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sky-squido · 1 year

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there were already a lot of parallels between Princess Mononoke and botw, but i am incredibly pleased to see that the trend has continued :D

#botw #loz #ghibli #tears of the kingdom #totk #princess mononoke #squido's op

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sky-squido · 6 months

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i, like every other fic author in existence, love getting comments from people who enjoyed my work. i don't care if your comment is "late" (that's so weird to me like it's literature—do you apologize to homer for being late to reading the odyssey?) or "unintelligible" (late night commenters, english language learners, people who feel like they "just aren't that good with words", believe me, i entirely understand what you mean and appreciate it immensely), or anything else that you feel might make your comment 'not good enough'. i love all of the comments i receive and i am eternally grateful to all of you for your continued support.

and yeah, i've read fics where i felt like adding a comment would be doing the fic a disservice because there was nothing that could be said that wouldn't cheapen or patronize the magnum opus i'd just witnessed. in instances like this, that is exactly what i say in the comment: "there's nothing i can say that doesn't do this work of art a disservice. thank you for writing this."

actually, now that i think about it, there are a bunch of ao3 comments i've gotten that i still haven't replied to because i felt any thanks i could give would be inadequate. i should really get around to replying because i want them to know how spellbound they left me. i love you all, have i ever mentioned that?

all of that being said, i would like to make a public service announcement!

at least under default settings, ao3 authors do get notified every time you edit a comment. i've accidentally hit send too early before, or realized i forgot something i wanted to say, i get it, i really do. i have edited many comments in my day.

but you don't have to do this. really, it's okay. most of the time i honestly can't tell what the difference is. i'm not going to think worse of you for having typos in your comments because i guarantee that there were more in the fic you just read sfkljghsl

also these edits were over the course of twenty full minutes. i got another email while writing this post and had to update the image. please do not spend 20 minutes agonizing over your comment and changing the capitalization and adding a few words. it's okay, i promise. i love your comment, and i'm very very grateful for it, regardless of how "polished" it is. i'm not your english teacher in disguise.

tl;dr, i love you all and i hope you don't feel anxiety or a compulsion towards perfectionism in my ao3 comments section. i won't judge you, i promise <3

#squido's op #squido rambles #i hope i don't sound annoyed because i don't want to sound annoyed #but also that was a lot of emails #if they were different comments that would be sick i love that #but on several occasions i've had edit spam #and i don't really understand the logic behind it #i figured that people just don't know that we get notified every time you edit a comment #so that's all i wanted to say really but i got sidetracked with appreciation because i think someone plugged some of my works somewhere #because i've been seeing a big uptick in comments lately and it's really really sweet #i haven't written for this fandom (or at all really) in a long time now so i'm always really really happy to see my works are still #out there and being read and loved and affecting people. i do still plan to finish hfwkadwm i promise #i guess i have writer's block >:/ never had it quite like this before #BUT I SAID I WAS GONNA FINISH IT AND I AM #MARK MY WORDS I'LL FINISH THIS FIC OR DIE TRYING #eventually

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sky-squido · 2 years

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Legend: Sky, are you... are you, like, okay? You sleeping alright?

Sky: Yeah, why?

Legend: I mean, you're always struggling to stay awake whenever we have downtime together. I was... I figured you might not be sleeping well.

Sky: Oh! No, I appreciate the concern, really, but I’m not struggling to stay awake at all!

Legend: So… you’re not even trying to stay awake? Do you actively want to be unconscious for every group conversation we have?

Sky: Legend, you know I’m never actually asleep when I do that, right?

Legend: Wh–what?

Sky: I do it because it lets me cuddle with people. Nobody ever stops me from leaning on their shoulders if they think I’m falling asleep. And I know I’m not the only one who needs that kind of affection, sometimes.

Legend: …

Legend: I am personally offended by how well that worked on me.

Sky: I know <3

edit: i illustrated it here!!

#linkedunvierse #linked universe #lu sky #lu legend #linkeduniverse sky #linkeduniverse legend #squido's op #lu incorrect quotes #linkeduniverse incorrect quotes

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sky-squido · 6 months

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HI I'M DOING INCREDIBLY JANKY PSYCH RESEARCH ON TUMBLR WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG

basically i'm doing a paper and trying to really dissect and understand the experience of having and coping with depression. while i've thought about this, i've sort of been extrapolating off my own experiences, but i just realized i have no idea if anyone other than me has had this experience:

do you ever feel depressed emotionally and physically, but not cognitively and like, morale-wise? like you have no energy, and are really sad, and nothing seems interesting or can hold your attention, and you're just kind of a lump who wants to curl up in a ball under a desk somewhere and melt into the floor.

but at the same time, you're not like,,, deeply existential or mentally spiraling or having self-hating thoughts about it. like your internal monologue isn't depressed, too. somewhere in the back of your mind, you're sitting there like "hey, man, i know it's rough right now. just hang in there, okay?" maybe your brain produces the thought "what's the point?" and you go "dude. no. there are so many points. don't talk like that."

i'm sort of imagining an army that's been losing a war but still has high morale, if that helps at all. like you're not winning. you're not okay. but in a sense, some part of you is okay, because you still have hope. in short:

i couldn't have as much specificity/put as many options as i would have liked so please feel free to elaborate in the notes/tags if you want, but i know it's personal so no pressure. also don't worry about if you're Officially Diagnosed or not—if you have a reasonably strong suspicion, go with it for this.

