Okay, not really, but I do believe this is a better option, and one that is much better supported by the evidence. To support my argument that there is only one Ganon, I am going to use two kinds of evidence. The first kind of evidence is the kind we are all familiar with: canon evidence from trustworthy sources (namely, games and manuals). The second kind of evidence is a sort I have not used before in an article on this site: creator evidence. Creator evidence is any evidence that gives insight into the intention of the creators, regardless of whether it is in the Zelda canon or not. Why am I considering such evidence? Because the games were made by these creators, and if anybody's intention should have weight, it is theirs. If the creators intended for something to be true in their world, then it is a waste of time to speculate otherwise. There are of course important caveats one must keep in mind when using such evidence - for example, do we really understand what they're saying, and was their intention communicated to us correctly? But that is a subject for another article. In this article I am only going to use very straightforward evidence, the clarity of which no reasonable person can deny.
To explain why I believe there is one Ganon, I will give the story behind Ganondorf and Ganon, as I think the creators have intended to tell it all along. If you don't believe this account, please bear with me to the end, because I think you will find that it is well supported. Now then, the history of Ganon begins with Ganondorf. Ganondorf was just a regular human until he found the Triforce. He used the Triforce to become an evil king, and he took on the name of "Ganon" as well. At times he appears in monster form, and usually, but not always, this monster form is known as Ganon. Ganon was first told about in LoZ and AoL, but this is when Ganondorf has already been Ganon for many long years. We got our first peak at Ganondorf, Ganon's original human form, in the ALttP manual:
One day, quite by accident, a gate to the Golden Land of the Triforce was opened by a gang of thieves skilled in the black arts. This land was like no other. In the gathering twilight, the Triforce shone from its resting place high above the world. In a long running battle, the leader of the thieves fought his way past his followers in a lust for the Golden Power. After vanquishing his own followers, the leader stood triumphant over the Triforce and grasped it with his blood- stained hands. He heard a whispered voice: "If thou has a strong desire or dream, wish for it..." And in reply, the roaring laughter of the brigand leader echoed across time and space and even reached the far-off land of Hyrule. The name of this king of thieves is Ganondorf Dragmire, but he is known by his alias, Mandrag Ganon, which means Ganon of the Enchanted Thieves. (U.S. manual, SNES version, p.5)
This is the story as given in the American ALttP SNES manual. Note that, from the perspective I'm giving, this story about Ganondorf is giving background information about Ganon, a character we are
already supposed to know about from the NES games. Keeping that in mind, I would like to point out some things from the Japanese version of the manual. (Wherever the American version of a source differs from the Japanese version, the Japanese version wins. The Japanese version is closer to the original intention of the creators. The American version is a translation, and translations often go awry.) Now, the last sentence of the above quote is significantly different in the Japanese version of the manual:
The man's name was Ganondorf, and his common name was Ganon of the race of evil thieves. Indeed, the King of Evil Ganon, the one who has threatened Hyrule so, was born at this time. (Zethar-II's translation)
According to Zethar, that last sentence implies or assumes that the reader already knows who Ganon is. "Duh," the reader is supposed to think, "they're talking about Ganon from the NES games." This sentence is saying that the Ganon we all know and love from the NES games was
born right here. That is to say, the thief Ganondorf became the evil king Ganon, the
same Ganon from the NES games, when he got the Triforce. Now why, I ask, would the creators appeal to knowledge that the reader is already supposed to have about the NES Ganon, if they
really intended for this to be a different Ganon? The common-sense answer is clear: the creators intended for ALttP to tell more about the NES Ganon, not to introduce a new Ganon.
(On a side note, Wind Waker corroborates this story about "Ganon" being Ganondorf's common name. The names "Ganon" and "Ganondorf" are mixed almost interchangably in TWW. In fact, he is most often called Ganon by those who know about him best (such as the King, Valoo, Jabun, etc.) Sometimes they call him Ganondorf, and he calls himself Ganondorf.)
