The Legend of the Princess, Chapter Six Illustration

[rynling]

This comic is an illustration of a scene from the sixth chapter of The Legend of the Princess created in July by Lightsintheskye, whose brilliance knows no bounds.

I put The Legend of the Princess on hiatus during the spring of this year, and one of the reasons I spent so much time thinking about this story before returning to it is that I was having a lot of trouble with Ganondorf. In the actual games, I don't read him as "evil" so much as taking radical action in extreme circumstances. This doesn't mean that he's a "good" person, but rather that Hyrule is an awful, awful place. If Ganondorf wants things to change, then he has to defy not only history and society but also the will of the gods, which he learns is all too real in its consequences. The gray moral area that the character occupies is what I find so interesting about him. For me, he represents a lot of the issues involved in what might be called "the ethics of rage."

I therefore tried to express to the artist that, although the Ganondorf in my story is relatively young, he's not innocent and beautiful, but neither is he evil and ugly. In this particular scene, Ganondorf is expressing anger, but Zelda is wise enough not to make assumptions about what he means when he says "Hyrule will burn." Does he mean that he's planning to do something, or that something will happen of its own accord? When he says this, then, she isn't scared so much as she is concerned and intrigued.

When I wrote this, I was focused on creating a sense of tension between the characters, and I didn't include much visual detail. Just about the only details I provided were that the Great Hall of Hyrule Castle is very large and made of the same white stone as most of the rest of the castle, and that it has chandeliers and clerestory windows. Although there are a lot of people (from all the races of the Zelda series, excluding the Gerudo) in the room, Zelda feels as if she is completely alone with Ganondorf; and, although she knows that people are watching her, she doesn't have a strong sense of being in the middle of a crowd.

I imagined Zelda wearing a formal gown with a jeweled tiara and her hair partially down (as she appears in some of the scenes in Breath of the Wild), while Ganondorf is wearing black gold-embroidered robes with his hair up (maybe along the lines of the Desert Voe style). I didn't put too much thought into it, though, as I tend to imagine these two characters more as personalities than as actual physical beings.

In the first draft of this image, Ganondorf was bare-chested in the full Desert Voe Outfit from Breath of the Wild, and something about that didn't sit right with me for some reason. I thought about it, and I finally realized that, to me, Ganondorf's canonical clothing design, which leaves only his hands and face uncovered, is indicative of his desire not to leave any part of himself vulnerable or exposed. He may also be trying to assert a masculine gender in relation to the rest of the Gerudo, in which femininity is partially performed through clothing that flatters female secondary sexual characteristics. I think it might also be the case that, among the Gerudo, "the one male born in every hundred years" is treated as something of a sex object, and Ganondorf has higher ambitions than to make Gerudo babies. As much as I love the idea of Ganondorf wearing "traditional" Gerudo clothing, I think he would probably go out of his way to avoid showing any skin.

I was therefore thinking that Ganondorf would be wearing the type of form-fitting shirt with a high collar that he does in Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, and Hyrule Warriors. In contrast to Zelda's "European-ness," I see Ganondorf as vaguely Algerian, where men wore this fashion of high-collared shirts under robes well into the twentieth century. For a formal event such as the one described in this scene, he would probably be wearing dark robes with a bit of gold embroidery, as he does in Wind Waker.

Thankfully, Lightsintheskye is a true pro and was able to be flexible and accommodate my headcanon. The double collar that she drew is a thing of beauty, and the color combination of navy and gold suits the character perfectly. It's also incredible how she was able to make Ganondorf simultaneously attractive and threatening, and the way his face changes from panel to panel (especially from the third panel to the fourth panel) is fascinating. Not only are his expressions painfully emotive, but there's a fluidity in the transitions that makes the static art seem almost like animation.

I think it's also worth saying that, although Ganondorf's canonical combination of brown skin, red hair, and gold eyes is very weird, Lightsintheskye handled it in a way that makes these physical characteristics seem like a perfectly natural set of phenotypes for a human being to express. I also love the way she drew his teeth and eyelashes, which I often see stylized in "cartoon" or "anime" art but rarely drawn this realistically.

Meanwhile, Zelda is sheer perfection. Her face and hair are lovely, as is her color palette, especially the combination of her earthtone lipstick with her seafoam green dress. I love the folds and billows of the fabric of her gown, as well as the shine of the pearls adorning her hair. Her pendant and earrings are gorgeous, and it's also really cool how they capture and reflect light mirrors the gleam in the characters' eyes.

When I spend time looking at this comic, I always get drawn into the crowd depicted in the first panel. I feel like it must have been an enormous challenge to draw such glamorous focal characters in the foreground and then come up with a group of people who are similarly attractive and well-dressed enough to be appropriate to the scene, but Lightsintheskye handled this task with style and flair. Not only is every individual figure in the crowd interesting and unique, but the small degree of simplification of the details used to depict them also creates a subtle but effective background effect. Combined with the use of the out-of-focus but still discernible background, this is an almost textbook-perfect example of how good establishing shots work in comics.

Although I love all of Lightsintheskye's illustrations, it was this comic that inspired me to step up my own creative efforts in writing this story. Before this, I wasn't taking the fic all that seriously, but after I saw this incredible artwork I could no longer be satisfied with my lazy 1,200-word chapters. Essentially, Lightsintheskye helped me to realize that what I was doing had the potential to become an interesting and meaningful story that's absolutely worth my time and effort. The full-size comic, optimized for Tumblr, can be found (here)!