Fanfic / FFS, I Believe in You

FFS, I Believe in You is a The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Link/Sidon shipping fanfic written by DyraDoodles. The narrative follows Link and Sidon as they come to grips with their feelings for each other, a process complicated by Link's growing feelings of self-doubt, the looming threat of the Calamity, and a lizalfos succession crisis that the two find themselves drawn squarely in the middle of.

While primarily a Breath of the Wild fanfic, the story makes multiple references to earlier games, primarily The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Knowledge of the earlier game's particulars isn't however necessary for understanding the story.

The story is complete and can be read here on Archive of Our Own. A sequel, titled FFS, What Now, is set after the Calamity's defeat, and follows Link and Sidon navigating their newly-established relationship, Link and Zelda attempting to figure out what they're going to do with their lives now that the Calamity has been defeated, and an unexpected contact with a new group of zora who are bringing a lot more trouble to Hyrule's shores than they're advertising. It is also complete. This story incorporates multiple elements from The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages, most prominently the nation of Labrynna.

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This work contains examples of:

FFS, I Believe in You

• Adaptational Intelligence: Downplayed. While canonical lizalfos are smart enough to fashion weapons, use bows and create structures to live in, they're not generally portrayed as very organized, clever or communicative. This story's lizalfos, by contrast, are just as civilized and organized as Hyrule's other peoples, and simply divided from them by a language barrier.
• Admiring the Abomination: Lightning being as deadly as it is to the zora, Farosh the lightning dragon is quite easily the most dangerous being alive insofar as they're concerned. Despite this, Sidon can't help but be entranced by the dragon's terrible beauty when seeing it for the first time.
  Lightning had always been terrifying to him. The threat of the lynel's shock arrows. Lizalfos raids on his people. Lightning storms. Pain. Death. Every instance he had seen electricity used before had been terrifying. As Farosh twisted and twirled through the wind, however, dancing among its dreadful power, Sidon found himself entranced.
• Aerith and Bob: The lizalfos names — Isolda, Candis, Tristram, Doomsnarl... and Gerald.
• Antiquated Linguistics: Lizal is translated as this in order to represent it being a very archaic language from the perspective of the zoras, resulting in the lizalfos routinely using ornate turns of phrase, poetic metaphors and flowery language that wouldn't be out of place in a Victorian romance.
• Distracted by the Sexy: In the last chapter, while smuggling the Zora's Sapphire back to the lizalfos, Sidon temporarily zones out from the mission entirely while admiring the very close fit of Link's Sheikah gear.
• Everyone Can See It: Sidon's infatuation with Link is considered quite obvious and common knowledge by the other zora — in fact, Sidon himself is one of the last people to cotton on to the fact that he's crushing on Link, only becoming consciously aware of it when he catches his soldiers making bets on when he'll confess.
• Famous Ancestor: Isolda is implied to be descended from the King Zora who sells Link the Flippers in A Link to the Past.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Morpha, much like in the original game. It comes out nowhere, with nothing foreshadowing its appearance in-universe, showing up to fight Link and Sidon without anything about its origin or nature being revealed to them afterwards beyond probably some connection to Ganon.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: Link harbors considerable self-doubt, stemming from a number of past failures and miscalculations both canon (chiefly not being able to stop the Calamity and being the cause of the Master Sword's diminished state) and specific to the story which lead him to consider himself a fraud and not truly worthy of his role as the Hero.
• Hope Spot: In chapter eight, Link using Cryonis on Dark Link instantly freezes it within the block of ice, seemingly ending the fight for good... until it casually forms a new body outside of it a few seconds later and goes right back to trying to kill him.
• Large and in Charge: In life, King Doomsnarl was colossal, far larger than regular lizalfos get.
• The Magnificent: Lizalfos leaders tend to append descriptive titles to their names, such as Isolda the Terrible and Tristram the Woeful. Link is fairly surprised to hear that the old lizalfos king went by Doomsnarl the Brilliant, as in his experience lizalfos leaders usually choose monikers such as "the Bloody" or "the Hateful".
