Special:Badtitle/NS90:User talk:DocColress/Some more discussion/reply (8)

For the death of the queen, what sells it for me is that we see how affected people are by her death: if memory serves, most of the local Zoras are shaken up quite badly by what happened to her, even moreso in the case of her son. Plus, we do meet her ghost, so I suppose that Zant's actions do speak for themselves in a way. :p As for sparing Zelda, I don't know if they ever went into why he did so. For all we know, he did it to show her exactly what he was doing to her kingdom, as it was still slowly suffering under his rule. And as for the state of the world under the Twilight Realm's influence, I feel that Zant deserves more credit than Ganondorf for that since he was the one who came to Hyrule and actively attacked it.

And I'll admit, Ganondorf makes for some steep composition, especially since his rapsheet from Ocarina includes murdering the Great Deku Tree, trying to starve the Gorons to death, turning most of Hyrule into a monster-overrun wasteland, murdering the Composer Brothers, forcing Ingo to sacrifice horses to him in fear of his wrath, turning the Kokiri Forest into a monster breeding ground, tried feeding the Gorons to Volvagia, froze over Zora's Domain, and brainwashed the denizens of Gerudo Valley so they would be loyal to him all on top of him providing Zant the means to give Hyrule hell.

However, Ganondorf did all of this over the span of seven years, which I think is important to remember. Zant rising to power happened pretty recently in the context of the story, yet he already succeeded in doing his fair share of nasty things too. His rap sheet is pretty small compared to Ganondorf's, but I feel that if he had more time available for oppressing Hyrule's citizens, his crimes could easily equal his master's.

I hope that doesn't sound like a cop-out by the way, I'm just trying to show you how I'm thinking. As of now, Zant is the only Zelda villain among the ones that aren't listed who I see realistically having a shot at CM status.