Okay, most people on this board believe that OoT is the Imprisoning War spoken of in ALttP. And hey, why not? Miyamoto himself said that it was. Unfortunately, either Miyamoto made an error in judgement when he made WW, or he has seriously retconned OoT so that it is no longer the Imprisoning War. Allow me to explain:

In the Legend of Zelda series, there are five generally accepted points where Ganon(dorf) dies. Those are: LoZ, ALtttP, OoX, WW, and TP. In WW it must be noted that only Ganondorf dies. His alter ego Ganon never shows its face, which leads me to believe that Ganon still lives. In TP, the ending with Zant snapping his neck and Ganondorf still standing, his body not going limp, is a rather ambiguous ending. I would argue that it is impossible for anybody to say with certainty what happened there, and so for the purposes of this theory, I will not be considering that a true death until other games are made which support that it is, or if someone can show me some very good in-game evidence for this idea. In OoX, Ganon is reborn through Twinrova's sacrifice as a mindless being, and not nearly as powerful. He is easily defeated by Link.

So, that leaves us with two TRUE deaths of Ganon. LoZ and ALttP. There is one thing that both of these deaths have that no other Ganon defeat, seal, or possible death has: Silver Arrows. I would therefore make the logical deduction that it is in fact the combination of Master Sword and Silver Arrows that allows one to kill Ganon. Now, I know that the Light Arrows are often viewed as a replacement for Silver Arrows and have the same effect, but this can be easily disproven. In OoT, the Light Arrows do not kill Ganon(dorf), they merely weaken him so he can be sealed away. This is another piece of evidence as to why I do not consider the TP ending a true Ganon death.

Now that I've cleared that up, we can actually begin theorizing. Since LoZ and ALttP Ganon do actually die, we can therefore assume that they go on separate timelines. Now, the obvious choice would be to put LoZ on the child timeline, and ALttP Ganon goes on the adult timeline. It would in fact seem that ALttP must go on the adult timeline, otherwise this Imprisoning War spoken of would have no explanation. There was no seal placed in the child ending of OoT. Now, I know that a lot of people here can justify putting both of these games on the same timeline because Ganon is somehow reborn or reincarnated.

But, the only true piece of evidence we have as to Ganon being reborn is in OoX, when Twinrova make their sacrifice. It can be said that there is a rebirth in FSA, but as pointed out by Erimgard in his "Freshly Picked Oracles" thread, that line was actually mistranslated and it was supposed to say that the previous owner of the Trident was a demon reborn, not that Ganon was a demon reborn who claimed the trident. Thus, we have only one certain rebirth in the entirety of the Legend of Zelda series. I cannot help but believe that if there were another one somewhere in the timeline that they would show it to us, or tell us somehow, as that is a rather important aspect of the story.

Moving onwards, it is this reason that I feel obligated to place LoZ and ALttP on opposite timelines. Here is where the dilemma is. In the adult timeline, we have WW, in which, as previously stated, only Ganondorf dies. Ganon remains, which creates an interesting problem. In ALttP, both Ganon and Ganondorf are present, whereas in LoZ only Ganon is present. This would lead us, or at least me, to assume that the game missing Ganondorf would have to take place after WW. So, our timeline thus far looks like so:

------[WW - PH] - [LoZ -
-----/
[OoT

Brackets signify that the same Link completed those quests. Now, this leaves us with an interesting problem. If LoZ is on the adult timeline, and ALttP and LoZ must be on separate timelines, then that would relegate ALttP to the child timeline. But wait?! Where did the Imprisoning War magically disappear to? In the child ending of OoT there was no seal placed on the Sacred Realm, and Ganon even has no reason to be there at all if it goes straight from TP to ALttP. Well, I believe I can answer at least one of these problems. If we place FS and FSA on the child timeline, we can at least explain Ganon's presence in the Sacred Realm in ALttP. In FSA Ganon was sealed in the Four Sword at the end of the game. In the GBA port of ALttP, there is a secret dungeon that can be unlocked called the Palace of the Four Sword. Within it, is the shattered Four Sword. The Palace of the Four Sword is in the Sacred Realm/Dark World, so I think it is safe to assume that Ganon was imprisoned in the Four Sword, which was then taken to the Sacred Realm where he subsequently escaped from the Four Sword. So, out timeline now looks like this:

------[WW - PH] - [LoZ - AoL]
-----/
[OoT
-----\
------MM] - [TP] - [FS-FSA] - [ALttP]

I have added MM and AoL for completion's sake. And since I'm fairly certain that the placement of these games is not disputed, we should have no problems with this. So, if we were to place ALttP on the child timeline, we have only explained one half of the back story. That is, how Ganon managed to get into the Sacred Realm. But there is still no explanation for how the Sacred Realm was sealed off in the first place. So, just to view all of the angles, let's look at what would happen if we were to place ALttP in the adult timeline:

------[WW-PH] - [LoZ - AoL] - [ALttP]
-----/
[OoT

We have this magical unexplained rebirth of not only Ganon, but also Ganondorf. After all, with the games that have happened, we have WW in which you kill Ganondorf, and LoZ in which you kill Ganon, WITH the Silver Arrows. Whereas that never occurs on the child timeline until you place ALttP there. So, we now have a dilemma. If we place ALttP on the adult timeline, we have an unexplained rebirth of Ganon (even if you were to place LoZ after ALttP, the unexplained rebirth remains because Ganon was killed by Silver Arrows in ALttP as well). And on the contrary, if we place ALttP on the child timeline, we have the unexplained Imprisoning War. I ask this of you then, members of ZU, how do we solve this?