Fi: What Is She?

Fi. The amount of speculation about her has been high ever since she was first seen in leaked concept art from E3 2009, and it has done nothing but rocket skyward since then. It’s been suggested that she could be the Fairy Queen from The Wind Waker. People have theorized about how the features on her figure resemble that of the Master Sword, saying that she could somehow be a part of the sword itself. It’s even been proposed that she could be Nayru. No matter how you look at it, Fi is shrouded in mystery. In this article, I will be going over these speculations and present my own personal opinions on her. I’ll start with the simplest theory: Fi being the Fairy Queen.

When the leaked concept art from E3 2009 was shown, a few fans noticed that Fi looked somewhat similar to the Fairy Queen. Not much was said on the subject, though, until the GDC 2011 trailer where an icon that strongly resembled the Fairy Queen’s head was shown on the outline of the Wii Remote on the HUD. Upon seeing this, countless fans went into a frenzy and said that Fi would leave the Goddess Sword at the end of the game and become the Fairy Queen, at which point the Goddess Sword would become the Master Sword. Right off the bat, I noticed two major problems with this.

First off, while Fi does look somewhat similar to the Fairy Queen, she also has some significant differences, like her height. The Fairy Queen has the form of a child, both in her height and her facial appearance. Fi looks absolutely nothing like a child. The other inconsistency in their figures is that Fi has no arms. I pointed this out back when the craze of the Fairy Queen theory exploded onto the scene, but almost everyone shrugged it off saying that we just couldn’t see Fi’s arms under her cloak. Well, it turns out I was right on this. At E3 2011, we finally saw Fi with Skyward Sword’s artstyle for the first time, and the truth was staring right at us. Not only did Fi not have any arms, but her “cloak” was actually more like wings, meaning her upper limbs are actually what was first thought to be a cloak around her. These are huge inconsistencies between the Fairy Queen and Fi’s designs. It’s true that design changes typically aren’t that important, but differences like these are too severe to not be a factor.

Second, there’s a problem with the idea that Fi leaving is what causes the Goddess Sword to become the Master Sword. How would her leaving give the sword the power to be the Blade of Evil’s Bane? That doesn’t make any sense. If a sword is to become the most powerful blade there is, powerful enough to be evil-destroying, it’d be more likely for some form of mixture to be involved rather than a parting. If Fi were to leave the Master Sword, it would be more likely that the sword would lose power rather than gain it. With these two flaws in mind, I think it’s clear that Fi has nothing to do with the Fairy Queen at all, and it appears most others have come to agree with me on this, as well, seeing how the speculation about Fi and the Fairy Queen has pretty much died out.

Another theory about Fi is that she could possibly be Nayru. This theory was proposed by Axle the Beast in his latest article, “The Three Goddesses: The Ally, The Enemy, and The Fallen“, but he is not the first to suggest it. He did however expand on it in a theory completely his own, and I have to admit, his ideas are very intriguing.

Axle’s theory revolves around the story of Skyward Sword possibly being a retelling of the legend of the Golden Goddesses. Basically he says the legend is simply that, a legend, and that it was obscured by the mists of time to become what we have known it to be since A Link to the Past. In other words, he’s suggesting that the tale the Deku Tree told Link in Ocarina of Time won’t be the creation story of the world as it has always been. Instead, it will just be the founding of the Royal Family of the Kingdom of Hyrule. However, there are some flaws in his arguments.

The first problem is what Axle said about one of Fi’s features. He said that she is predominately blue, which is Nayru’s signature color. However, this statement is inaccurate. Fi is actually more dominated by purple than blue, making that argument null and void. The fact that she’s mainly purple also plays into the theory about her connections to the Master Sword, but I’ll get into full detail on that later.

