Lady @Lady@cat.family

@coriander like the whole Hyruleans came from the sky and the Goddess Hylia blah blah is because Nintendo wanted to show off the skydiving thing with the Wii MotionPlus. like that’s it. that’s what it was

@coriander one of the "great" things about Zelda as a franchise is that Nintendo literally does not care about the lore until it comes time to actually like, market and sell the thing, and they design the games generally primarily around game mechanics and let the worldbuilding fall where it may

so like in ocarina of time they added these masks for this trading sequence and then in majora’s mask they were like “huh we could do more with this mechanic” and made a whole damn game about them and now suddenly Hyrule just has this entire Mask Culture sitting there which is never quite explained and like

that’s not a reference to anything?? they just did it for the game mechanics?? but what it means is that there’s actually a bunch of worldbuilding in Zelda which is really pretty unique and doesn’t necessarily have a real‐world parallel that you can just run with

@coriander this all said i get very salty at people who portray hylians as christians; there is zero justification for this and “what if indo‐european peoples but the whole christ thing didn’t happen” is WAY more fun

@coriander and really this is just me staying in my lane because i’m not saying that the zelda origin story with hylia ISN’T riffing off of the japanese origin story or that the settler‐colonialist nature of Hylians doesn’t reflect the very real settler‐colonialist approaches and racism towards indigenous people of japan as a nation, and there’s lots somebody could probably do with that, but

look link’s shield originally had a cross on it and i’m way more adept at addressing those same things in a Western context lol

@coriander basically the approach i take is:

japanese‐influenced lore? throw it in the bin. i don’t care that phoeni might reach up your ass and steal your soul orb. that doesn’t have anything to do with anybody

japanese‐influenced aesthetic? 1000% preserve

zelda is supposed to be about germanic white people so i don’t have a problem making it extremely about germanic white people, but the narrative structures and way the storytelling goes are very East Asian and i think it’s wrong to get rid of that

now, due to my personal interests, oftentime they wind up more Chinese than Japanese because i’ve spent more time reading zhiguai than yokai stories but

@coriander so there are two syllabic Hylian scripts in the legend of zelda (because all Hylian scripts are simple subtitution ciphers of either English or Japanese)

ONE of them i can pretty comfortably align with Linear B; it’s old, it’s used in a region with Greek influence, it was previously used for a different language which nobody today understands

the OTHER one i am just kinda throwing my hands up over because Zelda is very indo‐european and indo‐european languages just didn’t do syllabaries much because uhhh

we have words like “strength”

so i’m just like maybe it’s Celtiberian??? i guess?? i don’t have any celtic influence evidenced in Zelda anywhere right now lol but it’s the closest i can come up with