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By Root 325 0

The Wind Waker was a much earlier game than in many other timelines (occurring well before the first two Zelda games), and the landscape’s depiction (“barren wilderness” versus “close-knit kingdom”) was used to hang certain posited events upon in the overarching story (for example, when the Koroks created a “union of the lands”). What’s most interesting about the use of geography is not really geography per se, but the ways that it works as a stand-in for the passage of time in the game. Some posters (such as SWORDM) have put forward theories in which all of the games’ narratives can be reconciled into a single timeline, while others refer back to the conclusion of Ocarina of Time, and argue that the future that the adult Link left behind continued in his absence and became the setting for future games’ adventures.

One of the most popular conceptions of the games’ timelines has been a variety of so-called “split timeline theories.” Starting with the multiple timelines shown at the end of Ocarina of Time, fans have used elaborate means to organize other games based on the two timelines seen in that game. The conception of time as nonlinear and involving potential branches (with some games occurring in the world that the adult Link left and others occurring in the world that the child Link was sent back to at the end of Ocarina) has led to elaborate models of the games’ overarching story.

Philosophers such as David Lewis have explicitly addressed this kind of issue—is it possible that multiple “worlds” (timelines or realities) may exist?35 A common read of Hugh Everett’s and later Bryce DeWitt’s interpretation of quantum mechanics implied that, for every quantum event, all outcomes that did not occur actually did occur in a separate universe. That is, the universe was conceived not as a solitary universe but a “multiverse,” branching into separate realities with every event. This idea, in which multiple realities and timelines are potentially real, was popularized through various forms of science fiction, and likely influenced the Zelda discussions.

But, how are these conceptions of time shaped throughout the course of the discussion? As SEGA42 and SWORDM have shown, there are a variety of approaches a discussant may take in negotiating and arguing a theory of Zelda chronology.

Understanding Evidence: Opening the Treasure Chest

As you might have guessed, many kinds of evidence have been used to support Zelda fan timeline theories. How evidence is employed in these debates sheds light on the ways that reasoning occurs in these settings, as well as the nature of many fan arguments. We propose a way of organizing the types of evidence used in Zelda chronology debates, which include (but are not limited to):

• Dialogue within the game (What did Midna specifically say in Twilight Princess?)

• Existence and naming of characters (Is the villain named Ganon, Ganondorf, or both in a particular game?)

• Existence and placement of objects within the game (Where is the Master Sword found?)

• Geography within the game (Is Hyrule a “barren wilderness” or a “close-knit kingdom”?)

• Information from game manuals (The print materials for The Adventure of Link)

• Relational game marketing (Phantom Hourglass was an explicit sequel to The Wind Waker).

• Game designer intentions (Interviews with Shigeru Miyamoto or Eiji Aonuma)

• Game mechanics and game design (Is the game rendered as 2-D or 3-D?)

To understand how these arguments work, we’ll need to dig into them in some detail, and carefully tease out the particular ways that arguments are formed, grounding our claims in the statements of the thread’s participants. How do these discussions work? That is, how does the back-and-forth of a forum debate show how people use evidence and argue their claims? What “counts” as evidence, anyway?

The following is an edited excerpt from November 2004 showing the proposal of a timeline by poster LINK-FAN-242, and a discussion with another poster (SWORDM again). In this series of posts, several