Commissions: {Open} The fae took my gender and Nintendo stole my wallet. I write fanfiction when I’m not translating Babylonian curse tablets. The Gerudo deserve better.
Hi, I’m demon dream on ao3 and I have enough Zelda content in my files to build a house and live in it.
Since I have been flooding my wonderful friends with headcanons that they support but might not be invested in, I decided it’s time to subject the internet to the unfiltered ramblings of an anthropology major.
My promise as a writer:
I will write about anything and everything I want to, tagged appropriately. This will include things you find problematic. I will research any disabilities, cultures or identities I include or reference in my work, and I will be open to discussion about how I represent them.
Things I do not promise:
Finished work. Moral qualms. Restraint. Sanity.
I’m queer, neurodivergent, a system, and an anthropology major. All of these perspectives have a part to play in my writing, and I hope you enjoy the ride.
Welcome to the jungle. AU master list here:
Charge of the Goddess (role twist)
Rewilding (exploring Wild’s dehumanization)
The Picori Blade (the Hero of Men)
Penumbra (Four joins the Chain but fucked up)
Fingersmith (LU Four, post-canon, wakes up in Elden Ring)
Fourth Night (modern day Minish Cap)
Tool Gods AU (the weapon spirits all talk)
Hot Girl Shit AU (three dark Links on a quest)
What Soil They Fed (body horror Four)
COMMISSIONS: OPEN
DETAILS
Accepting: Four Swords Adventures, Minish Cap, Skyward Sword, Breath of the Wild, ask if you don’t see what you’re looking for, open to some fandom AUs
DRABBLE REQUESTS: OPEN
PROMPT LIST
Accepting: Tool Gods AU, Linked Universe, Four Swords Adventures.
See?! I heard you guys. You missed the gloom Queen, right? So did I 🖤 You have no idea how much FUN i have drawing Puppet Zelda, i will never grow tired.
But, one issue that has remained unaddressed throughout the entirety of the LOZ canon and apocrypha is the lack of a royal mint.
This implies that rupees are a commodity (a physical material that has value) rather than a fiat currency (a currency not backed by a commodity but by faith in a specific government that ensure it's value).
Most modern governments use Fiat currencies because:
"Fiat money isn't a scarce or fixed resource like gold so central banks have much greater control over its supply. This gives them the power to manage economic variables such as credit supply, liquidity, interest rates, and money velocity." [1]
We can see evidence of Hyrulean government's failure to manage their economy during the runaway inflation of Wind's era
This graph depicts the price to buy an arrow in each specific era of the Legend of Zelda games. The price of arrows between Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass jumped by two rupees and arrow, indicating inflation.
The Origin of Rupees
So if Hyrule's Royal Family isn't minting rupees, where do they come from?
The Hyrule Compendium entry for blupees mentions that "these peculiar little things have a penchant for collecting rupees" but the identity of the compendium's author is unverified and so is their research.
The unregulated nature of Hyrule's commodities-based currency becomes a problem in Tears of the Kingdom, when Koltin asks Link to slaughter all 167 bubbelfrogs.
The life cycle of blupees, bubbelfrogs, and the King of the Mountain requires further study but it is evident that when a blubbelfrog is killed, a blupee is generated. So Link's quest to collect bubbelgems introduces 167 more blupees into Hyrule's ecosystem. These 167 extra blupees eat, drink, and more importantly to us, shit.
So how much did this quest impact Hyrule's economy? To answer that question, some math is required.
The first number we need is the average amount of rupees that blupees shit. To determine this, I shot 30 blupees and fitted the resulting data to a standard distribution.
Blupees Moneybags Georg who shat 51 rupees was an outlier who should not be counted and thus was removed from the dataset.
Multiplying that average amount of rupees that blupees shit by the blupee population [2], gives us the amount of rupees being shat in hyrule.
As you can see, a lot more rupees are being generated during the events of Tears of the Kingdom than in Breath of the Wild. How big of a problem is this? Well, to answer that, we need to know the size of Hyrule's economy.
