one of the things i'm constantly thinking about when writing botw/totk zelink is that they are pawns in an endless cycle, and they do not realize that this is the case.
the beginning of their life is framed like a hellenic tragedy. we, the players, to varying degrees, come into the game aware of the cycle of reincarnation. every game, there is a disaster, and a hero is roused to stop it.
the hyrule before the calamity attempts to subvert this! a soothsayer predicted calamity ganon's return; they have an entire culture born around hyrulean queens teaching their daughters the sealing power; they had a contest to see which capable swordsman could draw the sword that seals the darkness. this time, they would not wait until the hour of darkness, but would grab the calamity by its throat, and avert it before it even begins!
but they fail. they had to fail. by attempting to escape the prophecy they only hastened its becoming. many have pointed out that the calamity arrives the moment mipha is poised to tell zelda how she uses her own magic; zelda, indeed, does not harness it until after everyone is dead.
but neither link or zelda know this! at most, zelda knows that she comes from a long line of princesses with sealing power, but not that the first in her line was the reincarnation of hylia herself; link is told that in the past there was a swordsman who wielded the master sword, but he is given no indication that he is any kind of reincarnation (unlike twilight princess' and wind waker's link, for example, who are both directly told of their legacy). this makes sense! it's been millennia: this information would be lost! all that they know is that there was to be a tragedy, and they could not stop it.
so when i try to get in their mind, i remember that each of them are made to believe, through the mythological telephone that informed their fates, through the nature of tragedies, that the calamity was preventable, and that they failed. we know that there was no universe where they do not fail - in an intertextual sense, because they are the most recent in a long line of cursed incarnations, and in a metatextual sense because they are characters trapped in a narrative - but they still have no choice but to believe that there is a world in which they do not fail! everything we learn about them between breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom reinforces this: not only are they trying to rebuild hyrule, they're trying to rebuild it stronger, so that it does not make the same mistakes! they are defined by this guilt, even though we know that they are not deserving of it! it was not their fault! there was nothing they could have done! they were only teenagers!