Downtime For An Animal Lover @grimalkenkid - Tumblr Blog

I think a big part of the reason Pokopia is hitting so hard for so many people is that we have had an absolute glut of post apocalyptic media that take the "humans are the monsters/disease/problem" angle. Even the most well meaning solar-punk I can think of often have this undercurrent of 'humanity's nature is inherently short sighted and exploitive and they must constantly be kept in check to protect the environment' which slides very quickly into 'the world would be better off without humans in it to complicate and threaten things'.

But Pokopia fully does not do that. The world is lonely without humans and lesser for humanity's absence. So much of the game is about how Pokemon miss humans and are struggling to make sense of a world without us, how the ecosystem is just as hurt by our absence as any other species, and how the things we left behind, even in ruins and burned shells, are often beautiful and strange and helpful to the Pokemon who find them.

Pokemon have always been this allegory for the natural world- back to the original idea of the games inspired by children who caught bugs and kept ant farms- and thus the relationship between Pokemon and humans becomes this allegory for the relationship between nature and humans. And Pokopia looks you dead in the eye and says "the world would be poorer without humans, and if we all vanished tomorrow the echoes of who we are and the things we did would still ring out for eons uncountable. We would be missed and mourned and searched for and the wound of our absence would be deeply felt on this earth for the rest of its turning. The actions of a few greedy short sighted humans will never change that."

And that. That hits.

#pokemon #pokopia #this game is so goooood y'all

theinternetarchive

System wallpapers from Windows XP's RTM, Build 2600; Microsoft Co., August 24, 2001.

custer-mp3

#those fish unlocked some core memories #I used to have my background set to the autumn park

vunblr

After redesigning the packaging of the products to resemble the main ingredients of their formula, Uzon -a korean skincare brand- had a boost in sales. Gee, I wonder why🤔

cheeseandthankyou

#the funnies

chloemew

Absolutely enamoured with this snail mug I got yesterday....

A snug of snoffee

#snail #cute

apofiss

Northern light cats ₊⊹✨｡⋆

#northern lights #cats #art #lovely little space fluffs

holy-leapin-splits-batman

#the funnies

anyaboz

Join the cult

Check out my Patreon for tutorials

#art #beautiful I love them so much

prokopetz

While it is generally agreed that the folkloric figures of "Link" and "Princess Zelda" are based on real historical individuals, neither those individuals nor their respective myth-cycles were contemporary, being separated in time by nearly two hundred years, with each initially being the protagonist of their own body of tales.

When the two myth-cycles were fused by later chroniclers to produce the combined Link-Zelda cycle which is familiar to audiences today, the figure of Link assumed the role of overall protagonist. Securing Zelda's freedom from captivity is often inserted as a secondary objective into episodes which were originally Link tales, while Link typically subsumes most or all of Zelda's role in episodes which were originally Zelda tales.

In many cases, the Link-Zelda version is the only iteration of a given episode which survives, so determining which tales were originally part of which precursor cycle is not without controversy; however, the repetitive nature of the perils which preclude Zelda's active participation in many episodes – kidnapped, possessed, sealed in enchanted crystal, etc. – may offer some clues.

(The Gamelon saga represents the the largest known body of Zelda tales which are believed to have persisted in more or less their original form. Linguistic analysis suggests that the episode in which Link is revealed to have been trapped in a heretofore-unmentioned magic mirror the entire time is a clumsy interpolation by a later author, inserted to justify the saga's inclusion in the broader Link-Zelda cycle.)

firefly-factory

tobiasdrake

The very first Legend of Zelda was itself a Zelda legend, hence its title. It was also one of the first to be adapted to the contemporary Link-Zelda structure of the myths. The introduction of Link into this myth was shoddy and introduced a number of inconsistencies.

For example, it's said that Link is a wanderer from afar who rescues Impa from Moblins but when he arrives in Hyrule, he has to take the place of the unarmed and inexperienced Princess Zelda. And so this allegedly experienced warrior who just killed a bunch of Moblins arrives in Hyrule without so much as a sword in hand.

Similarly, the original myth featured Zelda assembling the Triforce of Wisdom, the only force that could stand against the Triforce of Power in Ganon's possession. Because it was the first to be adapted, there were concerns about disempowering Zelda by replacing her entirely with Link. As a result, a strange compromise was struck; One in which Zelda, after assembling the Triforce, then immediately broke it back down into its component pieces and re-hid them for Link to find.

By contrast, The Adventure of Link, true to its name, is the first Link legend. The importing of Zelda into it as the sleeping princess that Link awakens from her long slumber proved to be just as clunky as the importing of Link into The Legend of Zelda. Most notably, the confusing questions raised as to whether Zelda is meant to be the princess Link rescued in his previous adventure or the one he is rescuing in this new one.

Similarly, Zelda's nemesis Ganon is roped into Adventure of Link very awkwardly. Link's nemesis is his own dark shadow, with only a scant few mentions of the idea that Link's defeat will somehow result in Ganon returning... just because.

But the largest and most consequential of adaptations made to The Adventure of Link is the revising of the magic scepter Link uses to awaken the Sleeping Princess into the Triforce of Courage, a modern invention meant to tie Link more closely to Zelda and Ganon's mythos.

And this is where the study of the legends' history becomes rocky, as many scholars consider the very notion that the Triforce of Courage did not exist in the original tales to be downright apocryphal.

daja-the-hypnokitten

We also can see the shoehorning of Zelda into Link's Oracle Saga, where instead of having 2 unrelated adventures, Ganon's minions form a superficial bridge between the two stories to introduce peril to Zelda - Zelda's presence or lack thereof has no significant impact on either story

And there are some distinct quirks to the Gamelon cycle that argue for the presence of syncretic merging of the Zelda in the tales we know with a similar legend from another culture. As does the difference between the Triforce of Wisdom, her sometimes status as a Sage, and the Sacred Power/Light Force/etc power that has different names in different legends.

