So a while back Hyrule Historia came out, adding some perhaps unexpected official say-so on the existence of a Zelda series timeline. I'm sure it's still the source of debates, but there's one period in particular I'm thinking about at the moment, and that's the "era of decline", in which Zelda 1 and II are said to take place (preceded by an era of Hyrulian monarchy using the Triforce as described in Zelda II's manual, preceded before that by Link's Awakening, the Oracle games, and LTTP- though I'm honestly not too sure how Oracles are supposed to fit in between those two, but really Oracles is a whole headache unto itself as far as timeline connections).
So basically, the story goes that Link got the Triforce in LTTP, fixed all kinds of stuff Ganon had done in that game per the ending, and then, apparently, brought the Triforce back to Hyrule, where it was enshrined in a castle (possibly just Hyrule Castle??). That Link had some other adventures and kept an eye on the Triforce (as is said to be happening at the beginning of the Oracles games, for instance), but basically, it became the property of the royal line, who used it wisely for many generations to ensure peace and prosperity throughout Hyrule, in a sort of golden age. Must be some pretty darn trustworthy kings and queens I guess, but presumably they are descended from the Zelda in LTTP, so that makes sense.
So finally the royal line starts to screw up, and this one king decides to hide the Triforce of Courage somewhere so that his son can't misuse the entirety of the Triforce. When it's time for the Prince to inherit it, he gets jealous, gets a sorcerer involved, questions his sister- another Princess Zelda- who knows where the triforce is, and she winds up getting put to sleep for centuries (until Zelda II happens). In the meanwhile, Hyrule enters an "era of decline", especially once Ganon returns, setting the stage for Zelda 1 where everybody lives in caves and Ganon's minions are all over the place.
But wait a minute- Zelda II happens just a few years after Zelda 1. In that game, Link travels across a huge zoomed-out world map, in which a tiny portion of the map is the actual overworld from Zelda 1 (south of Death Mountain). But here, we see there's a whole bunch of towns- probably more towns than we've ever seen in one Zelda game- which are all doing fine, aside from the occasional Ganon follower waiting to pounce on Link (all of whom are keese in disguise as humans until they do that). The overworld music is happy, Ganon is still destroyed so long as Link doesn't die and get blood-sacrificed to facilitate his revival, and the main reason Link needs the Triforce of courage is to revive the sleeping Zelda (as opposed to the other, later Zelda he just rescued from Ganon). Presumably having the whole Triforce again will benefit Hyrule in other ways, but yeah.
So basically, what I'm wondering here is; is this "era of decline" actually all that bad? You might look at Zelda 1 and say "everybody lives in caves, where's Kakariko village" etc., but surely all those towns in Zelda II weren't JUST built in the, what, six years afterwards? And if they were, that suggests that things improved pretty quickly after Ganon's defeat. Either way, it seems less like some kind of horrible era of death and suffering happened at this point in the timeline, and more like the kingdom- possibly literally just the government of the kingdom itself, not like, the entire populace of the land- had a bit of a downturn in an otherwise very prosperous era. Like perhaps the central governing body of Hyrule, and Hyrule Castle itself, fell apart for a time, but all the surrounding territory held out pretty well anyway.
Now granted, this timeline is still pretty grim with the whole imprisoning war thing that came earlier, but it gives me the impression that basically, things were actually pretty cool after LTTP, except in a comparatively small region of Hyrule where Ganon managed to make an actually fairly small comeback. Which might explain why he hides during the whole fight and dies in a handful of hits from the magic (magic- not master) sword (that some old dude in a graveyard got from somewhere) and like, one silver arrow- arguably one of the easiest battles against Ganon in history. (of course, IRL that's due to the game being the first in the series, and the easiness is debatable- and I'm not commenting on the difficulty of the whole game, as it's definitely not one of the easiest, just the battle with Ganon himself-, but compare that to say, how many hits Ganon takes in LTTP, and how much more complex the dodging is, and so on).
Anyway, that's just my theory- that the 'decline' in question was somewhat minor, more of a hiccup in a golden age than the direst period in history or somesuch (which for that timeline probably came earlier, after the defeat of the would-be Hero of Time). But what do you think? I'm not the biggest expert on all this.
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