Been watching this guy's legend of zelda theory videos for funzies and they're generally pretty good but sometimes his narrative analysis can be shockingly shallow and right now i've spent the last three minutes screaming at the screen "IT'S A SUBVERSION. YOU'RE NOT TEASING OUT HIDDEN CLUES, THEY'RE INTENTIONALLY THERE TO SET UP THE S U B V E R S I O N"

"it's so weird that there isn't a third dungeon here in wind waker, maybe it was cut?" IT'S. A SUBVERSION. THERE'S ALWAYS THREE OF THE THING AND YOU CAN FAFF ABOUT AS MUCH AS YOU LIKE BEFORE GETTING TO THE DUNGEON AND THIS TIME THEY SUBVERTED THAT BY HAVING YOU ARRIVE TOO LATE.

"maybe there was something special at big fish isle???" YES THERE WAS THAT'S WHY YOU WERE GOING TO IT AND THEN IT TURNS OUT YOU GOT THERE TOO LATE ASKDFN THIS ISN'T CLEVER IT'S EXTREMELY STRAIGHT FORWARD

you're expecting a third dungeon and then there isn't one, if there was one there then the story wouldn't have the dramatic emotional YANK that happens there, it would just be bog standard, nothing was cut, you're not teasing out hints of a cut dungeon, please

/nodding-furiously

lmao sob

post in the youtube comments, tho you'll lose life force while setting the record straight

okay, see, this is the sort of thing i mean where his analytical skills can be lacking in really bizarre ways

(haven't watched this video, maybe it'll turn out it's not as stupid as it looks, but)

so on the surface this is a good premise for a fan theory video, like "ooh look at these subtle connections between these games maybe???"

but like... in order to follow this premise, you have to ignore the deeply ragtag nature of the zelda franchise's development process

would it be cool if the two things were connected? sure. is it possible that botw took design ideas from ww to design it's guardians and intentionally ties those ideas together retroactively? why not.

was the tower of the gods intended to be a sheikah shrine? absolutely not, because botw wasn't even a twinkle in the devolopers' eyes yet and the concept of the sheikah shrines hadn't been created yet.

you can't just treat the earlier games like they're working off the information from the later games, loz isn't a well planned out coherent series with fancy things like foreshadowing in it, you have to take the order of development into account 'cause otherwise you're going to come up with spurious connections

it'd be like combing the original loz for connections to oot or information about fucking demise or whoever, you're not gonna find them. any connections were created by oot or ss intentionally referencing back to og!loz, not by og!loz acting as first installation in a story

RIGHT, like maybe one or two games apart you can connect them because often games are being developed in random, or ideas get moved from one game to another. BUT NOT WW TO BOTW DEGREE OF SEPERATION

tandem*

i graduated from three different levels of education in the time between ww and botw