I know I'm making this Zelda post a little early, if I wind up blowing my Zelda load before November I'll just make sure to give this post additional promotion. I simply have too much Zelda on the brain right now to post about anything else.
I'm one of those people who hated the Split timeline theory before Hyrule Historia made it official, and kind of still do. My relationship to Timeline theorizing was always complicated however, as on some level I prefer seeing each Game as it's own universe. None the less I'm the kind of person who also just can't resist getting into that kind of speculation, and the fully 3D games at least were definitely implying a shared universe.
I am still convinced to this day that the split timeline was not at all what anyone was thinking when they wrote Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. The fact that in TP of all the sages they had Ganondorf kill the Water Sage was clearly meant to foreshadow things going wrong with that element in the future.
There was always this notion that single timeline was simply "everything is the child timeline" and so they'd make arguments like "how does Adventure of Link have cities named after the OoT Sages if they were never awoken?"
1. Each of them was already at least an important person to their tribe.
2. The Sages clearly exist in TP with the same elemental symbols, so clearly they transcend timelines in some capacity.
3. And it turns out AoL is on the not at all anticipated Downfall timeline where there is no logical reason to celebrate anything the OoT characters did. So in hindsight that argument for the split meant nothing.
I always viewed the end of OoT as the same as the perfect ending of Majora's Mask where the Goddess of Time somehow creates a timeline where Link did all of the Mask missions even though that's not actually possible. Link gets to have his Childhood but the Sages are still Sages and Ganon was still captured.
Breath of the Wild has confirmed that TP's Ganondorf wasn't permanently killed regardless so that argument isn't valid anymore. If I'd seen Infinity War at the time I would have made a certain reference to compare the finishing blows of WW and TP.
Another theory I always advocated before Skyward Sword retconned why Hyrule always has a Zelda was that the Sleeping Zelda of AoL was the same Zelda as OoT Zelda. She was supposed to be the first Princess named Zelda, but her father also ruled a recently united Hyrule and in OoT Hyrule was unified at the time it's Link and Zelda were born. Her brother is missing from OoT but we never see the King either, or the Shiekah as a tribe, a lot of stuff was somehow off screen there.
A Link To The Past however remains the major problem for creating a timeline.
Ocarina of Time was definitely made to be a prequel originally, but it was also retconning like crazy. The real reason the Downfall timeline was needed was because that's the only way to have a Ganon with the full Triforce. That plot hole clearly didn't concern them at the time however.
I don't mind OoT making the Sages all come from different tribes since that alleviates a certain problem this Genre often suffers from. But it is still a retcon, in ALttP there is no ambiguity that all Seven "Wise Men" were all Hylian. It was also heavily implied that no one before this Link ever wielded The Master Sword.
I have a lot of Nostalgia for ALttP, it is roughly tied with my Mom reading The Hobbit to me as my introduction to High Fantasy. The game may have always been promoted as a hypothetical prequel to the NES games, but it was clearly written as a remake of the original, all of it's core elements now more fleshed out.
And so I still prefer to envision all of the backstory that game and it's instruction manual gave us as I did when there wasn't a Zelda 64 yet, as taking place on those maps and in that art style. And with the reason for Mandrag Ganon being a humanoid Boar being simply that that is the Darkworld form of Ganondorf Dragmire. And that he was just the leader of a gang of thieves that were like the thieves you encounter in that game, none of this only male Gerudo or reincarnation of (basically Morgoth)'s Malice stuff.
I suppose that's how certain Star Wars fans feel, they had their own vision for what Episodes 1-III should have been that they were attached to. But I'm not a hypocrite because I'm not offended by the existence of Zelda Prequels, I don't think they actually work as Prequels as well as the Star Wars Prequels do, but I still like each of them as their own story, as their own take on the basics of what Zelda is. My ablity to imagine something different isn't taken away.
Maybe ALttP as the start of it's own timeline but also a prequel to the NES games can also work. Maybe Sleeping Zelda is that Zelda and the Triforce pieces were separated after Link entrusted it to the Royal family and then left. That still gives Zelda an offscreen brother, and makes him trusting a shady wizard even weirder after the whole Agahnim fiasco, but never underestimate the selfishness of a spoiled rich kid.
When I first played the game I actually didn't know that the Golden Sword was just another upgrade of the Master Sword. What the Cursed Fairy said (at least how the SNES localization translated it) made it sound like a completely new sword, and the official artwork made it look like more then just the color of the blade had changed. I also because of a friend I think used to believe it was called the Magical Sword, same as the final sword in the original.
