It's as if
@Spirit wants me to make her cry again...
Yeah, Zelda canon is all messed up. It's a shame too because up until Wind Waker it was all pretty neat and tidy. Then ninty got distracted and wandered off out of the home confused.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. Wind Waker is a good enough game in its own right but it has no business being a Zelda game. It has every business being its own unique adventure and it would be better served if it was. Disruptive art style and gimmicky overworlds and forms of travel notwithstanding, I've already ranted at length at the betrayal to players and previous games that Wind Waker has to conspire to just to make the premise of the game's sailboat work. The writers had to nuke Hyrule for it to make any shred of sense. SO MUCH FOR SAVING IT! And they didn't even have to do that. It has already been established that Hyrule
has an ocean! Or at least access to one. The premise of an entire game is predicated on this knowledge! Link
set SAIL in Links Awakening. Dude was on a boat, lost at sea and everything!
Despite all the talk of old Hyrule beneath the waves and Ganon(dorf?)'s presence and the King of Hyrule being a major character there is no real connection to previous games or the rest of the series in Wind Waker. Heck, this isn't even really Link and
ZeldaTetra's fight because Hyrule has nothing to do with them. Sure that's a major thematic aspect of the story that an age old war being fought by a couple of old fogies over a long dead kingdom nobody else knows of or cares about is posing an unfortunate inconvenience to a bunch of kids but it still stands that the story and premise of Wind Waker is so far removed from the series that its relevance on it is lost. Tetra even has to physically and even mentally literally magically turn into standard series Zelda just so the title character can be in the game.
While Suckward's story is - after all - lore relevant, its explanation of needless details is beside the point. Nobody f-king cares how the bird emblem motif got on the Hylian Shield! We don't need a 80hr+ major main series console installment to explain that, thank you! This could be explained in a few lines of NPC dialog in any given Zelda title past, present or future. This would be like having an entire game devoted to explaining the lore behind the man whose eye could see the truth that some random dude sums up in a few lines of dialog in Ocarina of Time.
And the details that are relevant to the lore are insipid and ruin so many things it's appalling. Ganon and Zelda's origin story completely wrecks an entire series worth of building Ganondorf and Zelda's characters. To this day I will simply hear no talk of Demise or Hylia as if it never happened. Because it didn't. Because Suckward reads like one of those inane fables about how the Zebra got its stripes or some such bull$#!% that only stupid parents tell to gullible babies. And getting all specific about the whole reincarnation thing opens up major inconsistencies that contradict with what is already understood about the lore. Instead of offering greater understanding it actually makes things more confusing.
And it is obvious that Breath of the Wild is deliberately trying to distance itself so much from the rest of the series in a desperate attempt to excuse itself. Nevermind in terms of gameplay, Ninty played it safe by having it so far removed from any established series lore it couldn't possibly interfere. I'll leave it up to philosophers to decide whether or not that can actually qualify it as part of the Zelda series.
I can't be too hard on obvious side projects like FSA or TFH or Minish Cap or the DS Wind Waker sequels and such. They speak for themselves. It's pretty obvious that these entries are just there to tide players over until the next main console installment and aren't going to try too hard to fit in - not that ninty bothers to make sense of what can no longer properly be considered a
series anymore with their main line titles anyway.
The last Zelda game that made any shred of sense in regards to the lore or just the basic logical progression of a series was Twilight Princess.