Squid Reviews: CotT Prologue

Hey. I'm MSTing Ryuu's fanfic, Child of the Triforce, over on my WordPress, so I decided to do a proper review of it at the same time.

I already have to read it multiple times so I figure I may as well get as much material out of it as I can.

When I say this is going to be a “proper review”, by the way, I mean I'm only going to offer criticism. Being a smartass is going to go on the backburner for a bit. Well, as much as humanly possible. It's not intentional if some slips out. For me, that's a self-defense mechanism, and if it happens I'm sorry.

Right, first up is the Prologue. You can find the whole thing over here. And for some more shameless self promotion, you can find my MST here if you want to watch me be less reasonable and much more of a jerk.

The title alone reeks of special snowflake/Sue syndrome, actually. So this isn't a good start. But the plot...

The abridged version is that this chapter is a retelling of Ocarina of Time from Princess Zelda's perspective. This is completely unnecessary. If you're looking for Ocarina of Time fanfiction you've probably completed the game or are at least familiar with the story. I would strongly suggest deleting this entire chapter, as it adds nothing to the story beyond saying “it's five years later”, and there's better ways to do that.

Right off the bat, Ryuu writes:

“Narrator: Princess Zelda”

It's really NOT necessary to do that, because your readers probably aren't stupid enough to not pick up on that. Believe it or not, most people actually don't like someone holding their hand through a story. Very nearly everyone I know prefers to use their imaginations.

And it's extra pointless to say Zelda's narrating when you write:

“All this trouble caused by a desire to keep disaster from happening. I am ashamed to admit that the young girl was me, Princess Zelda.”

Normally, people would pick up on this the first time someone uses the character's name, if not earlier, but you went one step further. There's absolutely no need for the “Narrator:” thing.

The content of the story itself... We make it two sentences in before there's an error in the face of canon:

“A hero from the forest, assisted by a white fairy, [...]”

As I think everyone who's played Ocarina of Time knows, Navi's blue. I have no idea where white came from, but I can assure you she's blue.

Call me crazy, but I don't think that's white.

A large error this early on is careless and makes your entire fanfic look sloppy, which doesn't really encourage people to read further. It doesn't take a lot of research, as you can clearly see from the art and from her in-game sprites that Navi is very much blue.

Moving on, everything's written in very stilted language and while your mileage may vary here, I feel the pace is really bogged down by it. I'm less than one paragraph in and it's already dragging a bit.
And then this happens:

“In this dream, she had seen the boy Link and she felt the dark clouds in her dream resembled a dark-looking man she was spying at.”

When someone has a history of making racist remarks, this is really not a good choice of wording. Actually, it isn't a real great choice of wording at all. But it's especially unnerving in this case, as I believe most of us are aware the author's made several racist and xenophobic remarks. And Ryuu refers to Ganondorf as a dark man several times.

Ryuu, I'm begging you: please, please, please change that. It makes me extremely uncomfortable with your history, and I'm not a Woman of Color by any stretch of the imagination.

After that unnerving set of comments, it's pretty slow going, really. Some of these sentences, for example:

“She threw to him a musical instrument, an Ocarina, as she had ridden away on the horse her attendant was carrying her with."

Are really hard to read. This, by the way, can be interpreted as Impa carrying Zelda along with a horse. Poor wording choice, that. (And someone totally needs to draw that, but I digress.)

And then there's:

“Using me as bait, he caused Link to travel through even more torture just to come to my aid.”

Traveling through torture is a horrible, awkward word choice. Torture is not a place, you cannot travel through it. A better word choice would be “Link traveled through more hardship to come to my aid”. I would strongly suggest Ryuu check both a thesaurus and a dictionary and try to see if he can find the word he's going to use used in a sentence.

So after we slog through everything everyone already knows, we reach the present-day:

“At last, the war was finally over. We could rest at last. But, I could not help but express the guilt in my heart for such things that had happened. I wanted to give back to Link what he had lost: Seven crucial years of his life. With the Ocarina I had given him those years ago, I played for him a song that would return him to the past so that he could live his life as I believed it was to be.

But for whatever reason, the kingdom that had suffered so much still stands as all before had still taken place.”

What... Actually happened here? I'm still not sure. But based on later chapters, I THINK she somehow managed to send Link back in time but the rest of the kingdom stayed in the present.

This is a painfully obvious plot device that exists just so Ryo can come in and save everything. This NEEDS to be removed, as this reeks of Mary Sue. I have no objection to canon/fancharacter pairings in and of themselves, believe it or not, but I do have an issue with canon/fancharacter pairings that completely remove a RATHER MAJOR PLOT ELEMENT, IN THIS CASE LINK, FOR THEM TO COME TO FRUITION. If you look at this in a rather sinister way, you can interpret this as "Ryuu is threatened by the fact that his girlfriend supports ZeLink", incidentally.

I'm also confused by the fact that Princess Zelda has experienced the seven year time jump as an adult AND an additional five years but has nothing to add to the story except “I felt guilty”. What was she doing before she became Sheik? Where was she? There's absolutely nothing new there, so why even bother writing this up?

My final thoughts...

THINGS I'D LIKE TO SEE ADDED OR EDITED: Nothing. No, really, nothing.

THINGS I'D LIKE TO SEE REMOVED: This whole chapter. It serves no purpose, and assuming your readers have forgotten enough to retell the entire story is just insane. It's a drawn out chapter that could be be reduced to a paragraph or less in chapter one explaining that Hyrule's spent the past five years healing.

Also, Link doesn't NEED to be gone. Still, I'm fairly sure the Ocarina of Time doesn't work that way in Hyrule (Termina's a parallel universe and so I'm not counting that here.) Find a more plausible solution if you absolutely have to remove Link from the picture, though I still can't see a need.

OVERALL OPINION: There's literally nothing worth saving in this chapter. Writing can be hit and miss and this chapter is definitely a miss. The chapter is stilted, drawn-out and a rehash of everything your readers know. There's not even enough new content here to get a decent-length review.