Fanfic / Again (Breath of the Wild)

"Wake up, Link."

A hundred years after the Great Calamity, the young knight Link wakes in the Shrine of Resurrection, called by Princess Zelda of Hyrule. At her behest, he travels the land, slaying monsters, helping others, completing the tasks in the ancient Sheikah Shrines, freeing the giant Divine Beasts from blighted corruption, and finally vanquishing the monster that was Calamity Ganon. Finally, he and Zelda can rest.

Then, three days later, Link wakes up in the Shrine of Resurrection, called by the Princess again. And then he slays Ganon again. And then at midnight three days later, he wakes up in the Shrine. Again.

Again is a The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild fanfic written by Drich, with the premise that Link is trapped in a "Groundhog Day" Loop spanning the entirety of the game and three days after. As the loops progress and Link slowly progresses beyond his martial skill, he finds himself exploring Hyrule's limits and beyond, awakening magics, uncovering secrets forgotten by time and delving into the follies of gods and demons.

But will he ever escape the loop? And what will he be like if he does?

This story was written and completed in 2020, and as such, it does not take into the account the sequel game The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom or any of its lore. It can be found on Archive of Our Own here and on SpaceBattles.com here.

Warning. Spoilers for the original Breath of the Wild game will be unmarked.

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This Fan Fiction contains examples of the following tropes:

• Affectionate Nickname: As deference to the smartest man in the Nerd Squad (Robbie: Temporal Recursion Investigation and Prevention committee!), Purah calls Maz Koshia "Senior Nerd".
• Animal Motifs: Link and Zelda wonder why the Shadow Crystal turned Link into a dragon instead of a wolf like the Hero of Twilight. Fi posits that it's because dragons are powerful, benevolent, and have a propensity for hoarding precious stones.
• Ascended Extra: Sheikah Monk Maz Koshia, the Bonus Boss from the game, takes a bigger role in later loops, helping Link work out the nature of his curse.
• Aura Vision: When Link's magic is fully awakened, he is able to see the magic in and around Hyrule, from the natural shine of the Great Fairies, to the truth of spirits like King Rhoam, to the absolute wrongness that is Calamity and Malice.
• Awful Truth: Played for Laughs. In a later loop, Link finally collects all the Korok seeds, delivers them to Hestu... and upon receiving the final reward, finally realizes what he'd been collecting all this time. He can barely keep his stoic expression up to say goodbye to Hestu, whereupon he warps to Eldin and throws himself into the nearest hot spring.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • What would Link shapeshift into when he uses the Shadow Crystal? A wolf? Nah, a dragon.
  • It at first seems like the Fierce Deity Mask would be the solution to escaping the time loops, but Link manages to break the looping without it. It instead comes into play when Link connects with the God inside it to vanquish Demise and its curse for good.
• Big "NO!": The Malice-puppeted Ganondorf's reaction when Link pulls out the Fierce Deity Mask.
• Canon Welding: It's explicitly established that the events of the other Zelda games happened many millennia ago in Hyrule's history, with long-lived characters calling back to those events. As the loops go on, Link even uncovers relics from those events buried long ago.
  • Fi, the spirit of the Master Sword, is reawakened when Link learns how to channel his magic into his weapons and applies it to the Master Sword.
  • Maz Koshia tasks Link with finding and retrieving several ancient relics hidden in vaults across Hylia - the Sword of the Six Sages, the Shadow Crystal, and the Fierce Deity Mask.
• Captain Crash: Link becomes this after trying to use Revali's Gale to properly fly, then when he tries to fly in his dragon form, and then when he tries using both at once.
• Clingy MacGuffin: Once Link retrieves the Fierce Deity Mask, in every subsequent loop, it is right next to him when he wakes up. Link is relieved that the Mask in the current loop moves from its vault to his side, as opposed to there being multiples of a powerful divine artifact existing at the same time.
• Combined Energy Attack: The climax of the Final Battle has the Divine Beasts use their energy beams one more time, and the Fierce Deity absorbs all that power into the Master Sword, turning it into the helix-bladed Fierce Deity Sword and using it to smite Ganondorf, the Malice puppeting him, and the Curse of Demise all at once.
• Comical Nap Drool: One late morning, Link wakes up wondering why his sleeve feels damp, and since Zelda's head is in the way, he uses the Sheikah Slate to take a picture. When he sees that she is drooling on him, his snickering wakes her up, and she takes one look at the picture and goes bright red.
