“When the world turns its back on you, you turn your back on the world.” I was a child the first time I heard those words. A bipedal meerkat spoke them as the camera zoomed in on him and he alternated between gesturing at an imaginary world behind the camera and pointing an instructive finger at the young, depressed lion that was just off screen. As far as scenes go in The Lion King, it’s important for the plot but maybe not the most visually interesting. The sort of thing that would normally slip past a child of five or six, which is how old I was when I first saw it, but one of my younger siblings became obsessed with the movie and we watched over a hundred times before a new movie caught their attention. If you watch something that much, enough that you can still recite the whole movie, front to back, about two and a half decades later, you wind up taking it all in even as a child. Maybe especially as a child. It was an interesting thought to me, back then, as it was the answer that meerkat, Timon, offered in response to the suggestion that there is, in fact, something you can do when bad things beyond your control happen to you. It was a big thought for a child, but it was something I thought about constantly and so it stuck.
I planned my first attempt at running away from home not long after that.
As I attempt to play through The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom again, I’m once again struck by how little of that world’s past still exists in one of the few direct sequels in the Legend of Zelda franchise. Link starts the game with a level of strength that wasn’t attainable no matter deeply you’d played Breath of the Wild, trapped in a beginning sequence that would grow into something approximately the shape of the “beginning plateau” of Breath of the Wild but without the freedom and exploratory encouragement of the original game. Here, you have things (“constructs” and yet another ghost) to explain everything to you. How to cook. How to fight. What counts as a weapon. How to solve almost every problem in front of you. The game holds your hand and guides you forward until it pitches you into the wide open world below, telling you to go wherever you wan, but putting you in a position where going anywhere but the way it wants you to will make it incredibly difficult to succeed. After all, walls don’t need to be literal to be effective. Enemies scattered around every single interesting feature on the horizon that are strong enough to kill Link in one hit can be just as effective at stopping your exploration and far more discouraging.
So you go to town and discover a world full of people! They all have names, jobs, lives, and interesting information about the world. The only thing they seem to lack is… well, information about Link. Despite having an incredibly singular profile, almost no one recognizes Link right away. Many of them need a closer look at him or a reminder that seems to come from Link without him ever speaking and even then most of them don’t know “Link.” Most people of the world know Link as “swordsman,” a descriptor likely applied as he followed Princess Zelda in her travels through the land. Most surprising of all, even the people who recognize Link immediately often refer to him simply as “swordsman” or “the swordsman” like it would cost them something to speak his name.
I find a lot of this unsettling, even before we get into contact with people outside of this little fort that has become the hub of Hyrule as its people seek to rebuild. Link, with some direction from Zelda, saved the world! He, under your control, probably traveled to every single corner of the map, talked to hundreds of people, defeated thousands of enemies, and saved the day! Everyone should know who he is! The people he had to work with in order to accomplish all that should know him and know him well, considering the relationships Breath of the Wild builds between its characters! So many people’s lives were changed as a result of Link’s reappearance in Hyrule and yet Tears of the Kingdom sets up a world where so much of that seems to have happened but no one seems to remember Link’s part in it. Link, who freely messed messed with his gender expression (as perhaps the most gender neutral of all versions of Link, these moments were quite notable if you looked beneath the nearly translucent surface) in order to enter the Gerudo city. Link, who helped save Zora’s Domain from an endless rain that threatened to erode the city to nothing. Link, who helped build a little town on a tall island and fostered a community that eventually culminated in a marriage between its founder and one of its residents in a genuinely touching (if somewhat silly) moment. Link, who helped dozens of people with the problems afflicting their lives, big and small. And now, here, in this world, none of that has happened. Only a few short years have passed and everything Link (and you, by proxy) did has disappeared. The past might as well have never existed for all the good it does you in this supposed sequel.
I was six or seven, the first time I planned to run away. I was so certain at the time: full of ideas about Boxcar Children, The Hardy Boys, practical minutiae from my Cub Scouts meetings, and how my life should not be the way it was. I would not have been able to put that last thought into words or explain it to myself for a few more years, but I knew it even then despite the murky, formless shape it held in my mind. My life should not have been the way it was. Things where happening to me that were beyond my control and that I could do nothing about. Save by turning my back on the world–which, thanks to the context of the Lion King, I knew to mean my past. So I got a handkerchief, grabbed a couple packs of peanut butter and cheese crackers, made myself a sandwich, got a water bottle, and bundled it all off into the spot in the woods where I’d go sometimes to be alone.
