i'm no longer confident i'll ever get a fic out of this
and I would like to purge the papers/I don’t think I’ve put this on tumblr yet. I generally think of the concept as “Three Days Later” despite every version I've found having Link pass out for less than 3 days, and based on my notes it’s kind of a jumble of ponderings following the end of A Link to the Past.
Roughly, the idea is that after touching the Triforce and setting all to rights, Link goes immediately home and passes out in bed for maybe a couple of days, then wakes up to a letter from Princess Zelda who wants him to come to the castle to actually chat, which is awkward because she knows so much more about Link (having been watching him for most of the game) than Link knows about her. And then a little Twilight Princess callback, as a treat.
In the intro a feeling I really wanted to capture is one of those things drawn from life. Having lived in the same house with the same bed in the same position for 20 years, waking up in my new bedroom after moving out for probably the first half-year was occasionally very surreal. In the very brief window between waking and awake, the moment before my eyes opened, I would have a very vivid sense of where I was located in my bedroom and which walls I would see when I opened my eyes, and often simultaneously a very disorienting sense of not being sure I knew which room I was actually in. The weirdness would clear up immediately after I opened my eyes and saw where I was, but that didn’t make the moment any less intense every time it happened.
I just think it would be a very likely sensation for a Link to have, having spent an entire game not-sleeping or passing out wherever and very rarely stopping in at home to sleep. Being convinced that when you open your eyes you’ll be in your childhood bedroom, knowing that you actually have no clue where you went to sleep at, and then realizing upon opening your eyes that you are actually home. Emphasis on home because Link’s uncle is alive again! It’s not waking up to an empty house, it’s waking up to the sounds and smells of someone who loves you cooking a meal.
The letter from Princess Zelda is probably something very official, nice heavy stationery and royal seal and polite wishes for Link to be recovering well from his ordeal. The crown would surely like to give him some sort of commendation or boon as thanks for his services.
Link is a bit bemused by that part as he did, after all, lay his hand on the Triforce and have it look into his heart and mind and grant all his wishes. He’s not entirely sure what he wished for because he was really tired at the time but he’s pretty sure it was fine and he doesn’t have any desires left unfulfilled. The Dark World was supposed to have dissolved with Ganon’s defeat, Princess Zelda and the sages are safe, the King of Hyrule is alive again and so is his uncle–it seems the Triforce did a bang-up job of interpreting Link’s brain fog and sincere desire for the world to just be right again.
He supposes he’ll go to the castle anyway because it would be rude not to after Princess Zelda specifically asked.
And then, per my usual, I wanted to end with some feelings of pre-Zelink. While Link and Princess Zelda may have gotten in some Friends Bonded By Trauma during the flight to the sanctuary, I think it just wasn’t that conducive overall to becoming close friends. And I don’t think Link was technically an official Knight of Hyrule yet, so he probably didn’t even have a business relationship established with her yet? Plus I feel there’s some inherent awkwardness to Princess Zelda feeling like she knows Link very personally–having witnessed all his trials ~as if in a dream~ while prism’d–while Link knows very little about her and didn’t get to choose to reveal everything she saw about him.
So I wanted to have Princess Zelda acknowledge that and try to convey her desire to start becoming friends going forward, on an equal footing, using their words and not sage powers.
Because I’m me, I also thought: yes, this should touch on Twilight Princess.
So I pictured Princess Zelda getting up and standing away from him, giving him the decency of not being stared at or feeling scrutinized for reactions while she gives a little speech. And telling him that when she first learned that the Dark World had transformed him into a rabbit, she thought it was a mistake.
How could the hero she depended on, the young man who’d answered her plea on that horrible night and fought their way to the Sanctuary, have the heart of a hapless and helpless bunny? She thought it would be more fitting for a hero to be reflected as something like a wolf, a beast that would drive out Agahnim and Ganon, beasts themselves with their jaws around Hyrule’s throat.
But as she came to know him better, she realized that what Agahnim needed to fear most about him wasn’t the bite of his sword, but the staunchness of his kind heart.
I’m reminded again that I failed to write this up properly because I still don’t have a clue how to pace it such that the above line really has a punch since it is kind of the core of the thing to be conveyed. Instead it is just dangling there, not sure it’s impactful at all, no clue how to let it sit with you and breathe, and then it would just be like “that’s the kind of person I’d like to know better as a friend” so good talk pls come back to the castle again soon
but hey now I can recycle those papers and not keep shuffling them around in the clutter!
(it kept being recommended by the algorithm and I consistently went "hmmmm hard pass tho" but a friend convinced me that I only needed to watch the first episode to determine whether to keep watching or not, so I Tried)
i thought I had mixed feelings about it and felt eh about the idea of ever rewatching and then have talked nonstop about it for several days regarding 1) ideas I'd like to reuse 2) things I wish had been addressed/made clearer and 3) recontextualizing and reinterpreting scenes that I likely didn't understand the full import of the first time around
so actually it was just
delayed-onset terminal brainrot for the Nowhere King
[image is two small, flat paintings arranged vertically. the top drawing depicts lan wangji and wei wuxian as youths in cloud recesses, wei wuxian eagerly tugging on a recalcitrant lan wangji’s sleeve, his dark clothes standing out against the pale clouds. the bottom drawing depicts lan wangji and wei wuxian as adults during the sunshot campaign, lan wangji’s white clothes standing out against a dark stormy sky as he speaks urgently to a desolate yiling patriarch, who seems to avoid his gaze.]
Since I posted Extremely Sad art of Jiang Cheng and Jin Ling last week, I am now legally required to post this Significantly Happier art of them this week.
See? Look! Jin Ling gets to meet some puppies! Jiang Cheng ALSO gets to meet some puppies! Little Fairy and her little paws get to meet Jin Ling and Jiang Cheng! (Can you tell which one she is?) This is NO HURT ALL COMFORT material
