Author's Notes
Well everyone, I've finally completed a long and epic struggle to get one single Legend of Zelda fanfic complete, in the midst of a hailstorm of back luck ranging from job losses to lack of job availabilities, and other such things that can seriously sap the leisure time out of one's life.
As such, I'm glad that 'Light & Shadow Collide: Union of the Blades' is finally over – the story has been little short of a labour (literally) of love for me and I'm overjoyed with the positive feedback the tale received. While I know it's ostentatious and kinda sad to post a chapter comprising entirely of author's notes and comments upon the story, I simply feel that that I'd like to have some of the things that inspired me to write this tale down on the page for all to see, and perhaps to understand the story a little better.
Anyone disappointed by the lack of fiction material or a little irritated by my choosing to post a 'chapter' like this, you are most welcome to turn away now, I shan't be offended haha, and my apologies to you all! For the rest of you good people, onwards to business...
When I began the story, I initially intended it to be fairly simplistic, and at least 10,000 words shorter than it ultimately ended up being. The conflict between Dark Link and Link in the sub-boss battle arena has fascinated me ever since I first played 'Ocarina...' at the tender age of 10, more so for the setting of the battle than anything else. The bizarre, somewhat unreal location was extraordinarily evocative and unique amidst the themed stylings of the dungeons, and has stuck in my imagination ever since.
When I considered what I wanted to connote with the story, the idea that struck me hardest of all was the theme of the EFFECT of war, not war itself. For purposes of realism I was making the world around Link ten times larger than it's depicted in the game (with his journeys taking days upon days to complete), and I began to think – what would a person on such a quest really be thinking about the goal that has been handed down to them from those above him? How would it affect him physically, mentally, emotionally? More importantly, I reasoned, was the next question – how would someone constantly engaged, with such ingrained focus and dedication to killing in close-quarter sword combat, be truly affected by the blood they had split, even if it was not innocent? How would it affect (or more accurately damage) their psyche?
After this point came up I was instantly attracted to the notion of Dark Link being a literal reflection to Link in every way, but that he was not an inverse creature so to speak – he was not a creature who inverted Link's inherent goodness into darkness and pitted the two against each other, as the game seems to suggest. If the Link of this story was to be a broken, battle-scarred man with all sorts of heavy emotional baggage and dark secrets accumulated from his endless embroilment in war, then Dark Link couldn't work as a inversion, as Link was not pure enough.
The idea of a hero being a person of outward goodness but full of sinister flaws has always fascinated me, and it allowed me to take a new direction with Dark Link – if Link himself was essentially a good man with flaws, wouldn't Dark Link become more interesting if Dark Link amplified these flaws? In this way I had an interpretation of Dark Link that's hardly new but still workable – it isn't good and evil that is put together but the good aspects of the spirit against the dark aspects. This not only gives the story a less straightforward, and more thought-provoking, angle, and serves to make Dark Link a more personal menace to Link – he is confronting his own darkness, and the idea of being unable to defeat that is far more terrifying than a Stalfos swinging a sword in your eye.
After this idea came to fruition my imagination went promptly beserk.
It seemed to me that such an interpretation of Dark Link made conventional ideas about origin redundant; he can't be a creature made by the primary antagonist Ganondorf, who has not had the personal interaction with Link that would be needed to pick out his emotional pitfalls and use them against him. I then turned my attention to the room itself that the battle occurs in, desperate to utilise its ethereal and sinister design to my advantage.
After some thinking I hit upon the idea that the room itself is, in short, not of Hyrule, but a bridge between realities where a person must take on their own darkness if they wish to pass through.
As anyone reading this will be thinking, that idea sucks, sounding far too much like a cheap rip-off of Bizarro world characters from DC Comics. So I turned to.... the Bible. Oh yeah.
Taking a great deal of inspiration from New Testament descriptions of Satan, I took the notion of an expanded world further by adding in the scariest kind of antagonist – an unseen one. Retaining the idea of the room being on another plane of existence to Link's world, I imagined a creature that had many aspects of the Christian devil. Remaining unnamed throughout the story, this entity has the ability to observe the actions and thoughts of every single creature in the known world, feeding off of their dark actions, impulses and desires, no matter how secret they may be. With the idea about the hall itself being a place of confrontation remaining in place, I decided that the room is where the entity manifests these dark thoughts into a physical being – in Link's case, Dark Link – and forces the arrival into a literal confrontation with their own sins. Call me high-minded, but I loved this idea, and the decidedly religious overtones seemed to add to its impact a great deal.