I did not have a plan past that point. I’d told my mother that I was going out to play in the woods, a thing that was fairly common for me at the time since there were still kids my age in the neighborhood and we usually met up in the forest preserve behind our houses. The place I went this time, though, was one I’d found all on my own. I could see signs that other people had passed through there and even spent time there, but there was a bush I could hide in that other people couldn’t find me in (or so I assumed) and it seemed as cozy a den as I could need on a warm summer afternoon. I sat in that clearing for hours, nibbling on the first of my crackers and idly watching the forest in peaceful silence, content to simply exist amidst the noise of the forest until, finally, I began to learn the lesson that we saw Simba learn in the Lion King. The past does not stay gone. It took Simba years to learn that but I learned it in hours. No one came to find me, of course. My mother had my two younger siblings to contend with and was already used to me not seeking attention, so she wouldn’t have even noticed until I was late for dinner. Instead, I found that the past is not so easily escaped and the knowledge of what my absence would mean to my mother and younger siblings had me caught fast. I returned home after leaving the sandwich out for a raccoon and I doubt anyone even knew I’d tried to run away. My past, and my present for that matter, would not be so easily left behind.
The thing I remember most clearly, above every other detail, about my first playthrough of Tears of the Kingdom is how often no one remembers Link. It stands out even more in my second and third attempts at playing through this game, but I remember the feelings of disappointment and sadness every time I came upon a part of the world I’d known and loved in Breath of the Wild that bore no trace of my passage. Tiny children I could remember running around in circles as they spoke about strange lights or monsters or the canyons around their home were now young teenagers or, in some cases young adults, who didn’t remember the hero who had frequently passed by years before. The rulers and the powerful who had befriend Link as I had helped them solve the problems of their people with no need for a reward, now noticing his presence with only passing recognition. Characters who had flirted with Link or who had been saved in more ways than one now looked up at Link with mostly disinterest or unfamiliarity. Time had passed, the world had grown, and nothing Link had done years prior mattered to them. Even the war that he’d fought and nearly died in before returning after 100 years… Almost all traces of that were gone aside from the clear preparations for building something new where the ruins of old had once stood.
It is difficult to say that Link was forgotten. The game never draws a clear line between what parts of Breath of the Wild did or didn’t happen. So much that I remember is just absent with no reference and so much more seems to have been doable but ignored as the Link of Tears of the Kingdom took a path through Breath of the Wild that I still can’t plot out in any way that makes sense. Did he never do all the things I remember? Did he do them and people just forgot, distracted as they were by the labor of survival and the subsequent upheaval of sudden peace? The game refuses to comment and I, for the life of me, can’t decide which I believe. It is almost as if the game was written in a way to refute any of my attempts to establish a canon between games. Like it wants to displace this direct sequel from the timeline in a way that would allow it to cut off all traces of the past so that they didn’t matter. Any yet, if that was the case, why cling so tightly to the world and look of Breath of Wild? Why place it in such similar context when it seems to want nothing more than to entirely remove itself from whatever past you might have created when playing through the grandest game of the Zelda franchise?
There is a sense in the game, as you learn about a distant past that appears to have sprung into being as a result of Link and Zelda’s actions in the prologue, that whatever came before doesn’t matter. Whatever the world looked like before Link and Zelda explored this strange chasm beneath Hyrule Castle is irrelevant. By delving those depths and inserting Zelda into the past through a mysterious surge of power that doesn’t make sense when you consider the timeline and power rules the game later develops, you have forever changed the present in a way that invalidates the past you might have built in Tears of the Kingdom. These strange shrines and objects in the sky? They were always there, in some way or another. The fathomless depths? Just waiting for the shifting of the earth required to reveal them. The patterns created by the tears of a dragon? Always there and always mysteriously unknowable. Even that fourth dragon, the one flying conspicuously around the sky at the start of the game that is more detailed and differently monstrous that the three you might be familiar with from Breath of the wild, was always there. Your past is gone, though, and all you have left is this strange and echoing present that feels close enough to what you knew that it makes you miss that world, but never so close that you can get comfortable in this new one.
