Lost in the sauce (brainstorming Zelda aesthetics filtered through a Celtic lens)
The story would be set in a world inspired by contemporary Gaelic culture because they're basically the only extant Celts left but I think ancient Hylia and all the myths would be inspired by continental Celts, probably the Gauls
Ideally this would also keep the specific and very distinctive Japanese tinge that all Zelda aesthetics have, but I'm sure not the person to know how to do THAT properly =P
@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 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
@Lady No yeah hundo p
@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
@Lady Oh yeah their entire theology is incredibly non-Christian like please pay any attention to the religious lore
@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 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