THANK YOU EVERYONE ILY!!

#also please rb so this can get out there i only have a week before it closes #squido's op #squido rambles #squido attempts science

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sky-squido · 2 years

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okay so it’s no secret edward elric has a terrible sense of style

but i think i just realized why that is.

when edward elric was eleven years old, his little brother turned into this:

look at all those spikes and sharp edges! maybe his sense of style got so bad......... because it reminded him of alphonse

#Fullmetal Alchemist #fma memes #fullmetal alchemist brotherhood #fmab #squido's op #edward elric #alphonse elric

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sky-squido · 1 year

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GASP!!! IS IT TIME????

#squido's op #squido plays twilight princess

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sky-squido · 2 years

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i would like to take this time to appreciate my boy sky. twi’s down for the count, time’s out of the room, and he and wars are the defacto leaders here. it could be argued that they compliment each other well as a good-cop-bad-cop duo or in the sense that wars focuses on external threats and sky focuses on internal unity, but i just love how it’s sky standing in the middle of this room. it’s sky who’s the center of everyone’s attention and sky who’s speaking for the group as a whole. i love that when wild claims that twilight’s secret is his fault, that sky’s expression is this very focused, measured, cautious “hey what’s this new development and how can i run damage control if this gets heated” kind of expression. then when he finds out it’s not gonna escalate, it’s pure, genuine appreciation for wild and hyrule’s efforts, no matter how insignificant they feel. then his expression when the situation is changing yet again and he needs to make sure everyone’s gonna be okay.

sky is exactly the kind of presence they all need right now and i’m so glad he gets his time to shine :D

gosh i love my boy.

#squido's op #linked universe #linkeduniverse #lu sky

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sky-squido · 1 year

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this is the greatest video game ever made

#squido's op #squido plays twilight princess

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sky-squido · 1 year

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you heard it here first, folks! eat! sleep! drink water! take your meds! stretch! go for a walk!! pet a plant or animal that it is safe for you to pet!

#squido's op #squido plays twilight princess

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sky-squido · 10 months

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i will extol the benefits of donating blood to my dying days but by far the funniest is that, after my fourth time donating blood yesterday (meaning i've lost a half gallon in the past half a year :0) i've noticed that i'm feeling the aftereffects of it less and less every time, which then means that THIS interaction is now possible:

friends on the sidelines of the fight: "oh no! they've lost too much blood!! there's no way they can fight on in this state!"

anime protagonist covered in blood, spitting yet more blood out of their mouth, gritting their teeth: "you're forgetting one thing"

villain standing over protagonist, sure they've won: "and what is that"

anime protagonist, grinning, and there's a spark in their eye: "i'm a blood donor"

villain, gasping, and stumbling backwards: "no! it can't be!"

protagonist, standing up: "i shrug off far worse than this every other month. it's going to take more than that to keep me down!!!"

villain, getting stabbed by protagonist: "noooooo!!!"

#squido's op #squido rambles #DONATE BLOOD EVERYONE DO IT U WONT #seriously i suck at taking care of myself and regularly skip way too many meals #but being a blood donor has legitimately made me so much better at that because it's not for me it's for the blood!!#and i mean come on you have to get your blood in as many peoples bodies as possible #you know #just in case

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sky-squido · 2 years

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hi hello let’s talk about legend and the master sword!!!

this newest update got me thinking. legend never seemed super attached to the blade before, but the way he defends it against both wind and four so vehemently? well, let’s look into it!!

this is so INTERESTING you guys, because like, yes, it’s LU canon that legend is grumpy and quippy

but he never actually like,,, explicitly hates his adventures themselves and especially not this one specifically!

the way he says “I’ve just been traveling the world to train but...maybe it hasn’t been all that good for me” in divine dark reflections implies that this is the FIRST time legend’s admitting that his experiences haven’t been unilaterally positive. and i mean.... look at him!!

let us not delude ourselves into seriously believing that this young man is not having at least a little bit of a good time.

most importantly, though:

this is after koholint!! this is post-koholint legend!! this is after his “bad experiences” and his “maybe it wasn’t all god for me.” and still!! he is like “aw heck no i’m not settling down—i want to adventure forever.”

*cough* maybe it was an adventure, is all i’m saying. like maybe legend had an adventure out there, on his travels, and they weren’t such a burden on him as one may think. but i have other posts on that. this is about the master sword and so now that we have this appropriate framing of legend’s character and how our boy feels about adventure, let’s explore his feelings about the Blade of Evil’s Bane!

so—and this is funny—legend wields the “Tempered Sword” (which is just a mild upgrade of the Master Sword, so it’s still technically the master sword, just not The Master Sword, because Sky’s is all squeaky clean and fresh off the Sacred Flame). But we don’t actually see the tempered sword for a while! It’s usually not drawn on his back like Twi and Sky’s sword are, until it pops into existence for the first time on his back in mipha’s journal.

but then again, legend doesn’t have a proper sword-holding-strappy-thing and it just kind of magically floats back there but we’re not gonna question it because i’m going to assume the master sword has the same magical disappearing-reappearing properties its sheath does (WHERE DOES IT GO WHEN THE SWORD IS IN THE PEDESTAL WAITING FOR THE NEXT HERO? WHERE DOES IT COME FROM ONCE THEY HAVE IT??) anyway, now that our boy has the darned thing, he barely uses it! i mean look at this!

