Hyrule Haeresis 10
In mythic times, when magick coursed free and unbound through the veins of the land, our ancestors walked as goddesses and gods across the becoming-moment. The myth-landcape was formed from their migrations and universes were born from their footsteps. Forests and flower fields grew from among the life-streams and had voice and spirit, and the sea and the sky were together as one.
Such goes the Legend of the Golden Age, the departed plane of eternity when Light spoke with the ecstasy of shared emanation in the All Moment and when all Immortal Stories lived here on Earth. In the telling, the Past becomes a distant country from whence we are separated by Time and Tide. Your ancestors are There, because They cannot be Here. There is cast a great insurmountable chasm between Heaven and Earth, and only in Heaven do we allow ourselves to be happy with the fulfillment of our calling.
But this mythic landscape bears the laugh-lines and contours of a magickal birth. There are worlds around us for the initiate who has learned to See to behold and enjoy. In truth, the Golden Age never ended and the Immortals never departed. The Otherworld is always there, waiting for us to listen to it. Life begets and recirculates Life, and ancestors live on to keep stock over the land. Trees and flowers grow from ash and soil and guardian spirits stand vigil and laugh as the generation returns to and from the wellspring of source energy. And the true meaning of ancestor is not one born of your own flesh and blood. Your ancestors are those who love and and guide you towards the fullest actualization of your highest self.
All is Life, and All Life is Kin. Anyone can walk these planes, even you: Just be present and listen for the music of existence, and you will learn to read the veil.
The Nintendo WiiU gave up its Legend, and in its place gave us many. The one thing Zelda used to be was abandoned and rejected in favour of allowing it to become everything it could be. Revealed in 2013 at the same time as the game that would become The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was a rare and unconventional Zelda spinoff title to be called Hyrule Warriors. Omega Force, a development subsidiary of Koei-Tecmo known for the Dynasty Warriors series, would be one of the few developers outside Nintendo to be passed the Legend and would craft Hyrule Warriors as a musō game, just like their own flasghip series. As they say, the story adapts to the storyteller, who always bring a little of themselves to the telling. And while The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild would take four years to materialize and become most associated with a system that it was not designed for, Hyrule Warriors would be released just the following year, in the Fall of 2014 and give birth to a legacy of its own. This is that story.…
And so it begins once again. And so it ends.
This is the story they used to tell in the lands of Ordon.
Do you ever wonder why Celtic music always sounds so sad? Because it is always lamenting something it lost so long ago it can’t even remember what it is longing for anymore.
There was a child once long ago who went into the woods outside Kokiri Village. The child was looking for someone, and was very sad because all of their friends had gone away, and they thought that they didn’t have any. As it came to be, these woods were enchanted, and it was said strange and mysterious things happened to those who travelled through them. Some of the village people thought these woods had been the dwelling-place of the Old Ones in the time no-one could remember anymore, and that their spirits and memories still haunted those same woods.
Patriarchy is built on epic time. Learned male history requires exhaustive documentation of political kingdoms and dynastic successions. The Chosen Warrior-Hero God-King must come of age, become anointed, take a throne and lead his people to victory in battle before retiring and passing his crown on to the next generation. Rise, fall and rise. In our language, we call this canon, and the canon of the aristocratic literate patriarchy stands in stark contrast to the cyclical deep time of the feminine and feminine understanding. This is, in fact, the true first war in the world, and its battle scars have played out across the visage of our ideaspace since the start of all time..png)
Blasphemy, they would have said.
When Christian monks and missionaries first reached Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man, they brought their gods, language, writing and canon with them. And with these tools, they set about the process of assimilating the indigenous gods, culture, history and tradition they found there. One problem they had was what to do with the in-depth genealogies the locals in Ireland had that told tales of a series of invasions and resettlement of the island by successive groups of immigrants, some of which seemed to have a decidedly divine and magickal air about them. As this clearly did not mesh with what their own mythologies told them about the origins of humanity, they put these stories to the pen and retconned them as the supporting cast, ungods and demons of what they interpreted as the definitive Christian canon.
Video game sequels are a different beast than sequels in other mediums. In video games, a sequel is typically expected to improve upon its predecessor because video games are intensely technical. Since a game is thought of at least partly as a feat of software engineering, sequels are approached as a honing, refining and improvement of the original as much as they are a thematic and aesthetic continuation of them. In other words, we should think of video game sequels as new and improved models as much as the next chapter of a story, if not more so. On the other hand, the nature of a sequel demands in any medium of genre demands narrative escalation.