So, a little less than a month year ago (this is all my fault, I take sole responsibility for this loooong delay), I got roped into reading The Trials Of Apollo by @flightfoot’s amazing meta. I loved it more than I could have ever anticipated, and I’ve been gushing about it non stop to her on discord. We had a lot of fun reviewing the series and taking it apart to overanalyze bit by bit, marveling at the way it keeps growing layers and dimensions the longer one looks at it. Finally, we took out a google doc. The following is result n.3 of our combined excited ramblings, and… well it sort of turned into a full on dissertation. Whoops.
It’s like…both Hylia and Rauru run into the Robot Problem, where they create/cultivate servants who end up achieving sentience (the Robots in SkSw and the Constructs in TotK) or were already sentient to begin with but were supposed to fit into this grand design to restore the order they’d created (the Sheikah, their respective Links and Zeldas). And it gets a little uncomfortable because both characters are so focused on imposing their respective ideas of order that they…don’t quite see their charges as people?
Hylia at least had the excuse that she was a primordial goddess of Light and Time and therefore had no frame of reference to emotionally connect with the mortals she was charged to protect. Her actions were ruthlessly pragmatic, but it made sense for a god totally alienated from humanity to think like that.
Meanwhile, Rauru has this sort of…naïve carelessness? He descended to earth, took the people living there as his subjects, and even fell in love with and married a mortal woman, but he never seemed to understand that his actions could have unintended and far-reaching effects on the people around him.
When confronted with how the Constructs continued to obey their orders instead of leaving to do other things, he couldn’t really muster up more than a sheepish, “Oops, my bad.” Granted, he was a ghost invisible to everyone but Link at the time, but, still, he never considered including a contingency plan in their programming to preserve themselves and do other things with their lives in the event of his own death.
And then there was him and Sonia positioning themselves as Zelda’s surrogate parents after she lost her original parents in traumatic circumstances related to the Sealing War’s aftereffects. Zelda, having to step up as Sonia’s replacement as his advisor and sole confidant to make sure he kept a level head after the queen died. Not stopping Mineru when she started talking about draconification because he was convinced it’d never come to that. Zelda effectively being primed to accept sacrificing herself a second time to preserve the order Rauru created whether he wanted that or not. And then him taking Link’s arm and replacing it without his permission while he was unconscious, because the Ultrahand is such a useful tool, why wouldn’t he be fine with a little limb graft?
Then there was the whole thing with Ganondorf. Just this catastrophic underestimation of human agency, intelligence, and capacity for cruelty. Zelda herself warned him about Ganon being more dangerous than he seemed, but Rauru waved her off (inadvertently recreating yet another Calamity-related trauma of Zelda’s). Ganondorf might be causing trouble, but in the end he was just like those other funny little mortals Rauru watched over. How could he possibly be able to understand something as divine and complicated as a Secret Stone? Only Sonia could do that, but Sonia was Special because she was so smart and wonderful and he loved her very much, so that didn’t count! Furthermore, how could he possibly come up with a plan that could blindside him and the queen? That would be silly!
(Also, note how he didn’t give any non-Sonia mortals stones until after Ganon proved any one of those funny little guys could master using one without any instruction from Rauru, lmao)
And then the circumstances of Rauru’s own death, and the consequences that had for everyone around him well after he’d faded to myth. Rauru assumed the “consequences” Ganondorf threatened him with were limited to giving up his own life, when what actually happened was that the people of Hyrule were left to deal with Ganon punishing them for Rauru’s hubris, poisoning the land again and again in rage at his imprisonment, while the people themselves had to figure out on their own how to beat back each wave of his bilious rage with no record or understanding of its source. Zelda being left with no guidance for how to return home, forced to make a drastic decision. Mineru, still alive, but unable to intervene was she was just a soul without a body.
Like…I don’t think he’s evil, much less malicious, but the way the story panned out reminded me a lot of the way Rose Quartz kept accidentally hurting the people who loved her because it didn’t come naturally to her to think of other people as equals, or to consider how her actions made them feel. She loved Pearl, but she didn’t acknowledge Pearl’s baggage from their former relationship as master and servant because she’d assumed they’d moved past that simply by never speaking of it anymore. She loved Greg, but she initially didn’t treat him like a real person. She tried as hard as she could to relate to others and understand them, but in the end she committed one last tragic act of thoughtlessness. She thought would be creating this special, wonderful person free of her flaws who would make the world so much better solely by existing and being himself (at least in part, I think, because she hated herself and thought everyone would be happier without her burdening them with her guilt and her selfish desire to run from her past)…only to leave everyone grappling with the emotional fallout of her no longer existing, including her son, who was stuck dealing with the legacy she’d left behind even though that was never her intention.
She didn’t actively try to sabotage her son’s life from beyond the grave. She didn’t think that the things she’d done would catch up to him, that her old family and enemies would treat him like an interchangeable replacement for her, or that her friends would treat him in strange ways out of grief at losing her. It just…never occurred to her.
But the thing is, I’m not sure if Rauru was intentionally written that way. If he was, the narrative wasn’t really interested in dwelling on the consequences of that, instead treating him and Sonia more like figureheads of this lost, idyllic past that the present must grieve and then strive to follow the example of, even if the present was suffering due to paying the debts of their ancestors’ carelessness.
