Questioning "Unanswerable" Things in Games?

[Moonface]

I've had a particular question bugging me for a while now about The Legend of Zelda and been wracking my brain over where a good place would be to pitch it, and finally came up with this thread idea for questions we've had about something in a game that isn't necessarily answered by the game or any lore and is instead based on speculation, guesses, or just doesn't have any answer or explanation that can be formulated.

So for my question, my question is why is Zelda always titled as Princess even when she is the only surviving member of the royal family. Breath of the Wild establishes that the current King of Hyrule is killed during the Calamity, as well as any other members of the royal family except for Zelda, and yet in Tears of the Kingdom everyone still refers to her as Princess Zelda. Wouldn't she be the Queen of Hyrule now? She's the only surviving member of the royal family and as such isn't in line for the throne as a Princess because that line got evaporated 100+ years ago, so shouldn't she just get promoted like Prince Charles did when Queen Elizabeth died? I don't know if she's the only royal family member if any other games but besides keeping her as Princess Zelda for consistency and marketing as a character I can't figure out any lore/in-world reason why she keeps that title when the throne is open for her to take.

[Dragon Lord]

She continues to be referred to as Princess because there's no longer a kingdom, and thus no one to preform the coronation ceremony for her, and thus she is forever stuck at just being the Princess, never to be Queen. Trust me, my uncle works for Nintendo and told me this.

On a serious note (hey, who knows, maybe that is the reason Nintendo would give for it), my guess would be that she's not "Queen" Zelda because there's no Kingdom left. The kingdom is destroyed, the royal family is gone, she's just by herself now. Maybe she continues to be referred to as Princess strictly out of respect, despite their being no royal family anymore, essentially just making her a normal person now (after all, being royalty is just a status that can be lost -- plenty of instances of that happening throughout history). Perhaps if they make a third game in the BoTW/ToTK series of Zelda games, they'll have the Kingdom be saved and restored, and Zelda will be crowned Queen then.

In the end though it's probably not even something Nintendo thought about and just kept having her referred to as Princess Zelda in BoTW and ToTK just because that's what the fandom has always known her as and they figured it would just be easier to keep referring to her as that.

[Moonface]

Looking up Zelda on a Wiki, I noticed she is explicitly named in the opening of TotK as "Zelda - Princess of Hyrule", so I assume the kingdom is still in existence especially as she is helping to rebuild what was destroyed prior to the events of TotK happening. However, your point on a ceremony being required has weight since apparently Twilight Princess opens with Zelda intending to become Queen, but the ceremony for it is interrupted by Zant so she is forced to spend the entire game as Princess. I guess the same thing has to happen in the TotK timeline, and just hadn't happened yet. She is also called Queen Zelda in Hyrule Warriors in the Japanese version, although it isn't a canon game.

I wonder if Nintendo will ever try to give a decent lore reason for how every new generation of Pokémon has all these new Pokémon that have never been heard of before in a region never heard of before. We've gone from 151 to over 1000 and as far as I know there's no in-universe reason given for how 10x the Pokémon exist but aren't discovered or known of in any way until Game Freak makes them.

[Dragon Lord]

Looking up Zelda on a Wiki, I noticed she is explicitly named in the opening of TotK as "Zelda - Princess of Hyrule", so I assume the kingdom is still in existence especially as she is helping to rebuild what was destroyed prior to the events of TotK happening. However, your point on a ceremony being required has weight since apparently Twilight Princess opens with Zelda intending to become Queen, but the ceremony for it is interrupted by Zant so she is forced to spend the entire game as Princess. I guess the same thing has to happen in the TotK timeline, and just hadn't happened yet. She is also called Queen Zelda in Hyrule Warriors in the Japanese version, although it isn't a canon game.

Yeah, I have no clue. I just threw out a random guess because I haven't played a new Zelda game since A Link Between Worlds, and I also never played Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword, which makes Wind Waker on the Gamecube my last console Zelda game, so I have no clue what the timeline/lore of the series is like any more. So I'm definitely no expert and can't give any theories back by concrete reasoning for any of it.

[Moonface]

Keep having this come to mind and forget to post it in here every time. I've never understood what the reason is the villains in Uncharted 3 are actually after the Djinn urn. At face value you could say because they're villains that want power from an ancient artifact. Which would be true but the whole story leading up to this contradicts their whole motive.

