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critical-birb · 9 days

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Before tears of the kingdom came out, I was watching a video on youtube that talked about volcanic signs around hyrule. As they pointed out what different structures around death mountain and akkala could've been, I started seeing those kinds of structures and shapes everywhere and I realized..

Hyrule is on top of a very large volcanic area

I started looking for signs. I realized there were hot springs in tabantha, and hot springs is not just something that cold regions have, no, it's something volcanic regions have.

When tears of the kingdom came out one of my top priotities was to get to the depths and see if there's lava underneath these hot springs, and sure enough there they were! Not only that, I found volcanic shapes in the depths themselves, as well as lava in other places I didn't know about.

Why am I talking about this?

Because they're not just there as decorations, at least not to me.

Look at Hyrule great forest. It obviously used to be a big forest spanning from above hyrule castle all the way to the top of the map, covering the west part of death mountains foot. Now the trees are all burned down from a volcanic eruption, except for in two regions that have strangely moat-looking "rivers" around them.

I'm not going to pretend I believe these are rivers. I'm 100% sure they are man made. These moats were dug in order to protect important land marks, because the people knew that they live on a volcanic region. It's no coincidence that the castle has a huge moat around it as well. They are trying to be safe from their inevitable doom.

But it's not just this. Moats don't always save you, and volcanoes eventually go dormant.

I imagine if you're the least interested in zelda lore and the zelda timeline, you've asked yourself the question, "Why does the map change so drastically?". Well, here's your answer.

Death mountain isn't just any mountain, it's always the most recently active volcano and the place where the gorons live! The gorons move around, when there's a new volcano they move there!

Towns safety become threatened, and so they move. Look at the ruins on the sides of death mountain, they're not burned, they're abandoned. So the people move around, they literally have no choice but to do so, unless they take to drastic measures, like raising your town high above the ground and building a wall around it, like the great plateau.

Why are the sheikah towers buried under ground and designed to shoot up with incredible force? Why not just build them in place and why do they need to be so tall? Maybe they were preparing them to be able to function even after lava has covered the ground.

The extremely mountainous nature of all of hyrule is honestly the best sign we have of this. By looking at the mountains we can conclude where the latest volcano was, and I think it was in Hebra.

So when trying to piece together how the maps work together, you can't look at things like a town, a castle or a volcano, because those things are constantly moving. I'd say maybe the desert could be the way to go, but we've seen very clearly that deserts used to be oceans. If you look to the horizon in gerudo desert in botw, you'll see water.

I think that the gorons migrate when their volcano gets too cold. If we look at majoras mask and assume that termina is in fact a real place, this is the first time we see gorons living in a cold place, and they don't seem to be thriving. Gorons like the warmth that the volcano provides.

So why does death mountain switch places?? Because it's not the same mountain! Death mountain is always the volcano! So one volcano goes dormant, another one pops up and the gorons move there. And this also explains a loooooot of other geographical questions. The people of hyrule are living under a constant threat of destruction by volcano, and that's why they need to move their castles and everything. If we were to assume the temple of time from ocarina of time is the same as in breath of the wild, we clearly see they moved/abandoned the castle and castle town because of the close proximity of death mountain in ocarina of time. It all makes a lot of sense and makes me feel like the map changing isn't such a big problem to me anymore.

#THIS IS SO FACINATING OOOOOOO #they put so much thought into the topography I LOVE this!!!!#thank you for sharing such cool insight OP!

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critical-birb · 15 days

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This is not a shade post whatsoever I support and love whatever people ship. But Link/Sidon is the funniest fucking ship to me, the concept of it is genuinely the best thing.

Poor fucking Mipha spent her life adoring and falling in love with Link and being turned down right until her death, only for the dude to wake up later and be like ok buy ur brother is kinda hot tho...

#legend of zelda #prince sidon #link #princess mipha

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critical-birb · 15 days

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Since people seem weirdly interested in my info dump about Rito bows, I feel I may as well point out another thing.

I see it mentioned a lot that Revali's bow has this scrap of fabric tied to it and people theorising in fanfiction that it's something sentimental or represents something.

But it's actually fairly common to tie a piece of fabric to your bow, and you'll see that the other Rito bows have a feather attached to the supports for the same reason - because it shows the direction the wind is blowing.

Having something loose hanging from the top of your bow means you can see what direction the wind is blowing and how strong the wind is by the way that thing is moving in your peripheral vision without having to take your eye off the target.

So yeah! Another bow fact of the day for you guys from your resident archery nerd and birb boi enthusiast.

#legend of zelda #revali #rito #rito village #teba #zelda hyrule warriors #legend of zelda breath of the wild #breath of the wild #age of calamity

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critical-birb · 16 days

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You know what I havn't heard anyone talk about yet?

The fact the Rito use what look like their own simplified version of compound bows.

So - for anyone who doesn't know archery, there's different types of bows you can use. The type you'll usually see in media is a long bow. (There's also flat bows, recurve bows, crossbows, etc.)

A compound bow is a more modern bow - and the most common type you'd probably use now days if you joined an archery club.

You can see the familiarities - the wheels, the supports, the shapes. The Rito bows are like a wooden version.

So why is it interesting? Well - they made the design choice to chose a more modern bow style rather than a more traditional one like a longbow dispite the fact the enviroments aren't modern. So this was a very specific design decision they made. Why are compound bows more commonly used now days? Because they take less strength to pull and fire. Simple as that. To shoot a long bow, you need very good upper arm strength. Compound bows distribute the pressure to make them easier to wield if you don't have that.

Birds have hollow bones so that they can fly, and the Rito warriors seem to mostly have slender builds for dexterity. The liklihood is that they don't have incredible muscle strength. So using compound bows makes perfect sense. They can also be lighter, because a long bow or a flat bow must be made of a solid piece of wood so it can bend without breaking, but a compound bow is usually made from hollow pieces of metal (though theoretically could be made from wood), because they don't have so much pressure on them. So they'd be able to be flown around with much easier.

This probably isn't of any interest to anyone, but it was something interesting I noticed that I wanted to share!

#legend of zelda #zelda hyrule warriors #age of calamity #breath of the wild #tears of the kingdom #rito #rito village #revali #teba

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critical-birb · 16 days

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every possible line of Revali’s dialogue during the Windblight Ganon fight. this... was a labor of love.

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critical-birb · 16 days

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The legends of Zelda is such a wild fandom to enter into in the year of 2024. I saw fanart of a funny bird man while looking for something unrelated, decided he was my new blorbo, then without researching picked up the most recent game to play (ToTK). I have no idea what's happening. I'm just vibing. I've read 20304959 fanfictions about the ravioli bird and that's my only source of knowledge. People out here who have been playing the games since the early 90s are arguing about which generation is the best and writing fanfictions where different generations of Link kiss and I'm nodding along like yeah man - Link is the uhhh lil blond guy with the funny arm you play as. Love him, he has a cool broken sword and his wife is flying around during the zombie apocalypse I think.

#legend of zelda #tears of the kingdom #breath of the wild

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