The second time I ran away from home, I think I was seven. It went about the same as the first one, albeit with more crackers, two bottles of water, and a couple sandwiches, all packed in a backpack–that I no longer needed now that I was home schooled–with a blanket for me to sleep under. I didn’t declare my departure this time and this time, hours later, I was brought home by my father who had gone into the woods to find me when I didn’t show up for dinner or respond to my mother’s calls. I heard him coming and saw him from a long way off since the foliage had begun to turn and fall, so I pretended to be asleep. I’d already unpacked the blanket and I new that its bright colors would give me away once my father had found my little clearing, so I put to use a skill I’d developed to avoid the danger of afternoon naps (my brother liked to sneak up on my while I was asleep) and feigned sleep until he shook me awake. I was not punished, at least not for that. I, who had already eaten one of my sandwiches for my dinner in the forest, was punished with sitting at the dinner table until I’d eaten enough of my dinner. I never went back to that clearing in the forest again.
The third time I ran away, I was eight and told my mother what I was doing since I could not stand to be there any more and needed to leave. I was brought back by my father who I had the misfortune of passing right as he returned home since I’d decided to walk through the neighborhood this time. I was chastised but not punished. My mother and father never brought it up again.
I stopped running away after that attempt. I never stopped thinking about it, though. I just had nowhere to go. By the time I was nine, all of my friends had moved away from the neighborhood and all the ones I’d made since then lived an unimaginable distance away, so far away that to my child’s thoughts, they might as well have been in different countries despite the fact that we’d meet up monthly as a home schooling group for a facsimile of “normal” education while the core parents in the group tried to turn it into religious indoctrination. I had no one who wouldn’t report me to my parents. Who hadn’t shown their loyalties lay to the illusion of perfection and happiness my parents prized above me and my well-being. As the years passed and the thought never left, deeper concerns emerged. From ten to thirteen, I never had enough money for more than a single McDonalds meal, a thing I knew meant there was no way I could survive on my own. From thirteen to fifteen, I did not imagine there could ever be an escape and that maybe this was just my lot in life, to suffer so that others could be happy. At sixteen, I accepted that this was my life. At seventeen, I made peace. At eighteen, I was already two weeks into college and eight months away from my parents essentially kicking me out of their house in the most indirect way possible: they vocally assumed I wouldn’t return.
It was at that point, at the age of eighteen, as I scrambled to find a job to pay my rent for staying the summer at my college, that I realized the decade-old dream of finally turning my back on my past. I stopped calling or texting my parents, a thing that went from a temporary testing of the waters to a permanent silence when I realized they didn’t care because they’d gotten rid of the landline, the number I always called when I felt obligated to talk to them, without telling me. All the friends from my time in high school couldn’t come visit me and I couldn’t afford to visit them, so I drifted apart from them as they returned every summer to reunite and reconnect while I worked. I stopped thinking of the house I grew up in as home, started cutting ties to what my relatives called my “obligations to the family,” and began to forget as much of my past as I could. Finally, I’d put my past behind me and turned my back on it. I could live in peace. I could escape it. This time, I managed to keep that idea going for a little over three years.
Playing through Tears of the Kingdom requires you to put your past behind you, both as the person playing the game and as a narrative element within the game. It requires you to set aside everything you’d done in the direct prequel, in Breath of the Wild, so that it can create a world apart from the one you’re oh-so-familiar with. It requires the world to exist in a state of conflict and disconnect that seems to fly in the very face of the unification it seems to hint at having been present not long ago, when Zelda still traveled through Hyrule to help rebuild it from a war Tears of the Kingdom never pauses to mention, and that we knew existed as the world came together around Link to deliver a decisive blow against Calamity Ganon. Whatever past existed before the game begins to reveal it to you is gone and instead you have the bits and pieces of a timeless, disconnected past that have somehow unearthed themselves in the present. You, the player, are asked to ignore how so much stuff could now occupy a world you thoroughly explored in a previous game. The world and people of Tears of the Kingdom is asked to ignore everything they’d learned from surviving years of rampant conflict and danger now that the danger seems to suddenly be more intelligent, more dangerous, and more organized. There is only the present and the shards of an unknowably distant past that are, nevertheless, inserting themselves into the present. You are both required to forget the past and entirely bound to it.
