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AoL and Its Crosses

dumb180

Warrior Postman
Joined
Sep 30, 2009
Location
AL
So I was playing through AoL again, trying to finish it, and I noticed something rather obvious: There are churches and presumably Christian cemeteries in this game. I'd never really thought about it before in light of OoT and all the games after it.

Well, what do you guys think is going on there with that? Is this evidence that the developers didn't really have the whole story cooked up yet, and should thus be ignored? Or is Hyrule perhaps meant to be a kingdom set somewhere in the real world that's slowly converting to Christianity? The latter seems a tad odd to me, as I had always thought of Hyrule as being in a fictional universe with no real world connections. Thoughts?
 

knowlee

Like a river's flow, it never ends...
Joined
Jun 2, 2009
Location
USA
Well personally, I see that the reason why crosses appear in AoL is because the cross is a widely known religious symbol. Most people automatically think of the cross as representing something religious.

I think that the developers put that in there in order to show that some religious atmosphere exists in the game. I do not think that it was put in there to show that Hyrule is converting to Christianity.
 

Clucluclu

Time for waffles
Joined
Jul 9, 2009
Location
Los Angeles
I think that during LoZ/AoL, Nintendo wanted Zelda to be very Mideival Europish (for obvious reasons) and Christianity (Catholicism in particular) was huge around those times. If you lived in Europe back then, it is safe to say that you were Christian.
 

Shadsie

Sage of Tales
As in many cases, TVTropes has the answer!

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CreepyCoolCrosses

The page from the fiction-tropes wiki explains how the Japanese like to include gratutious crosses in their media - without the crosses having much to do with what they usually symbolize in the west.

As said before - "General religious symbol" or "General death symbol." In early Zelda titles, they seemed to be more magic symbols and death-symbols (graveyards) than anything else.

Also:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrystalDragonJesus


The "Crystal Dragon Jesus" page above actually has a mention of LoZ, OoT in particular:

"The Legend Of Zelda, being sort of based on Arthurian legend, has a fictional religion with many parallels to Christianity; the Temple of Time resembles a Christian sanctuary, the young Zelda wears a wimple like a nun or passion bearer and the three goddesses and their Triforce can be seen as a parallel to Christianity's Holy Trinity."


Basically, superficial trappings without being any real religion.
 

Master Kokiri 9

The Dungeon Master
Joined
Aug 19, 2009
Location
My ship that sailed in the morning
The cross is a somewhat universal religious symbol. It's existed for thousands of years (since ancient egypt) in various forms such as the Ankh or however it is you spell it (a cross with a loop at the top). Nintendo probably didn't think that the Triforce would be a good religious symbol for the Hylians during the periods in which AoL and LoZ were developed and decided to use a preexisting one: the cross.
 

basement24

There's a Bazooka in TP!
Joined
Feb 28, 2009
Location
Ontario, Canada
I often just thought that the cemetary was represented by crosses on the overworld map mainly to distinguish it quickly and easily as a cemetary given the size of the graphics that they would have to be. Little round-topped stones or some other kind of cemetary marking in those 8-bit graphics would have been a bit less obvious at first. I know there were rounded stones in LoZ, but the gravestones were larger terrain.

As for churches, it was probably again a limitation of story in the 8-bit era. Most small towns would have a place of worship, and it was easily explained through a cross instead of a newly made up symbol. It wasn't until games became story based in later eras that Hyrule's own philosophies were able to be fleshed out, so it might've just been that the simplest answer was the best one for the 8-bit era.

As for Link's shield as depicted in promotional art, it was probably designed to reflect shields of knights from eras of our time that certain aspects of the game were based upon.
 
Joined
Jan 3, 2009
A Christian Cross is generally considered a sign of goodness, light, and all that stuff. Crosses were used for exorcisms. Crosses are used to weaken vampires. Exorcism isn't always used to refer to getting rid of the Christian devil. Vampires aren't in any religion (other than Twilight fanbases but that's another thread). The crosses must be used to keep evil out of Northern Hyrule. I mean it only makes sense. In LoZ there were always monsters (unless in the first room of a dungeon or in a cave) and there were no crosses. Except for the one on Link's shield, but that was more so a decal. In AoL, there actual crosses that were sculpted into three dimesional objects. The Northern Hylians were in Northern Hyrule because there were no monsters and they want to keep monsters out of their towns. Gannon's eyes are the only ones who exist in towns untouched by a cross. Also, the Old Kasuto is a town that doesn't have many crosses and was taken by monsters. The crosses in the cemetery don't work because it is a tombstone, and therefore a sign of death.

It also could mean that Northern Hyrule is a medieval european land that is mostly Christian, but has some belief in Hylian religion.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2007
AoL isn't the only Zelda game to feature crosses. But the truth is, is that the entire story of the Goddesses and the Triforce was not revealed until ALttP. And there actually more religion references in the old Zelda titles than most don't know of, mainly due to NoA not featuring them.
 

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