A Plot-Speculative Thing That I Think Would Be Really Neat in BotW (and by “Neat” I Mean “Soul-Crushing”)
If they’re going to go for the Tragic Villain route with Ganondorf this time around, but this game has nothing to do with Wind Waker, I’m wondering if they’re going to go the Eveline route?
So, Eveline. Basically a small child who was genetically engineered to be a bioweapon and raised inside of a glass box. Looks ten years old (or 115, by the time the rapid cell degeneration kicks in just before Resident Evil VII starts), but is actually not much older than five. A small child with no socialization whatsoever with a terrifying amount of power and, once she escapes, license to do whatever she wants with no authority figures to tell her what to do. What would have just been a bratty and annoying (but ultimately harmless) little kid turned into an engine of destruction that ruined countless peoples’ lives with the addition of telekinetic fungal powers and a high exposure-to-infection rate.
What I’m thinking the deal with Ganondorf becoming Calamity Ganon might be is that the Royal Family might have been messing around with something they shouldn’t have, and somehow the current iteration of Ganondorf got exposed to it and became an Eldritch monstrosity, or he was exposed to whatever turned him into a monster by his well-intentioned but incredibly-poorly-thought-out attempt to put a stop to whatever the Royal Family was planning (because he is most likely between seven and thirteen, the typical age range that Magical Children of Destiny are exposed to their defining quests), becoming an Eldritch monstrosity in the process. That would explain why he “came out of nowhere;” nobody would have expected a small child to be able to harness/become the Superweapon, and nobody wanted the truth of the matter to leak out, or to acknowledge that they were basically fighting an angry and extremely traumatized young child, so they covered it up with a narrative of a natural disaster that totally came out of nowhere we have no idea how this could have possibly happened we promise.
So he ends up sealed in the castle, grows up in isolation for hundreds of years, without any friends or family to comfort him. By the time Link and Zelda get there, they encounter a horribly warped old man who is responsible for their problems, who is also a confused, frightened, and angry child who has no idea what he’s doing half the time.
Either that, or this Ganon is the Ganon we know from OOT, but the Royal Family asked the Sheikah to hook him up to a machine to use him as a power source for whatever military weapons they had in development (I doubt they would have been able to whip up something like the Guardians so fast if they were truly as “peaceful” a nation as they claimed). Of course, what neither of them took into account was that Ganon was still alive and aware, and didn’t appreciate being taken advantage of as a slave to a kingdom.
So he breaks out, only to be sealed away again by people who have no idea why he’s there in the first place, and spends yet another century in isolation, with the knowledge that everyone he knew is either dead or not coming for him, culminating in yet another encounter with an angry but confused and horribly traumatized old man in a tower somewhere.
I think about Eveline’s final, tearful line of “Why does everyone hate me?” in the context of Calamity/Downfall Timeline Ganon a lot. Eveline was an absolute bastard to everyone under her thrall, because as a lab experiment trained to assimilate and kill with impunity, she had no sense of boundaries or respect for human life. But, at the same time, she still had that childish need to be loved, and to be a part of a family. Even more tragic is that, had she tried not to take what she wanted by force, the Baker family would have gladly given her exactly what she wanted: a loving adoptive family.
I wonder if that was the same thing with Downfall Ganon, too? The desire to be in control might have stemmed from an unstable upbringing, both in the harsh unforgiving climate of his homeland and the unstable and dangerous Hyrule of the pre-OOT Civil War era. He might have begun his quest for dominance as a way to win his peoples’ love, or to compensate for some sort of “failure” that kept him from being a proper King, real or imagined, whether it was because he felt like he wasn’t doing his job because everyone around him was suffering for no reason, or because in some way he wasn’t quite fit for the role he was born into. As with most things involving warfare and politics, it quickly spiraled out of control, until everything was destroyed, and Ganon was basically unrecognizable but trying to hold onto the one thing that had defined his life and his identity.
And if there was a little moment like that, where he asks why everyone hates him and won’t accept him, even though he was born as the “King” of his people and therefore special, but was later rejected by them; even though he “won” and the war is over. That would take him from being just a boring two-dimensional Ancient Evil to someone absolutely pitiful, even if the harm he caused wasn’t necessarily justified or even necessary.
The Good Ending should involve him being depowered and having to live out in Hyrule. He lives under someone’s porch like some kind of awful overgrown feral child, but slowly learns how to interact with other human beings as a human being again.
