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[hyruglyphics]

IC:

Name: Zelda
Age: 117, though she's functionally 17 because she spent a hundred years of that fighting in spiritual form. Though she was also mostly self-aware while doing that so ... idek both work.
Canon: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
History: Here! ... Obviously this only applies to the Breath of the Wild one.

Canon Point: (Good) End of Breath of the Wild
Material Regains:
- The Sheikah Slate (only with the picture taking/menu/map stuff, so no runes)
- A Silent Princess Flower
- Her royal outfit
- Her winter outfit
- A fruitcake (repeatable)

Basic alignment: Lawful Good, though with shades of Neutral Good. Zelda wants what is best for her people and everyone else, even at the cost of her own happiness. She does have her moments where that eats at her and light rebellion when that stress got to her a lot, but not a single piece of canon material ever shows her as anything but diligent, warm-hearted, and selfless.

Strengths and Weaknesses:
+/- For being, you know, a Zelda, her spiritual affinity is fairly weak. This one's a little odd to call, but bearing in mind that as Princess Zelda she is from a reincarnating line of basically wizards that originates with the reincarnation of a goddess, she shows very little ability to access the powers which are her destiny and birthright. Actually, this failure to do so throughout most of the Breath of the Wild's backstory is core to many of her other weaknesses and some of her strengths. Going through the motions and diligently praying to the goddesses, doing her best, none of it allows her to use her powers or even hear the voice in the Master Sword up until her and Link's lives are threatened after all seems lost in Hyrule.

That said, there's much else to interpret there: the activation of her power happens because of a threat to one of the people most supportive to her in her life, and gaining them in that way claims them as her own instead of the powers meant for her as part of her destiny. She rallies, and sets the situation that the game begins in up: she hears the voice of the Master Sword and entrusts it to the Great Deku Tree for Link to find later, sends Link to be revived, and then goes out alone to use her newly awakened powers to stall for the time Link needs to do that. And once Link does defeat Ganon (with no small assistance from her) those powers fade, and Zelda in the post game declares that she no longer needs them, despite being what she suffered in trying to master all her life.

What this tells us is twofold: The first is that she was able to make use of the power that was her birthright in order to (belatedly, admittedly) save all she held dear, but she was only able to do so once she stopped defining herself by those powers, and in fact once she had fulfilled that goal, that spiritual power (including hearing the Master Sword's voice) faded, because her natural affinity is more to the natural and physical world that she sought to protect than to the spiritual and divine; the very core of her entire conflict. A conflict she resolves by making it her own and accepting that the weakness she has is acceptable, despite everything she "needed" to be and everything her father urged her to be.

+ Despite what she and some others see as her failings (though to be clear, they are very arguably actually failings, because while it's likely Ganon would have won anyway due to his surprise ability to control the Guardians, one major part of Hyrule's strategy not having her powers activated by the time her showed up sure didn't help), Zelda does still inspire people. All four of the Champions clearly have some level of respect and loyalty to her, them all urging Link to help her and in fact judging Link based on his ability to protect her and be a good partner for her. Urbosa goes as far as to say that Zelda has and will continue to be a beacon of light for Hyrule in the trying times that they live in. Her resolute dedication to her people and to the well being of others stands out to people, and her innate goodness of character serves to help spur others (like Link and Robbie and Kass's master) on to great things.

+ No discussion of Zelda can happen without talking about her intellect and passion for knowledge. Her three defining pillars as a character are her sense of duty, her innate goodness in order to meet that duty, and her passion for the sciences that both helps her in that is serves as an outlet for that duty and in the eyes of some, a distraction from her destiny. But either way, the fact remains that the game heavily establishes that basically everything that we know about the Guardians, Sheikah Slate, shrines, and every other piece of ancient technology was learned by her, Robbie, and Purah working together to piece out their findings. Ultimately the other two bore more fruit (in part due to having a hundred more years to work with it), but her efforts are far from fruitless.

And perhaps more importantly for looking at her strengths, she is very passionate about it. Hunting out shrines and pondering about work arounds to the fact they are meant specifically for the hero (IE Link), working to tweak the Divine Beasts, working with the Sheikah Slate, and her own room at the castle having a little lab about it; all of this shows that Zelda loves to learn and unearth the mysteries of the now mythical past. And her field of scholarship isn't limited to that, either! She casually throws out facts about the kingdom's attempts to domesticate flowers, she knows the properties of animals as cooking ingredients, and clearly comes alive the most when she's able to be left to her own devices to study and talk about her findings.

- As mentioned with that opening part, throughout her history, (beginning when she was seven years old) Zelda regularly and consistently failed to activate the powers which she was "meant" to have. She did not slouch in her duty to do so, but the desperation to meet the expectations of her father and her own destiny resulted in her having both self-destructive and depressive tendencies. We learn in her journal that at least one time she prayed for literally a whole day and passed out in the cold water of one of the springs of the goddess. We see in the flashbacks her breaking down sobbing in frustration, asking "what's wrong with me?"