• Cooldown Hug: As Goddess Hylia is castigating herself for not finding another way to end their endless situation, Link kneels down and hugs her, understanding that she put him through 10 years of seemingly-unending torment for a chance to break Demise's cycle once and for all. The huggee is in disbelief.
  Hylia: I put you through hell. And you try to comfort me?
  Link: This isn't forgiveness. But that doesn't mean this isn't the right thing to do.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Link equates rampaging through a Bokoblin camp with a freed Guardian and its lasers to when he doesn't feel like looting and just breaks out the bomb arrows.
  • When Ganondorf's corpse rises from beneath Hyrule Castle, fueled with Malice, it finds itself completely outmatched by Link moving to face it. The 10 years and 6 days of looping, training, learning magic, practicing his skills and powers, and becoming a dragon means he can cut apart his enemy without it even touching him, with only its Malice-fueled regeneration allowing it to keep up. And that's not counting the Fierce Deity Mask.
• Deer in the Headlights:
  • As Link is practicing flying in his new dragon form, he suddenly freezes and looks up to see the Spirit Dragon Farosh curiously looking right back at him.
  • Maz Koshia's reaction to seeing the Fierce Deity Mask is to go very still like a prey animal in the vicinity of a predator.
• Deity of Human Origin: The Spirit of the Hero, formed when one man decided to protect his home many eons ago, has been reincarnating into Hero after Hero year after year, growing stronger and stronger until it couldn't contain itself. A piece fell off, containing a reflection of the spirit's original desire to fight to protect, and that fragment became a deity that not even time could contain - the Fierce Deity, the End of Evil.
• Determinator: In other "Groundhog Day" Loop stories, there may come loops where the hero gives up, makes a mistake, abandons his journey out of desperation or brokenness, or just ends it all, only to be brought right back to the beginning with nowhere else to go. Not so in this story. The constant loops in the beginning take a toll on Link's psyche, but in every single loop, he never falters in defeating Ganon and never fails to rescue Zelda. When Link posits that the time loop was a curse cast on him to break his spirit, Maz Koshia outright scoffs at the notion. Possibly justified in that for all Link knows, Calamity is controlling this time loop and is just trying again and again until Link finally loses, whereupon it'll make that loss stick.
• Dragons Are Divine: The three dragons Dinraal, Nayrda and Farosh are described by Kaysa as Divine Spirits, one level below true Deities like Hylia and Malanya.
• Evil Only Has to Win Once: The Malice-fueled corpse of Ganondorf says this to Link during their Final Battle, that he will keep coming back until the Hero loses, but Link inverts this trope by pointing out that he only needs to win once as well, by breaking the curse of Demise once and for all. And he has just the tool to do it: the Fierce Deity Mask, the End of Evil.
• Extended Disarming: Monetary variant. Kaysa requests as many Rupees as Link can find to awaken his latent magic, so Link returns after a marathon of collecting, upends his Sheikah Slate and starts pouring gems into her fountain... and keeps pouring... and pouring... and pouring until Kaysa is almost speechless.
• Forgiven, but Not Forgotten: Downplayed; Link explicitly doesn't forgive Hylia right away for putting him in the time loop without his consent for a chance to permanently defeat Ganondorf (and she doesn't want it anyway), but he understands her decision and knows he'd have made the same choice, and he is kind enough to comfort her over it.
• Fountain of Youth: Once Purah, Symin, Robbie and Jerrin are brought in to assist Maz Koshia with the time loop project, Purah perfects her time rune project and gives it to the others, de-aging herself, Robbie and Jerrin back to young adulthood (Symin just chooses to take 20 years off his own age).
• Gender Flip: When the Fierce Deity shows Link glimpses of his past lives as the past Heroes, a few of them are girls and women.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: After Link finally breaks down and tells Zelda about the time loops after his Speedrunning stint, Zelda points out that this was what was happening to him as he neglected all the sidequests and personal interactions in favor of saving her as fast as possible.
  Zelda: You’ve cut out your support structures, dropped everything you enjoyed doing, and you’ve been trapped against your will in a situation that you can’t resolve, which nobody else can remember, without any help, while the stress builds up.
• Groundhog Peggy Sue: The impetus of the fic; in that after Link vanquishes Calamity Ganon, exactly three days after at midnight, he wakes up back in the Shrine of Resurrection and has to complete his entire adventure all over again.