• Morality Pet: Gerald is this for General Isolda, being the one person towards whom the cruel, dangerous warlord is consistently nice to — in fact, she's explicitly the only person to consider him a friend and treat him and his ideas with a minimum of respect.
• The Necrocracy: The Rule of the Dead variant is played with, but ultimate subverted. When Link and Sidon encounter the skeleton of the old lizalfos king in the Water Temple, it reanimates and, from what Sidon can understand of its angry ranting, seems intent on continuing to rule over his living subjects as a stalfos. However, after Gerald arrives and manages to speak to the king, it turns out that he's quite unaware of his undead status and, on being informed, simply says "oh." and collapses into a pile on inert bones.
• Offered the Crown: When the lizalfos retrieve the Zora's sapphire, a number of them offer it and the rulership it represents to General Isolda. She rejects it, as she has no wish to be queen and the lizalfos' history of promoting generals and warlords to the throne gave them nothing but terrible rulers.
• Poor Communication Kills: Narrowly avoided at the end. When Isolda announces that Gerald will be the new king, a group of lizalfos instead try to convince her to take the crown instead. Isolda refuses, and the disagreement almost leads to a civil war starting then and there... until it occurs to Gerald to point out that he was the one who found the Zora's Sapphire, which confers authority to lizalfos kings. This quickly defuses the issue and is met by exasperated groans from the others, as they only got there after he had passed the gem to Isolda, and the general sheepishly admits that she should probably have led with that to begin with.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Link receives one from Dark Link that mocks and exposes his flaws and weaknesses, such as his inability to prevent the Calamity and his actions having caused the Master Sword to lose most of its power. As these are all things that Link already privately believes and that it comes together with the Master Sword becoming stuck in a tree and resisting Link's attempts to pull it free, implicitly signifying a rejection of Link's worthiness to wield it, it hits him especially hard. Later, it's revealed that Sidon's copy was doing much the same with his own personal issues.
• Related in the Adaptation: On a species-wide scale — lizalfos and zora share no particular relationship in the games, but here they're both descended from the ancient, hostile river zora of early Zelda games.
• Tomato in the Mirror: When Link and Sidon encounter Doomsnarl, the old lizalfos king, he turns out to still believe that he's alive, and is extremely surprised when Gerald explains to him that he is, in fact, undead.
• Trauma Conga Line: From King Dorephan's point of view, the bulk of the first story is an extremely stressful and unpleasant time. First, his only surviving child goes off on his own to spy on an enemy stronghold and almost gets himself captured by their people's sworn enemies. Dorephan responds by essentially grounding Sidon to Zora's Domain, but shortly afterwards he disappears without a trace and seemingly vanishes altogether, with no clue to where he went or what happened to him. He only returns days later, at which point it turns out that he was kidnapped by a lizalfos raiding party, taken to their stronghold and made to fight several dangerous monsters. The emotional impact this has on the king is particularly visible when Link and Sidon return from the lizalfos fortress to find Dorephan visibly stressed and haggard, and his first reaction is to make sure that they're all right and unharmed. Then he explodes.
• Underwater City: The majority of Zora's Domain consists of buildings and artificial caverns built deep below the waters of their lake; the in-game Domain is essentially the topmost levels of the city, built in the air to facilitate contact with the rest of Hyrule's races.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: Analyzed and Played for Drama. Over the course of his travels, Link cut down hordes of lizalfos, bokoblins and assorted Mooks with very little thought, assuming them to simply be puppets of the Calamity and little more than animals. Learning that lizalfos are intelligent beings, with their own language, society, personalities and foibles, casts this in a new light and induces feelings of doubt and guilt as he starts to ask himself how accurate his internal categories of "person" and "monster" are, whether any of the other monster races are actually intelligent beings as well, and how much any of this matters when they all try to kill him on sight anyway.
  As the Hero, he was supposed to protect the denizens of Hyrule. He thought he knew which races fell into that category. Which ones got saved. Which ones were just monsters. Servants of Ganon. Now, watching Gravelly laughing at whatever High-pitch had said...
  He wasn't sure.

