I’m confused on the story in Totk. I know totk is after BotW, but I’m curious about the other events in the game. The game talks about a war, which is the imprisoning war. This would put it squarely in the “hero is defeated” timeline before the events of a link to the past.
“7 sages seal away Ganon in the imprisoning war”
What is confusing me however is that Rauru is claimed to be the first king of Hyrule. Hyrule however was founded well before the imprisoning war. It was actually founded shortly after the bandaging of the twili and sealing of the sacred realm. Now, in the timeline it states that sage Rauru seals the sacred realm to protect the tri-force. But that isn’t the imprisoning war, nor do I think it’s the same Rauru. But it also states that Skyward Sword Zelda’s descendants founded Hyrule shortly after the sealing of the sacred realm. Skyward Sword Zelda wasn’t a Zonai though.
Does anyone understand the timeline enough to explain what I am missing? It just feels like Rauru is too many people
IIRC the “timeline” was originally just a fun little thought experiment by the playerbase a la “what if all of these stories exist in the same universe instead of being separate legends” and Nintendo just rolled with it eventually … but the actual games have always had their own contained stories that aren’t actually fully compatible with each other, retcon or change things that “happened in the past” and generally shouldn’t be viewed as being in the same universe, otherwise things get VERY confusing (like for example why TH Majora’s Mask is present in BotW and Link can just wear it without being taken over by the evil spirit sealed within, or why you can get multiple “Goddess Swords” in BotW despite it being the unique, Hylia-made proto version of the Master Sword).
Nintendo just likes to re-use known plot elements and characters, like that every wise (old) Sheikah woman close to Zelda is automatically Impa. “Rauru” is no exception to this - the Sage of Light in Ocarina of Time for example was also called Rauru, but he was definitely a Hylian back then and definitely also NOT the King of Hyrule.
What confuses my more TBH is that Zelda is somehow Rauru’s and Sonia’s descendant. If they had kids already before Zelda got sent back in time, why weren’t they ever mentioned? And since they’re both dead at the very beginning of the game, it isn’t exactly likely that they managed to have kids after the events of TotK either, so … how?! This can’t be explained by plot dissonance between games as all of it happened within TotK.