Breath of the Wild’s Zelda Part 2: On Silent Princesses and Cathartic Endings

The Silent Princess gets to thrive and I love it.

Welcome to Part 2 of my Breath of the Wild’s Zelda Narrative Thoughts series, where I flail about the ending and the structure of Zelda’s story specifically and why it impacted me so much.

Previously I talked about how refreshing Breath of the Wild’s Zelda is in Breath of the Wild’s Zelda Part 1. I love how the game treats her narrative with focus and care. Despite her being a passive character we rarely see in game, we get to see her memories, her experiences, her anxieties, and just empathize with the sheer pressure she’s under.

I just think Zelda is neat, okay? She’s dealing with a lot and she’s trying her best and who among us isn’t doing the same? I just—

Ahem. Sorry. Let me stop flailing and explain properly.

So I finally beat Breath of the Wild in time for Tears of the Kingdom. While I haven’t been able to delve as properly into TotK because of streaming schedule (trying to do the main plot on stream as much as possible, it is difficult), I do still have a lot of feelings about the full memories ending of Breath of the Wild. I want to talk about endings, catharsis, and self-acceptance.

Spoilers for Breath of the Wild below this point

You have been warned!

Flee the spoilers if you stumbled over here somehow not having played BotW!

Still here? Awesome. We’re going to talk about flowers and finales.

The final fight sequence in the game is one of the most epic game finales I’ve ever played. I got through it in one stream (somehow) and felt like a badass. You fight your way through Hyrule Castle at last, after playing the whole game with it often looming in the distance in a menacing swirl of red. You make it to its heart, where Calamity Ganon is imprisoned by Zelda. There’s a bunch of Guardian turret lasers, Lynels, and the boss fight at the end succeeds at making you wonder how the Hylia you’re supposed to win.

There’s also a chance to gain added context on Zelda’s progressive relationship with Link via her journal—miraculously not destroyed, 100 years later, still on her desk in her bedroom. If you didn’t collect all the memories, this journal chronicles each one. What’s nice is the entries add a layer of new perspective to the memories themselves as well as extra bits of information—Link loves cooking and doesn’t speak much because he feels so much pressure to perform as the Hero of Hyrule that he’s very reserved. When Zelda learns this, she realizes she’s not the only one forced to perform to this prophecy, forced into these roles with no voice. The silent princess and her silent knight it just writes itself, it’s so good.

These are just two teenagers with a lot of anxiety, okay. I love them both.

So when Link and Zelda finally succeed and defeat Calamity Ganon, you can’t help but cheer. When you have all the memories, there’s a lovely scene of her and Link riding on a hill exploring. They’re smiling, time has clearly passed a bit. And the hill they stop on is covered in Silent Princesses.

The Silent Princess is a flower useful for some things in game like stealth food and dyeing clothes, but they’re ultimately a metaphor for Zelda herself. The flower is endangered, and can only thrive on its own in the wild. Any attempts to domestically cultivate them have failed. Zelda mentions she can only hope the flower is strong enough to survive and grow on its own in one of the memories. Before she makes Link eat a frog for science, as you do.

In that moment she’s basically telling Link, I hate the pressure of my destined role against Calamity Ganon and I just want to be left on my own to do science and help Hyrule how I can because I seem to be failing as the Chosen One.

That’s why that final scene, with the hill blanketed in Silent Princess, says so much despite having few dialogue lines. Zelda is no longer beholden to this prophecy and can help how she wants, pursue her scientific interests, and just be herself. She also admits she can’t hear the voice in the Master Sword anymore (which had been a sign of her power). And, you know? She’s okay with that. After everything she sacrificed to fulfill this prophecy and save the world, it’s okay if she can’t use her powers much again. Her whole life was defined by this ability, or the lack of it, and she did manage to eventually succeed—with love and support of her friends, not condemnation from her father.

Now she gets to be her own person and forge a new future for Hyrule on her own terms. It might not be what was expected of her, but it’s what she can do. She seems to genuinely accept that this is who she is, that she isn’t a failure for it, and seems excited for the future.

Zelda in Breath of the Wild never gets full agency of her own narrative until the final scene, and there’s criticisms of that too—this is her series, but she’s never once been a playable character. But also the narrative of a girl trapped by expectation and subverting what she can, fighting for her own interests, and doing what she must is powerful.

If Part 1’s ramble about “passive” characters wasn’t any indication, I think stories involving characters who aren’t allowed a voice or a say in their own narrative are important, and I think this Zelda resonates with so many players because of that. Certainly that’s why she’s my favorite. There’s a lot in life I can’t change or can only try my best to work around or exist in spite of. There was something powerful about Zelda falling down crying in a memory while Link silently holds her and lets her have that space to just be utterly broken for a moment that is so poignant—especially juxtaposed with the full memories ending. When I see that hill of flowers, I can’t help but smile because Zelda has found some small measure of peace and self-comfort, at least, even if she never quite became the powerful princess she was supposed to be. She never quite lived up to expectation, but that was okay. She was happy with who she was, and that was enough.

I’m so curious to see where they take Zelda in Tears of the Kingdom. I’m honestly a little worried about her character arc in that game, but we’ll see! I haven’t gotten far, the intro section was adorable but then plot suddenly happened and now I’m a ball of confusion and concern (as is intended at this stage of the narrative).

Of course I’ll do a Part 3 on Tears of the Kingdom once I get further into it, a Part 4 when I beat it, and a final Part 5 that wraps up her whole arc between the two games and my thoughts on them. Did I expect a whole Zelda Narrative Thoughts miniseries when I decided this would be my first Narrative Thoughts topic? Absolutely not. But I hope you enjoy it!

Also here! Have Link holding the maximum amount of Silent Princesses which are now a metaphor for all my emotions about Breath of the Wild.

(As an aside, her father was a jerk and I’m okay with accidentally dropping flaming apples on his ghost pants at the beginning of the game now. He deserved it. Apologizing as a trapped spirit for how he treated his daughter is not enough—I will throw flaming apples at you, sir.)

Thank you for reading my second Narrative Thoughts! I hope you enjoyed it and it wasn’t too rambling. If you liked this post and would like to support more articles like it, consider becoming a patron or throwing me a tip on Ko-fi~