My next topic is Ocarina of Time. There has literally been endless debate in the Zelda community whether the events depicted in OoT correspond to the "Imprisoning War" described in the ALttP manual. Thanks to this confusion and the proliferation of debate, there have been many opinions about where the Imprisoning War is placed in the timeline. Some put it before OoT. Some put it during. Some put it after. Nobody agrees on anything. Since this issue pertains to theories about whether there is one Ganon or many, I will attempt to quash some of the more radical theories with some simple interview quotes. These quotes are real beauties, and I would never have found them without the help of Mak and Zethar-II. (Thanks guys!)
The first quote comes from the Japanese magazine Famimaga 64. This interview was conducted with Miyamoto-san around November 26, 1997, about a year before the game's release. Miyamoto answered 100 questions about OoT in this interview. This translation was originally posted on IGN64.com, and the whole transcript can be viewed
here.
Q: Are the backgrounds different in the child and adult eras?
Miyamoto: During the time when Link is an adult, conditions are intensified. Ganon, from the Super NES game, is a human form before he transforms into a monster. Ganon's elements change during the adult, since he changes into a monster.
The second quote comes from
Ki no ue no Himitsu kichi, a Japanese gaming web site. This is an Ocarina of Time interview, parts of which were translated by Zethar-II. The quote is from character designer Satoru Takizawa.
This time, the story really wasn't an original. We were dealing with the "The Imprisoning War of the Seven Sages" from the SNES edition Zelda. To give that game a little "secret" recognition, I thought that keeping the "pigness" in Ganon would be the correct course. So we made him a beast "with the feeling of a pig."
These two quotes should make it pretty obvious that Ocarina of Time is meant to be a further explanation of the Imprisoning War account in the ALttP manual. It should also be obvious that Ganon(dorf) in OoT and Ganon in ALttP are the same person, because, well, the creators said so.
The one-Ganon interpretation is corroborated by all available Nintendo of America (NOA) materials, including guides, Nintendo Power magazine, and NOA's web sites. NOA is admittedly not the most reliable source for solid Zelda facts. I am the first to admit that, in the early days at least, NOA was not very careful when they communicated the story of Zelda to us. However, I do have some sources which supposedly have information straight from the creators, relatively untainted by carelessness and stupidity. Two summaries of an early version of OoT's story were published by NOA in 1997. They supposedly came straight from the creators, and are therefore of great interest to fans.
The first comes from Nintendo Power magazine, volume 103 (Dec 1997). It implies that there is one Ganon, the same Ganon one has been familiar with in past Zelda games.
The outline of the story for Zelda 64 comes straight from EAD, the chief game development department at Nintendo Company Ltd. in Kyoto, Japan. Although EAD considers everything "tentative" until the final version of a game is completed, much of what you read here will be part of Mr. Miyamoto's greatest epic. Long ago, before Gannon stole the Triforce and kidnapped Zelda, Link set out to his coming-of-age ceremony in the Maze Woods.
The second quote comes from Nintendo's own web site, Nintendo.com. Thanks to the Internet Archive, this page was preserved for prosperity and can still be viewed at
this URL. Once again, it is implied that OoT stars the same Ganon we are supposed to be familiar with from earlier Zelda games.
Prepare to journey once again to Hyrule, land of the ancestors of the gods, in Zelda 64. As Zelda 64 gets closer to release this winter in Japan, additional details about the game's setting and story line are being revealed by the game's developers. Even though Zelda 64's story is set in the misty past, players will once again take on the mantle of the young hero, Link.
[...]
Zelda 64 tells the story of an earlier age of Hyrule, when Gannon was merely known as the king of thieves and not the powerful creature of evil he becomes in the other Legend of Zelda adventures.
One could argue that it's
possible the creators didn't say it was the same Ganon, and that NOA merely assumed this. However, if you look at the two interview quotes from Miyamoto I gave above, you will see that this information is confirmed by a direct quote from a creator. One could then argue that Miyamoto was mistaken. After all, he did state his own timeline order, which most people suspect must be wrong. My answer is, it is possible for the creators to say something that is wrong, but this doesn't mean they're wrong all the time, or should always be suspect. I don't think it's possible for any creator to be careless about something this important. I do think the creators take a kind of cavalier attitude toward the storyline many times. That is why the timeline seems to be a confusing hodgepodge, and why certain creators are confused at times about the story. But as far as there being one Ganon, that's pretty simple and straightforward. Either they decided from the start that there was one Ganon, or they decided there were many. I think the above evidence points to the former option.
