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I can’t wait to actually get a better idea of what TotK/BotW Ganondorf is like so I can start going off on another tangent about him being an artist.

Like...art’s always been a personal interest of his, as a character, even if the game doesn’t really actively embrace that and use that to make a point about him as a character because the man is not allowed to have Traits.

We’ve seen him do stuff like playing the organ in OOT, and then there’s the basement full of portraits in the Forest Temple that were also very likely his own works. OOT3DS took this a step further by adding assets that turned the hallway leading up to Phantom Ganon’s room into a little gallery of impressionist paintings that don’t jive with the style of the portraits outside of the basement, suggesting that they were a later addition brought in by you-know-who.

And then there was that whole bit in Wind Waker, where his primary passion was theater and performance. He performs multiple soliloquies for Link, which are among his most famous and oft-quoted lines among the fandom. He puts on a puppet show with this giant marionette that expresses his own frustration with his destiny. Even his fighting style looks like a dance.

And in Cadence of Hyrule, where he picks up music after being inspired by watching Octavo through the window, building his own instrument and refusing to come out even after the door to his home is unblocked so he can devote himself solely to practicing.

Yet…he doesn’t get to define himself as “an artist” the way other characters do. Ganon’s own interests outside of the boss room are unimportant. At best, they’re treated as set dressing to hype the player up for the boss fight.

Yuga gets to define himself as an artist. His self-esteem is wound up in his own work. His work is his only love and is used to say something about him as a character, even if that something is just “he’s a pretentious jerk who thinks he’s better than everyone else.” Ganon’s own love for art and how his relationship with it compares/contrasts with Yuga isn’t brought up at all. ALBW Ganon is barely even a character. All the passion and creativity comes exclusively from Yuga, while Ganon himself is a mere tool, a medium through which Yuga sculpts himself.

Octavo, too, is allowed to define himself through his art, his relationship with his music, his personal passions. His climactic boss fight is a literal recital, performed before an adoring audience of monster soldiers. Ganondorf, on the other hand…the audience is given the impression that he sees his art merely as a tool with which to dominate others. He’s just a big mean thug with a weapon that happens to be musical for you to stomp down to prove how far you’ve come and save the world. His personal feelings about his work, his development as an artist (including his foray into experimental electronic music and building his own synthesizer), the profoundly autistic way he expresses his passions, how his beast form that’s used as shorthand to depict him giving in to his worst impulses is defined not by traditional animalistic warlord behavior but by him devoting himself entirely to his music and forsaking all else, and how other people feel about his art is completely unremarked upon by the other characters by comparison. When you fight him, there is no audience. He’s not allowed to perform or want to perform. He’s not “supposed” to hold recitals or want people to understand and appreciate his music. He’s not expressing interest or passion in the “correct” way, and therefore his internal life is completely ignored. As the BBEG who exists solely to be killed in a test of strength, he’s not supposed to have an internal life in the first place.

TotK has this strange, dissociated reprise of the “puppet show” in WW. He’s made all these puppets in his own likeness, has sent them aboveground to perform on the great stage of Hyrule in a display that’s impossible to ignore. But the artist himself is absent. He doesn’t lend his voice to the characters he’s created, and all they can do is growl and scream, maybe occasionally darkly chuckle to themselves. None of them have faces. Even Calamity Ganon, at best, only has a distorted, unrecognizable likeness of the man whose image he was made in.

TotK itself is a game about creation and creativity. Not only that, but it seems to be pulling back the curtain on Ganon’s artistic process, the media he used to create his myriad marionettes and hostile sculptures in his own likeness. But until we actually meet the artist himself, we have no way of knowing what his relationship with his whole body (bodies?) of work is, much less whether Nintendo is actually interested in answering this question and making this association with art and the act of creating a work a more integrated part of his character instead of mere set dressing that’s breezed past by the narrative to get to the exciting stabby part.

Something I unambiguously love about TotK is how they have re-imagined the Gibdo.

Previous entries in the Zelda series portrayed them as mummies, an undead enemy wrapped in bandages, often able to be set on fire for either bonus damage, or to burn away their wrappings to make them more vulnerable to damage. In the 3D games, they behave identically to another undead enemy type, the ReDead, inheriting their nightmare inducing shriek that paralyzes Link as they slowly lumber towards them for their attack.

(Images of a Gibdo from OoT3D, a ReDead from Oot3D and a Gibdo from TotK)

In Tears of the Kingdom the Gibdo are visually similar to the early 3D ReDead. While they now lack their petrifying screech, they are still immensely durable, barely taking any damage from physical attacks. This durability can be stripped away, much like older Gibdo, with elemental damage.

On top of that, there are also flying variants, which have mothlike wings, further tying these already undead enemies to symbols of death. The boss version, Queen Gibdo, goes even further. Having a full on insectoid body composition.

I didn’t know what else to do with all these keys other than put them on a sort of keyring? I’m not that crafty yet

oh my god old zelda bosses STILL give me anxiety

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