Do you FanonDiscontinuity Tears of the Kingdom? - Zelda Universe Forums (2024)

Quote from Tailbiter231

Remember when you have to fix the stable by levitating a plank of wood onto its spot and attaching it? Apparently Karson and anyone else were unable to do such a thing.

Yeah, they aren't able.

Instead they would have to get some tools, a ladder, a few buddies to hold the plank steady, and work that time into their schedule and discuss who provides payment for fixing a volunteer stablekeeper's stable.

Every chore in Hyrule will get done, it just takes longer.

Yet, conversely, we need Karson for the finetuning of the tower. And a few others of hudson construction for various construction tasks.

There's plenty stuff that needs to be done that Link can't.

I'm a little late to the party, mostly because when I first saw the title I was a little resentful that the thread even existed. The idea that people hate my favorite game in the series so much that we need a long thread debating whether it should be decanonized (whether in headcanon or not) is incredibly aggravating. Granted it's also not new to me as a fan of The Last Jedi in the face of all the "decanonize the sequels" nonsense, but I hate that too.

But reading through it does seem like there's some good (and some not so good) conversation happening in the midst of a concept I don't like so here I am. I'll start with a couple things that stuck out to me.

Quote from Abyss Master

Nobody knew for a fact that Minish Cap preceded Ocarina of Time, for instance.

To my memory, we had a dev quote saying Four Swords was the earliest game in the series and then Minish Cap told of the forging of the Four Sword. So while not everyone knew it and some chose to override the dev quote for one reason or another, we *did* know this technically. Unless I'm hallucinating that quote or the quote came later but I don't think so...

That said, while I believe the timeline was always intended and that a lot of it looked very similar to the HH timeline, I agree with your major points. They were always playing fast and loose with things, always contradicting themselves, always adding stuff as they thought of it even if it changed everything we thought we knew. Your example of LttP and OoT is especially relevant - while the intent was definitely for them to be linked (and the change to an ending where Link won is in line with your point about the series simply not wanting to give us a dark ending) there were hotly debated contradictions. I don't think there's anything that can't be handwaved or otherwise explained, but the same is true of the modern games and I don't think we should revise history to pretend the contradictions weren't there at all or weren't debated, especially if we're then using it as evidence that TotK is somehow an egregious example never before seen.

Quote from Abyss Master

It is more akin to recontextualizing the lore and giving it new meaning

YES. And this is what I LOVE about theorizing. The whole reason I care about a sort of continuity in this series is because those recontextualizations breathe fresh life into old favorites. The first thing I did after beating TotK was replay TP and think about how the Oocca may have once been Zonai. After SS I did a full run of the Child Timeline just to reimagine things with this new history. After BotW I played LoZ to look at all the animal dungeons and AoL to look at all the mysterious ruins and palaces and potential Aztec inspiration to fit with how I viewed the Zonai at the time (still need to revisit now). I don't want to get into the weeds with any of these specific theories and connections right now, I just mean to showcase how things being recontextualized makes me excited to go back.

It seems a lot of people get hung up on small details and previous assumptions and use those to say "no this cannot possibly fit together" but I love seeing how everything we knew may be a little bit off. This has also begun to inform my approach to other series, as I think long running franchises are bound to bring in new creators with fresh ideas and not all of them are going to line up perfectly with prior interpretations, but if they tell a good story then I'm happy to recontextualize.

Quote from Evran_Speer

I think the takeaway is that TotK doesn't directly contradict BotW. It contradicts some assumptions that we as fans may have made about BotW and how it connects to the rest of the timeline. Reasonable assumptions, but not things that were known with certainty to be true.

Absolutely my thought too. Building on what I said above, much as I love recontextualizing, I also often feel that it's not even needed - that what we *thought* we knew and what we *actually* knew were separate things and that the new lore actually slots in perfectly well. The approach to Zonai is a perfect example of this that has come up in the Discord a number of times. We knew *nothing* about the Zonai before. Was it a reasonable conclusion to believe the Barbarian Tribe and Zonai were one in the same? Totally! Both lived in the Faron region and we had nothing to go on except some vaguerie about the ruins. We knew so little that people were looking for every instance of a swirl in the series to say "a ha! It's the Zonai!" They were theorized to be the Deku, the Twili, the citizens of Lurelin, pre-SS surface dwellers, even to have a hand in some parts of WW. TotK gave us entirely new answers that contradict all of those theories and all of what we thought we knew, but truth is we actually didn't know anything at all.

