#zonai brainrot

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The Zonai ear flops in this game are just wonderful btw. The only complaint I have is that we didn’t get more of them

Like lmao Mineru what you doing with your ears?? I love you. Please flop your ears more, it’s adorable

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Some Mineru sketches for the soul. I bet she wears sleep deprivation and fatigue so elegantly

Hmmm I wonder if the next Mineru art I draw should be her being wrapped in a blanket burrito because girl please take a break and go lie the fuck down, everyone is so worried about you 😭

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Okay so a hill I will absolute die on, especially on this site, is that one of the best character design decisions Nintendo has ever let their artists make is giving the Zonai, specifically Rauru, massive eyes with those long fluffy eyelashes and huge rabbit ears! Holy shit, I want to bap them! It’s think it’s like the perfect contrast to their Everything Else. Especially Rauru because his ears are floppy! Like a baby bunny 😭

Him being so regal, so serene, and proper and royal, his strength, his height, his fucking deep conditioned hair and mouth full of sharp dragon fangs that I would love him to sink into my shoulder please

Just look at him! He’s so pretty! He’s so fucking cute!

He looks like a kicked puppy when he’s sad, I need to kiss his big, soft snoot, oh my stars

Even when he’s trying to be fierce, or he’s Doing Battle he’s either otherworldly levels of Pretty

Or accidentally adorable!

10/10 design! He’s so soft yet so regal and serene. He looks like he should be intimidating as *fuck* considering he’s 2.7m or 8.9 feet tall! (Here’s my proof of this btw yes I went into Blender and CHECKED!)

And yet he’s a soft spoken, fluffy haired, gentle sweetheart, with massive puppy eyes with those long eyelashes, and those ridiculous floppy fucking ears! I love him

My only critiques are that they should’ve given Rauru a tail and not made his abs absolutely shredded? Just give him a bit of tummy pudge, I promise it’s normal for a man who is definitely in his late 30’s omfg.

Also why would they give Rauru such huge, pretty eyes and not fill them with tears? What were the people at Nintendo thinking? I need his pretty, serene, regal composure to break entirely, I need him ugly sobbing like Zelda was in the rain in BotW! Where’s the fan service? It’s called TEARS of the kingdom for fucks sake, there should be a 600% increase in emotional breakdowns across the entire cast! Nintendo I demand compensation!

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Okay so something I’ve not seen anyone talk about is this line here that Rauru says in AoI to the Knight Construct

This struck me as really odd when I first heard it because of who Rauru has for an older sister!

Not only does Mineru more than once (as of the small free update) put her spirit into a Flux Construct but Mineru at multiple points is shown to value constructs beyond just being fascinated by them as a researcher, she specifically refers to them as “friends” and values them as companions and allies.

Which as an aside this is just— awww! This is really adorable, I fucking love this detail about her so much, and I love that it comes up more than once! (Yes I’m sneaking in some Mineru appreciation, fucking sue me).

But this then makes what Rauru says here even more strange, has he never spoken to Mineru about her area of special interest before? That… doesn’t sit right with me. This game never gives me the impression at all that Rauru isn’t close with his only other family member. I do not believe that him and Mineru simply don’t spend time together, we get multiple side missions of specifically these two together where they talk about things, one of them being the damn Knight Construct! In addition to this Rauru clearly highly values his big sister’s insight, that’s how Mineru is able to be so persuasive with him on multiple occasions.

So he certainly thinks highly of her and deeply trusts her wisdom to the point where he lets her have a great deal of sway in his decisions, so like… why does he have such a different view of constructs than Mineru?

It’s not that I don’t like this detail or even disagree with Rauru as a person feeling differently towards constructs as Mineru does, I just wish they’d taken the chance to explore this and just given us a bit more dialogue to give us more context. After all Rauru does seek Mineru out to talk about constructs and well spirits and souls, and she’s literally the perfect person to consult about that, it’s just strange that it took so long for the story to show us Rauru talking to Mineru about this.

Like Rauru clearly has a lot of hang ups about constructs and tbh I think he has every reason to feel super fucking uneasy towards constructs that specifically are combative, and I wish they’d like touched on why Mineru not only lacks this sense of unease towards them but she actually cares for all of them (not just steward constructs) as companions and speaks highly of them!

Like this split in Rauru and Mineru’s views of their own culture and technology is super fucking interesting and I’m disappointed that they didn’t really do anything with it outside of this specific context with the knight construct :/

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Their sync strike is way too cute for me to not draw! And I also plan to draw Rauru and Mineru’s because they’re adorable as well!