The second flaw in the argument is that if the three Golden Goddesses aren’t the creators of the world itself, then who is? The Goddess in Skyward Sword? Plausible, but if what Axle says is true, the Goddess is Farore and Fi is Nayru. That makes two of the Golden Goddesses, but what about the third one? According to Axle’s theory, Ghirahim’s tribe is actually the group or symbol in Skyward Sword that represents Din, who will later be identified as the Goddess of Power. The problem with this is the Triforce requires three parts: Power, Wisdom, and Courage. The tribe Ghirahim is in is inarguably the “dark interlopers” mentioned in Twilight Princess, meaning this group will be sealed in the Mirror of Twilight at the end of Skyward Sword. If they’re trapped in the Twilight Realm, how can they play into the Triforce of Power? They can’t.

The Triforce is made up of the very essence of the three Golden Goddesses themselves. They made the Triforce from their specific powers after creating Hyrule and the rest of the world. As the legend states, they “descended upon the chaos that was Hyrule,” which many have speculated to be the chaos that Ghirahim and the rest of the “dark interlopers” caused when they raided Hyrule. This actually is most likely not the case. The “chaos that was Hyrule” would have been the nothingness that was there before the Goddesses created the world and all the inhabitants of it. They brought life to the chaos along with law that governed their creation. The telling of these events would have been passed down through the generations before the backstory of Skyward Sword even happened if this legend is indeed an accurate tale. And an accurate tale is what is has to be. Why? Because of a tale told by someone who was a witness to the events of Skyward Sword: Lanayru. Lanayru directly told Link the exact same legend that the Deku Tree told Link in Ocarina of Time: the legend of the Golden Goddesses. Since the “dark interlopers” are the main enemy in Skyward Sword and Lanayru told the events of the creation story and the Interloper War chronologically, that automatically means the legend of the Golden Goddesses happened exactly as it was told. Lanayru wouldn’t have told Link a false legend. With all this in mind, I think it’s safe to say Fi can’t be Nayru.

That’s two theories that have been proposed, and it’s increasingly obvious they are quite seriously flawed. So what’s left? What other theory is out there that could be accurate, if any? There is one, and it’s the only one left. The theory that Fi is part of the Master Sword itself. This happens to be my personal theory, but I don’t say it’s accurate out of bias. It’s my theory because of the overwhelming evidence for it.

Fi has six features of the Master Sword:

1.) Her hair: the tip of the blade

2.) Her “wings”: the wing-like extensions on the hilt of the sword

3.) Her diamond: the scabbard on the center of the hilt

4.) Her torso: the portion in-between the hilt and the blade

5.) Her hips: the bottom portion of the hilt

6.) Her legs: the handle of the sword (same crisscross pattern)

These similarities have to be much more than coincidences. Again, her design, which has stayed almost exactly the same since the leaked concept art of 2009, matches the Master Sword’s perfectly. It’s very significant that her design would stay the same over a 2-year period of time. I say this because it means these features on her figure have to be important for them to remain unchanged during the design process. Since the Goddess Sword will eventually become the Master Sword at some point during the game, and seeing how Fi houses herself in it, the theory that she is part of the Master Sword has an incredibly strong foundation. But there’s more to it than that.

Bill Trinen told us in an interview that Link “sort of forges [the Master Sword] along the way,” and recent footage has shown us what he meant. Throughout the game, the Goddess Sword changes design via an upgrade sequence in which Fi absorbs red, green, and blue fire and shoots it at the sword. In the process, the Goddess Sword slowly takes on the shape of the Master Sword, which has Fi’s features. Since it’s taking on Fi’s form, I think it’s quite evident that she will eventually completely morph with the Goddess Sword, thereby powering it up and transforming it into the Blade of Evil’s Bane.

What once started out as the belief that Fi was the humanoid form of the Master Sword has now completely reversed. The Master Sword is actually Fi’s figure in blade form, and I believe that the creation of the Master Sword will play out as I’ve described. Whether you believe it or not is up to you, though; you may have your own theories. As for the truth about Fi, we’ll just have to wait and see with our own eyes.