Quote from Abyss Master

The ending of BotW indicated that the Sheikah tech was shutting down, and TotK shows that it has disappeared. Isn't it very easy to just assume that this means the Sheikah tech vanished after it stopped functioning, because it had fulfilled its purpose? You know, like how the ancient Sheikah monks vanish into thin air when they've fulfilled their purpose in giving Link their spirit orb? Why do you need an explicit explanation to something that you can so easily infer from the visual and contextual clues that both games give you?

Thank you. Would it have been nice to have someone go "oh hey here's what happened?" Sure. Is it a perfectly reasonable conclusion given the prior game's ending and understanding the gameplay focus shift and need for both games to have their own identities? Completely! Sure I buy people not being satisfied with the explanation but all the posturing about how it's some egregious example that proves the devs just don't care and pretending that it's so much worse than *every other time* they've done the same thing in the series drives me nuts.

The issue I have with that explanation is that, if it's accurate, it really muddies the water as to what the specific purpose of the Sheikah tech is.

At the most basic level, Sheikah tech was created for the forces of good to defend Hyrule against evil. It clearly didn't fulfill its purpose 10,000 years prior to Breath of the Wild when Calamity Ganon was first sealed away, because it didn't disappear for good (unless it conveniently disappeared for just under 10,000 years, right before King Rhoam had it excavated).

Did it fulfill its purpose once Calamity Ganon was vanquished at the end of Breath of the Wild? Not merely defeated or sealed away? That's highly debatable, because it feels open to interpretation if Calamity Ganon actually was vanquished. Part of him certainly was, but the part that spawned him in the first place, i.e, Ganondorf, remained 'alive' and well.

Was the purpose to the Sheikah tech then strictly to be used against Calamity Ganon and only Calamity Ganon? Thus, it was destined to disappear even when only a couple of years later, the very enemy that Calamity Ganon originated from, would emerge and cause all hell to once again break loose across Hyrule? If so, that's a wildly specific, and wildly futile purpose.

Sheikah tech also isn't 100% gone in Tears of the Kingdom. It's mostly gone, but there are small traces of it that still remain: the

Skyview Towers, the Purah Pad, the Guardian sitting on top of Lookout Landing, the Ancient Blades, Purah having perfected her anti-aging Rune in between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, etc.

The presence of the ancient Sheikah monks within the shrines already insinuated pretty strongly that the Sheikah tech hadn't fulfilled its purpose 10 000 years ago, because they wouldn't be around to grant Link their spirit orb if it had. The fact that they vanish upon doing so, and the fact that they explicitly state that their purpose has been fulfilled once you clear every shrine, makes it abundantly clear that yes; it is only now, with this particular Link and this particular Zelda, that Calamity Ganon is well and truly vanquished, and that the Sheikah tech has finally fulfilled its given purpose. Calamity Ganon isn't merely sealed or defeated, he is destroyed. And if it seems futile that the technology vanishes, keep in mind that the ancient Sheikah never intended for their anti-Ganon technology to literally get corrupted by Calamity Ganon and turned against the kingdom of Hyrule either. Hyrule Castle was never supposed to fall, and Ganondorf was never supposed to break free of Rauru's seal.

There is indeed some Sheikah tech still remaining in Hyrule, but what's also clear is that it isn't being powered in the same way as before. There are no blue flames or ancient furnaces to be found anywhere. It's most likely that Purah and Robbie found some alternate means of powering the technology that still remains, but it's nowhere near what they had before. The Purah Pad doesn't have anything close to the capabilities of the Sheikah slate from BotW. The Skyview Towers are clearly built only partly with Sheikah technology, and require regular maintenance to keep functioning properly. And the Ancient Blades literally only last for a single hit.

I don't know if I buy that, either, because it creates another inconsistency. When the Sheikah Monks see their purpose fulfilled, they don't waste any time disintegrating themselves out of existence. There's no waiting around for them. They dissolve into a fine mist right then and there.

That's not how the Sheikah tech worked, evidenced by Breath of the Wild's ending, and the trace amounts that remain in Tears of the Kingdom.

