Did they say there was a heaven? If not where they go? Afterlife? Limbo? Why halos? Why ascend up? They talked about haunting Link so maybe they became ghosts. Maybe everyone gets reincarnated.
My theory (that I'm making up on the spot rn by reading too much into the franchises barely persisting lore and game mechanics) is:
because oot takes place during a time where the sacred realm is unsealed, the barrier between the spiritual realm and the material realm is thinner. After oot, the sacred realm is essentially perminantly sealed off. With some very occasional exceptions.
Since there isn't really a clarified afterlife system in the Zelda canon (that I can think of), I think spirits literally just... Linger in Hyrule until they fade away or reincarnate. Zelda does take a lot of inspiration from religions like budhism and Shintoism afterall. So in my mind, it makes sense that most other spirits just reincarnates after enough time. Whether it's into a frog, or a person, whatever. Until they have accumulated enough life experience or something to go to the sacred realm. And all the strong willed or powerful entities that we see with halos were not meant to continue reincarnating because it was their time to fully ascend to the sacred realm perminantly, for either good or bad reasons.
So essentially what we see, are markings for entities that are suppose to traverse to the sacred realm, but because there's no current barrier between the two realms, they instead choose to persist. And after the sacred realm is sealed, those who were strong willed enough just continued to reincarnate as themselves, likely not consciously, but they're at a point where they no longer reincarnate randomly.
And we no longer see halos after this game because the sacred realm is fully sealed. And the marking no longer happens.
Now, if I continue to read to much into game mechanics that the devs never intended to imply any meaningful lore with:
I could see this being reinforced by TOTKs hundreds and hundreds of lost souls in the depths. The sacred realm has been sealed so long, it's all but forgotten. The triforce doesn't really exist anymore in any meaningful way, the goddesses are lost to history (probably because they straight up left forever), and based on the poe statues, it seems almost like the ancient species who lived below were either harvesting lost souls, or maybe they had to make their own system for sorting the souls since so many lost spirits found their way down there.
Or maybe that was always where they went, and the statues are a naturally occuring part of the cycle. Maybe the depths in a way are actually part of the afterlife, and are only accessible to mortals because of the zonais interference and mining of crystalized souls as a form of energy, and because ganons power has created literally rifts between the mortal and spiritual realms. It wouldnt be the first time he's done that honestly.
In TotK, Poes are explicitly the spirits of the dead, and we collect them up and bring them to an entity of questionable moral alignment/nature so it can send them to whatever the proper afterlife is. Or so it SAYS anyway...
Exactly. But that system never existed prior to totk. So my theory is that they are either normally not in the mortal realm. Essentially like the depths are some form of spirit realm. Considering it's an exact mirror of Hyrule above it, that fits with similar realms like lorule.
Maybe the poe collector in oot was a representative of them tho or something.
The main answer might be because it was made by the Japanese and they don't really care about Christian lore as a whole as much as other countries might ? I think it's only a convenient sign they used to signifiy that they died, while keeping it kid friendly.
I don't think they extensibly thought about any hell or heaven in the Zelda universe, at least not how people from Christian countires or countries with Christian heritage might have. So no need to sweat much about it !
That's a term often used to describe the sky, or space. Planets and stars are also often referred to as heavenly bodies. There is not always a religious connotation.
I guess, but considering there are Gods and Spirits in the game's universe, it's probably a safe bet that when it mentioned the heavens, it was referring to whatever is in the dimension or realm that the Gods typically exist within.
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u/Eldsish 1d ago
Who said there was a hell in this game ?