The idea that the series has no continuity or overarching plotline, or that it was only introduced in the 2013 Hyrule Historia. In reality, even ignoring the series' complicated timeline, there have been direct sequels to prior games, such as the Majora's Mask and Phantom Hourglass. This is older than most people think, and goes back to the first three games. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is a direct sequel to the first game while A Link to the Past was originally advertised as being a prequel to the first game. More generally, the basic outline of the series' timeline had been established for some time when the Historia was released — the idea of the timeline branching after Ocarina of Time, for instance, goes back to a 2002 interview with Aounuma and Miyamoto that described The Wind Waker as taking place a hundred-odd years after the Adult ending of Ocarina of Time, while Aonuma later defined Twilight Princess as taking place in the other branch in in 2007. The Hyrule Historia's primary innovation was introducing the "Hero Fails" third branch.
"Link" is not a singular character, nor is Zelda, and you're bound to anger some fans if you assume otherwise. There have been many Links and many Zeldas. Only Ganon(dorf) usually remains the same person from game-to-game, and even then, there is one confirmed instance of him being reincarnated: The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, where, several hundred years after Twilight Princess, he is born again in the Gerudo tribe with no memories of his past life.
Overlapping with the timeline, this doesn't mean every game has a new Link or Zelda. If a game is a direct sequel to another installment, it usually has the same Link and Zelda present. These are Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (which takes place a few years after the first game), Majora's Mask (taking place some time after Ocarina of Time), the Oracle duology (which take place one after the other), Phantom Hourglass (which takes place a few months after Wind Waker) note Spirit Tracks is likewise a sequel to Phantom Hourglass, but it takes place decades afterward with a new Link, and Tears of the Kingdom (taking place shortly after Breath of the Wild). While A Link Between Worlds is explicitly called A Link to the Past 2 in Japan, it is actually a distant sequel with different Link than ALTTP's; both games have their own "same Link" sequels in Tri Force Heroes and Link's Awakening (respectively), though their plots have little to do with the aftermath of either game.
Link and Zelda are always reincarnations of those from Skyward Sword. Skyward Sword's Zelda is explicitly a reincarnation of Hylia, but everything else is far more ambiguous. The reasoning used to explain why Link and Zelda reincarnate is that Demise states as much when cursing them at the end of the game... but he doesn't. Rather, he defines the targets of his curse as "Those like you... those who share the blood of the goddess and the spirit of the hero..." His use of "spirit of the hero" is fairly ambiguous regarding whether it means a literal reincarnating soul or a metaphorical "spirit" in the sense of shared heroic qualities; meanwhile, there is no indication that future Zeldas are reincarnations of the original, as they're simply stated to be her blood descendants.
Related is the belief that Ganon/dorf is locked in a similar cycle of reincarnation: most of his incarnations in the series as the exact same guy, who is magically imprisoned at the end of Ocarina, breaks free centuries later in each timeline, and is then killed. In The Wind Waker and the Adult timeline, it sticks and he never comes back; in the Downfall Timeline, he is artificially brought back to life by his minions on a few occasions, losing most of his intellect in the process; and only in Four Swords Adventures in the Child timeline is he actually born anew.
Link is physically incapable of talking. In reality, every Link can talk, with some implied to be more verbose than others; we just don't hear him. He regularly he speaks in the form of player-chosen responses to NPCs, he's shouted short phrases in games such as Wind Waker, a character in Twilight Princess comments on his voice, and even as early as the second game he speaks to himself on occasion (for example, remarking "Strange... it is deserted" when entering Kasuto). And that's to say nothing of the manga adaptations, where he talks all the time, or appearances of non-playable Links, such as the Hero's Shade, who is the ghost of the Ocarina of Time Link and talk plenty.
Many fans think Zelda and Link are consistently blond. This is incorrect as the NES Link and Zelda are brunettes, and the second Zelda (the Sleeping Zelda) is a redhead. It wasn't until A Link to the Past that blond became a staple feature of Link (his hair was only pink in-game due to hardware issues), and even then, it turns the gamut from light-blond to dark-blonde. Meanwhile, while most Zeldas from ALttP onward are likewise blond, there are still exceptions: the one from Four Swordshas orange hair◊, while Twilight Princess Zelda is brunette◊.
A lot of non-fans and media claim that Link's main objective in all the games is to Save the Princess. While this is true in a few games, it is very much not the case for most installments. Sometimes it's a (last-minute) secondary goal, sometimes she plays a support role for Link (to varying degrees), and sometimes she doesn't even appear at all.