As such, I was intent on putting my description-heavy writing style to good use – the story had to be metaphorically powerful if it was to have any impact.
The two partitions that surround the entrance and exit doors in the story are perhaps the most blatant uses of symbolism in the story. The marble around the entrance is filthy, coated with grime and dirt, whilst the stone of the exit is gleaming, clean, and purest white, the concept being that the entrance represents a man tainted with sin entering a purgatory and the exit shows a man leaving that purgatory, washed clean of his sins and a better person because of it. My apologies for being so unimaginatively blatant, haha!.
The dead tree in the centre of the room was there, in my mind, for a purpose I didn't want to specify. Link's fear of his surroundings builds as he gets closer to the tree and subsides as he goes past it, like a living game of 'Hotter/Colder.' Why is this happening? Could it possibly be that this tree is the physical version of the evil entity described earlier? Is it giving off resonating energy – a likely theory considering that Dark Link appears right next to it? Or is it simply a creepy, dead tree? That I leave for you all to decide.
As for the violence in the story, I made the decision that it was thematically right to make it as explicit as it was. While it might seem unnecessary to describe a Dodongo's head being blown to pieces, Tektites being eviscerated, Dark Link being impaled and to include general scenes of torture, I felt that it not only made the story (in a sense) more realistic, but it made the idea of Link having to confront his own sins more tenable – you can't be shocked at the horrors you've committed when they don't sound repulsively horrific.
Dark Link himself grew as I wrote the story, and the massive gap between writing times gave me a chance to look at his motivations and discard what were at the start of the story less developed ideas.
I decided that if Dark Link was a creature with his (to an extent) genetic basis in Link's inherent darkness, he was still a little one dimensional if he was simply out to pit that darkness against Link to see if Link was strong enough to overcome it. After a good deal of deliberation, I decided that this one-dimensionality would not do at all (heehee).
I expanded upon the idea of the entity producing a shadowy reflection of a person when it encounters them, deciding that these creatures are 'born' in a powerless but self-aware (and thus individually minded) state, in spirit form on another plane of being, at the same time their real-world counterparts are born. These shadows are condemned to watch over their living counterparts from birth to death, and they are fuelled (perhaps unwillingly) and strengthened by the darkness hidden in the actions and thoughts of their real-world selves. While this idea functioned by giving Dark Link a degree of individual self-awareness and thus his own individual opinions and thoughts, it didn't truly work until I set on the idea that this process of 'strengthening' by absorbing darkness and sin would be perpetually torturous and agonising – if Link has entered purgatory here, it is nothing on Dark Link, who has lived in hell all his life and has finally been given a chance to free himself from it. He cannot kill himself since Link's continuing existence and darkness would resurrect him, and he does not simply allow Link to kill him out of a combination of a sense of honour of his own, and that he is fuelled by anger at Link for making him, indirectly, what he is.
Finally, I had found his motivation, and his thematic and emotional development had grown far better than I had even hoped for. The ending even gained a degree of plausibility that my initial immaturity prevented – Link's own emotional story arc is resolved by his coming to terms with the killing machine he is in deadly danger of becoming, and learns to remember those who he fights for and loves not only in moments of exhaustion in a manner that could almost be described as begrudging, but when he puts his very life on the line – he remembers his true reasons and remembers only too well the horrors that will occur if he does not succeed, and he even comes to respect and honour the man who serves as this unlikeliest of mentors. Dark Link, for his part, is given the peace he desires – because Link's victory over the entity is a magically potent act that none have ever achieved before, he has freed Dark Link by destroying the creature permanently. Under these circumstances even the childish, initially yaoi-influenced kiss at the end of the story seemed to work – the yaoi influence was scrapped in favour of including the kiss to reference to classical mythology and even Christian stories, where a kiss is intended to have respectful connotations rather than erotic ones. It was implausible to have Dark Link and Link express affection, but it was certainly workable to have them feel a deep sense of gratitude to each other for what the other has done for them.
And thusly, I complete my discussion on the themes and ideas behind this particular piece of work – I have always loved dissecting the written word and seeing what lies beneath, and I hope you, dear reader, think a little higher of my story as a result. Once again I apologise sincerely for even posting this, but I do sincerely hope you've enjoyed what you've read in this tale - if you wish to talk further on any of these ideas you can either drop me a review on the story or send me a message via my fanfiction profile page. My hailz to all the wonderful fanfic writers and readers out there, thank you all once again!!