The Zelda timeline explained (possibly)

I've been sitting around, clearly with too much time on my hands and reading too much Legend of Zelda info, and it suddenly occurred to me how the Zelda timeline might possibly make sense in-universe. I sent a big long text-message essay to my sister about it, and she thought it made sense too, so I thought I might as well write it up.

Now, this isn't really anything mind-blowing. I'm not going to speculate on the meaning of some obscure half-hidden graphic asset, or invoke the hypothetical missing fourth piece of the Triforce, or put together a Tolkien-esque three-volume history of Hyrule that I'll insist is way better than anything Eiji Aonuma can come up with. I'm just going to apply some real-world historical analysis principles and invite the reader to reexamine the entire idea of the timeline from a different angle. If you disagree with my stance, that's totally okay. I'm just putting some thoughts out there.

Read on after the jump (spoilers ahead)!

More work from my character design class in college, including practicing aging characters, making up our own superhero, an alien rock star, and an agricultural faun.

 Also, more fleshed-out character designs for that Western cast project I mentioned in my last post.

Honestly that project got on my nerves in more ways than one, because aside from the cliché characters, the story pitch specified that it took place in South Dakota in the 1840's, and South Dakota did not become a state until 1889 (to say nothing of the fact that it did not start to be extensively settled until the latter half of the 19th century). The characters definitely gave off more of the vibe of a stereotypical turn-of-the-century Western setting than early frontier America, so that threw me off a bit.

To add to my OCD, when we did a class roundtable discussing everyone's designs for the young female lead (upper left of the image), the teacher commented that the ringlets on my character's design made her look juvenile. This irked me because I had actually spent time researching 1840's women's fashion and yes, women of every age wore their hair like this back then. I was just trying to stay true to the specified historical period. And yet the teacher didn't have any critical comments when some of my classmates showed designs that looked like modern cowgirls. Am I the only stickler for historical accuracy around here?! Five minutes of research. That's all I'm asking of people. Five minutes of research would have told you that South Dakota as such did not exist in the 1840's.

I'll... I'll just be over here in my fussbudget corner.

A smattering of miscellaneous classwork from my character design class in college.

 Most of these are just extremely random character designs based on directions from the teacher, but that is Saturos at the top! I'm so glad I finally found a storyline to put him in years later. Yes, he does use those energy blades at one point in the novel. He doesn't often have opportunities to use his combat skills (and he prefers it that way), but when push comes to shove he can unleash some serious fury and is capable of single-handedly taking down skyscraper-sized elementals.

Down at the bottom is a cast lineup from a hypothetical story pitch we worked on for part of the semester about characters in an old Western town. The lineup was supposed to be about practicing utilizing different character shapes to create a visually varied cast, and also using visual cues to inform the audience of the personality and role of each character. For example, the villainous sheriff is drawn with sharp angles to suggest a sinister edge, while his brawny deputy is built with square shapes to depict physical solidarity. The token girl's rounded features give her an air of friendliness and innocence, while the beanpole unlikely hero is basically made of spaghetti to emphasize his total lack of physical might, which he presumably makes up for by having plenty of heart or something like that. (Honestly my favorite character to design was the female lead's dog.)

Video game ramblings: prices, princesses, and the casual/hardcore divide

 No, there's no typo in the title. Today I want to discuss a sustainable video game industry, appeasing two very different subtypes of gamer, and my thoughts on Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.

Read on after the jump!

 Here's my midterm project from one of my animation classes. I believe the assignment was to animate a character entering the frame, interacting with a box and then jumping away. It absolutely did not have to be in color or include backgrounds. #overachiever #everyclassneedsaHermioneGranger

I animated this in Flash*, but converted it to a GIF for easy viewing. Once again featuring Toko and a generically gritty cyberpunk environment.

*This isn't to say I employed Flash**-style animation and used tools like tweening, rigging, and shape drawing. I did that stuff in my Flash class. Everything here is hand-drawn frame-by-frame. I just executed this in Flash because that was the animation software I had on my computer at the time, and it had some helpful features that made frame-by-frame animation much easier, like onion skinning and the ability to easily manipulate objects on the frame (which I used for the motion of the box at the end, because who wants to hand-draw twenty frames of a rectangle wobbling back and forth).

**Yes, I said Flash. I'm old.

I'll be totally honest, at the risk of sounding self-important, I disliked days when the teacher showed everyone's completed assignments to the whole class for commentary and critique, because I felt really self-conscious about turning out pretty polished stuff like this when some of my classmates could barely draw. I wasn't out to make anyone feel inferior--I was just determined to do my absolute best and earn that A. I tried hard to be charitable in my assessments of their work and find something nice to say about each of them. I often felt like there was some tension between my classmates and I when they made noises like they felt I was purposely trying to upstage them, which I wasn't. 

I guess the takeaway from this is that college is a lose-lose situation socially.

 A project from my storyboarding class; my memory of those long-ago days is fuzzy, but I think we were just supposed to storyboard a humorous action scene with no further requirements.

Cats are the best weapons. Especially the ones who decide to wake you up at 5 in the morning by sitting right next to you and meowing incessantly until you get them breakfast. Not naming any names.

Project from my character design class back in college.

For a portion of the course, we focused on designing a cast of characters for a hypothetical TV show. Students were individually given the option to either develop their own original cast and story pitch, or work from a premade concept that the teacher came up with. 

At that point I was not feeling particularly confident in my own story ideas*, so I opted for the latter. The plot revolved around a suburban American kid and his Leave-It-to-Beaver family who get mixed up with the owner of a shop that sells monsters. It wasn't really the sort of thing that appealed to me, but I soldiered through because 90% of working in the animation industry is just doing the job that's handed to you regardless of how much you personally like the project, because money.**

Probably because of this, most of my design work for the project turned out pretty lackluster, but I did enjoy designing the old monster shop owner. Sketchy, eccentric, grotesque old men with mismatched argyle socks are fun to draw.

*Honestly I think this lack of confidence was somewhat justified, as up to that point I had no training in story development and my story ideas were half-baked at best. For example, the story involving Toko that I mentioned a few posts ago had all the sophistication of a really forgettable manga, and the plot outline was essentially "the good guys defeat the bad guys, and then justice or something". It wasn't until I started taking my writing seriously after college that I started to really learn how stories work and what makes them work well. I guess the entire point of this rambly footnote is that I promise I'm better at writing now.

**Frankly, this was a large part of the reason why, after college, I opted to go freelance (and started to focus on novel writing) instead of trying to fit myself into the industry; I just couldn't bring myself to care more about money than about artistic integrity, and I was also very tired of being forced to work on other people's ideas that I didn't particularly care for, and work and associate with groups of people not of my choosing. I may not be making tons of money with my writing, but I'm definitely way less stressed.