This urn is presumably filled with something like a hallucinogen that tainted the water of Ubar, leading everyone who drank the water to lose their minds and kill each other thinking they were seeing demons. The villains of Uncharted 3 want this to control their enemies through fear, but both Cutter and Drake are at different points shot with a dart by the villains that causes them to hallucinate and be convinced their friends are foes, as well as being put into a state of great fear. These darts clearly do not contain the essence of whatever tainted the water in Ubar because no one has gone there yet, so why is it that what the villains are already using isn't good enough?

The best I can assume is the urn can contaminate an incredibly large source of water and is wanted to do what the darts do on a larger scale, but it's weird to me the villains don't just use what they have already to target just their enemies instead of what I assume would be an entire civilian population that isn't doing anything to be their enemies.

[Moonface]

I originally came to make this post to question why the Gerudo in The Legend of Zelda don't just make a note to kill the sole Gerudo male that gets born every 100 years since it will clearly never end well to let it live, but I discovered that Ganon/Ganondorf has only had three incarnations across the entire franchise and so the Gerudo probably haven't even had the opportunity to implement a "Gerudo Male Newborn Elimination Plan".

Looking back at earlier posts in here though, I extend the Nintendo Princess debate to ask why is Princess Peach not the Queen of the Mushroom Kingdom when she's the ruler of said kingdom? Apparently there have been very minor mentions of her mother but if Peach is the ruler then shouldn't she be Queen? Same applies to Daisy too being the ruler of Sarasaland yet remaining as a princess.
I guess the same argument for why Zelda is still a princess could apply, but unlike Hyrule neither the Musrhoom Kingdom or Sarasaland have suffered from a war or evil force killing off all the people who could perform a ceremony to make Peach or Daisy the Queen so what canonically is stopping them?

[ShiraNoMai]

I actually wonder if it's a thing that Nintendo (and I suppose Disney) finds that kids identify more with a princess than a queen; princess invokes "young, pleasant, perky" and queen probably invokes a parental/adult figure with which a kid would be completely out of tune with.

[Moonface]

I actually wonder if it's a thing that Nintendo (and I suppose Disney) finds that kids identify more with a princess than a queen; princess invokes "young, pleasant, perky" and queen probably invokes a parental/adult figure with which a kid would be completely out of tune with.

Hmm, maybe. For Disney I figured they go for Princess because a) you're more likely to call a little girl a princess than a queen and b) most of the older Disney movies were about the princess finding their prince. I don't know if Japanese culture has a similar view to the term princess as Disney does though, although Disney doesn't tend to make their princesses rulers of a kingdom like Nintendo does.

[Maniakkid25]

*Throws down shovel* I knew we had a topic like this! Well, it's intent might not be what I'm looking for, but I'm throwing it here anyway.

Yes, it's time for another patented Maniak Necro, and this one is definitely going to be worth it. So, as alluded to across this board, I've been recently playing Legend of Dragoon, and my mind came back to a very, VERY interesting question that runs to the core of the story itself. But, in order to talk about it, I'm going to need to spoil the big plot twist, so spoilers spoilers spoilers, here we go.

Legend of Dragoon spoilers ahead

So, the entire game, we've been told about two mythical beings: The Black Monster and the Moon Child. The Moon Child is a child born every 108 years when The Moon That Never Sets (so called because it never moves in the sky) glows red. It is said that it is meant to purify the world, and the Black Monster opposes this purity, and kills the Moon Child and everyone around it. There's a lot to unpack with this tale, but there's one thing that is important to the question: The Moon Child has a hypnotic effect on all who behold it, causing them to rally around to protect the Moon Child to their very last breath and beyond in order to bring about a new god to the world.

At the end of Disc 3, you get the big plot twist: one of your party members is the Moon Child, and another is the Black Monster. I'll keep the spoilers light, and won't reveal who is who, but it's something you should have twigged well before that point.

And it's here where the question comes in. See, throughout the game, the characters have all been motivated to protect the Moon Child well before they even knew they were the Moon Child. All the characters who talk about them want to keep them safe or are attracted to them, to the point that a guard is nearly pulled away from his post at the mere sight of them! And so comes the question: is the party under the spell of the Moon Child? This is a question that is never answered, but it's tantalizing, isn't it? The very idea that the party itself is motivated by an unseen force that isn't their own will, even as they are the saviors of the planet? Because even after this point, their goal is not to protect the world from the villain. The Moon Child has been kidnapped by the main villain this point, and the party's biggest motivation is to rescue the Moon Child!

Not only is this question never answered, it's actually never even addressed! It's only when you start thinking about the plot in context does the question even open up, and THAT is a showing of a genius story writer. When a question is left unanswered, that's usually bad. But when the question itself is interesting enough? That lets a story live far beyond its reach.