Comment by hn993302
3 days ago
LttP officially named him Ganondorf Dragmire. Sounds like they were just giving a generic, intimidating European fantasy name. The rest of the early games are that kind of thing, enchanted woods with fairies and knights.
There's not a lot that makes sense in the Zelda theming. Link is officially Christian somehow, at least through LttP. Gerudo Valley is like the Middle East in OoT, which I would say is just loose theming but the Fire Temple has literal Islamic chanting. First few games had King Harkinian of Hyrule which sounds a bit like he's Armenian. The game series is named after author Zelda Fitzgerald.
I don't know why the Zelda series in particular gets retconned so much. It's so clear that they just drew on various fantasy/cultural tropes that they liked at the time and weren't thinking decades into the future.
It's fine to just accept them as loosely connected standalone games
> but the Fire Temple has literal Islamic chanting
...had. Nintendo swapped it out in version 1.2 of OoT and all versions afterwards. It is of course relevant that they had it in there in the first place, but AIUI they didn't know it was Islamic chanting then, given they had a strict policy on not including such kinds of references and made the change for that reason.
The same version of OoT also put a crescent moon on the shield you get from the Gerudo area (Spirit Temple). I don't think that or the chanting were accidents.
I’m so glad they got rid of the moon. The new Gerudo emblem is so much cooler looking.
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