Lady of the Land @Lady@cat.family

• i can beat the first half of colgera pretty easily but
• i think the only way to do the second without the paraglider might be to kill it all in one go in the time it takes to fall after the initial cutscene

i wish i had thought to capture a video of me actually getting up to that top platform because it was amazing but to give you an idea, it involved waiting for all five of the balloons attached to my wing to time out and detach, rewinding the wing to stabilize it, and then gliding under the platform and using ascend

lmao

i did not in fact need another balloon

• i heard impa was doing some cool stuff so i went and visited her
• impa: “it's true we are high up in my balloon, but you can just float down with a paraglider” me:
• thankfully there was a river nearby and i just lept from the balloon into it
• went into the forgotten temple
• time to find all the geoglyphs!!
• marked them on my map, which of course is not filled out because i can’t get in the towers
• Journey Into Hebra
• found two geoglyphs but not the one i was looking for?? explored a bunch of caves
• finally found it
• hmm these rito folk need help i should assist them
• MURDEROUS BOUNCY BOATS
• (barely) made it to the top of the storm!! but i used up all my balloons and have no other means to get inside
• that’s right kids i still do not have a paraglider
• i will try again while saving a balloon tomorrow, i BET i can make it
• this would be a lot easier if i had rockets lmao

having things be easy to climb but hard to descend just adds so much more fun puzzle to the game

no i haven't spoken to purah yet

it’s a better game without the paraglider and they were cowards for including it

throwing a firebomb in front of a bokoblin cart and watching it burn is dope as fuck

i don’t like that they made Zelda an Official Princess but her diary had a line which was like “it’s the people’s job to rebuild. it’s my job to protect them” which i thought was a very interesting mentality

them making her into a schoolteacher was very lol; glad nintendo in all their wisdom has decided to make their female lead’s passion be raising kids

• made it to my (and Zelda’s?? fucking tiny bed lmao) house
• did a bunch of things in hateno
• travelled up north to kakariko
• did a bunch of things there too
• there was a zonai hot air balloon contraption so i launched myself into the sky and then had to get very creative solving the shrine puzzle there
• SO MUCH “move the platform where you want it; move it back to you; use Rewind”
• finally tried doing a shrine on the surface and failed at it because it requires the paraglider which i STILL don’t have
• i do have lots of paraglider fabrics though
• rode my horse to dueling peaks stable FINALLY

i really don’t think i can toss this one like Hylia’s statue has fucking wings

i just want you to know that before TotK was released all signs were pointing to the Hylians fucking the Rito not the Zonai and the latter is wildly inconsistent with most of the existing symbolism in the games

mostly the reason this all annoys me is that the involvement of the Zonai places that part of the legend very early in Zelda mythological tradition, which means that the stuff in e.g. Ocarina of Time has to develop FROM this bullshit and not the other way around

you can do a LITTLE bit of “people got it wrong in the retelling” but that’s subtractive, not additive; people didn’t get it wrong and invent a whole new type of sage

THERE WERE ALREADY POWERFUL ELEMENTAL BEINGS, THEY WERE THE DRAGONS, YOU CAN’T JUST PASTE ANOTHER SET ON TOP OF THEM THAT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE

it’s really very silly BotW was like “there are three elemental powers in Zelda: Fire, Ice, and Electricity” and then TotK was like “that means we need a Lightning sage”, but ignored Ice and replaced it two new elements Wind and Water

ALSO HEY GUESS WHAT if Zelda The Light Dragon is descended from Zelda The Sage then that means that the OTHER three dragons could ALSO symbolize sages. You can pretty easily say Naydra is Ice and Dinraal is Earth and Farosh is Forest but this doesn't REALLY line up; Dinraal is pretty strongly Fire-elemental and Farosh is pretty strongly Lightning-elemental. the latter also speaks to a larger problem which is that they split up Storms into Wind and Lightning; Faron has past associations primarily with Wind (but they pushed that onto the Rito) and Lightning USED to go along with it (but not anymore??)

i already had a running theory that Ganondorf was not actually Gerudo but that theory presumed that he was Yiga instead and associated with Shadow. it doesn’t reconcile the Lightning~Spirit split

Lightning has been associated with the desert before but that was when it was considered a part of LANAYRU province. (Worth noting that Skyward Sword really fucks up the elemental associations in general though.) Lanayru in BotW/TotK is associated with ICE, which, importantly, is an element which still does not have a sage (waiting for the return of the Anouki 🥲)