If Ganondorf was lying to anyone during that Wind Waker speech, he’d be lying to himself. The gerudo desert was indeed harsh, and Hyrule sucked during his time, but legit everything he did in Ocarina of Time is completely unjustifiable, except for the murder of the King of Hyrule. The man sat in luxury for 7 years with monsters surrounding the land, while his people remained in the desert. Yet at the end of the day, he believed that he had every right to do all of that.

Self-justification isn’t a trait that’s outright noticeable with Ganondorf, but Wind Waker puts it out in the open and shows that yes, the self proclaimed “King of Evil” truly believes he’s deserving of the world, and that his circumstances justify his crimes.

I feel like the fandom misses that while Ganondorf may not be this complex 5d villain, he still carries an interesting amount of traits like this

Hey, thanks for the ask!! I'm sorry, I haven't slept in over 24h and felt particularly rhapsodic today so uhhhh sorrryyyyy for being cringe about my little guyyyyyy (and the approximate use of English language that might ensue)

So yeah, I think there's absolutely a huge part of that, trying to make sense of the violently absurd situation he found himself in, a monster and one of the last people who remembers Hyrule and how it was destroyed, and rationalizing to himself why it is not meaningless.

I have to say, not to be uhhh a parody of myself, but I think it could be a little bit more complicated than that (all of it being interpretations of the text that I don't think canon entirely backs always, but my point is that it could be read out of it).

If Ganondorf wanted any meaningful chance to reshape his own reality, then there's no doing that without access to the Triforce. If he had wanted to go for the King's head and nothing else, he would have been stopped immediately by everybody who do have access to shards of the keys to the Sacred Realm (not to mention how trigger happy Zelda was about wishing ????? something to the Triforce about erasing him in some form). I don't think it would have been reasonable to aim for anything but the Triforce as a military goal --not to mention that his beef is half with Hyrule, and half with the Goddesses themselves for considering the gerudos beneath them in some form and for some reason (which becomes even more apparent and deranged in Wind Waker, as part of why he can't let go of Hyrule in my opinion is because their intervention was so violent he simply cannot wrap his head around it and, as usual, Will Not Be Defeated >:((( because he's that kind of bitter little shithead, which I uhhhh relate to a little too much maybe). And then, well. You can't exactly ask for the Triforce and be nice about it, right?

I'm not saying he wasn't gleefully horrible about it the entire time, but I can absolutely see a case of him being self-centered enough to see each of his actions as the necessary (or righteous/vengeful) next step to get closer to his goals, and one thing leads to the other, and after seven years of strife, well, the kingdom you wanted to rule is a pile of rubble, ash and misery you enforced at every step, and oops! You have alienated absolutely everyone who aren't your weird moms!

There's a ton of things to say about the many interpretations that could be made of his relationship to the gerudos so I won't over-expand on that, but, uhhhh yeah he probably used them, or at the very least ruled them with an iron fist to enforce his own power he believed unquestionnable (even if the goal was genuinely to do things for their sake, which in my opinion could still be argued --Hyrule is a big nightmare place during his reign, but the Valley is the only location basically untouched with arguably Kakariko after all).

To be honest, I think TP Ganondorf is more accursed with a sense of self-justification than WW Ganon, who has a surprising amount of clarity on his own motives (to restate my tags on a post I just reblogged: I don't think "I coveted this wind, I suppose" is particularly self-pitying, it's soberingly self-aware if anything). TP Ganon is the one who's obsessed with divine purpose and considering himself a weird take on the Chosen One.

But yeah, I think... To be completely honest, I sometimes feel like Ganondorf's potential (!!! not actual execution, very important to draw this distinction) is just kind of too large for the IP that birthed him? The full breadth of his complexity cannot be explored in a setting that demands he merely generates a simple conflict that doesn't seriously question the status quo while everything about him inherently begs for it (and I love Zelda and its simplicity and what it does, to be very clear!). Like, I know this is just me justifying my own investment to a degree, but... his relationship to the gerudo culture, his relationship to gender, to divinity, to fate, to self-definition, to absolute resistance grinded down to the point of absurdity (but at the same time, what else is there to do)... like all of this absolutely has potential to be large and epic and breathtaking, but. Nintendo needs to preserve the statut quo. And Ganondorf just cannot express all of these themes without having this simple world literally collapse around him.

This is what I find incredibly compelling about this dramatic disaster of a guy. And the very media that suggested all of these contradictions and inner conflicts (without necessarily understanding them at first I think) is now fighting tooth and nail against what it introduced, what he can embody and once questioned (in WW most potently) for the sake of Hyrule's moral balance, backpedalling into a state of simplicity that just never truly existed to that degree before --partially, in my opinion, because this conflict is scary to face heads on without taking significant artistic risks I am not confident we will ever see again, to be uhh less than optimistic.

