I’m confused on the story in Totk. I know totk is after BotW, but I’m curious about the other events in the game. The game talks about a war, which is the imprisoning war. This would put it squarely in the “hero is defeated” timeline before the events of a link to the past.
“7 sages seal away Ganon in the imprisoning war”
What is confusing me however is that Rauru is claimed to be the first king of Hyrule. Hyrule however was founded well before the imprisoning war. It was actually founded shortly after the bandaging of the twili and sealing of the sacred realm. Now, in the timeline it states that sage Rauru seals the sacred realm to protect the tri-force. But that isn’t the imprisoning war, nor do I think it’s the same Rauru. But it also states that Skyward Sword Zelda’s descendants founded Hyrule shortly after the sealing of the sacred realm. Skyward Sword Zelda wasn’t a Zonai though.
Does anyone understand the timeline enough to explain what I am missing? It just feels like Rauru is too many people
It’s mildly infuriating how much BotW referenced back to previous games and fit itself into the existing timeline map, and TotK simply… ignores all of that.
For what it’s worth, in my head, I just consider this Hyrule, founded by Rauru, as a whole different kingdom from those that came before. If we get reincarnations of Link and Zelda and Ganondorf, why not the whole kingdom? That just puts BotW and TotK super far forward in time, so far that whatever preivous Hyrule(s) we’ve known are dead and gone.
BotW didn’t fit in any one timeline. It had components from all the timelines. However, they said it occurred at the end of all 3 timelines. So my headcannon was that there was a large merging event that combined the timelines back to 1. And I expected it to be a “reset” where games would only reference the story from that point forward to kind of “clean up” the past lore without dealing with it. That clearly didn’t happen since TotK was all about history