so legend’s GOT the master sword, but he’s not quite so reliant on it as sky is. he’ll use whichever of his items he thinks is most useful, and if that’s not the sword, he doesn’t mind one bit. it’s just another tool in his toolbox, is my point.

but he’s very good at using it! oh, look at him go! let’s just appreciate it for a moment. gosh i love him. anyway, that panel in the top left is the first time he draws it, prepared to back warriors up as he duels the shadow for the first time.

cool! so legend’s master sword is just another item at his disposal. not too special, but not too shabby, either. so what does he think about sky’s master sword?

well, he greets her like an old friend (literally, he talks to her and calls her “old girl”), is appropriately mortified when wild “breaks” her, smiles fondly at her, enthusiastically suggests they upgrade her further, yet, when se sees Sky’s Skyward Strike, he doesn’t assume it’s from the Master Sword (“whoever sent that sword beam...”). he recognized sky’s master sword as his own, as as such, assumes he already knows everything about it.

he’s convinced it’s not gonna help because his didn’t help, and even when twilight gives his explanation, he’s still not buying it. he’s still assuming he knows this blade inside and out (”yeah, yeah, but—”). speaking of, he’s dubious the master sword will work like a moon pearl. he thinks there’s any item more adept at magic-purging than the master sword, and he’s used the darned thing. this shows that his master sword is definitely far weaker than sky’s. not that he believe that yet, but still, he’d rather hunt down sky on a chance than have twi run back to camp and grab his moon pearl for him because he’s willing to test twi’s theory that their swords are different (and maybe there’s just the slightest inkling of academic curiosity in play here, too, let’s be real).

he also, i shall note, doesn’t seem surprised or upset by time’s bitterness towards the blade, evidently finding it at least somewhat understandable. neither does he resent twilight’s implication that his master sword is somehow worse than sky’s or twi’s. still, though, that expression on his face when he senses Fi’s presence in there, and the warm grin when he holds her blade as a hylian again, and the way HIS SWORD IS GLOWING TOO WHAT IS UP WITH THAT JOJO EXPLAIN PLEASE

so legend’s not quite so emotionally attached to it as sky is, though he thinks of it as an old friend—albeit one he’s known for long enough to know everything about. then he’s confronted with the fact that there’s still a substantial amount he doesn’t know about this sword, uses sky’s, and then we see him slide full-tilt into the Master Sword Fan Club

before, he was dubious the sword could solve his problem. now, he’s convinced that the sword can solve this problem. he also says things like “you don’t get it“ and “you’ve never used the master sword“ and “i can’t believe you! you’ve used the master sword! don’t you remember how powerful it–“. he’s not trying to use logic or reason, he’s just going off the overwhelming power of the blade that he encountered before. he’s held her before, twice, as we’ve mentioned, but the way she was glowing in the forest, the way she purged the shadows from his form while he was wearing his own master sword, changed his opinion so drastically that he will fight both four AND wind over this. and look at him, look how familiar he is with his own blade, how used to it he is, how many times he’s used it, how he “yea, yeah,”’s twi’s “blade of evil’s bane” speech. to be so overwhelmed by the power of sky’s version that he can’t properly articulate it but will try anyway really shows how these two blades are in whole different leagues from each other. keep in mind, also, that legend’s has been upgraded. no wonder he called a hypothetical upgrading of sky’s version an “unspeakably powerful blade.”

and that’s something neat! both legend and four had experience with dark worlds and they were both FURIOUS when they found out that that was how twi was turning into wolfie. legend was dubious that the master sword outranked his moon pearl in terms of evil-banishing and he knew how evil-banishy his evil-banishing sword was. once he used sky’s, he had no doubt that it could handle this easily. four, who’s never used either variation of this particular evil-banishing sword, is utterly unconvinced that it’s going to do anything to help (yet he’s perfectly content to hold it with a moon pearl). while legend was open to the idea, having had experience with the blade before, four shoots it down immediately (and judging by the way the four sword and its pieces get tossed around and, it doesn’t have the same gravitas as the master sword).

in fact, legend is so gung-ho about his defense of the master sword now that it takes sky himself coming in and putting a hand on his shoulder to calm him down! legend was clearly willing to accept that the sword wouldn’t solve Everything at This Exact Moment (he did run around the forest with sky cleaning out all the monsters for a while instead of rushing the sword to twilight), but it’s The Principle Of The Thing.

anyway, that’s the story of how legend, connoisseur of magical artifacts and old friend of the master sword, found his awe and respect for the Blade of Evil’s Bane rekindled quite explosively and ALSO HE AND SKY ARE PALS HAVE I MENTIONED THAT (i have actually it’s right here)

okay i have to go now bye

#squido's op #linkeduniverse #linked universe #lu legend #linkeduniverse analysis #analysis post #squido rambles

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sky-squido · 1 year

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USING CELESTIAL NAVIGATION TO LOCATE THE KINGDOM OF HYRULE

PART TWO: The Part With Actual Celestial Navigation In It

*part one is here*

oh yeah, quick heads-up that I’m a LinkedUniverse fan, so I do make a casual reference or two to the comic and characters, but this analysis is about—and solely based on evidence present in—the games themselves. so, general LoZ fans who have no knowledge of or interest in LinkedUniverse whatsoever, this analysis is for you, too! go wild, friends!

