Nintendo’s most ambitious Zelda game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, is best known for its immersive open world. It’s full of mysterious landmarks like the Zonai ruins and the three leviathan whale skeletons, but some of the most intriguing – and its most frustrating – are the contradiction-laden Seven Heroine statues and their lost counterpart, the Eighth Heroine.
It may not be as jam-packed with things to do as other popular open-world games, but Breath of the Wild’s open world gets a lot right. Large portions of Hyrule are fairly barren, but that helped keep it from being the activity checklist that many open-world games become. It’s not void of interesting locations, either – the landscape is dotted with environmental storytelling that’s kept fans theorizing long after the game’s release, such as the aforementioned Gerudo heroine statues.
The Seven Heroines seem to have a fairly simple explanation at first, but their origin is complicated by the Eighth Heroine. Theories on the statues’ true identities are much less solid than those on some of Hyrule’s other mysterious ruins, with plenty of contradictions that make the statues’ identity a sort of unsolvable riddle. But that doesn’t mean fans haven’t come up with a few possible explanations.
Breath Of The Wild: What We Know About The Heroine Statues
The Seven Heroines and the lost Eighth Heroine each have a number of clues that hint at their identities and their relationship to one another. Below is a breakdown of all the information known about the statues.
What We Know About The Seven Heroines
Found in the East Gerudo Ruins on the edge of the Gerudo Desert, the Seven Heroines are a group of large stone statues. They stand facing one another in a semi-circle, each holding a sword out in front of it in a pose similar to Buliara, captain of the Gerudo guard. Gerudo-language text running up and down the front of the statues reads, “Seven Sages.” An NPC named Rotana tells Link the heroines were said to be divine protectors of the Gerudo, each with a different power – “skill, spirit, endurance, knowledge, flight, motion, and gentleness.” Each is also associated with a different color and symbol as part of the Shrine quest called “The Seven Heroines.”
What We Know About The Eighth Heroine
The Eighth Heroine is a near-identical statue sequestered on the side of the Gerudo Highlands mountain range opposite from the Gerudo Desert. Its sword was at some point separated from it, currently lying atop the Highlands between the Desert and the statue. The entire statue is a mirrored version of the others, so its “Seven Sages” text is flipped. The person the statue is based on is said to have been “Wiped clean from history” for unknown reasons, though she is apparently still worshiped by faithful followers in the Gerudo Highlands.
The only inhabitants of the Gerudo Highlands at the time of Breath of the Wild are the Yiga Clan, a Ganon-worshiping offshoot of the Sheikah tribe. The Yiga hideout appears to be a structure built by the Gerudo and taken over by the rogue ninjas, and a room near its entrance contains eight statues. Though much smaller, these statues are similar to the heroines, and, as decoded by YouTuber NintendoBlackCrisis, they have text that reads, “Gerudo There Is No Strife,” “Gerudo Like Water We Flow With Life,” and “Gerudo An Unblemished Desert Flo[wer].”
Breath of the Wild: Who Are The Gerudo Heroines?
If the Eighth Heroine statue didn’t exist, figuring out the Seven Heroines’ origins would be a simple task. The text embedded in them literally says “Seven Sages,” which would identify them as the all-female Gerudo people’s interpretation of the Seven Sages, the group of mystics seen time and time again in the Zelda series. The fact that the Eighth Heroine’s text also reads “Seven Sages” and is reversed could then indicate there really was only seven real-life heroines, and this odd, mirrored statue was just a design mistake the Gerudo wanted to discard.
The presence of eight heroine-like statues in the Yiga hideout, however, suggests the heroine statues could have been purposely sculpted as a unit of eight. If Zelda is included in the count as the leader of the group, A Link Between Worlds has eight sages, so it’s canonically possible for there to be more than seven. But the fact that the statues, including the Eighth Heroine, all say “Seven” shows the main Gerudo civilization never saw them this way.
Here’s one possible explanation: The Seven Heroines were the Seven Sages, once revered by the Gerudo, but one Sage betrayed the rest. The Sage was replaced, and most Gerudo shunned the betrayer, but a group of followers split off and created a secret shrine to all eight in the Highlands. They also built a large statue to match the rest back in the Desert, reversing its engraved text as a symbol of the so-called Eighth Heroine’s denial of tradition.
Unfortunately, even this story has holes. If it were true, why would the Eighth Heroine’s sword not be with the her statue? And why would the Yiga – descended from the Sheikah, not the Gerudo – worship it, as the in-game text about current-day faithful followers implies? NintendoBlackCrisis explores many other possibilities for the heroines’ identities – including Link and Ganondorf – in each of their two videos on the subject, but all of the theories have holes or possible counterarguments.
The mystery of the Eight Heroines is nearly impossible to solve because of these constant contradictions. The most likely explanation, sadly, is that Nintendo threw the mystery in without giving it much thought, similar to J.J. Abrams’ infamous “mystery box” storytelling. Perhaps Nintendo will give fans missing, crucial context needed to decipher the Eighth Heroine mystery in Breath of the Wild’s sequel. For the time being, the Eighth Heroine seems to be either a vague symbol of the Yiga Clan’s evil or a poorly planned example of the Hyrule people’s lack of understanding of their long, complicated past.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was released for the Nintendo Switch and Wii U on March 3, 2017.