Silly Zelda Timeline, Mark 4.
Someone urged me that the children’s book Molblin’s Magic Spear really needed a place, so I rushed out a new version of my wacky timeline. I’ve put it in the same vicinity as the comic and animated series. As I said previously, Ganon’s design is sourced from the cartoon while other characters seem to crib from the Zelda 2 manual. This results in a disconnect with the appearance of Zelda, who is captured in this story. It did remind me, however, of the continuity quirk in this era: there would logically be two extant Zeldas, owing to the plot of Zelda 2 involving reviving the sleeping princess of a previous generation. So I figured this event involved that older one, whose likeness is seen in this book.
The other important addition to this version is “The Hyrulean Adventure”, which is the result of an officially-sanctioned message board roleplaying event in 1996. Nintendo Power Source on America Online was the online presence affiliated with Nintendo of America’s official magazine Nintendo Power, and in this early Internet age they encouraged their fans to participate in collaborative storytelling periodically, which also gave us the Metroid-themed Blood of the Chozo. The Hyrulean Adventure is less well documented, but was summarised in Issue 89 of Nintendo Power. Now you could argue that it’s glorified fan fiction, but at least the information provided by the admins (most likely employees of the magazine) on the premise and setting, as well as event updates, can be considered semi-official and hence pseudo-canon. Which is good enough for me!
The Nintendo Power coverage is a little confused on whether it’s “A” or “The”, and also on the spelling of Hyrulean/Hyrulian, but I’m going with the caption on what I assume is a map provided by the Source authorities, which is also what I’ve used to represent the event in the timeline; this was published in the Nintendo Power article. It’s also a little difficult to place in the timeline because of my lack of access to the primary source, but supposedly it’s on an island in “an unexplored corner of Hyrule”. I figured it was safe to place it around the time of the most recent console release at the time, Link to the Past. Done and done.
Apart from a couple of small tweaks, that’s it. But there were many, many things that I considered adding to beef up this timeline iteration. WarioWare and NES Remix, for example, but they’re mere excerpts of existing games and have no impact on the continuity. The Howard & Nester comic for Zelda 2 is just a dream, and the two Zelda-related Nester’s Adventures strips are not quite substantial enough. I really wanted to include some other Japanese book or comic to represent all the material that’s produced there (try browsing some of the pages here) but decided that they’re pretty much adaptations despite their additions and expansions so I had to draw the line. Maybe if I get much more ambitious one day I’ll rework the whole thing to involve adaptations. But not today.
Before you screen-print this awesome timeline onto a T-shirt or apron, remember to first check the zelda-timeline tag on this blog, in case there’s an update published after you’re reading this! http://miloscat.tumblr.com/tagged/zelda-timeline
