Anybody else not buy the whole "the world turned into an ocean, so Zora turned into Rito" explanation? I feel as though in the case of a sudden flood it'd be more probable for them to evolve to breath salt water than to have beaks and wings. But then I wondered, what if they didn't evolve in a natural sense?
When we see them in WW the Rito are feathery and have beaks, but not wings. They only get wings after Valoo gives them one of his scales. We could assume that showing their courage to reach him helps them grow their wings? But I think that the power is in the scale itself. In a similar way, when Link gets the Silver or Gold Scale in OoT, he is able to breathe underwater (when diving) for a longer period of time. It isn't that the scale is acting as oxygen or anything, but that by simply owning it permanently changes the way Link breaths underwater. Back to the Rito part of this, perhaps they would never have had wings on their own and only through the scale's power do they gain them. When Hyrule suddenly flooded, the Zora may not have had time to "evolve" and went to Valoo for help. He helped by giving them feather scales, or beak scales, until the Zora/Rito began forming them naturally and didn't need the scales anymore. That would explain why the Rito are born with wings by the time it gets to BotW (assuming you think those timelines are connected but that's a whole other story). It makes more sense than "oh hey I'm a bird now", imo.
When we see them in WW the Rito are feathery and have beaks, but not wings. They only get wings after Valoo gives them one of his scales. We could assume that showing their courage to reach him helps them grow their wings? But I think that the power is in the scale itself. In a similar way, when Link gets the Silver or Gold Scale in OoT, he is able to breathe underwater (when diving) for a longer period of time. It isn't that the scale is acting as oxygen or anything, but that by simply owning it permanently changes the way Link breaths underwater. Back to the Rito part of this, perhaps they would never have had wings on their own and only through the scale's power do they gain them. When Hyrule suddenly flooded, the Zora may not have had time to "evolve" and went to Valoo for help. He helped by giving them feather scales, or beak scales, until the Zora/Rito began forming them naturally and didn't need the scales anymore. That would explain why the Rito are born with wings by the time it gets to BotW (assuming you think those timelines are connected but that's a whole other story). It makes more sense than "oh hey I'm a bird now", imo.
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