The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [54]
Second, not only do the makers of the games not care that much about meticulously linking their plots together, there isn’t even one “author” that we can point to and say, “The author intended for us to interpret the game like this.” Normally, when we read a book or see a painting or listen to a song, we reflexively ask ourselves, “What was the author trying to tell us?” To find out, we can go back through what the artist has said about their own work and what schools and influences bear consideration when thinking about the artist’s past to gather together clues about what the right interpretation of it is.
To resolve questions about the Lord of the Rings universe, fans quite regularly sift through the letters of J.R.R. Tolkien looking for some written indication of his intentions on the matter at hand. For the Lord of the Rings universe, Tolkien’s views are definitive, because the series as a whole is his attempt to express a coherent vision of “Middle-earth.” However, with the Zelda games, there is no one author who was trying to tell us anything. Each Zelda game was made by a vast team of people working together, each of whom had a direct impact on the final product.
Sometimes, fans talk as though producer Shigeru Miyamoto or director Eiji Aonuma are personally responsible for every aspect of the games, but that’s just not the case. In reality, different groups of people worked together to make each game, and each person probably had a different idea of what the game means and how we should interpret it. Since no one person wrote all the text in the games or designed all the dungeons in the games or even translated all the games into English, how are we as fans supposed to decide which of the many people on the team is “the” author whose vision counts for more than all the rest? No matter how great we may think Miyamoto and Aonuma are, without programmers, artists, and sound technicians working for them, they couldn’t have accomplished anything. Isn’t it odd then to give individuals all the credit for collaborative effort? Besides, the personal involvement of the pair with some Zelda games, such as The Minish Cap, was only slight, since those games were created by developers outside Nintendo. Taken together, it’s odd to credit the vision of any one person, no matter how crucial to the development of the Zelda series, as final and authoritative. But, without an individual’s vision to credit as authoritative, what are fans supposed to point to when trying to fill in the gaps in the Zelda world? All that is left is a multiplicity of competing interpretive visions. Some of these visions are from developers and some are from fans, but none is any higher than the others, or so it appears.
It seems then that there’s just no possible way that fans could ever agree on a timeline for the Zelda games, because there is no timeline to agree on! … And yet, though the fans do debate the timeline quite passionately, they still agree with each other often. Even if they disagree on the specific order that the games are linked together, almost all of them at least agree that the games seem to be linked together. Particular games clearly offer clues that are meant to remind the player of other games in the series. No one goes on to Internet message boards to passionately explain their theory that each game is an island. Fans have persistently seen some connection between the games and intricately worked out the possible relationship between the many plotlines. They communicate and