Hyrulean and Hylian are not the same thing. "Hyrulean" refers to a resident of Hyrule while "Hylian" refers to a race of long-eared people. Not all Hyruleans are Hylian and it's theoretically possible for a Hylian not to be Hyrulean, though the vast majority of games only focus on Hyrule, so this isn't explored.
Hylians and Sheikah are always fair-skinned and Gerudo are always dark-skinned. While this was mostly the case in older games, there were still exceptions such as Telma in Twilight Princess, and Breath of the Wild onward has a wide variety of skin tones for both races.
It's common knowledge that the series is set in a fantastical "medieval" setting. It's more stuck in Medieval Stasis with a liberal dash of Schizo Tech, with several games having pictographs, trains, steam-driven boats, and even robots.
Beyond that, it's commonly assumed by those less familiar with the games that they all take on a generic "medieval Europe" aesthetic. While Ocarina of Time and earlier games leaned heavily on that look, most installments blend Eastern and Western cultural influences together, with a growing use of steampunk and Magitech in later titles.
Overlapping with Never Live It Down: the series is the Trope Namer for Hijacked by Ganon because Ganon is always the final boss and, if he's not present from the start, the apparent new Big Bad is alwaysrevealed to be working for Ganon and by the time Twilight Princess was released, the twist was already overused. In actuality, out of the mainline entries, twist has only been done in four games: A Link To the Past, the linked Oracle games, Four Swords Adventures, and Twilight Princess. Six, if you want to count non-canon spin-offs like Hyrule Warriors and Cadence of Hyrule. And of the mainline games, only two actually play it straight, as ALTTP's Agahnim was technically Ganon all along, while the Oracle games' Twinrova is the real mastermind of the game's events (the resurrected Ganon is little more than a mindless zombie). Ganon(dorf) is actually absent from about half the games in the seriesnote The Adventure of Link (barring the Game Over sequence in which he is resurrected), Link's Awakening, Majora's Mask, Four Swords, The Minish Cap, Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks, Skyward Sword (barring the idea that Demise is a preincarnation of Ganon) and Tri Force Heroes, and is usually front-and-center with no one to hijack when he is present. In fact, A Link Between Worldsinverts the trope by having Big Bad Yuga possess Ganon. Much of the reason it's thought to be more common than it actually is comes from the fact most of the games where Ganon isn't present were handheld rather than home console titles, meaning they generally got less attention or recognition, and the vocal backlash to the twist occurring in Twilight Princess.
Link and Zelda are not siblings in A Link to the Past (or any other game for that matter). This misconception was born out of a line of dialogue at the beginning of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, in which the final words of Link's uncle are the unfinished sentence: "Zelda is your...". In the early 2000s, many fans jumped to the conclusion that he meant to say "sister". The reason for this leap in logic was that, when the first details about the story of The Wind Waker started to come out, Nintendo stated that Link's mission would be to rescue his sister. Fans took the aforementioned line from ALTTP as a hint that Zelda was supposed to fill that role. However, even after Aryll was presented as said sister character, and despite the fact that Nintendo completely removed the line in the Game Boy Advance version of A Link to the Past, the rumor still persisted, and some fans continue to believe it to this day.note The original line in Japanese, translated more literally, would be more akin to "You are Zelda's...", and although it's not impossible to finish that sentence with "brother", it would be a really awkward way to phrase it in that context. A more likely end to that sentence would be something akin to "You're Zelda's final hope". But more than that, there are absolutely no other hints whatsoever to Link and Zelda being siblings at all. Neither in-game nor in out-of-game material, whether released when the game first came out, or later on. They were depicted as long-lost half-siblings in the Yuu Mishouzaki manga, but that work was full of all sorts of Early Adaptation Weirdness.
Fans like to joke about how the only beverages served in Hyrule and beyond, even in bars and other places you'd expect to find harder drinks, is milk. This is almost never true; Chateau Romani in Majora's Mask is heavily implied to be a mixed drink note considering an NPC who's trying to drown his sorrows wonders how you can get drunk off of milk, and you later get a quest to cure his hangover in the 3DS remake, this overlaps with Redundant Parody, the taverns in Twilight Princess and Breath of the Wild expressly serve alcohol, and most other games with drinking houses just don't specify one way or another. The only game in the series that truly plays it straight is Phantom Hourglass, a game expressly made for a younger audience.