• Hand Gag: Link has to do this to Zelda before she cam tell Purah what he'd been collecting for Hestu and the Koroks, for subjective years.
• Heroic BSoD: Sidon has a dramatic collapse when Mipha's spirit (via Link after he frees Vah Ruta) tells him that she saw his last triple backflip. Judging by the sound he makes, it was especially unsuccessful.
• Had the Silly Thing in Reverse: Happens when Fi tries to pilot a remote-controlled Guardian, but has to get used to the commands. After one command drives the Guardian into the dirt:
  Fi: Vertical orientation is inverted. Correcting.
• Heroic Mime: Averted. In the first loop, Link is implied to speak, but isn't described as saying a word. After that, however, his dialogue is described like any other character.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The Goddess Hylia outright says this about the Curse of Demise, how its last desperate gambit eventually brought about its own end. When the Curse, through its latest host Ganondorf, learned about the Ancient Technology that could more effectively defeat it in any later encounter, it invested and bound itself extremely closely to its host to the point where it created Malice, hatred so strong that it could keep its host body alive, forcing the Sheikah of that time to seal it away instead of defeating it. However, in doing so, this binding also created a vulnerability in that if a powerful-enough force could destroy the Malice, it would also destroy the Curse itself.
• Holding Back the Phlebotinum: After Link and Fi learn to free Guardians from Malice, they prove to be a powerful way of dealing with Dark Beast Ganon, but in later loops, Link doesn't use them against the Divine Beasts for a few reasons. Aside from the fact that corrupted Guardians have been a symbol of fear across Hyrule for decades and bringing them near civilization would be an easy way to incite panic, the paths around Vah Ruta are too narrow, they aren't heat or lava-resistant enough for the volcano around Vah Rudania (especially not its meteors), Vah Medoh is completely out of reach (and can outrange the Skywatcher's lasers with its cannons), and they are extremely susceptible to Vah Naboris's lightning.
• If Only You Knew: Link at first pleads to Hylia, Goddess of Time to free him from the time loops, but Zelda posits that Calamity would have a better reason to trap Link in a time loop and keep trying until he fails, somehow keeping Hylia unaware of its temporal meddling. As it turns out, Hylia is aware of what's happening, and she also has a good reason for putting her loyal Hero in a time loop.
• Important Haircut: After Link takes Zelda on a dragonflight ride, she decides to cut her hair shorter, both to better enjoy the wind and because it's as freeing as her burning her princess dress. Link has to do it for her because she doesn't know how to do it herself, they're too busy to ask Impa, and everyone else is too intimidated by her.
• Insistent Terminology: Despite Robbie's insistence on calling the group tasked with investigating Link's time looping a proper name like the Temporal Recursion Investigation and Prevention committee, Purah is equally insistent on calling it "the Nerd Squad".
• Instant Expert: Maz Koshia doesn't need to explain more than the first step to teach Link how to maintain Guardian weapons. Link chalks it up to memories of his past lives bleeding over.
  • In a later loop, he decides to try repairing and playing all the musical instruments the Koroks had found, in search of one that he can't expertly play off the bat. After trying flutes, harps, guitars, and even the castle's old pipe organ, he finally finds one - Kass's accordion.
• Invincible Hero: Dozens of time loops, years in subjective time, and Link never fails to beat Ganon. Even at his lowest, most desperate, and least-armed, he still beats Ganon with nothing but sheer determination. Of course, the main threat in this story isn't something that can be cut down with a sword.
• I Should Have Been Better: The essence of Hylia's lament in the final scene, as she falls to the ground and sobs that she took the chance to end Demise for good at the cost of tormenting her loyal, chosen hero for subjective years.
  Hylia: I was weak! I should have kept looking! I should have kept searching! I should have found another way! I shouldn't have done that! I should have gotten on my hands and knees and begged for help, but what did I do?! I went for the easy way out!
• Item Amplifier: Link's first technique to manipulate his magic is to infuse and channel it through his weapons. Mundane weapons get a boost to their durability, magic weapons increase in damage (and burst if he overdoes it), ancient weapons get sharper and stronger, and the Master Sword has its guardian spirit, Fi, awakened.
• Jumped at the Call: When given the opportunity to work alongside an ancient Sheikah monk and an expert in Ancient Technology, Purah, Robbie and their assistants don't hesitate in packing up their workshops and shipping out.
