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By Root 326 0

the obscure BS Zelda and Philips CDi games, Zelda lore has many story elements to reconcile. Over the past twenty years, there has been very little clear information from Nintendo and the games’ developers as to whether or not all of the Zelda games should be viewed as one large story, different versions of a common “legend,” multiple storylines/timelines, or something else entirely. The “texts” of the games themselves are often ambiguous on these issues (other than a few games, such as Majora’s Mask and Phantom Hourglass, which are explicit sequels to other Zelda games). We may not completely understand what motivates some fans to view it as their task to determine the “correct” organization of the Zelda timeline, but their activities show the complex ways argumentation and reasoning can occur in online communities.

Much like how fans in other kinds of media have taken ambiguity as a license to create elaborate new fan-written stories (like the fan fiction around Star Trek and Harry Potter), Zelda fans have taken this opportunity to elaborate and argue explicit theories of how the games are organized—that is, why might the events of Ocarina of Time occur after A Link to the Past? Do the events of Majora’s Mask occur in the same timeline as The Wind Waker or are there multiple timelines? The nature of these arguments varies, but all have at their root questions of chronology—how one should order the events of one game relative to the events of other games.

Many proposals rely on simple chronological orderings of the games to do much of the speaking about theories of time in Zelda. For instance, in the earliest days of the first forum thread, many posts were simply proposals for timeline organizations, such as this one from a poster named SEGA4234 in September 2004 (with SEGA42’s acronyms decoded in the brackets):

Here is my timeline on the games:

FS [Four Swords]

OoT [Ocarina of Time]

MM [Majora’s Mask]

TWW [The Wind Waker]

FSA [Four Swords Adventures]

TLoZ [The Legend of Zelda]

TAoL [The Adventure of Link]

ALttP [A Link to the Past]

OoS/OoA [Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages]

LA [Link’s Awakening]

I’m too lazy to explain it right now (), but I’ve thought over it a lot, and I find only one flaw: the geography of FSA. Its Hyrule matches perfectly with the Hyrule of ALttP, yet TLoZ and TAoL do not. I’m working on it …>_>

SEGA42’s timeline theory only included eleven games, since it was written before the release of subsequent games The Minish Cap, Twilight Princess, and Phantom Hourglass. The organization of the games into an intelligible timeline was a goal of many participants in this thread, and some, like SEGA42, started off by proposing their organization of the games, then opening it up for the rest of the forum to probe for flaws.

SEGA42 admitted that the geography of Hyrule might be a problem for his or her theory. For SEGA42, geography was apparently a marker for time in the game, indicating the time period in which the events took place. Since the Zelda games have featured quite different presentations of Hyrule (or, in the case of The Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass, the Great Sea above a sunken Hyrule), fan theories have sometimes hinged upon “which Hyrule” was the setting for a game. For example, in September of 2004, another poster, SWORDM, described a chronological ordering of games based, in part, upon these differences in geography:

… the Hyrule found in these two games [The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link] is, for the most part, a barren wilderness with spread out, isolated communities. This reflects the far-flung isles of the Great Sea in The Wind Waker much better than the close-knit kingdom of A Link to the Past and Four Swords Adventures. Observing landscape differences further brings to light the presence of a large sea bisecting the two halves of Hyrule, which was absent from Ocarina of Time or any game in the first timeline. This could reasonably be what remains of the Great Sea after the union of the lands by the Koroks.

In SWORDM’s timeline,