Okay, SO! In part one, we came to one conclusion: Hyrule does in fact, slide around gratuitously between games. This is good! Because that lines up exquisitely with my celestial results. Ah jeez, now I have to figure out how to explain what I even did to get these results. Here goes!

Section Three: Explaining How, Mechanically, This Is All Going To Work

Let’s break it down into only the essential basics, the stuff I did in like the first half of the semester (this checks out, because the second half involved using the moon, stars, and planets, the motions of which are… interpreted creatively in the 3D Zeldas released thus far). Basically, it’s time to talk about the noon reduction.

(You can just skip to section four if you want the answers, but I have an excuse to ramble about my hyperfixation and I will take that, thank you very much.)

*long inhale* okay so if you drew a line from any celestial body to the center of the Earth, that line would pass through some point on the Earth’s surface. If you were to stand on that point, your object of choice would be directly over your head. The spot in which you’re standing is called the object’s geographic position. We only care about the latitude of this position (or how far north or south it is from the equator), also known as the object’s declination. On the equinoxes, the sun’s declination is zero—at noon, it passes overhead on the equator. If you were in the northern hemisphere, you could see the sun by looking in the southern sky. If you were in the southern hemisphere, you could see the sun by looking in the northern sky. Does this make sense? If it doesn’t, shout at me in the notes and I’ll draw diagrams. But yeah, this is important: If you’re north of the equator and the sun’s over the equator, you have to look south to see the sun. This is why, if you’re in the northern hemisphere, the northern sides of buildings never see sun—the sun’s always in your southern sky.

On the solstice in June (the summer solstice for all you northern-hemisphere-dwellers), the sun’s declination is 23.5°N. It’s because of the Earth’s tilt, whatever, don’t worry about it. If you’re at 23.5°N (also known as the Tropic of Cancer), the sun is directly over your head at noon, now. Equator-dwellers (and everyone else south of the tropic) have to look to their north to see the sun, everyone north of the tropic has to look south to see it. You’ll notice that when the sun is in the northern hemisphere, it makes it nice and toasty and that thing we call summer. The southern hemisphere is, at that moment, missing their sun rather fiercely and would like to not be so cold anymore. On the December solstice, (winter solstice for the northern hemisphere), the sun’s at a declination of 23.5°S, ditching the north, baking the south, equator-dwellers have to look south to see it, Tropic of Capricorn dwellers can see it directly overhead at noon, etc. etc.

So, as you’ll notice if you’re one of those clever observant types, the height of the sun at Local Apparent Noon (LAN) varies by your latitude and by the declination of the sun. What’s LAN? Great question. Basically, thanks to time zones and the sun’s inability to hold itself to a decent schedule, it doesn’t always hit its peak for the day at 12:00pm by your watch. LAN is what we call whatever time it is when the sun does hit its peak for the day. But we don’t care about times right now, just the sun’s altitude at LAN.

That’s another thing—altitude. Everything in celestial navigation is measured as an angle (even distances; ever wonder why latitude and longitude come in degrees?) which makes doing math and measurements really freaking convenient. Because of this, the height of the sun above the horizon, or its altitude, is measured as an angle: 0° means it’s on the horizon, 90° means its directly overhead, and 45° means its halfway between the two.

So, the sun’s declination varies over the course of the year between the range of 23.5°N and 23.5°S. If you know where in the world the sun is overhead (that’s declination) and you know how far the sun is from being over your head (that’s altitude), you can figure out how far you are from that place where the sun is overhead (that’s gonna give you your latitude). Clever, right? Don’t worry if you’re not retaining any of this—this is tumblr, not a textbook. I just think it’s neat.

So, if you’re following my train of logic (quite a feat, as I’m notoriously convoluted), this all means that if you know how high the sun is in the sky in a Zelda game, you can figure out at what latitude the game takes place! Kind of. We also need to know the time of year, which will tell us what the sun’s declination is. If the sun in a given game passes directly overhead at noon, we could fall anywhere in that 47° band between the tropics, depending on the time of year.

There are two problems here: firstly, how do we measure the altitude of the sun—Zelda items are very cool but none of them are sextants (sextants are basically just really fancy protractors for measuring angles in the sky) and secondly, how do we account for the fact that we don’t know what the declination of the sun is?

The first solution is honestly rather simple. We use shadows. Sun hits Link, sun hits ground, line from Link’s shadow’s head to Link’s head points to sun. You’ll see plenty of these diagrams later, so I won’t bother explaining all of it here.

The second solution is more finicky, took me weeks to figure out, and I’m still not entirely sure how it works, but I brute-forced it with my Nautical Almanac, Excel, and several hours of tedious number-wrangling. Because, while 3D Zelda games understandably make no attempt to accurately model the movement of the moon and stars (and don’t even include planets), the sun gives us another clue.