• Kneel Before Frodo: When everything is over, the Goddess Hylia falls on her knees in front of Link and sobs fitfully, castigating herself for taking a chance to beat Demise's curse for good, putting her Hero into a time loop and subjecting him to years of torment, and taking, what she says, was the easy way out.
• Laugh Themselves Sick: The moment Link frees Zelda in one later loop, she turns to him with a huge grin, because he had just finished Hestu's quest and realized what Korok seeds were. Despite his begging, she eventually cracks, collapses to the ground, and cackles until her ribs hurt.
• Magic Knight: Even as Link unlocks his magic potential and learns to use new magical techniques beyond the Champions' powers, from his own time magic, weapon infusion, and dragon shapeshifting, he prefers to wield them alongside and to amplify his swordsmanship.
• Mark of the Supernatural: After putting on the Fierce Deity Mask and temporarily merging with the god, Link gets identical blue markings on his face.
• Money Is Experience Points: Specifically, Rupees are repositories of magic, which the Great Fairies can infuse into objects to awaken latent potential. Kaysa exposes Link to purified magic this way to strengthen his own time magic, and ends up fully unlocking his magical potential... by means of a ridiculous number of Rupees.
• Mr. Exposition:
  • Kaysa serves as this when introducing Link to magic properly and how it affects the whole of Hyrule, as well as fully awakening his own magic.
  • Monk Maz Koshia is this once he's read into Link's plight, proving to be a valuable font of knowledge about ancient Sheikah tech, even more than Purah and Robbie. He also is the one to describe Hylia's past and all the attempts to vanquish Demise before, including the attempt by the Sheikah that worked for 10,000 years.
• Mundane Object Amazement: When Maz Koshia refurbishes the Shrine of Resurrection to serve as a Home Base where he, Zelda and Link can analyze Link's curse, he adds a modern shower, bed and kitchen constructed with ancient Sheikah tech. Both Link and Zelda are fascinated.
• Mundane Utility: When Link has to dig through the Gerudo Desert to reach a vault beneath the sands without a shovel on hand, he uses Revali's Gale to unearth the vault while thinking that if Revali found out, he'd never hear the end of it.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Link at his most desperate and most Speedrun-ny mindset pulls off the pro-strategy of using stasis, explosives, a tree trunk, and the paraglider to blast himself straight from the Great Plateau to Hyrule Castle. And when King Rhoam sees what he's doing, he is first taken aback at the look in Link's eye, and then exclaims "What in the name of Hylia-?" when Link blasts off.
  • When Monk Maz Koshia learns about Link's time looping, he asks, "You have met a terrible fate, haven’t you?", which sends a shiver up Link's spine.
  • Impa once relates a Noodle Incident when Link tried to ride a bear and managed to set it, himself and part of the forest on fire.
  • The Koroks and the Deku Tree get excited when Link picks up an ocarina and plays Saria's Song.
  • When working to break the time loop, Robbie helps redesign a temporal amplifier, and though he didn't consult anything, Fi shows them that the completed design looks identical to a Timeshift Stone. Even Maz Koshia is amazed that the second oldest era of the Hero had technology that even surpassed his own in temporal workings.
• Never Got to Say Goodbye: Averted. In one loop, Link encourages King Rhoam to type a message into his Sheikah Slate to deliver to his daughter.
• Noodle Incident:
  • A story about Urbosa and a drunken incident that Link tells Riju to reassure her that she's doing fine as Gerudo leader.
    Link: Riju, I respected Urbosa greatly. I also once saw her challenge Daruk to a drinking contest, lose badly, ride a sand seal into a patch of voltfruit, declare war on cactus spines, claim to be the strongest Vai who ever lived, then headbutt a brick. The brick won. You are doing great.
    • Then later when he meets up with Urbosa's spirit:
      Urbosa: Of all the stories you could have given to encourage her... Did it have to be that one?
      Link: Would you have preferred the Molduga?
      Urbosa: I’d like at least some of my reputation intact. That one was fine.
  • Link also shares a similar story with Yunobo about Daruk, where he was mining with his Boulder Breaker and eating a Rock Roast at the same time, and got distracted and mixed them up.
• Note to Self: With a certain type of ancient Sheikah tech interface, Maz Koshia is able to store information within Fi, who can then pass it back to the Maz Koshia of future loops if he builds an identical interface. Once this is established, several others, including Zelda, store information to be passed on to themselves in future loops.
• Not So Above It All:
  • Fi comments that Link's dragon form is fitting for someone that is magical, benevolent, and hoards everything precious he can find. Link is speechless while Zelda laughs at the accurate comparison.
