@duke imagine if the middle east looked like this... 👀

@duke we'd be having holey wars rn

@ROYALTY that's just people extrapolating their own meaning from it though, not the creators intending on that being the meaning. It can be important to a story and have a specific meaning, but it can just as easily not. I find that the former is more often true when the story is meant to take place in our world (like Silent Hill), and the latter is more often true when it's a completely fictional world (like Hyrule).

Besides that, Zelda hasn't used real world symbolism very much and hasn't PERIOD since the 90s. They clearly wanted to show that these are separate people from real life people. They're just inspired by them and that's pretty much where the similarities end. Their lore is entirely different, their beliefs are different, their relations with other groups of people are different, etc. You can't just assume that there are crusades going on in Zelda lore solely because two races were inspired by two real life races that were involved in crusades.

@xianc78 the hyrulean civil war itself is something we know basically nothing about, but we do know ganondorf's motivations and they weren't religious.

ganondorf explains it in wind waker. he is like anakin and hates sand so he wanted to expand into hyrule so his people would have better living conditions. he tried taking it by force, which failed the first time around so he deceived everyone by surrendering and waiting for the opportune time to strike when he gained access to the sacred realm.

it wasn't about religion, it was just about ganondorf, as gerudo chief, trying to take hyrule's lands because he wanted them. not because they were of any holy importance to him.

the crusades were mainly because islam wanted to take the holy land from the catholics because they thought that the land was THEIR holy land and not the catholics' holy land. not to mention trying to convert everyone. so the catholics fought back and that went back and forth for fucking ever in several wars. that's barely similar to the story of ganondorf. his is a lot closer to stories of classic conquest. the only similarity is a leader persuading people to join him to take someone's land because they want it... but that's basically war 101.

the gerudo we see in ocarina of time have more or less been manipulated and even brainwashed by ganondorf. that is why there is tension between them, not to mention ganondorf himself being their chief and trying to overthrow hyrule would cause some disdain by hylians for the gerudo, which in turn would make the gerudo mad at the hylians.

a lot of gerudo are just kind of menaces during ocarina of time and majora's mask too, being thieves and pirates and such. but in breath of the wild and four swords adventures they're pretty damn well adjusted.

i still don't think any of it has anything to do with holiness or religion or anything like that. at best, some hylians think they are devil worshipers or something in OoT but they never like, DO anything about it.

@beardalaxy The Hyrule Historia says that the Gerudo Desert became Hyrulean territory after the war. Suggesting that it was either independent or a disputed territory prior to the war. Hylians are the chosen people of Hylia and they probably view the entirety of Hyrule as their sacred land, including the desert. So, it's safe to assume that religion was involved in some capacity.

https://invidious.poast.org/watch?v=ehPjeFb19Fw

@xianc78 the fucking confusing thing about the hyrulean civil war is that ganondorf was somehow able to swear fealty to the king, break his vow, and then swear fealty to him again to end the war.... yet the war somehow lasted "countless eras?" that doesn't make any sense. a long war would likely be considered an era in of itself, as an era is a period of time marking something significant, not something significant marking several periods of time. there was certainly a war that happened, the game itself makes that pretty clear, but i think what was written in the hyrule historia was a little scuffed.

by the time link is 9ish years old, the land has had a "long peace" according to a man in castle town. OoT also never refers to it as a civil war afaik, but as a "fierce war." we only get the idea that it was a civil war from hyrule historia, which seems it can't even keep its presentation of the war to what the game portrays. the goron and zora people seem totally fine with the royal family, with darunia being a sworn brother of the king and the zora being long time allies of the royal family. those two things are really weird juxtaposed to ganondorf swearing fealty twice with a war in between if it's supposed to be a civil war. at best, maybe ganondorf convinced the gorons to help him take over hyrule or something and then darunia became a sworn brother once the war was over.

what i think is most likely is the idea that wind waker hatches, which is that ganondorf coveted hyrule's lands and tried to stir up chaos in order to obtain them.

i know that for the most part, the hyrule historia is pretty bang on the money. there are some inaccuracies though and some things have been changed since it came out, including the timeline itself (actually splitting up one of the heroes in the downfall timeline into two heroes and swapping a game around iirc). it has some translation errors as well, naturally, and the only actual zelda creator to have anything to do with it was eiji aonuma.

well my head hurts now, my main point though was that i just hate it when people try to say that fictional things are real life things instead of just talking about the fictional things as the fictional things they are, because it's unlikely in a lot of cases that the two connect to each other whatsoever beyond superficial shit.