Ganondorf: Hyrule's Menace or simply misunderstood...?

The Legend of Zelda has been a long running staple in the Nintendo franchise. Since 1986 the world of Hyrule has taken many on a journey through hardship, battle and emotions in order to save it from the very incarnation of evil itself. Ganon, also referred to as Ganondorf in later games, serves as the primary antagonist of the series struggling against our hero to gain complete dominance over Hyrule for the sake of greed and power. Now while I'm not one to argue this fact, I have always wondered if our power hungry pig friend was always truly evil. I always wondered what brought him to this place where he felt the need to gain more power. While little is actually given on Ganon's history aside from serving as the primary antagonist in a majority of the games, his life is pretty much shrouded in mystery. It's not until later in the series that the players are given a specific type of background on our evil foe with the first glimpse of this in the 1997 game Ocarina of Time. I always enjoyed the fact that Ganon wasn't necessarily defeated in Ocarina of Time's installment so much as he was simply sealed away. It showed that despite obtaining the power through dark methods, Ganon insured himself a place in all of eternity as a wielder of the sacred Triforce. I would honestly love to see a game where the players dive into Ganon's story and what exactly made him be this utterly corrupt, power driven monster who plunges Hyrule into a world of chaos with his rule. What brought him to this point?

So we get a sense of a prophecy with Ganon's backstory in Ocarina of Time as he's the first male born every 100 years within his tribe. While not necessarily making a whole lot of sense for the people of the tribe, it gives the players a strong sense that his coming to be was destiny's form of a cruel joke. Better yet, every male born into the Gerudo tribe is then tasked with being the king of them! Royalty! That presence doesn't get any better! One could only imagine how a boy with such a large destiny ahead of himself becomes so obsessed with getting more and more power. What pushed him to this point? Was he unfit to rule? Weaker than the other females and unable to command their respect because of it? I'm not simply convinced that he was just born evil, no one simply is.

On top of all of this Ganon succeeds in obtaining the Triforce of Power making it so that he will be forever locked in battle against the other wielders of the remaining two piece, creating a balance between the three forces. The fact that a villain becomes an everlasting being in this eternal struggle blew my mind as a child. Never, as a child, had something that different ever cross my paths in other games and stories. One simply defeated the enemy saved the world. Nah uh, not in this game! Ganon became a permanent piece on the board that could never truly be defeated, simply hindered. This blew my mind!

Call me a skeptic, but I have a hard time believing that the world of Hyrule simply existed without turmoil. While nothing ever describes the world ever having issues, there is a reason why Ganon finds Zelda and her kingdom as unfit to rule the land. So I ask what this reason is? Why is it that he's so obsessed with ruling over a kingdom if there is nothing apparently wrong with the way things are? Has the royal family scorned Ganon before? Could there potentially be a bigger story to Ganon than simply craving the desire to rule over a kingdom and bring the world into his rule?

After seeing the Watchmen film, I couldn't help but find logic in grand scheme of things and how Dr. Manhattan serving as the ultimate evil helped unite the world from their internal conflict. Ganon plays a similar role in this aspect. While oppressing a majority of Hyrule, does he not succeed in uniting them against a central force. It was Jack Heath that wrote the famous quote from The Lab that said: "better the devil you know than the devil you don't." Ganon serves this purpose as he is the great evil that the world knows about and strives to overcome. Being a central enemy greater than any other forces people to see the pointless bickering over small things to unite them towards a common goal. This I argue is Ganon's great achievement, as he turns a world of separation into a world of unity. Before this, every race merely kept to themselves for the most part. The Gorons stayed on their mountain, the Zora's in their ocean, and several other races in their respective homes. Ganon broke through barriers to make them leave their areas of comfort to endure a battle that forces others to work together in supporting a warrior of light, our great hero Link.

Without evil Link would have no need to exist because the world wouldn't need him to intervene. He would simply be an ordinary boy going about an ordinary life. Maybe it's some underlying message from Nintendo's writers, but why not simply have Link defeat Ganon once and for all? It's this eternal balance that Nintendo strives to explain, showing the players that no matter what happens, evil will always exist in one form or another. Nothing in this world completely defeats it. Ganon is destined to always return. He's a piece of a much larger constructed mechanism that's always in motion.

Personally, I would love to see a Zelda game discussing the origin of Ganon and what let him to be the way he is currently seen. It would definitely be a new direction Nintendo could go that could be done very well.