What, then, are you supposed to do as every part of the world you thought you’d be able to rely on is swept out from underneath you? Some of the things you learned about how to get around are still reliable, but the whole feel of the world has changed such that you can’t help but wonder if maybe being less engaged would be better. Running turns to riding turns to driving vehicles and then eventually flying. You leave the world behind as you forge ahead, everything reduced from wonder and exploration to simple checklists and accumulation. Without your past, after all, you’re unmoored. What can any present be without a past to inform it? And what meaning does the present have when the only past that matters is so incredibly distant that it is almost entirely unrecognizable? It might as well be from an entirely different world, for that matter. How can you anchor and ground yourself in the present when the only thing left other than the endless here-and-now is a potential future that is not only undefined but so yawning as to be without meaning? You and Link have not turned your back on your past so much as the past has turned its back on you and even the future, there only to indicate that Link must fight to stop Ganondorf even after you’ve been told there’s no hope of finding Zelda, doesn’t have the space within it for you to imagine yourself there. So you wander the present, stumbling over shards of the past as they erupt into your day-to-day life of fighting for an undefined and unattainable future that you know is your only reason for fighting at all.
My past reemerged into my life in the final days of my summer job in 2013. A bit of play anger in response to a playful insult turned into a surge of panic I couldn’t contain and an emotional breakdown that worried my bosses. I’d been avoiding a thought for too long: I had to find a full-time job or else I’d be moving back into my parents’ house. To this day, I don’t know if anyone knew just how intense my panic was that day, that it broke through all of my careful defenses and splashed out into the world for other people to see, but my boss at the time assured me that the potential for a job that we’d talked about was just a day or two from becoming a reality. I was able to recover and move on. It reemerged a few months later when, realizing I needed help and had no one to call on, I asked my father to help me move from where I was living until that single-semester job ended to the city I live in now so I could start a new job that I thought held the answers to all of my problems. It surfaced again, two years later, when I hit a point in my therapy where the fragments of my buried past could be ignored no longer. It emerged with such strength and ferocity that it nearly killed me. It was a dark summer, the months before I turned twenty-five, and I almost did not survive it.
Between uncovering these horrible fragments of my past, that brought to light every little lie I’d told myself in order to survive what I’d been through–that shook the foundations of the person I’d built myself to be in order to survive and brought my self-image crashing down around my ears–and finding myself suddenly in a job that wouldn’t fire me but that would make my life as miserable as possible in hopes that I would quit, I almost entirely gave up. It was the closest I’d ever come because I knew I couldn’t live with my parents any more and that the things I’d been telling myself about the potential of my future weren’t so clear-cut and certain as I liked to believe they were. The walls of hope I’d built up around myself, my entire past abandoned as I pursued a future I’d convinced myself was only ever a few more steps away, came crashing down and it was all I could do to survive the cataclysm. I had to relearn what it meant to live in the present–in MY present–and who I wanted to be as I worked my way toward whatever uncertain future awaited me. This time around, I didn’t turn my back on my past, but I still left it behind me, where I’d kept it all these years.
The final time my past came back for me was when my mother called me on a Thursday to tell me that my grandfather’s cancer was worse than everyone had thought and that he only had a few months left. Almost four exactly, it would turn out, longer than everyone thought but never long enough. This time, though, I turned to face my past. After all, it had come calling. I’d ignored it for so long that I wasn’t ready for this. I wasn’t prepared. So I dove in to what preparations I could make, as I alternated between trying to examine my tumult of feelings and driving to my parents’ house in order to help my mother deal with my grandfather’s end-of-life care. Facing down my past, I moved through rooms that held nothing but dark memories and echoes of pains that I could still feel in my bones and discovered in my mother a faint echo of myself. Both of us second children. Both of the one that our siblings relied on. Both of us well-behaved, focused, driven, and everything our parents wanted us to be rather than a person in our own right. Both of us seemingly locked into futures that were giant, yawning, and entirely without definition other than what we found as we stumbled through them.
Eventually, my grandfather passed away. The funeral was lovely. The service after it was as well. The entire family gathered to say farewell. Cousins, various steps removed and various numerical orders from me, I hadn’t seen in ages. Great-Relatives of all kinds. A sober luncheon as I marveled at a word that had largely disappeared from common usage outside of this one circumstance. A wake that reminded me of every awful thing that had ever happened in my life as the one person I’d been able to count on was shown to look, in his youth, uncannily like the older brother who had tortured me. I left the luncheon early, suit coat in hand as I fished it out of the unstaffed coat check well before they expected anyone to leave, and drove away, never to return as a part of a family whose mourning had run parallel to mine. I’d known going there that this was a goodbye to all of them, not just the family member we’d lost. It would take a while for me to decide that it would be permanent and that it would be all-inclusive, but I think I knew even then that I was saying goodbye one final time. This time, as I turned my back on my past, I meant it to stick.
