Read, reblog, and resonate!
you have very good takes <3 a lot of the time I’m split between whether or not I actually ship something or if I just really like a good story and good dynamic. Maybe those are the same thing? But with GanLink I really wish there were more stories for them that explored the dynamic more thoroughly.
I think the way I was imagining their dynamic would be that Ganon is revived as a man, unlike the pig/beast form he’s taken for the past centuries. He would have empathy and emotions this time but he still has a hunger for power. He remembers some of his past, but not very clearly. He takes the weakened hero as a pet, mostly as a show of victory to the crown. He doesn’t realize for some time how badly he desecrated Hyrule in his last reincarnation. He doesn’t like this, at least not anymore. He still wants power, but what is power if you want to enjoy it? This land has nothing to give him, not crops, no art, not even clean water. So he starts gathering resources to start forging this land back into something great again. Something that he can actually feel proud of conquering. All the while he waits for the crown to attack, but they never do. I think Zelda from LoZ 1 would be unique in the way that she’s been a survivor since birth. It’s not like she doesn’t want to rescue Link or defeat Ganon again, but she knows that her kingdom does not have the resources to go to war. She decides to wait for Ganon to do something first and he hasn’t. All the while he’s had Link in a pretty birdcage of a room. He thought this might humiliate him but Link has never been better fed or rested. Oddly enough the hero begins flirting with him. Ganon learns pretty quickly this was just a ploy to draw him in to slay him once again when his guard is down. Oddly enough, the murder attempt is what attracts Ganon’s attention. The hero does start acting more and more like a caged animal after his assassination attempts keep failing while Ganon finds himself feeling more and more like a man (Like as in a person). He then finds himself in the odd position of being in a Cold War with the princess(es), in possession of a slowly maddening hero, and in the process of trying to heal a country he himself destroyed.
I’m sorry 😭 this turned into a short story instead of a response but the questions you asked were so good and I haven’t actually exercised this idea very well until today
thank you <3
Is there a certain version of GanLink that you like best or is it more of the concept itself that you like? I think it’s a really interesting dynamic in general but I think it would be really interesting with a post Adventure of Link Link and a cult revived Ganon.
I am 100% a Hero/Villain shipper if people put in the work to convince me of it, both consensual and not.
Obviously with That Broken Promise, Ganondorf there is a rational person, a good king, the only Triforce wielder with a braincell, and someone that the Curse of Demise had its work cut out for it to warp into doing what it wanted.
But I've also written a lot of Ganondorf's who are still villains, although I personally aim to keep the human-formed version rational with clear and obvious motivations that make sense. I'm only really into omnicidal villains once you leave behind active humanity (Or unless you demonstrate how and why their feelings about the world have been driven over that brink.)
This is only half because it's racist as Hell if you don't; the other half is because it's fucking boring.
eg. Calamity Ganon, a kind of amorphous blob makes sense as an omnicidal villain, as does the Echoes of Wisdom one, but once you drop back into Tears of the Kingdom Ganondorf I want to see that at least at one point he still had reason before it became corrupted, if that makes sense?
So on that front, Adventure of Link reviving with a Doll and being picked up by his revived Ganon could work for me in four or five different ways.
Is he revived as a proper man with real emotions and sympathetic cause? Win. Is he revived as a beast that keeps Link as a pet? Win. Is he revived as a man who has rational desires but still likes the idea of a pet hero? Win. Is he revived as an omnicidal force of nature that wants a trophy? Win. Is he revived as a monster and Link's just sick of this world and into that? Win.
Probably a few other ways that I don't much feel like listing on my main, but you can probably guess from my other works too. So I guess in general it's the concept I like: how DO you make these characters work together? How do you build a relationship that feels substantial with that kind of a polarized starting point that doesn't just handwave away the difficult parts?