FFS, What Now

• All for Nothing: Link, Zelda and Sidon spend considerable time and effort in searching for the recipe to the healing potion for Jabu Orkù, deciphering the archaic instructions once they find them, collecting all the ingredients, brewing the potion and getting it to Zola Province. In the end, Uisdean smashes it before they can use it, and it's revealed that it wouldn't have done any good anyway because Orkù's problem was that he was being parasitized by a barinade.
• Ambition Is Evil: The Mormaer Uisdean is obsessed with personal power and control, and considers it his inborn right to rule over all zora, everywhere. This leads to his oppressive rule of Zola Province, and later to his attempt to invade Hyrule and conquer Zora's Domain.
• Eye of Newt: Syrup's magic potion is given an extensive list of ingredients, most of which are specific to the Oracle games and thus fairly difficult for the Breath of the Wild-era characters to identify and track down — a raw mushroom, a fully-cooked rock brisket, five leaves from the Maku Tree, a roc's feather, two petals from a leever, and the liver of a river zora. Most of these need to have replacements found, due to their original sources being inaccessible or extinct — for instance, since there are no Maku Trees in Hyrule, the Deku Tree donates a few of his leaves in their place. The liver in particular turns out to be a problem, as the recipe was written when zora were hostile monsters (whereas in the fic's present day they're civilized beings); the direct descendants of the hostile zora are the lizalfos, whose liver may serve as a substitute... except that the lizalfos have just formed a peace treaty with the other races. It's eventually worked out that a specific kind of fish may be substituted.
• Fantastic Light Source: As Zola Province is located very deep beneath the sea, and is consequently very dark, the zoras living there make use of captured bari — bioluminescent jellyfish-like creatures — for illumination.
• Find the Cure!: A large part of the story is the characters' attempt to find the recipe for a potion with which to heal Jabu Orkú, track down the ingredients, and deliver the finished cure to Zola Province and the ailing Jabu.
• Ironic Last Words: Uisdean's last words are an angry rant at the heroes and the resistance about how he's not defeated yet and a pledge to return to kill them all, which is interrupted when Jabu Orkú emerges from the ocean and bites him in half.
  "This isn't over!" Uisdean screamed over his shoulder once he'd made a fair distance. "I'll be back! I'll be back to kill you all! Then you'll-"
• I Surrender, Suckers: The Yiga call for a parley with the Gerudo, claiming to have been left purposeless by the Calamity's defeat and Kohga's death and to want a truce, but this is simply a ruse to attempt to ambush Riju.
• Large and in Charge: The Mormaer Uisdean is the largest and strongest zora in Zola Province, where he rules uncontested. Notably, however, he still doesn't match the immense size and strength of King Dorephan.
• Lost Common Knowledge: A large part of the difficulty the heroes face in brewing the magic potion is that its recipe was written shortly after the events of Oracle of Ages, many thousands of years before Breath of the Wild, and thus uses names that have long since fallen out of common use and refers to things that most people have become entirely unfamiliar with. Likewise, when Link is looking through old bestiaries in Gerudo Town, most of the creatures are enemies that were very common in earlier eras but which, having since died out or migrated away, he doesn't even recognize.
• Minor Injury Overreaction: Played for drama with Uisdean. When he and Murchadh were children, they were playing in Jabu Orkú's presence and Uisdean was pushing around and bullying Murchadh, resulting in Orkù giving him a warning nip on his hand. This was a fairly minor bite that only resulted in mild scarring, but because Orkù is the zora's living god, the Province's people took this as a profound condemnation of Uisdean's ability to rule. In turn, Uisdean became obsessed with this injury and developed a seething hatred of Orkù as a result, leading to his eventual descent into tyranny and his attempt to assassinate the god-whale.
• La Résistance: In Zola Province, the unpopularity and poor rule of the Mormaer have caused an armed insurgency to form against him, resulting in a rapidly escalating conflict that the main characters find themselves drawn into.
• Sea Monster: The deep, lightless waters around Zola Province are home to numerous sea monsters, including electrified bari and massive, predatory morpheels.
• We Used to Be Friends: Murchadh and Uisdean used to be fairly close friends, when they were children, before Uisdean's increasing megalomania and obsession with power drove them apart and eventually forced Murchadh to join the rebellion against him.
• White Flag: Sidon's group uses one to signal their intent to parley when meeting with the foreign Zora, although in a twist Hyrulean peoples traditionally use black flags for this purpose.
• Womb Level: Late in the story, Link and Sidon end up being swallowed by Jabu Orkù, who much like his ancestor in Ocarina of Time has an extensive dungeon within his cavernous stomach.

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