The issue isn't in the science behind tech phasing once it achieves an abstract goal. Zelda is speculative fiction and, even if something is corny, the world building allows for elements that would go against all laws of existence as we know them in our world. The Sheikah tech clearly has some kind of supernatural property to it, almost as if its sentient and self aware.

It's not like there were Hylians or Sheikah out there who made the deliberate decision for the tech to disappear. If someone had flipped a switch and decommissioned everything because they saw the tech's purpose as being fulfilled, and they had zero idea Ganondorf was waiting in the wings to raise hell, that would at least make perfect sense. This is not what appeared to happen. Instead, the Sheikah tech made the decision on its own, or had some other incorporeal force make the decision. Whatever was behind the decision, it did so knowing that Calamity Ganon as mortal creatures in the Era of the Wilds knew it was 'gone', but depending on how you look at it, it's fair to say it wasn't actually gone. Calamity Ganon was an extension of Ganondorf. It and Ganondorf are part of the same being. The true threat to Hyrule, the progenitor of all that imperiled the land, remained after the events of Breath of the Wild. How could the Sheikah tech feel that its purpose was "fulfilled" when that threat was a short couple of years away from returning all over again? If Ganondorf himself didn't make his way back up to the surface, something else relating to his power simply would have, as proven by Gloom having already escaped when Tears of the Kingdom begins. Aka, the new 'Calamity Ganon'.

Sheikah tech either being that unaware of, or indifferent to the threat that Ganondorf posed is hilariously contrived and unimaginative writing.

It sounds like you're trying to ascribe some kind of sentience or will to the technology itself, which just doesn't fly with me. Technology isn't "aware" of anything, nor can it be anything but "indifferent". It literally just does what it was created to do, and nothing else. It can be corrupted into changing its purpose, like we see in BotW, but it cannot make any such decisions on its own. We have no reason to believe that the Sheikah technology is somehow different.

The technology was most likely designed to sense for and target Calamity Ganon exclusively, probably based on the presence of malice, which we know to be specific to Calamity Ganon rather than Ganondorf and thus would serve as a perfectly fine explanation for how the Sheikah tech could "miss" the existence of the latter (because it wasn't searching for him, see). I'm not really concerned with the exact mechanics of it because it ultimately doesn't matter; the ancient Sheikah didn't have the foresight to predict that the technology could be turned against Hyrule by Calamity Ganon, so why should we expect them to have somehow had the foresight to make the technology "sentient", just in case there was some other evil that would only emerge if something happened that they never expected to happen in the first place?

Bottom line is, we're talking about mysterious and ancient technology that was created several millennia ago, and which is just barely understood in the present day. We have no idea what exactly the ancient Sheikah programmed their technology to do in the event of Calamity Ganon's destruction, because none of them remain to tell anyone. Not only that, but their technology was suddenly shunned by the kingdom of Hyrule when they were at their height, which probably put a bit of a halt on whatever future plans they had for their tech. Who knows, maybe they were in the middle of developing a firmware update when Microsoft the king of Hyrule told them to shut it down. Then there's the fact that 10 000 years later, the Sheikah are literally having to reverse-engineer the stuff to figure out how it works and then repurpose it for their own use. Thus we get the Sheikah-esque technology we see in TotK, which (again) doesn't function exactly like the technology in BotW and which clearly has to be powered in a different manner than before.

This has all the hallmark signs of "we found this old stuff and we have no idea how it works but we made some cool things with it". I think it's best left at that.

I wouldn't say I'm resolute on the idea that the Sheikah tech was self aware. I was expressing that concept to demonstrate how the possible explanation you provided, that ] the tech disappeared because it fulfilled a purpose, still has a lot of unanswered questions. Because if the "fulfilled a purpose" reasoning is true, something within the Sheikah tech or with governance over the Sheikah tech was able to make distinctions for when it should disappear, or when its purpose was fulfilled. As i said before, nobody flipped a switch and decommissioned it. Even though Calamity Ganon was pretty much knocked out cold long ago, so emphatically that it didn't make a peep for 10,000 years, the Sheikah tech didn't disappear. It only did so in between Breath of the Wild's ending, and the beginning of Tears of the Kingdom. Whether it was the tech truly being self aware, a supernatural force with authority over the tech, coding within the tech that the Sheikah themselves wrote to someday activate, etc. etc. something related to the tech had any amount awareness and/or autonomy to initiate the "disappearing", much like the Sheikah Monks would have disappeared had they too did so under the precept of having "fulfilled a purpose".