Link and Zelda aren't elves. The two are Hylians, which is not a Zelda-flavored term for elves; Hylians are typically treated as the mundanes of the setting (roughly equivalent to normal humans), and can have multiple different shapes of ear, including the pointy ones commonly associated with elves. The closest analogues to elves in the setting are the Kokiri in Ocarina of Time and the sea Zora, the latter of which typically take the role of High Men (most prominently in Breath of the Wild).
It's common knowledge in the fandom that Link's name is meant to represent the "link" between the player and the character, signifying his status as a Blank Slate. However, this is not the case. According to Shigeru Miyamoto in a 2012 interview, the name "Link" is actually a holdover from a scrapped plan for the original NES game that would've have you switch from the past to the future (which was later revisited in Ocarina of Time), with the name Link being based on the idea of him traveling back and forth through time (serving as a link between the past and the future). That said, this is contradicted by Hyrule Historia, in which Miyamoto claims that Link got his name due to his ability to "connect people together" and says that "he was supposed to spread the scattered energy of the world through the ages". Either way, his name does not refer to the connection between the player and the character.
The Koroks are often assumed to be a separate species that evolved from the Kokiri similar to the Rito (who evolved from the Zora). However, this is not the case, as it is implied in The Wind Waker (and later confirmed by Eiji Aonuma) that the Koroks are the Kokiri, just transformed into a different form. This is also evident in Breath of the Wild, which only features the Koroks with no sign of the Kokiri.
It's a common belief that Hyrule is subject to frequent invasions by Ganon or other forces of darkness to the point of this becoming an almost routine occurrence. This isn't actually the case in the series. Hyrule is typically invaded about once per game, but individual games take place generations or centuries apart and are usually depicted as occurring at the sudden end of a golden age or at the conclusion of a long period of decline. The overall pattern is that Hyrule experiences very long periods of stability, punctuated by devastating but relatively brief cataclysms or wars.
Specific Games
The Legend of Zelda: The game is often stereotyped as Guide Dang It! to the max, where you need to "burn every bush, bomb every wall, and and unravel obtuse puzzles" just to progress. In reality, while the game does have its secrets, there are actually next to no mandatory rewards hidden behind bombs or bushes outside two dungeons, and even then, the one hidden behind a bush has said bush be obviously out-of-place, while the one hidden behind a rock formation is pointed out via a clue that isn't too hard to decipher. Everything else is optional, like rupees, the money making game, shops, and thieves, and you also quickly learn each screen can only have a single cave entrance or stairwell (which drastically narrows down where to search). Anything mandatory, like directions to go through the forest or up the mountain, are explicitly given to you as hints, and the only dungeon that actually falls into the Guide Dang It! stereotype is the final one and how to defeat the final boss... which you are on your own for.
"I am Error" is a funny mistranslation, isn't it? Actually, it's not a mistranslation at all. It's just a guy named "Error" introducing himself, which you'll want to remember later when someone tells you he knows something important to your quest. Ironically, his partner in Theme Naming, Bagu, is a mistranslation (it should be "Bug", as in a computer bug), but he shows up so much later in the game that comparatively few people know about him.
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past does not feature time travel. The Dark World is a parallel, corrupted realm, not the past. The title A Link to the Past refers to the fact that, in its original English release, the game was marketed as a prequel to the first two games. The original Japanese title was Triforce of the Gods but Nintendo of America policy at the time was to excise any religious references from their games, forcing them to come up with this more esoteric title instead.
Thanks to how infamously easy Ganon is in both Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon, it's commonly said that every boss in the games is able to be one-hit killed. This is true for Wand of Gamelon, but every boss in Faces of Evil can stand multiple hits from their weakness aside from Glutko and Ganon, though they still aren't very challenging compared to their dungeons.
Almost everyone believes that Lord Kiro is one of the king's soldiers when, in reality, he's a nobleman from Gamelon. It's not helped by the fact that barely anyone knows that his name is Lord Kiro (he's called "Fari" in YouTube Poops) and the fact that he acts loyal to the king the same way you'd expect an underling to be.
It's widely believed that the last cutscene of Wand of Gamelon takes place in Hyrule, since the background is similar to the intro which does take place in there. In reality, the fact that the cutscene plays right after Zelda defeats Ganon and saves the king means that the characters are still in Ganon's lair, in Gamelon.
There's the impression that Link found Navi annoying or hated her. While it's true that many players hate Navi, Link actually valued her as a true friend and cherished her companionship. It's heavily implied (and was later confirmed) that the "friend" that Link is mentioned to be searching for at the beginning of Majora's Mask is Navi.