For now have this line work that I will start painting tomorrow, Zelda’s dress took multiple years off my life and I’m super out of practice when it comes to drawing humans so oh god I hope it looks like her! This took way longer than I initially thought it would but ehh that’s what happens when I don’t draw for several weeks

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Oh yeah, I forget I can upload art here. Anyways

I still draw Zonai, I promise

I’ve been working more on this drawing recently which is a gift for my beloved, I struggled with it for a long while but it’s finally coming together. I’ll likely change Kiaru’s expression but overall I’m happy with her posing and such! Now to just -sigh- design an interior and include Hysane… somehow

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I forgot I can upload art lmao, I’ve mostly been working on re-learning 3D modelling and sculpting lately and also working on some painting studies, but I did manage to draw this the other week!

Two babies helping in the kitchen! There’s more to be added to this soon (I just have to figure out the layout of the damn kitchen) but it’s too cute not to share the wip!

On the left we have @brigamia ‘s oc little Ariaune and on the right we have my oc Leda

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So I just realised something about Mineru and her construct from thinking about AoI, the discussion post I made a few days ago, and then also from me just now drafting an answer to another discussion post I found, and that is that Mineru’s construct in TotK is able to suitably house her spirit only because she had been able to study the Knight Construct in depth!

Mineru in AoI is shown to be intensely interested in the Knight Construct, she hovers around him and is fascinated with him, utterly captivated, and at first I just thought “aww that’s cute because constructs are Mineru’s special interest primary area of study, she’s such a cute nerd!” And like yeah, that IS the reason why she’s so interested, but also I think her fixation is due to the fact that the Knight Construct is distinct in how it behaves.

It’s not like a typical Steward construct or any of the combat constructs, it’s very unique, it seems to have a mind of it’s own and in this scene here Mineru shows that she’s been studying the Knight Construct very closely!

Some things here really stick out to me. The first being wow Mineru is quite the fucking artist oh my god, look at that detail?? Oh my godddd, and here I thought she couldn’t get more perfect but here we are— ahem. Anyways, the second thing are these three lines: “able to house their Zonai power.”, “they bear a will of sorts. A mind even.” , and the last “If the core is key and it’s power determines their actions.”

Which is Mineru confirming the earlier suspicion that these forbidden constructs are special precisely because they basically house whole spirits in them, which allows them to have a mind and to be autonomous to the degree that they are, and to have additional magical properties. In addition to that this cutscene occurs after Rauru and Mineru have had two side-missions together where they discuss the knight construct and like… what determines the contents of one’s spirit etc.

So this tells me that perhaps a barrier Mineru kept running into with her research regarding custom building herself a body to house her spirit, is that the designs of the standard constructs she was reverse engineering did not have magical design principles that made them suitable, long-term vessels to house her spirit in. Presumably this is due to them not having the capacity to house her spirit and her Zonai magic to allow herself the degree of autonomy and free will that she has in her Zonai body!

The only times we see Mineru possess anything in AoI, like the Flux constructs and the Stormwind Ark, is when her Zonai body with her secret stone in it’s possession is still alive and is still acting as the source of that magic and spirit. So she’s only able to pilot those kinds of vessels if she has her original one still intact, which sort of defeats the purpose of building herself a back up body for when her own wears out.

So Mineru likely hit a wall with her research, being unable to do anything more than just being able to basically stream her spirit and some of her magic to a selected empty vessel, but it’s core doesn’t have the capacity to allow her to fully transfer her entire consciousness into it and resume full functionality!

Which if true would also explain why Mineru whilst in the Purah Pad in TotK was unable to emerge from her hibernation and communicate with Link until he got close to the head of her construct and directly interacted with it on Dragonhead Island. Because she had such limited functionality in the Purah Pad, she wasn’t able to “wake up” until something strong resonated with her near by, sort of attracting her like a magnet? And it also was the reason why she was so desperate to get to her secret stone beyond it being a precious family heirloom and also an incredibly powerful artefact! Because that being housed with the new construct would’ve allowed her to do a full consciousness transfer and resume full autonomy and have access to all of her magic again!

One last thing is that directly after the Imprisoning War concludes we get this little side quest;

Which mentions that Mineru has been working on upgrading an ancient Zonai facility in Tobio’s Hollow, which I think it’s safe to assume that this is the Construct Factory, which perhaps could be a clue that due to how much she was able to study the Knight Construct she was able to perfect the design of core of the Crafter Construct she inhabits in TotK to get it to accept and be able to fully house her spirit, which likely gave her the peace of mind to be able to leave her frail body wracked with chronic pain and enter the Purah Pad for hibernation.

But then again this is also just link speculation and headcanons etc, and I could entirely be missing something here but I just had to write yet another post appreciating my beloved 😅