  • Zelda seriously considers Link using his dragon form to become a person-saving legend; Link can't believe she's considering it. Her main impetus is Link scaring her father in the next loop.
• Not So Invincible After All: When Zelda uses the Goddess of Time's power on Link, it delays the reset for a few seconds past midnight, meaning that this looping curse can be held back. And for the first time in over twenty loops, Link can smile.
• Not So Stoic: Monk Maz Koshia turns out to be just like Zelda and the other Sheikah scientists - the opportunity to analyze a magic curse for a problem that spans multiple timelines has him very excited - though he still hides it behind his mask.
• Obsessively Organized: What has been bothering Revali's spirit for 100 years? That there's a single target on his training ground set up at the wrong angle.
• Oh, Crap!: Link's reaction when he next wakes up in the Shrine of Resurrection, feels something next to him, and realizes the Fierce Deity Mask, which he uncovered in the previous loop, had traveled along with him.
• Past-Life Memories:
  • As Link comes across pieces of older Hylian civilizations, he starts to get inklings of his past lives. He knows Fi's name the moment he sees her, hearing the name "Ganondorf" fills him with just as much loathing as the name "Calamity Ganon", hearing the phrase "a terrible fate" fills him with dread, and he works out how to maintain Guardian weapons with just as much ease as when he first used the Sheikah Slate with no instruction.
  • As a boon for finally defeating Demise (and for putting Link through the time loops), Zelda asks that Hylia give her all the memories of her other selves from the other time loops, so that there's someone else other than Link and Fi that remembers all of that time.
• Power Dyes Your Hair: Gaining the blessings of the three dragons tints the fur and feathers of Link's dragon form with a rainbow of colors.
• The Power of Language: It's a simple thing, but when Fi starts looping alongside Link, she greets him at the beginning of every loop with a new and different phrase, as a reminder that he's not alone and that she's still remembering everything alongside him.
• Post-Victory Collapse: After finally escaping the time loop, Link has just enough time to feel satisfied before he keels over and sleeps. For fourteen hours.
• Prank Punishment: After Purah goes mad with excitement climbing all over Link's dragon form and examining every inch of him, Link gets his own back by taking Zelda for their first flying ride and when they're done, declaring there isn't time to go again, driving Purah up the wall with envy.
• Properly Paranoid: Link uncovers an ancient vault containing an object of great power, hidden behind three massive vault doors. Link at first thinks it's a bit much, but then the third door opens and the power from the Fierce Deity Mask knocks the wind out of him.
• Rage Against the Heavens: Zelda falls into a Tranquil Fury as she realizes that Hylia, Goddess of Light and Time, was indeed responsible for putting Link in the time loops, and demands to know if there was at all a good reason. Afterwards, she is more angry at the Goddess than Link is.
• Rock Beats Laser: When Link is pulling off his Speedrun:
  Guardian beams flash, but Link has a pot lid, a traveller’s shield, and a few pieces of wood that used to belong to some Bokoblins. The Guardians die.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Everyone Link meets (from the second loop on) are glad that Link's memories are still intact, with Purah and the other engineers glad that the Shrine of Resurrection didn't wipe his memories like they feared.
• Running Gag:
  • Zelda burning her white dress that she just spent 100 years in with vindictive glee once she's freed. It starts off with Flameblades, and then it escalates to Guardian Lasers and beyond...
• Sadistic Choice: The Goddess Hylia finds herself faced with one when she finds out about the Hex that could loop Calamity Ganon's consciousness back in time to eventually defeat the Hero. If she breaks the Hex right then, then the timeline continues as normal, Link beats the Calamity, and then Ganondorf's seal breaks in a few years when they would not be ready and the cycle starts again. If she doesn't break the Hex right then, there will be more devastation when Ganondorf comes back, and although the time-meddling would allow her to act further, she's only strong enough to seal him again for another finite amout of time. She instead chooses to shift the Hex to Link, putting him in the time-looping situation instead, allowing him more time to learn and grow and when he eventually broke free of the loop, he'd be all the more equipped to defeat Ganon and break Demise's curse once and for all - at the cost of several years of mental torment and strain to her Champion. Even after making the choice and seeing it all work out, she still doesn't think it was worth it and berates herself for taking the easy way out.
