on, growing increasingly sloppy as time went on and Ganondorf gained more and more power and control.)
*This woman was also Nabooru’s mother, which is why Nabooru was allowed to get away with talking shit about him the way she did; everyone in the clan save for Twinrova read her rebellion against his rule as stupid sibling rivalry on her part and didn’t give her comments or her behavior any weight whatsoever. Twinrova, however, know an unmanifested Sage when they see one, and couldn’t allow her to progress to the point that she learned the truth about herself, hence why they stepped in.
