Tears of the Kingdom’s Light Dragon can teach you a lot about Zelda’s legacy

This story is part of Straight Fire, an open-ended love letter to all things dragon. Get more fire here.

A shimmering, wingless dragon slithers through the sky high above Hyrule. Get close enough to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s Light Dragon — all golden scales and glowing teal shards — and you’ll notice something unique about this dragon: the Master Sword is embedded in the dragon’s head, stuck right between its horns. And it’s no accident that Link’s weapon is stuck in this particular dragon’s skull; the Light Dragon is, perhaps, the most important character in Tears of the Kingdom.

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for Tears of the Kingdom.]

That’s because the Light Dragon is Princess Zelda, the daughter of the king of Hyrule.

Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo’s follow-up to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, begins with a broken seal releasing the decaying corpse of Ganondorf back into the world as rifts open up and a deep gloom covers Hyrule. Sent back in time, Zelda’s forced to make a decision: She swallows a powerful, secret stone to undergo the process of “draconification,” turning herself into an immortal dragon — the Light Dragon. Her memories are scattered around Hyrule in puddles of water called Dragon’s Tears, which is where the player learns that Zelda’s sacrifice is what gives Link the power to defeat Ganondorf. She’s protecting the Master Sword for thousands of years until it regains its strength.

Zelda has so many of the qualities that we’ve come to recognize with dragons, especially East Asian dragons — she’s wise, powerful, and benevolent. Her presence is always looming about the franchise, even when she’s not directly involved, like an ancient myth. Tears of the Kingdom, too, leaves us with a big question about Zelda’s legacy and the placement of the game within the Zelda timeline; Tears of the Kingdom establishes that Zelda’s been embodying the Light Dragon for hundreds or thousands of years.

For decades, dragons have had a quiet importance in the Legend of Zelda series — as both friend and foe. Tears of the Kingdom is the culmination of decades’ worth of respect and reverence, pulling together a legacy fit for the princess of Hyrule. The Light Dragon and the three other dragons in Tears of the Kingdom are of no threat to Hyrule, though the latter three are territorial. Farosh, Naydra, or Dinraal will hurt Link with their elemental powers, unless he’s wearing the right armor.

At times, the Light Dragon can be unpredictable and wild; it’s made clear that Zelda is not fully herself in there, her memories lost when she transformed. As Link attempts to pull the Master Sword from the dragon’s head, she shakes her head in protest. Link will only succeed if he’s got enough stamina to resist the dragon’s attempts to fling him off as something inside the Light Dragon recognizes the swordsman and she untangles the hair holding the sword in place. There are hints, too, that Zelda’s inside there somewhere — fusing the Light Dragon’s shards to Link’s weapons is healing, a nod, perhaps, to Zelda’s caring relationship with Link.

It’s immediately obvious that the Light Dragon, as well as Dinraal, Farosh, and Naydra, are based in East Asian mythology and not European imagery, which is evidenced most prominently by the dragons’ long, snake-like bodies and lack of wings. From their long snouts, these creatures have long, flowing whiskers and tufts of hair topped with a set of horns. (The Demon Dragon, too, from the end of Tears of the Kingdom has a similar look — but, of course, is indeed evil.)

The Light Dragon actually more closely resembles a Chinese dragon, according to descriptions from The Dragon Companion: An Encyclopedia author Carole Wilkinson: Chinese dragons are typically depicted with four toes and branched horns, and are found in the air rather than the sea, she writes. The similarities extend to dragon disposition, too. Traditionally, the Chinese dragon is “the symbol of most divine protection,” but the Japanese dragon is a symbol of power, Wuhan University sociology researchers wrote in 2010. Dragons are to be respected as sacred gods, not feared as monsters like they’re depicted in European mythology, where dragons are often greedy, destructive, and evil.

Tears of the Kingdom director Hidemaro Fujibayashi and producer Eiji Aonuma spoke about the portrayal of dragons on the Nintendo Power Podcast: “Instead of having that battle theme or something that will have an adrenaline rush, we thought something mystical, maybe something serene and a different experience would make the adventure for the player be more exciting,” Fujibayashi said. “That’s why we decided not to make it necessarily like a battle. And addressing the idea of how Japanese people portray dragons, we wanted to incorporate that feel of godliness or maybe something more serene.”

“In lots of Japanese folklore, there’s often stories where dragons are basically incarnations of gods,” Aonuma added.

Breath of the Wild, where Dinraal, Farosh, and Naydra were first introduced, showcases this: Through the Zonai lore, we learn that the ancient civilization worshipped dragons. In their culture, dragons represented courage (one of the three values represented by the Triforce). Players discovered that the three elemental dragons each seem to have a piece of the Triforce inscribed on their backs — together completing the iconic symbol.

Tears of the Kingdom’s logo even harkens back to the Zonai’s symbolic dragons; two dragons create an ouroboros — the symbol for life, death, and rebirth. As pointed out by the Triforce Times, you could map those words onto Link, Ganon, and Zelda. In fact, you could apply all those words to Zelda herself in Tears of the Kingdom: In becoming a dragon, she sacrificed both life and death. And only through her legacy was she able to be reborn.