The Size of Hyrule's Economy
I deciding to determine the size of economy by collecting the prices of every item sold in Hyrule by every merchant (except Ramella, I forgot Ramella).
With the collected price data, we are able to estimate the amount of currency changing hands among the people of Hyrule every year.
So after all this, we can see that the amount of rupees being shat per year should cause significant inflation. And yet, you may recall from our first graph, the price of arrows hasn't significantly changed and neither has the cost of most goods and services across Hyrule with some limited exceptions.
So why aren't prices skyrocketing?
Because the Great Fairies act as the Federal Reserve. They regulate the economy by removing varying amounts of money from circulation via their enchanting services.
In Breath of the Wild, the Great Fairies collectively charge Link 11,600 rupees to wake all 4 great fairies.
In Tears of the Kingdom, they charge Link per individual item of clothing enchanted. This, in total, costs 78,280 rupees.
Accounting for a target 2% rate of inflation, the Great Fairies remove 3.28% of all rupees shat during Breath of the Wild. In Tears of the Kingdom, their rupee removal rate is 5.17% of all rupees being shat.
The Great Fairies are definitely removing less rupees than are being shat but most blupees inhabit far-flung locations that most Hyruleans are not venturing to in these chaotic times. I have confidence that the Great Fairies can adjust their rate of currency removal should the need arise.
But who is attempting to cause this inflation and why?
One thing has always bugged me about Tears of the Kingdom, it wasn't the emptiness of the depths, or the fact that it was easy to miss out on the paraglider, or even the fact that that one cutscene kept being repeated after every temple. It was that Koltin asks you, Link, to go on a rampage of ecological destruction, to hunt the species of Bubbelfrogs to Extinction.
Koltin is clearly passionate about his quest to become a Satori, but he also has a secondary motive, to help out his brother: Kilton.
Kilton started his own currency that competes directly with the rupee and admits as much.
Kolton recruits Link under false pretenses in order to destroy the Bubbelfrog population, increase the amount of blupees, and cause skyrocketing inflation. This would devalue the rupee and incentivize the adoption of mon as a currency.
In the end, Koltins crimes caught up with him and Link helped the Great Fairies stabilize the economy, but Kilton is still out there and who knows what he has planned next.
The pre-switch 3D games just straight up tell you what their connection is
The 2D games where Link looks like the Link from A Link To The Past have the same Link. This is made very easy by how all his Gameboy games are "Link goes to a new location and has a self-contained adventure there"
Minish Cap and Four Swords Adventure are sort of just doing their own thing and should be cherished for that.
The DS games also just spell it out for you really clearly
The NES games predate the notion that anybody cares about the plot of video games
It should be very easy to figure out how A Link Between Worlds fits into this
"Fallen Hero Timeline" is the containment zone for stuff that wasn't made with Ocarina of Time lore in mind
"This is so far in the future that everything that happened before is forgotten" is the entertainment industry version of the farm the old dog went to, when they don't want to say reboot. Yes there are references to past games. No, save yourself the headache.
I'm glad the topic of orientalism was brought to the forefront instead of being stashed away in very niche parts of the fandom, but it is incredibly unfortunate that it has been boiled down to "sexualizing the Gerudo is wrong" and "to fix the Gerudo they should have designs that are a better reflection of the regions they are inspired from". While giving them more varied and appropriate clothing would be a good step forward (thinking of Facette in EoW), if that was the *only* thing fixed the Gerudo would still be orientalist. Orientalism, first and foremost, is a concept that was created to bolster western imperialism, making it seem enlightened in comparison to the "barbaric" east. And to be honest, even in circles that are more sympathetic towards Ganondorf, there is still this underlying sentiment aka "Ganondorf has a point but he's still evil! We're not denying that!" This is still orientalist thought at play, that in order to respect canon you have to internalize that the one person that opposes a kingdom that enshrines the divine right to power is evil and selfish and violent. And his people feel shame forever for his actions, and have only been considered heroic when they ally with Hyrule. Sexualization is a problem, for sure, but understanding the context of the sexualization is also important.
