STUDY / Ganondorf - Tumblr Posts
( BOTW ) ━ Link has many subtle quirks born from coping mechanisms, traumas and mental illness, as is unavoidable from being thrown into such a high stress situation with nothing to fall back on, with no memory but a larger-than-life goal set upon him, but one of the most noticeable and violent of them is the fact Link is half-convinced of his own corruption.
Throughout Breath of the Wild, the theme of disease, corruption and dark magic is an overarching one. Malice is a plague upon the land, each Blood Moon revives the undead through sheer will of distaste and discontent, Ganondorfs loathing manifested into what is ━ in essence ━ a magical blight formed exclusively through the warping of dark magic, being imbued with a poisonous amount of that hatred, the will to force itself into this form, and to attach itself to anything it can. a hatred so thick it congeals, and corrodes. The undead that the Blood Moon calls upon are full of rotten blood and malice, alive but reduced to the barest thoughts and actions, more nerves firing off instinct than what they were in life. Link, in many ways, is considered at best the healer of the blight and at worst the slayer of the already damned. He's the hero, the one whom Hylia entrusted to the blade that burns away the dark, he is something of the light, however blinding and stark and harsh that is.
... But Link has seen what happens to creatures when they are corrupted, he has seen how easy it is for it is him to cut it back, burn it down. Link has seen and Link knows, but Link isn't stupid ━━━ he was in a chamber for a hundred years, was he not? protected but so, so idle. Anyone else would die, he's learned, in that time. Any Hylian, anyway. What of him, then? He is alive, isn't he? Magic is mysterious, the Goddesses are vague and he is special but he is alive.
... Isn't he?
This is where the fear of corruption comes in, that could be called a delusion in terms of actual disorders but what Link only knows as something he doesn't want to look at but the knowledge still burns in him. He's half convinced himself that he is corrupted, he just doesn't know it yet. He thinks a lot about how Hino turns wild when the Blood Moon rises, and how that wildness is hatred in him, Ganondorf breaking desperately through chains to kill him, to despise him, and how Hino never acknowledges it after, like he doesn't know, just mindful enough to speak and growl before it's over. Do they know when their blood has gone bad and angry? Can they tell? Could he?
He doesn't know, but he is quietly petrified in the way Link does not let his fear breathe into recognition, that one day the Master Sword will burn his hands when he tries to take the handle, grip it tight & true as he was told to do, and there will be nothing for him but a simple knowledge that he is not ━ and perhaps he never was.
au where after the events of botw, the form of ganondorf & his malice in a last ditch effort to preserve itself - an immortality learned through the ages of its hatred and its diluted godhood in evading the namesake of its origins ( demise ) ━ condenses into an indirect, distant ground. a field turning white in its atrophy, and knowing, knowing its curse. Not ganondorf; but his hatred.
a crystallization of blood and ruin and a thousand years and a thousand more. a toxicity that instead of sludge turns into something beautiful into something not the same. not a growth, but a growing. a field that never dies. a field that never changes. snow does not fall on the grounds in which he infects, perhaps unlike himself, as though a grave. former body a cruel thing to fall back to, an ancient hatred, never enough roots to stretch back to beneath Hyrule Castle
Making what you can with what you have. Eventually something wakes up under that field. Eventually something digs their way out. Eventually something, remembering what it is like to breathe, names himself again. Ganondorf. Bones not his own, a corpse repurposed; he always finds a way.
A secret. A curse.
god. my favorite thing with my version of Ganondorf is his power not quite being a plague but rather a permanence.
his hands brushing reeds and it turns white as though shocking its color from its fiber, a field of silver left where he walks for generations that grows in on itself, out on itself, learning to live regardless. an insect swarm comes to him and leaves him with a violent coordination of those minds altered. punished or blessed beasts finding their eyes seeing a kind of sight they were not born with but given, rewired, cats given a dogs eyes, dogs given crows. he takes the quill and its ink and the ink writes itself into the essence of its parchment like an oath, an oath to stay, a promise on a future it is determined to stay in at his word, at his command. he may be corruption he may be ancient upon evil upon spite that does not die; that cannot die; but he is a memory you cannot get rid of, a history that aches in the bones of the land, a monument unmovable.
he is a bitter loathed selfish truth but you cannot make him pretty, you cannot make him gone. a lesson to keep learning. a person immortalized without body, without name. he inhales and you hold your breath. he speaks and you listen. he exhales and you see the world change. his personhood will never outlast him, who he is a footnote on a list of unimaginable enormities, but his single presence is a fact in a sea of shining lies. he is not pretty, but he has always been beautiful.
you who will not love him, but you who will know he was here. where you are. a hundred years ago. a hundred years ahead.
you tell him to apologize for his own birth, and he laughs, and says I was born, and you will be born knowing me, and you will die knowing me. the way gods are legend. the way he is history.