• Sanity Slippage: Chapter 4 encompasses over twenty time loops and an increasingly desperate Link, as he gets the idea that the faster he beats Ganon, the sooner Zelda is freed and the less her power will have faded, which could be the solution to escaping the time loop. What results is Link eeking every ounce of efficiency out of his runs, a rapidly shrinking list of sidequests and NPC interactions with half-hearted justifications for helping them later, even skipping the Divine Beasts and the Master Sword, until he's insane enough to go straight from the Great Plateau to Castle Hyrule and beat Ganon with nothing but scrounged weapons and raw experience. Zelda, after hearing the details, points out he was starting to Go Mad from the Isolation.
• Serial Escalation: Played straight for Link as each loop gifts him new skills, magic and powers, from awakening his magic and learning how to purify Guardians, to becoming a Weredragon via the Shadow Crystal and obtaining the Fierce Deity Mask. However, there is one aversion: after Link awakens his magic through the means of Kaysa shoving a fortune of Rupees' worth of magic into him, he finds that this awakening carries over into the next loop, and he approaches Kaysa to wonder what would happen if they repeated the process. Kaysa demurs after some thought, saying that shoving too much magic into his soul might make him burst.
• Sequence Breaking: As Link gains more knowledge and skills from past loops, he can do a few things out of order.
  • In the very second loop, Link addresses the spirit of King Rhoam by name, and not only does Rhoam reveal himself, but he also gives Link his paraglider before he has to do any of the shrines.
  • Once Fi is reawakened and joins Link in looping, he is able to pull the Master Sword without going through any of the trials, though he still does them to use its full potential.
  • After Maz Koshia is informed of Link's situation, he shows Link how to bypass the security protocols inside the Shrine of Resurrection, so that he can get to the Monk and ask for his help the moment he wakes up in a new loop. He also gives Link the Master Cycle Zero right off the bat.
• Speedrun: Invoked when Link gets the idea that if he beats Ganon and frees Zelda fast enough, her power will have had less time to fade and Hylia will be satisfied enough to free him. What follows are a series of rapidly escalating loops until Link is pulling the pro-strat of stasis-exploding himself clear to the Castle, deflecting Guardian lasers with a pot lid, and facing Ganon with a castle-ful of weapons, no armor, and raw experience and determination.
• Stunned Silence:
  • Link's reaction when Hestu tells him just how many Korok seeds were in his maracas for him to find, and that, after three dozen loops, he'd only found half.
  • King Rhoam is so dumbfounded when a dragon crawls out of the Shrine of Resurrection that he just freezes in place and drops his lantern. Perfect for Link to get a picture for Zelda.
• Spit Take: Link's first opinion of his new dragon body is that he feels like a floppy noodle, which causes Zelda to choke on her water.
• Spontaneous Weapon Creation: Link's second technique to manipulate pure magic; shaping it into a physical form to use. He can't make more than solid shapes that shatter after a single good hit, any weapon larger than a single-handed sword isn't energy-efficient enough and bows are too complex, but having infinite arrows and daggers proves incredibly useful, and he can even cook using conjured utensils while keeping his real hands free.
• Super-Empowering: Once Link learns how to transform into a dragon without the Shadow Crystal, Dinraal, Naydra and Farosh all give him their blessings, allowing him to command their elements of fire, ice and lightning.
• Take Your Time: Invoked by Zelda after Link finally tells her about his plight, who outright tells Link that she has held the Calamity off for 100 years and can hold out for another few months while he prepares, including connecting with and helping everyone in Hyrule. Considering she has just seen the aftermath of Link spending multiple time loops trying to save her as fast as possible, ignore all his sidequests, all but lose his mind in the process, and face down Calamity Ganon under-armed and one mistake away from losing, this isn't surprising.
  Zelda: There is no need for you to hurry through these loops. I want you to take your time. I want you to gather your strength again, in the future, if this happens again. Be as fast as you like, but I need you to do so safely.
  Link: “I’ll be making you wait. With Calamity.
  Zelda: Then I will wait. You’re more important to me than a few extra months with that demon. It’s already been a hundred years, trust me when I say that I won’t even care. However, you absolutely must do your best to live.
• Time Loop Fatigue: At the end of the 20+ non-stop Speedrun loops, Link is so worn out at so many attempts of just trying to save Zelda faster that when Zelda asks if he's okay, he breaks down sobbing in her arms.