I don’t know how many people know this, but “the sun rises in the east and sets in the west” is actually an approximation. Contrary to what the 3D Zeldas would have you believe, the sun does not, in fact, rise at 090°T (directly due east) and set at 270°T (directly due west) every single day of the year. It varies, sometimes rising north of east, sometimes rising south of east. There’s an equation that takes your latitude and the declination of the sun and calculates how far away from east and west your sunrise and sunset are, but that’s not actually useful here, because, as I alluded to previously, Zelda games don’t account for this. Fortunately, there’s another clue! I wonder if any of you are mentally shouting it at me right now. Spoiler alert: It’s the length of day and night! Is day longer than night? The sun’s closer to you (northern declination, which means northern hemisphere summer). Is night longer than day? The sun’s farther away from you (southern declination, which means northern hemisphere winter).

The really really nice thing about using the sun’s altitude at LAN and the length of the day and night is that between the two of them, we have almost all the information we need to get a solid fix on when and where these games take place. And the second nice thing about this is that, unlike the sun always rising and setting exactly due east and west, the sun’s noon height and day length vary appreciably and reasonably between games! …mostly.

To compile all this nonsense into something practical, here’s the plan: we crack open a 3D Zelda game, wait for the sun to rise and then we start a timer. See if the sun, after rising in the east, scoots to the north or the south or heads straight overhead. Now we know what hemisphere we’re in (give or take). Wait until LAN (the sun is always either directly due north or due south during LAN, because it rises in the east and sets in the west and it’s all symmetric and stuff) and then we snap a picture of our boy and his shadow. Wait until sunset and then lap the timer. Spend the night cycle screaming over how screwed up the moon and constellations are, then bop the timer once the sun rises. Now we know how long the day/night cycle is and what fraction of that day is spent in the sunlight. We do math to figure out how many hours long the day and night would be if the day/night cycle were actually 24 hours long. Then we grab that picture we snapped at LAN, literally just measure the angle with a digital protractor because trying to take the distances and do trig is way too much work and honestly probably less accurate, and then BAM, we’ve got everything we need to massively narrow down our game to a specific latitude and one of two possible dates. I say two possible dates because the sun hits a given declination twice a year—once between the equinox and the solstice, and then again when it doubles back to head to the next equinox. If that doesn’t make sense, think about the fact that the day before the solstice and the day after the solstice are both the same length. Cool? Cool.

Alright, let’s see what happens when we actually try this!

Part Four: Finally Getting to the Gosh Darn Freaking Point of All This

Sorry Leg, Four, and Rulie, but your games aren’t going to be very helpful here cuz we get to see neither the sky nor any pronounced shadows cast by stuff in the sky, so you’re off the hook.

Of the remaining Zelda games, Termina doesn’t actually take place in this dimension, but hey, maybe it’s somewhere neat! We might as well.

Okay, so we’ve got six canon 3D Zeldas. (Yeah, sorry both Hyrule Warriors’s (even though one of you is apparently canon), I couldn’t be bothered to actually boot you up and start measuring angles—doing these ones was enough work already and you don’t even have day/night cycles).

Of the six Zeldas I am using, all of them have day/night cycles except for one, Skyward Sword. As much as I’d like to slap it on the pole and say the entire game takes place near the solstice, celestial nights do in fact demonstrably exist, they’re just not looped into the gameplay, so we’ll have to figure something out.

Of the five remaining Zelda games, two of them feature in-universe clocks—which isn’t actually all that useful anyway, since longitude is way more arbitrary than latitude and I don’t know where Hyrule keeps its prime meridian—and those are Breath of the Wild and Majora’s Mask. The final three Zeldas—Wind Waker, Ocarina of Time, and Twilight Princess—have day/night cycles that just loop evenly along time spent in the overworld, which is handy.

Okay, so let’s do this!

Ocarina of Time: Our day lasts 2 minutes and 40 seconds and our night lasts 1 minute and 20 seconds. The full day/night cycle takes 4 minutes. 2 minutes and 40 seconds is actually exactly two-thirds of 4 minutes, so we can just apply that to 24 hours and BAM, we get a 16-hour day and 8-hour night. Those of you living in Canada, Northern Europe, and Patagonia are familiar with this phenomenon. And, when Link is both a child and when he’s an adult, the sun’s altitude at LAN is 70°.

Now let’s plug these two data points into the chart I bruteforced! Isn’t she pretty? I love her

Okay, so it’s kind of just outside the range of what’s possible—for a day that long to happen, you have to be pretty far from the equator. But, when you get that close to a pole, the sun doesn’t get all too high in the sky. We can give Nintendo a few degrees of wiggle room, though, and put Ocarina of Time on the summer solstice (June 21st) at 47°N. Wow! And those seven years he’s asleep for are exactly seven years because it’s still the solstice when he wakes up. 47°N is, for context, about the latitude of Seattle (Washington, USA), Munich (Germany), and Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia).

This is the most straightforward of all the Zelda games we’re going to cover. Majora’s Mask is exciting because Termina is a hellhole so we’ll skip to…

Wind Waker: Day: 5.5 minutes. Night: 4.5 minutes. Full cycle: 10 minutes. If 10 minutes became 24 hours, 5.5 minutes would become 13 hours and 12 minutes! The sun at LAN gets up to 54°

Now let’s plug that bad boy in—I’ll just use the version of the chart with all the games already on it to save space (sorry for the spoilers, I know you must be heartbroken).