Your theory that the Sheikah tech perpetuated itself based on the presence of Malice, on the other hand, makes more sense to me. But I also don't believe for a second that the writers behind Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom ever considered that idea.

Which is exactly why you'd be a better choice to write these games.

And me too. Because I want in on that sh*t.

Quote from Bald-Fi

I'm a little late to the party, mostly because when I first saw the title I was a little resentful that the thread even existed. The idea that people hate my favorite game in the series so much that we need a long thread debating whether it should be decanonized (whether in headcanon or not) is incredibly aggravating. Granted it's also not new to me as a fan of The Last Jedi in the face of all the "decanonize the sequels" nonsense, but I hate that too.

See Also

The Legend Of Zelda Breath Of The Wild Update 3.0 And DLC 2.0

For the record, I don't FD it, I can't decide which I like more between it and BotW and I consider it in continuity with BotW (and them being their own canon separate from other timelines despite the easter eggs). I just noticed a lot of people disliked this game.

And for The Last Jedi, I did find the sequel trilogy fun. (But I also consider it its own thing, a "what-if" alternate universe sequel like Dragon Ball GT, if only due to inconsistencies and undoing my number one favorite villain death scene of all time, Emperor Palpatine in Return of the Jedi.

I have a hard time accepting the retcon to Calamity Ganon as just being a change based on information we "assumed" to be true. All of the lore surrounding it indicated it was OOT Ganondorf, so if they really intend to retcon that and somehow make it a product of TotK Ganondorf, that's an egregious retcon that I feel deserves to be called out. I know I've brought this up before, and I don't want to derail this particular thread anymore with the topic, but in many ways such a change actively puts TotK at odds with a lot of the text of BOTW especially in it's native Japanese language. It's essentially a ALttP - OOT level retcon between two games that are meant to be directly connected. The premise of a refounding is also especially egregious because neither game suggests or even implies that, evidence in both directly counters it in fact, and accepting such a idea is essentially a death knell to having any reasonable debate or discussion over lore ever again. Nothing has to connect at all if the whole of Hyrule can identically reboot itself off-screen with no evidence or suggestion as such.

Thus my opinion on the lore of TotK really hinges on how they choose to connect these games to the rest of the series.

Quote from Mirren

Your theory that the Sheikah tech perpetuated itself based on the presence of Malice, on the other hand, feels a lot more viable to me. But I also don't believe for a second that the writers behind Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom ever considered that idea.

I dunno about that. The ending of BotW already suggested that the technology was starting to shut down in the aftermath of Ganon's destruction, so there was definitely some kind of intent behind it from the writers' side of things when developing BotW. The director of BotW and TotK, Fujibayashi, also mentioned the disappearance of the Sheikah tech in an interview with The Telegraph back in October of last year. So I do think that the writers thought this through a lot more than you might be giving them credit for here. It's just that Fujibayashi seems to favor leaving it vague in order to foster theorizing and discussion among the fanbase. It also makes sense to not dwell on the disappearance of the Sheikah tech from a storytelling point of view, because it plays no major role in TotK's narrative.

Personally, if I could make one change regarding the Sheikah tech in TotK, I'd have placed the Divine Beasts - broken and decaying - down in the Depths. It'd have made for a pretty cool easter egg, and would have fit in well with the Depths' apparent role as a place where old things go to die. Maybe there could even have been a sidequest related to taking a picture of each of them to show in Symin's class, which would entail first lighting up the area and then finding a fitting vantage point to get a good shot.

I think both Mirren and Abyss are still assigning too much sentience to Sheikah tech.

Even of you beat all 120 shrines, surprise, you download DLC and there are, by my count, 24 more monks.

If they can pull that one off, why not just say "oh and there was one more monk that stayed behind to throw the killswitch on the sheikah tech as soon as it was clear there was no malice left to cause trouble with the shutdown command going through.

