Rinku's pet piglet "Zelda" isn't just good at scowling because of an uncanny coincidental resemblance. Pigs are smart creatures at times, so it probably imitated her thinking face.
When Vaati is working on the physical engineering aspects of his Magitek portal, his space is littered with an alarming number of wine bottles, yet he seems completely lucid. Magic? Perhaps... or maybe a Furry Reminder. Minish are rodent-like with long noses and tails that look like a quill, much like real-life pen-tailed treeshrews which evolved a way to safely metabolise alcohol so they could feed on fermented tree sap without getting totally wasted.
Zelda laments that she barely has any memories of her past lives, and Ganondorf calls it "ironic forgetfulness" and implies that Zelda's reincarnations usually don't keep much. Ganondorf, by contrast, seems to not lose anything as a result of each reincarnation; this matches nicely with his Triforce of Power, with his many lives consolidating his experience into a formidable armoury of knowledge and skills. Unfortunately, it also plays a part in making the cycle repeat as he cannot let go of past grievances and falls back on the endless familiarity of violence. With his example so clear on the page, it starts to look like reincarnating without that baggage is, indeed, the wiser method.
Link's memories do return with each reincarnation, but they come back as nightmarish visions rather than the lived memories Ganondorf has. To be bombarded with a thousand lifetimes' worth of struggle and terror only to pick up the Master Sword and be the hero anyway, over and over again, would take incredible courage.
More like Fridge Sorrow, but Ganondorf's insistence on having at least 12 children with Zelda. As somewhat explained in the comic, in many of Ganondorf's lives where he's had kids, he's watched a majority of them die, some of them in his own arms. This happened in no small part thanks to the living desert hell (which gets incredibly hot during the day and incredibly cold in the night), which definitely doesn't help lower infant mortality rates. The factor that he also remembers his reincarnations the best means he might've seen plenty of children, even those that weren't his own, dying. It puts his desires for Hyrule (which fares better for life), and how Gerudo women seem to want boyfriends, into a scary perspective of trying to have a child where most of them don't make it past childhood.
Invoked when Impa's thoughts reveal that Link is a Heroic Mime because all of the past trauma made him that way.