So, that puts Wind Waker at a comfy 44°N in either early April or September. Wondering where those dates came from? Every little dot on this chart is a data point, and every one of those is from the 21st of a month, either March (the spring equinox), April, May, or June (the summer solstice (in the northern hemisphere)). Then you can just interpolate between them. So if Wind Waker lands between my solstice dot and the one next to it, it’s near the solstice, but on the summery side, so very early September or early-mid April. No Zelda games have nights longer than days, but if that were the case, you’d just read the X-axis’ “Length of Day” as length of night and the points to the far right would represent the winter solstice instead of the summer one. Don’t worry if this doesn’t make sense to you—this barely makes sense to me and I’m the one who made it.

But now we’ve gotten ourselves in a little pickle—is it April or September? You could use whatever in-game clues you’d like to try and figure this out, or research the prevailing winds and ideal sailing seasons at the relevant latitude, but I’ll be going off of celestial cues to the best of my ability, so here goes!

April. It’s April. Wind’s birthday is probably like April 9th or something and I like that a lot. Fits his vibes. How did I figure this? Well, let’s start by taking a look at the night sky:

Yeah, okay, it’s fricked. I’m not gonna get into into why the moon is so bad in every Zelda game, but this article does a good job of explaining it. All the nonsense that happens in there applies to Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, too—Ocarina of Time doesn’t have any moon phases, which is probably a good thing. Skyward Sword has its own issues and you don’t need me to tell you that the moon in Majora’s Mask is a problem.

Orion, however, offers us a clue. This little lad pops up in Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, and for some reason, Majora’s Mask. I couldn’t find him in Ocarina of Time’s sky, but I think I found Cassiopeia and the Summer Triangle. It’s not like any of this matters that much, cuz the stars are fricked in all the games and positioned in direct contradiction to the sun and also each other, but if we have two dates and we’re just trying to pick between them, we might as well give Orion his time in the spotlight.

Again, I’m not sure how many people know this, but the stars move over the course of a year and over the course of a night. They move a lot every night (about sixteen degrees an hour—just a little faster than the sun), and, since they’re speedy little fellas, they get just a little further along their path every night. This means—and I’m really sorry to all the fanfic authors who use this as a plot device in their fics—that you can’t just look up and know where and when you are. If you know when you are (exactly, like in time to the minute), you can guesstimate the where, and vice versa. My final project for this class was actually trying to see if I could figure out both when I knew neither, and the answer is yes, but it takes a lot of work and finagling and also you need to know what year it is and have a lot of celestial information about that year in particular. If any of you suddenly have a hankering for a fic in which the LinkedUniverse boys freak out over being celestially disoriented from both the time and location changes, stay tuned ;)

Okay, so my point is that if the stars are just up there, frozen in the sky, like they are in all the 3D Zeldas, it gets tricky to figure out what time of year it is. I mean, we could just… assume these are their midnight positions? Spoiler: it doesn’t actually matter because the stars are all fricked to heck anyway. We just need one little pointer to try and figure out which of the two possible dates we ended up with.

Slight tangent, but of all the constellations, why do they insist on putting Orion of all people in all their games. He’s a winter constellation! All the Zelda games take place in or near summer! I mean, yes, he’s a summer constellation for the southern hemisphere, but most games don’t take place down there! Does Nintendo have some sort of personal beef with Altair, Vega, and Deneb that I don’t know about? Are they a joke to you??

*cough* Anyway. Orion in Wind Waker is visible in the southwestern sky. Were it September, Orion would rise pretty late in the night, coming up in the east, and he’d scoot his way through the southern sky, but just after he crosses the meridian (due south) and is about to head into the southwestern sky, the sun rises and we can’t see him anymore. That’s no good! How about April? Well, yeah actually! The sun sets, and, blinking into view on the meridian is Orion, scooting through the southwestern sky before eventually setting at about midnight. So, Wind Waker probably takes place in early April at a latitude of 44°N!

But Squido! I hear you shouting, doesn’t the game take time for Wind to beat? And isn’t Hyrule big enough to span multiple lines of latitude? You were just talking about how big it was in part one of this post series! You can’t seriously be suggesting that the entire game takes place on a single day at a single latitude! And to that I say, you are, indeed, correct. This measurement can’t possibly apply to all of Wind Waker, just as my previous assessment can’t possibly apply to all of Ocarina of Time.

My solution? Hand-wave it. Seriously, Nintendo is not programming a fully accurate year-long celestial cycle that tracks the number of in-game days since you started and changes the positions of the stars and everything by your latitude. That would be badass, but hardware limitations are a thing and Nintendo has its priorities (somewhat) straight. We can say my calculation represents the starting point in time because I still like Wind having an early April birthday and this gives him the whole summer to adventure around while the daylight hours are long. We can say the latitude in question is, I dunno, towards the top of the map. There’s palm trees around, so I hesitate to put us any further north than the 44°N I calculated. That is about the latitude of Toronto (Canada), Milan (Italy), and Sapporo (Japan) after all. Maybe that’s the upper bound of the map. I honestly don’t think it’s that important.

Twilight Princess: We’re old hats at this by now! Day: 8 minutes. Night: also 8 minutes. We’ve got ourselves an equinox—12 hours of each! LAN altitude is 55°, so that puts us at a lovely 35°N in either late March or September.