But it's an interesting pairing of a Celestial legend (Zelda) with a Cthonic one (Link) - after all, how many of the stories that clearly are originally Link tales involve another world? I submit as evidence the presence of stories such as Link to the Past and Majora's Mask; even in the Era of Twlight cycle, we see a previous version of Link resurrected as a shade.

On the flip side, the Era of the Sky gives us Zelda as explicitly, canonically a reincarnation of the Goddess Hylia; whether this was part of the original mythos, or an evolution of why she has the Sacred Power of light in her bloodline is unclear to me. But Skyward Sword was clearly, originally, a Zelda story - after all, Link spends the entire tale chasing after Zelda.

karaloza

Skyward Sword cannot possibly have been a Zelda tale, because it clearly follows the ur-pattern of the Legend of Link, wherein Link meets three challenges (usually associated with the colors green, red, and blue) and is rewarded with his principal sword, with which he is then able to meet some number of additional challenges before defeating his foe.* However, it is highly likely that in the original iteration, it was Hylia and not Zelda whom Link sought. Skyward Sword has many hallmarks of being a later expression of the Link cycle, including themes of enlightenment and spiritual transcendence that are very different from the simple physical violence of the earlier expressions. Link's quest for Hylia is a quest for the essence of divinity itself.

Current research seems to indicate that the oldest extant version of the Link tale is the one labeled Wind Waker, which clearly dates to the Hylians' Seafaring/Exploration period, before they settled in the land which they named Hyrule (the legend-within-a-legend wherein Hyrule is sunk under the sea can be attributed to a later admixture of elements from other versions of the Link cycle, or other mythologies entirely). There is of course a Zelda figure in Wind Waker, but for the first half of the tale she is identified as Tetra, a very different character indeed! There is speculation that most of the "Zeldas" in confirmed Link stories were actually Tetra, his original female companion, before she was overwritten as Zelda when the two mythologies were merged.

* Linguistic scholars believe "Ganon" to derive from the Hylian root dialect word gann, which simply translates as "enemy" or "opposition." There is no reason to suppose that every instance of "Ganon" or "Ganondorf" in the tales refers to the same entity!

prokopetz

While identifying Tetra with Zelda is of course the product of later revision, the revelation that Tetra is herself a princess may not be.

As previously noted, descent into a mystical Underworld – often, but not always, explicitly identified with the realm of the dead – is a common element of Link tales. This descent is frequently paired with an encounter and subsequent rivalry or alliance (often one, then the other) with that realm's queen. In particular, the motif of Link forming an early alliance with a mysterious young woman who later proves to be the Underworld realm's queen-in-exile is not found only here; consider, for example, the (admittedly divisive) Twilight saga. Indeed, if we accept the identification of the Skyward saga's desolate surface realm with such an Underworld, the revelation of Link's childhood sweetheart as a mortal incarnation of the goddess Hylia arguably fits this mould!

(Of course, as the earliest versions of the Wind Waker saga are presently lost, any conclusions regarding exactly how this trope was introduced to the tale are unavoidably speculative. In the absence of further discoveries, whether Tetra was originally simply a young pirate lord who acquired her Underworld-queen attributes in the process of being fused with Zelda, or whether she was already queen-in-exile of a very different Underworld which was later replaced with a fallen Hyrule to justify her identification with Zelda must remain an open question.)

messagesfromthefrog

While I do agree with a large portion of the claims made here, I would also like to suggest an alternative to the commonly accepted Link-Zelda model. It is my belief that the inconsistencies in Ganon and Ganondorf are in actuality the result of a third mythic cycle being fused into the Link Zelda myths. It is my belief that this possible third hero survives in the form of Groose, who is known to be a later addition to the Skyward Sword myth. Now, I will not claim to be a well read scholar on the matter, and it’s likely that someone more knowledgeable on the subject will shoot my theory down. But if Groose or an unknown ur-Ganondorf exists from a third body of myths, it may explain some inconsistencies in the tone of the Link Zelda myths. In particular I believe that this third hero survives in the form of tangents in the story, often with themes of acquiring power or encountering something unexplainable. In these tales Groose would be an ambitious everyman who sets out seeking glory only to be humbled by the strangeness of the world. For some examples I believe that the events at Romani Ranch may be one case of a surviving fragment of a Groose story, as is the character of Tingle who may have originally been his companion. As Groose is theorized to originally have been a gerudo folkloric figure, It is likely that as relations between the hylians and the gerudo soured, Groose eventually became conflated with Ganon, forming the figure of Ganondorf.

#the legend of zelda #video games

grootficguy

“Every Pokemon is someone’s favourite” I’m making a spreadsheet to see if this is true. Reblog with your favourite Pokemon in the tags.

Here’s the spreadsheet in-progress

grootficguy

Ok, mother of GOD that's a lot of responses and I am but one man with Excel. I'll update these ASAP but also some rules:

A Pokemon only counts for itself, not its evolution line.

A Pokemon with multiple forms (like Zygarde) will only be counted for the specified form. A Pokemon with multiple appearances (like Spinda, Vivillon, Sylvally, etc.) count for all their appearances.

I'm literally doing this as a testament to my own depression that not everyone is lovable, so add that to the weight of this post's meaning.

#pokemon #always hard picking just one as my favorite #but I’m going with Absol #honorable mentions to Houndoom Jolteon and caterpie