More or less up until she gets clarity and closure through making the power her own and it activating, this was a gaping hole in her heart which served as a wedge between her and almost everyone else in her life: Her father was cold to her, believing he needed to be stern in order to force her to stop, as he saw it, shirking her duties. The other Champions (especially Urbosa) are kind to her, but she feels her own sense of failure every time she sees them. And Link especially she herself is cold to, because here is someone her own age with his own impossibly weighty destiny, but she seems to meet it stoically and succeed in every way she can't. All of these relationships (except her father, who tragically dies before they reconcile) do mend themselves, but the scars of the decade she spent failing do linger with her.

- What we can take from all of Zelda's various complexes and sense of duty is that she is incredibly hard on herself. In both his journal and in the cutscene we get where he scolds her, her father seems to believe that she's shirked from her destiny, chasing this alternate path at the expense of it, but based on all the scenes we see and Zelda's journal, nothing could be further from the truth. Everything she's done since a very young age has been for Hyrule's salvation, and while she does find more passion in some of it (such as the study of the Guardians and the ancient technology), she still holds herself to the insane if perhaps factual standard of being one of only two to six people meant to literally save the world. And so every failure she has shows she isn't good enough for that.

Which also does couple with the death of her mother, also a factor in all of this. The journals of Urbosa and the king both establish that Zelda's mother would have been her teacher in her spiritual matters, had she lived. However, Zelda's mom died when she was young, just a year before her her training would have started. We can deduce from both the fact her mom should have been her mentor and that the line of princesses (and probably queens therefore) in the royal family inherited the sealing power that her mother also had some sort of abilities. Urbosa notes that Zelda used to smile much more before her mother passed and she had to take up this duty alone; Urbosa express regrets at how isolated it must make Zelda feel to not have someone else to see her through her trails. This is clearly something that eats at Zelda, given her genuine surprise at Urbosa explaining why she calls her "little bird," an affectionate name that her mother apparently used to use when she was very small.

+/- Her relationship with Link probably bares special mention. In the beginning of the chain of memories that Link regains throughout the game, Zelda is quite cool and terse to him - we see in her diary that this is because she is intimidated by his quiet nature, jealous of the fact he seems to effortlessly slot into his destined role, and thinks that he judges her for her failure. She snaps at him more than once in the early memories, but after he defends her as a loyal knight, she opens up more to him. She learns that his quiet and serious nature is in fact his defensive mechanism for trying to live up to to the expectations on him (in fact, the game implies that the arguably more goofy personality that players inevitably end up giving Link through their in-game actions like cooking or leaping off cliffs or whatever is closer to who he would actually be without the pressure) she comes to care more for him, leaning on him as one of her closest confidants and arguably one of her only friends that is actually her own age.

It is protecting him that allows her to activate her powers for the first time, and it is through faith in his abilities to defeat the darkness (and, as the Great Deku Tree says, hope in her ability to see him again and say what she needs to say to him face to face) that powers her through the hundred years that she battles Ganon by herself. After Link awakens, she regularly sends him telepathic messages of support and hints. When the battle in over (and in the Normal ending where you don't get all the memories this is the end of the game), she hesitantly asks if Link truly remembers her. It's clear that Link is tremendously important to her, both as a weight against and later a catalyst for her own destiny and as someone that she at very least loves as a friend and companion and very possibly something more.

Skills and Abilities:
- Zelda is a dedicated scholar! Left to her own devices, she would love to study both the natural world and her world's distant past. Her along with three or do others (Purah, Robbie, and an unnamed poet) uncovered the majority of the information that Hyrule knows about the shrines and Guardians and ancient technology. She also is able to spout off facts about the environment around her, be it plants or animals. She's just as at home looking into these things in the field (practical) or studying in the castling library (esoteric) as well.

- So speaking of out in the field! For being a princess, she's actually not at all averse to or unused to travel. In basically all of the memory flashbacks we see her traveling all over Hyrule with only Link or maybe one or two other guards quite regularly. She's able to ride a horse, the knowledge of ecology she has suggests she can cook things, she can adapt to various climates and terrains, and she just generally seems to be adapted to the wilds far more than you'd think for being a blue-blooded noble.

- ... Also she can apparently sew really well? The various blue Champion clothing that all the Champions plus Link wear her father claims that she sewed herself, which honestly is a little bit badass even if it's a random skill that we don't see mentioned or eluded to anywhere else in the game.

- Anything else I'd mention about her, especially devoid of her powers as she now is (this applies to both because of power nerf and because her sealing powers faded in the post-game, for the record), is pretty much emotional/mental strength stuff which is covered above so I think I'll mostly just leave it at those two?