Ganon's Mysterious Origins (Revisited) | Hacker News Reader

Ganon's Mysterious Origins (Revisited)

thrillingtalesofoldvideogames.com

39 pointstobr21 comments

LttP officially named him Ganondorf Dragmire. Sounds like they were just giving a generic, intimidating European fantasy name. The rest of the early games are that kind of thing, enchanted woods with fairies and knights.

There's not a lot that makes sense in the Zelda theming. Link is officially Christian somehow, at least through LttP. Gerudo Valley is like the Middle East in OoT, which I would say is just loose theming but the Fire Temple has literal Islamic chanting. First few games had King Harkinian of Hyrule which sounds a bit like he's Armenian. The game series is named after author Zelda Fitzgerald.

I don't know why the Zelda series in particular gets retconned so much. It's so clear that they just drew on various fantasy/cultural tropes that they liked at the time and weren't thinking decades into the future.

It's fine to just accept them as loosely connected standalone games

Yeah, when I was a kid and read "oh there are actually 3 timelines," I stopped caring about a continuous storyline. There's already enough of a story within each game.

> but the Fire Temple has literal Islamic chanting

...had. Nintendo swapped it out in version 1.2 of OoT and all versions afterwards. It is of course relevant that they had it in there in the first place, but AIUI they didn't know it was Islamic chanting then, given they had a strict policy on not including such kinds of references and made the change for that reason.

The same version of OoT also put a crescent moon on the shield you get from the Gerudo area (Spirit Temple). I don't think that or the chanting were accidents.

I’m so glad they got rid of the moon. The new Gerudo emblem is so much cooler looking.

This went completely off the rails, it's actually kind of funny.

Kind of reminds me of JK Rowling backfilling all of that stuff in the Harry Potter books (now there's Luna Love good!.) Or Nintendo retconning Bowser's sons and replacing them with Bowser Jr.

Sometimes there just isn't that much thought behind a character.

Sometimes? I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure these games were generally not built with a hefty bible full of inviolable lore. Plot and continuity errors are common enough to show that.

Some people are very invested in making sense of things that just don’t have a ton of intention and meaning behind them.

The timeline's always been a mess, but it has been something that has been given serious thought since at least the late 90s.

https://www.zeldadungeon.net/forum/threads/the-truth-behind-...

https://old.reddit.com/r/truezelda/comments/sejcwx/newly_tra...

https://old.reddit.com/r/zelda/comments/6866wt/addressing_th...

That's not to say that there is a capital C canon that constrains all subsequent installments to be 100% self consistent. They seem to enjoy the freedom of being able to change things to fit their vision for the next installment. I just don't think it's correct to say there's no thought at all put into the head revision of the canon.

I read through those links (ha) and I agree, they knew the overall story was interesting to players, but intentionally elevated story over continuity. That was my original point.

The same debates happen about early games made with far less intention and artistry. For those games I’d be surprised if there was much care about canon at all.

Especially when the studio which made game v1 was fired and a new studio was asked to take some random game in development and update the sprite to look like v1’s box art. And 40 years later people are arguing about timelines and character arcs?

The developers of the Zelda series always tried to make new games fit the previous one's lore.

The devs themselves put a ton of effort on making these games kinda fit with each other at the time they were making each new installment, it wasn't a retroactive thing. They just weren't super pedantic about it until the official timeline came out.

Early Nintendo games were sort of like Osamu Tezuka works. There were "actors" that all had the same appearance and sometimes names used across multiple works that filled the role they needed. Of the first five Zelda games only The Legend Of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventures Of Link have a connected story, and even that's questionable as the beginning of Zelda II retcons the ending of The Legend Of Zelda and rewrites the setting extensively.

They put thought in, it just changes periodically. Like Mario used to be a plumber in Brooklyn. There was a whole TV show and movie, the old one. Then he moved to some fantasy world that always changes and he has an Italian accent.

Before that he was just Jumpman rescuing a damsel from a kong that couldn't be called king for intellectual property reasons, and the genesis of a gorilla being involved at all was nintendo's loss of the popeye license.

He didn't become Mario until there was a two player sewer themed game requiring names for the protagonist plumber brothers.

The Gerudo are pronounced Geld (ゲルド) in Japanese, which is the German word for money. Ganondorf (ガノンドロフ) also has the German word Dorf (village) in it.

This doesn't get us closer to the origin, but speaking of German influence, Link also happens to be a German word. As a noun it shares the same meaning as the English word link.

Zelda seems to come from (ital.) Griselda which supposedly is rooted in the old high German word gris (grau) and hiltja (fight). But that's kind of a stretch.

I think you can find a Miyamoto interview where he claims he chose the name from Zelda Fitzgerald.

I think there's a lot of interest in German culture in Japan. You see German characters and phrases fairly often in anime, pronounced just as badly as English in anime.

The popular anime Frieren names all its characters on-the-nose German words. Plot twists get spoiled for German speakers, for example one of the characters is called "Lügner", Liar:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/MeaningfulName/Friere...

The bit about Journey to the West was the most germaine bit of the article. The Kayman Rider stuff just seemed like wild speculation.

It is fascinating just how much of Japanese pop culture carries deep (and shallow) references to Journey to the West.

The argument hinges on Ganon's sprite in the original Legend of Zelda looking like the a monster from Kamen Rider and the skull on Ganon's belt looking like the monster group's symbol.

I don't think either looks similar, at all. I don't get how you can look at a symbol of an eagle entwined with a snake and say, oh yeah, the skull pixel art they made for Zelda? Totally inspired by that. Not just a skull, you know, that symbol traditionally associated with evil. And Ganon looks like some kind of big pig man, not some vague crab-bat hybrid (e.g., he has no claws or wings). It then the article goes on to cite an Iwata Asks episode where the say the inspiration was a pig character from the Journey to the West, so I'm not sure why it's trying to seek some odd alternative explanation.

Also, does that crab-bat thing have a large, green, erect penis very clearly visible? That was a... bit of a surprise.

The article starts by calling Kamen Rider, Power Rangers. Before that it said something about posts taking a long time due to research.

Didn't read the rest but did skim through that crab bat pic wondering what that was, didn't realize it's Ganon!

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