have we been mixing up Zora and River Zora? What are they in the manual. Zelda 2 is such an abstract game tbh. Everything about it is crazy weird, but if that's what it says in the manual it must be true. :/
Alright I guess. I suppose if all of that logically makes sense to you that the Fokka are the best candidate then roll with it. I would rather it was the Fokka than the Rito because I like the Zora as a species better, and I'd love to see a BOTW Zora, but I still think it's the Rito regardless. But if the King can only create the guardians in the dungeons, if they came out and built their own cultures and stuff and are Kass's race, the king would actually be a god wouldn't he? Can his creations do stuff like that or are they more like Robots? How else would they live in temples all day without food? :/ It's still a little weird.
Well I mean the King and the Royal Family did have the full unbridled might of the Triforce, which made Ganon a literal deity for a time in ALttP before Link claimed the Triforce from Ganon. The Royal Family also had the Triforce shortly after SS.
If the Fokka are the race we see in BotW, they could have easily been made post SS with the Triforce to guard the Royal Family and/or various artifacts. I mean the Shiekah up and vanished, and considering the race seems to be closely connected to them it'd make sense for our little bird friends to get in on the vanishing act with the Shiekah and make like a timeline (and split).
Considering Impa is the one who guards the knowledge of the "long lost" dungeons from the NES games, it's entirely possible the dungeons in both NES games are now supposed to be Shiekah Shrines (hence why you go underground in all of them. Yes I'm including Zelda 2; Link always descends in an elevator, as in BotW, in AoL).
Alternatively, they were made by the king from AoL's manual using the might of the Triforce in his time (rather than repurposing/making more of the older Fokka that don't exist in this possibility).
Making machinations isn't really far fetched since we see random baddies do it very frequently in Zelda, but if it helps you do keep in mind the Royal Family had the full might of the Triforce when the King did all this pre NES games. So for all intents and purposes, yes, the King sort of is a god (but isn't literally one) due to having the full Triforce.
Tl;dr, the Triforce is the most OP piece of **** in the universe and the AoL King can do basically whatever the hell he wants.
As for Zoras, it's made clear by PH, TP, and the 2D games that the Zoras from the 3D games that remained in Hyrule all evolved into the river Zoras, with the catalyst for this evolution strongly alluded to being the Zoras in Hyrule becoming militarized between OoT and TP. ALBW makes this also pretty clear with Oren being descended from Queen Ruto. "Sea" Zoras just outright don't exist any more in Hyrule in the 2D games; there's only one kind of Zora in Hyrule at a time. And the Zoras eventually become so averse to Hylians and apparently distrustful/hateful towards them that they side with Ganon and kill Hylians on sight, going so far as to work towards resurrecting Ganon along with the other legions of hell/the Dark Realm in AoL. I stand by what I said in another thread; a sidequest involving Link having to go into an extremely hostile Zora's Domain (as in ALttP) and finally bring peace between Hylians and Zoras once again would be a pretty amazing sidequest and have Zoras as both enemies and eventual allies in the game.
And yes, they're just "Zoras" in the manual. They're just "Zoras" in every game, 2D or 3D, except for PH and OoX. In PH they're called Zora Warriors and in OoX a distinction between River and Sea Zoras exists, but in Hyrule there's just Zoras since there's only one kind at any given time.