Ganon's Mysterious Origins (Revisited)

There's not a lot that makes sense in the Zelda theming. Link is officially Christian somehow, at least through LttP. Gerudo Valley is like the Middle East in OoT, which I would say is just loose theming but the Fire Temple has literal Islamic chanting. First few games had King Harkinian of Hyrule which sounds a bit like he's Armenian. The game series is named after author Zelda Fitzgerald.

It is fascinating just how much of Japanese pop culture carries deep (and shallow) references to Journey to the West.

This doesn't get us closer to the origin, but speaking of German influence, Link also happens to be a German word. As a noun it shares the same meaning as the English word link.

Zelda seems to come from (ital.) Griselda which supposedly is rooted in the old high German word gris (grau) and hiltja (fight). But that's kind of a stretch.

Kind of reminds me of JK Rowling backfilling all of that stuff in the Harry Potter books (now there's Luna Love good!.) Or Nintendo retconning Bowser's sons and replacing them with Bowser Jr.

Sometimes there just isn't that much thought behind a character.

I don't think either looks similar, at all. I don't get how you can look at a symbol of an eagle entwined with a snake and say, oh yeah, the skull pixel art they made for Zelda? Totally inspired by that. Not just a skull, you know, that symbol traditionally associated with evil. And Ganon looks like some kind of big pig man, not some vague crab-bat hybrid (e.g., he has no claws or wings). It then the article goes on to cite an Iwata Asks episode where the say the inspiration was a pig character from the Journey to the West, so I'm not sure why it's trying to seek some odd alternative explanation.