Finally, one could argue that the interviews do not say what the creators really meant to say. That is, everybody misunderstood the creators and, assuming there is one Ganon, made it appear that the creators are saying this. All I can say to that is, if the creators intended for there to be multiple Ganons, they would have
said so in order to keep people from assuming there is only one. As it is,
nothing says that there is not one Ganon. So, almost by default, we are left to assume there is only one Ganon, since this is the easiest course given the similarity of all the Ganons. I doubt the creators would have left us to assume there is one Ganon, if they really intended for there to be multiple Ganons. They would have tried to correct such a misunderstanding by saying explicitly that there are multiple Ganons.
Perhaps some people will still want to be a stick-in-the-mud, or play devil's advocate. "I can't accept these rubbish sources," they'll say, "I only believe sources I consider canon: games and manuals." I was once this way. However, after seeing the preponderance of evidence given above, any doubt about the matter was in my mind erased. If you can't believe the creators when they're being
pretty clear, then who can you believe? Even if you choose to only look at evidence from the games and manuals, I think the one-Ganon interpretation is the only one that makes sense. As far as I can see, people only believe in multiple Ganons (a) because it helps their crazy, messed up timeline theory, or (
they want to be different. All I can say is, if you keep in mind that the creators were
intending to tell about one Ganon in the Zelda games, then the facts given in the games fit, and make a lot of sense. If you try to suppose otherwise, you'll be in for a world of pain, theory-wise. Most of the facts in the Zelda canon imply that there is only one Ganon, and do not in any way suggest there are more than one. I'm not going to spend my time giving all the evidence from games and manuals that supports the one-Ganon theory. If you approach the Zelda games with
too open a mind, you can come up with
any theory you want about the matter. I cannot prove every deviant theory wrong, because there are too many of them, and all of them are possible given
only canon facts. Eventually you have to draw a common-sense line: if the creators intended for a certain thing to be true, you'd be better off not wasting your time theorizing otherwise.
Conclusion
I have argued that multiple-Ganon theories are based on very little. A fair examination of all available facts leads naturally to the conclusion that there is one Ganon, not that there are many. People generally like to speculate about multiple Ganons to be different, or because it helps with their crazy timeline theory. Generally, the only support for multiple-Ganon theories is canon evidence that is pulled out and forced to fit. As Sherlock Holmes says, facts are twisted to fit theories, instead of theories being based on the trend of all available facts. It is very difficult to prove anything in Zelda using only canon facts from the games, because the facts are so vague that many different theories are possible. So, instead of trying to prove there is one Ganon using canon facts, I instead gave evidence from outside the Zelda canon. My evidence, if one chooses to believe it, shows that the creators
intended for there to be one Ganon, even if they didn't state this too clearly within the Zelda canon itself. The Zelda canon itself shows all the signs that the creators intended for there to be one Ganon: an examination of the relevant facts naturally leads to a belief in one Ganon.
One might disagree with an assumption I have made throughout this article: that a fair examination of the Zelda canon leads to a belief in one Ganon. After all, I have not bothered to give a fair examination of the relevant canon facts in this article. However, I do have some evidence for that statement, which is this: most Zelda fans believe there is one Ganon. In fact, most fans think it is obvious there is only one Ganon. It is true that not everybody examines the Zelda facts fairly; but the fact remains that, after playing through the games, the natural conclusion to make is that there is one Ganon. If the creators had intended for there to be multiple Ganons, they would have put in a LOT of facts to illustrate this intention, and it would thus be natural for fans to conclude there are multiple Ganons. After all, the point of creating anything is to get one's intention across. If the creators really intended for there to be multiple Ganons, and yet it
appears that there is only one, then the creators have failed miserably. I don't think any true Zelda fan would prefer to retain their crazy multiple-Ganon theory, if it means assuming that the creators have failed miserably in their storytelling. But that's up to fans to decide for themselves.