I'm ascribing no sentience to the Sheikah tech. I dunno why you would even assume that technology has to be sentient; all you have to do is assume that the Sheikah programmed it in such a way 10 000 years ago. No need to theorize that they had a Sheikah janitor stay behind to flick the switch when Calamity Ganon was finally vanquished.

The DLC makes no difference in this case because it chronologically takes place before the defeat of Calamity Ganon anyways.

I don't think there's a satisfying answer to the tech disappearing. They just got rid of it because it would be in the way otherwise. They say stuff like they don't want to write stories that feel like they're incompatible but then do stuff like this, so it is what it is.

Like at best you could say it was designed to be used against Calamity Ganon and only Calamity Ganon but the existence of the Divine Beasts appearance and the Divine Beast masks prove the Ancient Sheikah knew about TotK Ganondorf and the Imprisoning War, so getting rid of the tech because CG is gone would be pretty stupid and hard to explain on the Sheikahs part, and frankly we don't even know if Calamity Ganon is gone, the ending of BOTW would say that he is in fact not gone, as Zelda remarks that he'll likely return one day. Of course this hinges on how it does or doesn't connect to TotK Ganondorf who has no knowledge of CG existence at all, and according to the JP script of BOTW and all of the lore of BOTW, AoC, and CaC, can't have a connection to it.

Quote from gamtos

Even of you beat all 120 shrines, surprise, you download DLC and there are, by my count, 24 more monks.

That's 12 for the Divine Beast trials (three per Divine Beast), four for the Great Plateau, and Monk Maz Koshia. Who are the other five monks?

Quote from Abyss Master

I dunno about that. The ending of BotW already suggested that the technology was starting to shut down in the aftermath of Ganon's destruction, so there was definitely some kind of intent behind it from the writers' side of things when developing BotW. The director of BotW and TotK, Fujibayashi, also mentioned the disappearance of the Sheikah tech in an interview with The Telegraph back in October of last year. So I do think that the writers thought this through a lot more than you might be giving them credit for here. It's just that Fujibayashi seems to favor leaving it vague in order to foster theorizing and discussion among the fanbase. It also makes sense to not dwell on the disappearance of the Sheikah tech from a storytelling point of view, because it plays no major role in TotK's narrative.

In the end, I can't know what thoughts went through the writers' heads. That's a space I have zero access to. But I'm hesitant to believe they had reasoning in mind as super specific as the tech sensing Malice when that was never hinted at in Breath of the Wild, and seven years later no writer has even humored the idea. They thought to make an in-game mention that Sheikah tech was used to help create certain clothing, but not that?

Sheikah tech was a foundational element of Breath of the Wild's world building, which is also why I can't suspend my disbelief when next to no one in Tears of the Kingdom makes mention of it. I find that to be like Bending suddenly disappearing from The Last Airbender, but a story set a couple of years after Korra sees no one acknowledge it. Sheikah tech and its disappearance may not have had a major role in Tears of the Kingdom's story, but it sure has hell had a major role in the setting that Tears of the Kingdom takes place in.

Quote from gamtos

If they can pull that one off, why not just say "oh and there was one more monk that stayed behind to throw the killswitch on the sheikah tech as soon as it was clear there was no malice left to cause trouble with the shutdown command going through.

There already was one monk that stayed behind. Maz Koshia doesn't vanish like the other monks do. Also, Guardians have some amount of AI since they can move around, choose targets, and shoot on their own. I don't think it's out of the question that they'd be able to hit their own off switch. That being said, like Mirren said, I don't think it matters how or when the "purpose is fulfilled" decision is made. There are obviously mechanisms in place for making that sort of decision -- i.e. shrines that appear when that Link is standing in the right place at the right time or riding a deer or naked. Whether they be pre-programmed or made in real-time by the resident monks, either one of those could take later actions, as well.

Personally, I'm inclined to think Maz Koshia flicked the kill switch, because that gives him a reason to stick around, too.

Quote from gamtos

Do y'all think that whatever vanished the Sheikah Tech didn't work on the completely broken Guardians? Would explain why the new towers are made of scraps of ancient Sheikah tech.

I'm honestly not sure that the Guardians need to have disappeared at all. So long as they were being repurposed, there's a reason for most of them to be gone. But I'm pretty okay with this idea, too. If the intact, active Guardians had already disappeared, it's a good reason for people to have searched out even the most remote damaged Guardians and removed those manually.