So yeah! He isn't that complicated as the villain of the children video games for sure!! But. As a character, there's so much there, just sitting right under the surface.

submitting ganondorf from the legend of zelda franchise, especially the version from tears of the kingdom! ok i know this sounds a bit crazy but hear me out (and also sorry if i get some other character's names wrong, i didn't play the games in english)

so i'm gonna have to get a bit into the worldbuilding of zelda first, specifically ocarina of time where ganondorf has his first real appearance so in hyrule there are several fantasy races, there's the hylians, the sheikah, the gorons, the zora and the gerudo (also in some other games there's the rito. and there's the kokiri/the koroks but they're not relevant to this) the hylians are basically regular humans except they have long pointy ears which is bc they're chosen by the godesses and their ears are for hearing the godesses' voices. they also (only in older games) all have light skin. the royal family of hyrule only consists of hylians. you can probably see where this is going. the sheikah are also human and are only meant to be servants for the royal family and do their dirty work for them. like a whole torture dungeon/mass grave, which was presumably used during the hyrulean civil war that took place about a decade before the start of ocarina of time. the gorons and the zora aren't human and, while they have their own leadership systems, since the end of the civil war they are under the rule of the hyrulean royal family. then there's the gerudo. they are based on middle eastern people and they are all dark skinned. (their fantasy thingy is that they're only women, except for one man who's born every 100 years and becomes their king. that's ganondorf.) they live in the desert and they're the only race who is independant from hyrule, which the hyrulean royal family really doesn't like. also the hylians are just super racist to the gerudo in general.

so ganondorf's motivation starts out as wanting to improve the life of the gerudo, because the conditions in the desert suck. (this is technically only really elaborated on in wind waker, one of oot's sequels. the zelda timeline is an absolute mess which i admit makes discussions like this kinda difficult sometimes.) ganondorf then conquers hyrule but doesn't actually improve anything for the gerudo, he literally just sits in his evil castle and is evil and kills people. and then you defeat him.

as i mentioned, wind waker, a direct sequel to oot in one timeline, really went into depth about his motivations and made him a sympathetic character. but then he also kidnaps little girls to find zelda and is the evil bad guy who you have to kill at the end.

twilight princess is an interesting case bc it takes place after oot in a timeline where link timetraveled back to before the start of oot and told zelda what would happen. so, in the backstory of tp, ganondorf gets executed for crimes that he mostly hasn't even comitted yet (though the execution fails bc plot). the gerudo are nowhere to be seen, it's implied that they have either been driven away or murdered. ganondorf's attempted execution even takes place in gerudo desert. then he attacks hyrule again and you have to kill him bc he's evil.

then skyward sword, as a prequel to the entire series, retroactively retconned ganondorf to be an incarnation of the hatred of demise, the demon king, who is basically just personified evil.

but at least these games mostly agreed that the hyrulean royal family is terrible (except for skyward sword).

then breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom came out. (spoilers ahead for totk) smarter people than me have written stuff about how imperialist the narrative of totk is, but i'll try to summarize.

ganondorf isn't in botw, but the gerudo finally appear again after a long and very suspicicious and. it's bad. i'm not even gonna get into how their writing is so racist (and honestly, worse than their writing in oot which came out in the 90s), bc that would really be its own essay. but to summarize the relevant stuff, they're now allied with hyrule and have really assimilated to hylian culture. they have pointy ears now which ingame there are two myths given for why that's the case: one is that it's bc of interbreeding with hylians, which is not how gerudo genetics work, and the other is that it's bc of their shame of having given birth to ganondorf, which yikes. bc of all of this the gerudo have finally "earned" being portrayed as the good guys.

in totk, most of the story takes place in the past and we see it through zelda's (very biased) memories. and the whole thing is genuinely kinda uncomfortable to watch bc if just feels like propaganda. rauru, the first king of hyrule, comes from a race of basically demigods, called zonai, that are from islands in the sky. he arrived in hyrule and "united" the zora, gorons and rito underneath the kingdom of hyrule. it's really just colonialism honestly. he also keeps trying to pressure the gerudo to join him but they, and ganondorf as their king, refuse (said refusal is narratively portrayed as being super evil for some reason). there's some fights between the gerudo (where the gerudo seem to very willingly go along with ganondorf) and the hylians, and rauru easily wins by using powerful magical artifacts that function as weapons and that he and queen sonia literally wear as jewelry. eventually, ganondorf swears alliance to the kingdom of hyrule, just to later betray them and murder queen sonia. then he becomes some kind of demon god. one sage of each race, including a gerudo, get recruited by rauru to fight against ganondorf and they get magical artifacts but only after they swear alliance to rauru and hyrule. (we never find out how the rest of the gerudo in this time feel about any of this, whether they're still loyal to ganondorf or if they agree with the sage.) in the present day, the gerudo are completely allied with hyrule. the old gerudo sage holds a lecture to the new gerudo sage (who is btw a teenager) on how much the gerudo need to be ashamed of ganondorf having been a gerudo. also, underneath the gerudo desert, there are 2 zonai mines, which implies that the reason rauru wanted the gerudo under his rule was so he could get their resources. another place where there's a zonai mine is underneath kakariko village, which is where the sheikah live, who are basically the royal family's servants. through the entire game the hylian royal family is portrayed as being absolutely unquestionably good (even though their actions are the absolute opposite), meanwhile ganondorf is portrayed the most unsympathetically he's ever been.

totk especially is just so bad about this. the previous games are still kinda copaganda but they're still a little bit better which just makes totk even more frustrating.

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