Tears of the Kingdom held no solace for me. There was no resolution. No consolation. No eucatastrophe. Even those dark, horrible shards of the past that inserted themselves in the present–Zelda turned into a dragon, ruins falling from the sky, the youth of today shackled to the responsibilities their ancestors failed to fulfill–are undone by the time the game concludes. Whatever the past meant as you played, now it means nothing. There is no past, only the present. Whatever you thought of the world, whatever you labored to bring into it in Breath of the Wild, whatever you altered even as you played through the endless present of Tears of the Kingdom is cast aside as Link and Zelda reunite triumphantly. If you played well, chasing down every main quest, collecting every important item, and largely relieving the world of its ills, you see a cutscene that amounts to Zelda trying to cling to the bits of the past she lived through as they fade from the present and Link, the only person in this group no longer imbued with magical power now that the piece of the past that he literally carried on his arm has disappeared, stands silent and unemotive. All that remains now is the present and that undefined future every major NPC–many of whom seem untouched by the past you shared with them and Link–pledge themselves to help create as the game finally comes to an end without ever once telling you what you’re fighting for.
It was sobering to realize how deeply this game wanted to turn its back on its own past. Or on your past, given that it refuses to bring forward anything you might have accomplished in Breath of the Wild. It refuses to even take the lessons the game’s creators must have learned from the success of Breath of the Wild. Tears of the Kingdom constrains and explains when Breath of the Wild invited you to explore and left you to interpret what you saw. It feels like something created in a vacuum. In isolation and without any traces of the roots that are integral to its very existence.
I first played the game in a year that was perhaps one of the most overwhelming in my life. I started the year out by agreeing to expose myself to my past, all while changing therapists and uncertain that I’d get to see the therapist who had helped me figure out what I wanted out of my family relationships and what goals my parents had to meet in order for me to let them back into my life. An exposure that proved fruitful only in that it assuaged whatever anxieties I still had about my decision to remove my parents from my life as they quickly and clearly failed every chance they had to prove they were capable of growth. Not long after that, I had to remove old friends from my life for my own well-being as the they showed their preference for nostalgia over supporting the person I’d always been but only recently been willing to expose to the people around me. A friend of nearly a decade stopped speaking to me. Two of my friends got married. I started working on a project at work that has consumed my life for fourteen months now, that I can’t talk about in any degree of specificity due to the nature of the work I do. My past came back to hurt me and then vanished so many times that I lost count. My present was stirred into chaos so often that my mantra for the year was that it was “the most” out of any year I’d been alive. At no other point in my life has so much happened to me.
It was startling to play through a game that seemed as intent as I had once been to turn its back on its own past. I’d only just recently come to accept that there was no escaping my past, only making peace with it. It was difficult for me to rationalize and immerse myself within a world that felt as opposed to its own history as I had once been, given that there was no trauma there. There was no deeply-buried pain waiting for a chance to lance out and stab it, like often seemed to be true of my own forays into my past. There was every reason to pull on it’s past, even, given how much of that past was about joy and recovery and connection and being your truest self in a world that had somehow continued on after it had ended. I knew that past almost as well as I knew my own and it hurt to see something I wished I’d had–a collection of happy memories I could nostalgically revisit–be so thoroughly rejected for reasons I still can’t fathom. What harm would there have been in assuming that everyone had played through every inch of Breath of the Wild? It seems like a much better alternative than what we got, which was the assumption that no one had. To be struggling with my own past and chaotic present meant that I could not bring myself to struggle with the pastless, never-ending present of Tears of the Kingdom. It took me months to finally complete the game and every attempt to replay it since then has eventually come to an end as I find myself unable to settle in to it the way I do with other large, open-ended games like that. Instead, I fret and worry at it like picking a scab and eventually set it aside, hoping that it’ll have fully healed by the time I return to it again.
It never has. A game can’t be forced to contend with its own past. Whatever chance it might have had at one point has been squandered. There was never going to be any DLC for this game, no way to alter it after it was finally released, and so it eternally stands with its back stubbornly turned on its own past and its eyes staring into a vacant, empty future full of insubstantial hope for nothing in particular. There will be no growth for this game, no acceptance or even acknowledgement. Just an endless opportunity to experience what it might be like to fully sever my past and return to a time when all I had was hope that tomorrow would be undefinably better. I might still struggle these days, as accepting my past means occasionally turning to face it and the circumstances of my life make it difficult to imagine a brighter future, but at least I can work to make today better, every time it comes around.