Orion is in the southeastern sky so, as I said in the Wind Waker portion, that would make sense in September. So it’s September 21st! It find it fitting that a game about the balance between light and dark takes place at the time of year when light and dark are perfectly balanced. This latitude, for context, is about the same as Charlotte (North Carolina, USA), Albuquerque (New Mexico, USA), Tehran (Iran), and Osaka (Japan). I always knew he was a southern boy.

Breath of the Wild: Yeah, I was going in chronological order by release date, but Skyward Sword doesn’t have a day/night cycle and that complicates things, so I’ll just do Breath of the Wild now while we’re in the groove and—hey, isn’t that spunky! The sun and moon pass through the northern sky, did you ever notice that? That means this game takes place in the southern hemisphere! And not just any ol’ southern hemisphere latitude, it freaking commits. I mean, you ever notice how long those sunrises and sunsets always seem to last? How the game seems to draw out dawn and dusk as much as possible to minimize how much time you spend trying to find your way around in the dark? Well, that’s because Breath of the Wild has a seventeen hour day! How exciting! The sun rises at 0400 (4am) and sets at 2100 (9pm). Its LAN altitude is a groovy little 43°, leaving us at a latitude of 63°S in early either February or November (this is the southern hemisphere, so these are summery months now).

(oh yeah, my Switch is modded so I can play as Zelda instead of Link—it’s called Zelda’s Ballad and it’s pretty sick. My awesome little sister set it up for me :3)

And wow, if 63°S isn’t an exciting latitude. That’s level with *checks notes* Ross Island, Antarctica!! Wait, what? Yeah, Breath of the Wild takes place in Antarctica, apparently. I wonder if the Sheikah tech holding the moon in place is also responsible for the climate control.

But yeah, I looked real hard, and found something that I thought might be Orion, but I’m honestly not convinced. If it were him, he’d be in the western sky, which would check out for February but not November. The trees in Akkala have red leaves, which could mean fall (which, in the south, would make it February), but then again, I hesitate to take ecological cues from trees that are apparently growing in Antarctica. A spring month fits with the themes of the game—rebirth, life rising from desolation—and that would mean November. I dunno, this one’s up to the Zelda Lore Afficionados.

Majora’s Mask: Yeah, you know it’s all going to hjeck when I put Skyward Sword off because the alternate dimension in which the moon is crashing into the planet and you’re forced into a time loop is easier to do celestial navigation to than Skyward Sword is. Here’s the scoop:

Sun rises and sets at 0600 and 1800 (6 am and pm) so that’s another 12 hour day. But the sun is really overhead-y. Like, 80° overhead. That puts us in the tropics, so there’s actually a few latitudes and dates we could be at. We could be at 10°N on the equinoxes—in late March or September—or we could on the equator, 0°N, in mid April or August. This is pure conjecture, but I feel like the equator is oddly fitting for this game. A liminal space between hemispheres, where the normal rules don’t always apply…

But, when I was looking for other clues, I found something very fun. Okay, so you know how I said the sky is fricked, right?

Like, okay, we have some familiar friends, but you can see that they’re all screwy. The angle between the Big Dipper’s pointer stars towards Polaris and Orion are an acute angle in Majora’s Mask and an obtuse angle in real life. And why are they so close to each other?! It’s just… so weird. But anyway, here’s where it gets funky. The sun passed to our south at LAN, so we know we have to be north of it, though just barely. We’re either on the equator or north of it but then… Orion is to our north. Orion is directly over the celestial equator, which means he’s like the sun on the equinox—if you have to look north to see him, you’re in the southern hemisphere. So we must be in the southern hemisphere, even though I just said we were in either in the northern hemisphere or on the equator. As if that wasn’t bad enough, if you look at the Big Dipper’s orientation, the pointer stars that point towards Polaris are pointing over our head! Even if the star I circled isn’t actually Polaris, the real Polaris would have to be somewhere around there. Which means, since Polaris is the pole star and the whole point of it is that it’s directly over the north pole, to have Polaris directly over our head means we’re on the north pole. We are in the southern hemisphere and on the equator and on the North Pole. No wonder the moon got sick of us and wanted us gone.

Speaking of the Big Dipper and Polaris real quick, Wind Waker actually has a refreshingly accurate depiction of them. The Big Dipper is angled a little funny for this time of year, but eh, it all works out. You can see that the direction that the pointer stars are indicating that Polaris is in is actually to the north! That’s pretty neat! Polaris is also at about the right height, give or take, that it should be for the latitude we calculated. So hooray for Wind Waker!

Skyward Sword: So. Uh. This went downhill very quickly. I was like “hey, maybe the sun is just frozen in its LAN position cuz it doesn’t move, right?” WRONG. If it were LAN, the sun would be directly due north or due south. But NOPE, it’s to the southeast. That means its still morning. At least, when we’re in Skyloft. When we go to Faron, the sun’s due west. Eldin? Southwest! Lanayru? North of west. But wait, you may be thinking, this is handy! We get a few snapshots over the course of a day, and we can put them together to get a feel for what a day looks like here, right? WRONG!

I tried that. You know what I got?

THAT’S NOT HOW THE SUN WORKS!!!! That looks nothing like either a sine wave or a parabola. But I was like, you know what, maybe it’s okay, maybe my puny mortal mind cannot comprehend this. Let’s let Excel work its magic and give me a parabola.

