https://archiveofourown.org/works/33714115/chapters/83795353
This is an AU story in which Irelia and Riven were generals executed in a past war, but they’re reborn a century later with scars of their bullet wounds.
The idea came from another fanfic author called Nyenna.
Bee, the three Sacred Flame cutscenes are all slightly different, right? Do you have any idea as to what they're supposed to mean?
Oh, the cutscenes, my beloved...where do I even start?
Skyward Sword's plot is a love letter to everything Zelda. When I criticize games, plot is usually the first thing I go for; Breath of the Wild, for example—it had so much potential, which we luckily got compensated for in Age of Calamity, but the main/canon story just leaves you kind of...empty feeling. Link is just a vessel to watch through the eyes of, and while he is heroic, he’s also...just...there.
Skyward Sword, though? It brought me to tears. It was perfect. Every motion Link made, every expression; he no longer felt like Nintendo's favorite blank slate with a permanent expression on it, a la Pokemon Sun and Moon's protagonist.
We got his smiles.
His determination.
His panic.
His shame.
His fear.
We see him comfort a friend,
We see him cry,
We see him rage.
So much thought and care was put into every single cutscene, from beginning to end.
And the sacred flames are a point to that.
With Farore's sacred flame, he cowers. The power in front of him is new and terrifying, and he doesn't know what to expect of it.
When he raises his sword as Fi instructs, his hand actually trembles.
And when he first tests out the Goddess Longsword, his expression is blank and uncertain; he only gives it two swings and a twirl before sheathing it, which is the typical Master Sword twirl we get in Breath of the Wild and Twilight Princess.
We see a nearly identical setup with Nayru’s flame. His hand trembles as he raises the blade, but his expression is expectant. He’s bracing himself.
He cowers again as Fi takes the power in.
But he drops his guard almost immediately as Fi rockets into the atmosphere.
When she lands, the fear is gone. She only has to look at him, and he changes entirely.
His expression shifts. He stands his ground. He holds the blade out.
He’s ready.
When he tests the Goddess Sword White, it’s with feeling. He swings it like he means it, and the ready-for-battle Link we’ve come to be used to takes the stunned one’s place.
When Din’s flame appears, Link’s braced for the impact before the flames swallow Fi.
She looks at him.
And his stance immediately changes.
He cowers again, but not even a second after Fi lands
He retakes that stance.
He looks up at the blade fiercely.
When he tests it, he does three swings, then a leap into a spin attack. This is his blade. The Master Sword has forged him just as much as he’s forged it.
It’s character development in the subtlest way possible.
Can I just say that the Hylain Alphabet is weird. Like why I should there so many repeating letters?!? It makes it really confusing to decode if your starting out. I understand that it’s a fictional langue, but who thought it would be a good idea that X and I look exactly the same! It would be hard to read for the hylains to. TL:DR, The Written Hylain langue is Confusing. Thanks for coming to my TED talk
Yeah, for us it can get really confusing, and it makes it hard to decode stuff sometimes. But I'd guess the in-universe reason for the repeating letters and stuff is just that the sounds those letters make either just don’t exist in that Hylian or the repeating letters actually have a double pronunciation
Like, in SkSw for example, we have this "translation" guide of written Hylian to English:
D and W, E and K, G and Q, P and T, O and Z, X and I. Those pairs share hylian symbols.
So, retaking what I said above, this could mean those symbols have two ways to be pronounced, which isn’t totally unheard of? In many languages, like Spanish and English, the letter “C” can have both a “S” and a “K” sound, despite being completely different letters. In Spanish, “G” can have both an English-esque “H” sound and a normal “G” one.
The opposite theory would be that, in the case of the letter shared by D and W, one of those sounds doesn’t exist in Hylian - which, if we listen to the ballad of the goddess sang by Zelda and Fi, could be W’s case, since that noise could easily be replaced by a u sound, that has a unique letter in the alphabet.
But there’s also a third possibility here... As much as Hylian’s written in English throughout SkSw, we know for a fact it’s not pronounced the same. Let’s take “Link” for example
We know Link is written this way in Hylian, both because Nintendo confirmed the above translation of the alphabet, and because, in-game, we see Zelda wrote his name that way in the letter she sends to him at the very beginning:
but we KNOW his name isn’t actually said “Link” in Hylian! - It’s actually “Madas”/”Matdas”. Fi says it all the time, along with the Hylian for Master: “Mari” (Mari Madas = Master Link). You can hear Fi saying his name in the very first cutscene with Link in it, the one the above screenshot is from
So, going from the written “LINK” and the spoken “MADAS”, the corresponding sounds for each letter could be something like this in Spoken Hylian:
....i uh, got a bit carried away with this but the TL;DR basically is - Hylian might be written in English in some cases, and might be confusing since some Hylian letters share English ones, but that’s most probably because in Spoken Hylian the noises those letters represent are very different!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Since Skyward Sword is in the public eye again, I thought I’d highlight an old piece I did. Fi is a very underrated character, whose development was missed by many who played the game in 2011, but who seems to have been redeemed by history, and I’m happy for it.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
I’m working on an alternate canon League of Legends fic. Slowburn Riven X Irelia, because I’ve shipped it forever. It picks up immediately after Sisterhood of War.
This is my first writing project since 2016, so it’s also an exercise in shaking the rust off and getting my writing chops back.
I’ve decided to resurrect my writing blog. I’ll be working on original as well as fan works. Which honestly means that this will probably be a Rivelia blog for the forseeable future.
romaincrisis
jbbartram-illu
jacobvanloon
ellievsbear
kianamaiart