My only objection would be that even things built in modern-day Hyrule, like the Ancient Armor set, are nowhere to be seen in TotK. If the kill switch could affect Sheikahtech that had been completely redesigned into new items, I would think it would affect damaged Guardians, too. But maybe they were just destroyed by some other means.

Quote from Mirren

In the end, I can't know what thoughts went through the writers' heads. That's a space I have zero access to. But I'm hesitant to believe they had reasoning in mind as super specific as the tech sensing Malice when that was never hinted at in Breath of the Wild, and seven years later no writer has even humored the idea. They thought to make an in-game mention that Sheikah tech was used to help create certain clothing, but not that?

Sheikah tech was a foundational element of Breath of the Wild's world building, which is also why I can't suspend my disbelief when next to no one in Tears of the Kingdom makes mention of it. I find that to be like Bending suddenly disappearing from The Last Airbender, but a story set a couple of years after Korra sees no one acknowledge it. Sheikah tech and its disappearance may not have had a major role in Tears of the Kingdom's story, but it sure has hell had a major role in the setting that Tears of the Kingdom takes place in.

Creating a Champion states that the Sheikah towers are used to sense for Calamity Ganon's presence. It's not that "super specific" of a notion.

The problem with your analogy about bending in the Last Airbender universe is that the Sheikah technology is not anything close to this omnipresent factor in everyday people's lives that bending is in TLA. Most people in Hyrule have no idea what a shrine is, much less what it does. They know nothing about Guardians except that they're dangerous, and will flee at the sight of one. And they have no idea how to use any of this technology. Only Purah and Robbie do, and they only use it for the explicit purpose of helping Link alone. For everyone else, the Sheikah technology is little more than glowing junk that has probably tried to kill them at some point in the past 100 years. There is nothing in the text in BotW that suggests that anyone would ever miss the technology much if it disappeared, because there was no facet of it that ever proved to be of much benefit to them or their daily lives. It's only Link who is able to make the most of the tech, and only for the purpose of defeating Calamity Ganon. Because that was the whole point of it in the first place.

I don't have to suspend my disbelief to accept that the people in TotK are indifferent to the disappearance of the Sheikah technology during that game's events, because most of them were already pretty indifferent to the technology in BotW. And why wouldn't they be? It's of no use to their daily lives, and they only really take note of it when it's being a nuisance or posing an actual threat to them. The Goron, Zora, Rito and Gerudo people can't seem to stop talking about the Divine Beasts when they're rampaging and causing problems with the local environment, but once the Divine Beasts are quelled these people are all just moving on to other sh*t in their lives, as one would expect. And in the unlikely event that you find someone out and about who's taken an interest in a shrine, it's never because they're actually interested in the technology behind it (like Zelda was) but rather some other reason such as liking the color it makes or wanting the treasure within or something like that. How fitting then that the only two people who are actually knowledgable about the Sheikah technology in BotW are also the ones that most prominently continue to make use of it in TotK, being Purah and Robbie. Not only that, but they have shed their hermit-like status from BotW to venture out into Hyrule and take on leadership roles.

Anyway, the thing to keep in mind about both BotW and TotK is that what's important to Link, and by extention the player, isn't necessarily all that important to the common people of Hyrule. We care about the Sheikah towers and the shrines and the Divine Beasts in BotW because they actually served a significant purpose to our adventure, but to most people they were just mysterious constructs that few people ever dared to venture near. So why would any of them be dwelling on the disappearance of those constructs for what might be years after the fact? Especially when Hyrule is being rocked by new catastrophes in the form of the Upheaval.

Quote from Abyss Master

We care about the Sheikah towers and the shrines and the Divine Beasts in BotW because they actually served a significant purpose to our adventure, but to most people they were just mysterious constructs that few people ever dared to venture near.

And to add to that, the towers and shrines themselves only popped up when Link woke up and activated the first tower. So depending on how long BotW was canonically, they were only even present for maybe a month or so 6ish years before TotK? Certainly the Guardians were a different story, but the broken ones were a relic of an age long past and the active ones were just another reason the fields were dangerous, but now the Upheavel has brought things like Gleeoks and stuff, why dwell on a past threat that most didn't deal with directly?