• There Are No Coincidences: While exploring the origins of Link's time-looping hex, Maz Koshia posits that Calamity intended on using it on itself, to gain enough experience to eventually beat the hero. In fact, it may already have tried, since it was curiously prescient that Calamity appeared right when all the Champions were far away from their Divine Beasts and when Link and Zelda were far away from the castle, and even though it had been sealed away for millennia, knew enough about Sheikah technology to instantly corrupt the Guardians and the Divine Beasts, and about the Champions to create Blights tailor-made to defeat them. However, Hylia later informs Zelda that the Hex was never triggered during that time, Calamity learned of Ancient Technology during its slumber, and its ill-timed emergence was sheer good luck on its part.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: Link, with his newly awakened magic, can now perceive the sheer vileness, hatred and wrongness that comes off of Malice and Calamity, and all he wants to do is take the Master Sword and excise every inch of it from the world, now thinking that he was blessed to be unable to perceive magic. Kaysa notices his reaction and repeats what she said before the awakening: "Some doors, once opened, cannot be closed."
• Time Master: This fic establishes that Link's Bullet Time arrow-firing and Flurry Rush swordsmanship are a result of his innate time magic, on the level of the other Champions' powers. After he fully awakens to his magic, he gains the wherewithal to practice it more, until he can extend his Bullet Time into outright Time Stands Still levels.
• Trauma Button: For several nights after finally escaping the time loop, when the clock strikes midnight, Link involuntarily prepares his magic to force the curse back, only for Zelda to remind him that he's free and doesn't need to do that any more.
• Uncanny Valley: Link experiences this In-Universe when he sees the Fierce Deity Mask, which exactly resembles his own face other than the facial markings and the Blank White Eyes. As if out of all of his incarnations, it was waiting for him.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Third-loop Zelda comments that it's only natural that after 100 years of sealing Calamity Ganon, her powers to reach the goddess have faded. This comment sparks Link's motivation to free her as fast as possible as the win condition to escape the loop, which spirals into over twenty loops of progressive speedrunning and equivalent Sanity Slippage.
• Vehicular Turnabout: Fi learns that she can connect to Guardians and purge Malice's influence from them, turning them into Link's allies.
• Were Dragon: When Link uses the Shadow Crystal, he is transformed into a dragon, more lizard-like than the serpentine Farosh, Naydra, and Dinraal, and with feathered wings.
• Wham Line:
  • The end of Chapter 27, when Maz Koshia gains enough data to start answering the questions of how exactly this time looping curse works, how it can be broken, and how it was cast without Link noticing.
    Maz Koshia: And this brings me to something I have only speculated until recently. I do not believe that Link was the intended target of this Hex.
  • Princess Zelda has one in Chapter 39, after the Goddess Hylia mentions something she could've only known if she was watching things closely - the exact amount of subjective time Link had been looping for. And if the Goddess of Time herself was aware of Link's time loops, yet did nothing to free her hero from them...
    Zelda: We... always wondered, how you didn’t notice. But the real question we should have been asking wasn’t that, was it?
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: After Link gives Kaysa three to four hundred thousand Rupees worth of magic for her to purify to awaken his own magic, the last thing she says before flicking the magic at him is, "What's the worst that could happen?" The resulting flash of magic puts Link out for several hours, lights up the sky from the other side of Hyrule, and even briefly gets the Calamity's attention.
• What's Up, King Dude?: In the second loop, when Link meets King Dorephan, he greets him with, "Your Majesty, Mipha's Dad". Dorephan finds it hilarious, as the last time Link said that to him, it was over a hundred years ago and Link was only five years old.
• You Are Not Alone: After Link nearly Goes Mad from the Isolation over several loops of nothing but Speedrunning, Zelda orders him to tell her new self about the time loop the moment he resets, as he needs to not be alone during his trials. Indeed, companionship is an important aspect of Link keeping his sanity through the following loops, he is incredibly relieved and happy when Fi starts looping alongside him, and it is the assistance of Maz Koshia and the other Sheikah scientists that finally lets him escape.
• You Do Not Want To Know: Purah, as always, is curious about what Link was doing with 'that', and since 'that' is the Fierce Deity Mask, Link, Zelda and even Maz Koshia tell her that she does not want to know.
• Zerg Rush: In the loop where Link learns to purge Calamity's influence from the Guardians with Fi's help, the final confrontation with Dark Beast Ganon has Link commanding an entire army of freed laser-firing Guardians against the monstrosity.

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11:30. 11:50. 11:55. 11:58. 11:59...

"Wake up, Link."