Speaking of, how annoying Navi actually is. Because of Memetic Mutation combined with misconception, many believe that she constantly nags you to get back on track with the plot every five seconds. Actually, her reminders come about every 10-20 minutes in real time, and she doesn't force you to view them. She doesn't say "Hey, listen!" as one line either - she says "Hey!" when she has something to tell you, then something else when you press the C-Up button to talk to her - "Look!" when pointing something out, "Listen!" when reminding you what you were supposed to be doing, and "Watch out!" when giving advice on an enemy.
Everyone knows Dead Hand is the horrifying boss of Ocarina of Time's Bottom of the Well dungeon. Well, yes, but it'd be more accurate to say he's a miniboss in the Bottom of the Well, which is mostly optional and has no climax, being a mini-dungeon you only have to enter for the Lens of Truth. The Dead Hand can be fought almost immediately after entering, and after claiming the Lens of Truth (which it guards), you can leave at any time, with rewards there to be found but no scripted sequence of events. Also, there's two Dead Hands in the game, with the other guarding a room in the Shadow Temple afterward, but almost nobody reminiscing on the Dead Hand mentions that there's a second one.
A lot of people seem to be under the impression that the multiplayer modes of Four Swords, Four Swords Adventures, and Tri Force Heroes require four players (or three, in the case of the latter). Probably because of their titles. In actuality, they can be played with two or three people as well (though Tri Force Heroes limits its two-player to solely the competitive battle mode). Adventures and Tri Force Heroes can even be played single-player, as can later versions of Four Swords.
It is commonly believed that Demon King Demise is voiced by Takashi Nagasako, the voice of Ganondorf in Ocarina of Time and The Wind Waker, with various fan wiki sites, including this site, stating it as fact. But based on the game's credits, this cannot be the case, as Takashi Nagasako was never credited in the voice section. The most likely voice behind Demise is Tsuguo Mogami, who is listed on the credits just behind Kenji Takahashi, the voice of Groose, but after Rei Shimoda, the voice of Impa.
A significant amount of people believe Demise is Ganondorf. While its true that Ganondorf is supposed to be born out of Demise's curse, is stated to Demise's Reincarnation in Historia and Hyrule Warriors, and their face designs have more than a few similarities, they're not supposed to be the same entity even if one is the reincarnation of the other.
Link's infamous Vai Gerudo outfit is commonly assumed to be an outfit he never took seriously or wore to be cute, with the optional male outfit being the one he wore when doing serious work in the Highlands. This actually reverses the relevance both outfits have: the Vai outfit is the one he needs to take seriously, as it was the only way to sneak into Gerudo Town without raising suspicion. It's the Voe outfit that's the fetishistic one, as he obtained it from a hidden group of crossdressing Gerudo women.
The Blood Moon mechanic is often seen as either completely random or subject to player influence (or, sometimes, both). While the game may force a panic Blood Moon as an emergency cleanup service if too many things are onscreen as a result of player actions, the timer for the Blood Moon is consistent, being based on a cycle of around two hours of real-world play time. After that amount of time has passed and the game overworld has been reloaded, a Blood Moon will be scheduled for the next night. Many players don't know this and tell others to build campfires to pass time and check the moon each night, which will do nothing. You have to spend real time to get another one to appear, though if you enter a shrine as it rises, you can postpone the event until the next night.
Manga
Every fan knows that Zelda transformed into a male in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time manga, which is why parts of the fandom constantly used it as "proof" that Sheik in the game is a Gender Bender instead of a Sweet Polly Oliver. Despite this belief, it is not entirely true. Sheik is male in the manga... but by way of Zelda's personality being temporarily locked away and replaced with a male one. Their body never physically changed for the purpose of the disguise beyond aesthetics like hair length and eye color, with Sheik wearing a sarashi, covering up their face, maintaining their distance from others, and keeping encounters with Link limited. When Link carries Sheik in one scene, he notes that they're surprisingly light. Even if the manga version was a Gender Bender, the manga adaptations of the games are never canon; especially since Ocarina of Time makes it very clear that its version of Sheik has Zelda in control the entire time, no personality overwrite to be seen.
Despite some fans and fan-sites saying otherwise, there are more Zelda manga that just the ones by Akira Himekawa. This misconception is due to a mix of Early-Installment Weirdness (as the duo have been the main mangaka for Zelda adaptations from Ocarina of Time onwards) and No Export for You (as most manga not by the duo are Japan-only).
with Aounuma and Miyamoto that described The Wind Waker as taking place a hundred-odd years after the Adult ending of Ocarina of Time, while Aonuma later defined Twilight Princess as taking place in the other branch in in 2007