Okay, that’s not too terrible, we’ve got an LAN height of like 55°, which is workable. Hey, now that I think about it, what if we extended this parabola to find out where the altitude is zero! We’d basically get the compass directions in which the sun rises and sets, and I mentioned earlier that I can use that to calculate latitude and declination! So let’s just extend this little parabola here…

nOPE! Here, let me try to explain why this is so bad. You could make a chart where you graphed the sun’s altitude on the Y-axis and the sun’s azimuth, or the compass direction you’d have to face to stare straight at it, on the X-axis. You’d have a graph that intersects the X-axis twice, once at near 090°T and another at somewhere around 270°T. When it gets to the meridian, or 180°T, that’s where your peak, or LAN, would be. This graph does not do that. The sun is modestly in the sky to your north. The sun climbs, passing to your east, and then to your south. It hits its peak just after passing the meridian (that’s not how the sun works?? That’s not how any of this works?!??) and then begins to fall a little as it slopes to the west. It passes west, though, scooting through the northwestern sky before passing north again and continuing to circle towards the east, gradually making its way down to the horizon just before completing its second full rotation around the entire sky.

I joked briefly before about Skyward Sword being at the north pole in the summer so the sun never sets, but that actually seems to be the case?? At latitudes like that in the summer months, the sun can do a lap or two around the sky before touching the horizon. This wouldn’t be a huge problem, if for the fact that you can sleep until nightfall. Which could mean Link passes out for anywhere from a full day to a number of months. Does daytime come back around again? We’ve returned to another one of these strange infinite days, which means that Link has slept for approximately ONE ENTIRE YEAR. I know everyone calls him a sleepyhead, but that’s a bit much, don’t you think?

Furthering my hypothesis that Skyward Sword takes place uncomfortably close to the North Pole, there’s Polaris! Nice and high in the sky, so we must be close to the place where it is overhead—the North Pole. BUT WAIT! What direction is Polaris in? It couldn’t possibly be to the north, could it? No, the north star? In the north?? No, Skyward Sword got it right when it put Polaris IN the SOUTHEAST?!!??!!

Orion is just vibing up there at if we’re comfortably close to the equator, but no, that can’t be the case.

ALSO! I’ve been ignoring the moons cuz they’re all wonky, but THE MOON IN SKYWARD SWORD IS DIRECTLY DUE NORTH!

WE ARE NEAR THE NORTH POLE AND THE MOON IS TO OUR NORTH. For those of you unaware, the moon tends to stick to the same path as the sun, just that what the sun does in a year, the moon does in a month. The sun is never, ever, ever overhead at the North Pole, SO NEITHER SHOULD THE MOON BE!

The only possible explanation?

SKYWARD SWORD TAKES PLACE IN TERMINA.

You ever notice just how big the moon is in Skyward Sword? Yeah. Yeah, me too.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

To summarize: Ocarina of Time: 47°N, Summer Solstice (June 21st) Wind Waker: 44°N, early April Twilight Princess: 35°N, late September Breath of the Wild: 63°S, November or February Majora’s Mask: 0°N (maybe), mid April or August Skyward Sword: Who Freaking Knows

#squido rambles #squido's op #linkeduniverse #squido's navigational escapades #loz #linked universe #legend of zelda #well that's several days? weeks? months? depends how you count but it was a long time #and it was like five thousand words ellemayo #i'd apologize but i'm not sorry the slightest

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sky-squido · 1 year

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the "he" they're referring to here is supposedly a hero who went before me whose power is within me and whose tunic i now wear.... i know it's supposed to be Time, just given the release date and everything, but i'm actually leaning more towards it being Sky. it's his spirit, after all, and this tunic looks way more like his than Time's

#squido's op #squido plays twilight princess

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sky-squido · 2 years

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more seriously, though, it just dawned on me this update that:

twi has known since like the beginning of LU that time was going to die with regrets—regrets that were specifically eased by teaching twi swordplay.

at the beginning of divine dark reflections, twilight alludes to the fact that time is filled with regret and we can tell it’s kind of always on his mind.

twilight just got injured (in-universe, it was earlier this same day) and it’s clear he’s not going to get better like he normally does.

i mean, we saw how fatalistic he was being in that first invalid-twi update, but honestly? is it really that much of a stretch for twi to just... infer that he dies here?

like, oh, yeah, the hero of time. that guy over there. my ancestor. he’s watching me bleed out on a bed after sustaining a wound in battle. he’s then going to die with regrets so strong that he lives on as a stalfos and is only pacified after training me in combat. he must... really regret.... something bad that happened to me.... because i wasn’t good enough in battle......

*is dying because of something bad that happened to him in battle and time is standing right there, visibly feeling horrible*

and i feel like, it just makes sense. twi doesn’t want to die. i mean. obviously. he just said so. but he’s still fully convinced that he will. he wants to live, but in a sense, he’s already given up, resigned himself to his fate because he put the pieces together and it makes a horrible kind of sense.

THAT’S why this pep talk works so well. THAT’s why this is what he needed—not fairies or potions, but to be reminded that he’s still got a fighting chance. his story hasn’t ended yet. his night hasn’t fallen just yet. and he can’t give up on himself—not whenever everyone else is fighting so hard not to give up on him.

as always, all the props to jojo. absolutely stunning work.

#squido's op #linkeduniverse #linked unvierse #lu twilight

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sky-squido · 1 year

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