This article contains major spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
Is there anythin💎g quite as potent as two lovers separated by an unbridgeable gap? Sometimes that separation is physical distance, with entire continents and oceans keeping them 🅺apart. Sometimes, in an especially powerful permutation remixed hundreds of times across history, it’s their family, class, or culture. And sometimes, it’s time.
Zelda may or may not be Link's lover, but she is the heart of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Legend of Zelda, and she disappears from 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tears of the Kingdom early on. Link is left꧅ alone in a Hyrule that has been radically changed by an Upheaval the pair caused with their expedition into the tunnels beneath Hyrule Castle. When Link awakens in the Great Sky Islands, Zelda is gone and he doesn’t know where she is.
By working with Impa, Link finds that Geoglyphs have appeared across Hyrule, massive glowing chalk drawings on the landscape, each of which contain a Dragon’s Tear. These deposits each provide Link with a memory when touched. Not a memory that he was there to experience as in Breath of the Wild, but one that Zelda has formed on her own and left behind for her charge to stumble across𝔉 in a different time a✱nd place.
As you continue to uncover Geoglyphs it becomes obvious that Zelda is trapped in the past. Other scenes make it clear that the people of that era faced Ganondorf but could not defeat him on their own. To help win the fight in the long term, Zelda decides to transform herself into an immortal dragon so that she can repair the Master Sword and weather the ages until Link is ready for her help in the present. Minaru, sister of King Rauru, says that doing this will result in Zelda losing herself in the process, suggesting she is the first in a long line of people who swallowed tears and w🌊illingly took on a transformation to save Hyrule. At least, judging by those who dot the skies.
Finding the eleventh tear in Link’s present causes the Light Dragon to drop a final tear along Hyrule’s eastern edge. Going to the place where it lands unveils one last memory, and then the dragon, which we now know to be Zelda, appears overhead. If you glide up to her, you can retrieve the Master Sword from her forehead, the place where it has been resting for hundreds of years (and just a few days). It's a wonderful moment, and as I was playing through it yesterday morning, it prompted a deep sadness that I don’t think I’ve ever felt while playing a Zelda game.
The Princess Zelda that we were just with at the beginning of the game hasn't experienced the passage of time in the same way that we have. For Link, a few days have passed. For Zelda, it's been hundreds of years. Link woke up on the Great Sky Islands wondering where Zelda had gone. And Zelda was there, in the background, waiting, when he took that exhilarating title card plunge at the beginning of the game.
This kind of storytelling is deeply emotional to me. It's part of the reason I love Joe Haldeman's military sci-fi novel The Forever War, which follows one soldier through an interplanetary war as he ages at a normal rate but his homeworld advances through decades and decades while he's gone. He may only be a year older, but his home planet has changed entirely, with a new generation of soldiers who he has no life experience in common with joining the military to fight in the same war. It’s the same idea that fuels the father-daughter story at the center of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Interstellar.
Sacrificing your life, by allowing yourself to be killed for the greater good, is often held up as the ultimate act of love. But doing what Zelda does in Tears of the Kingdom, choosing to allow her sense of self to be subsumed for hundreds of years, is another level of sacrifice entirely. One that's hard to even imagine.