The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom players have been spurred into investigating the game's three elemental dragons, after one player discovered they're hiding a neat little Triforce design on their backs.
Earlier this week, the Reddit post below gained a lot of attention, thanks to the titular discovery: The three elemental dragons each have a piece of the Triforce on their backs. I don't know how I've never noticed this in the dozens of hours I've spent roaming the skies of Hyrule, but the player is right - there are three tiny triangular scales on the backs of the three dragons.
TIL the dragons all have a piece of the triforce on their back from r/tearsofthekingdom
"I thought it was neat since I always thought the three dragons symbolized the three goddesses," the player adds in the post caption. That's actually a really great theory, especially because the dragon's names are all similar to the three Golden Goddesses. The dragon Dinraal sounds similar to the Goddess Din, for example, as does the dragon Naydra and the Goddess Nayru, and Farosh the lightning dragon and Farore the Goddess.
If you want to go looking for the scales yourself, the original player notes that they're roughly "half way up on each elemental dragon." In fact, that's exactly what's happened to the Zelda community far and wide since the post went up on Reddit - tons of players have been descending on the three elemental dragons for themselves to find out what's up with the Triforce-like design.
The community hunt has thrown out the fascinating discovery just below. It turns out the triangle isn't a scale at all, but some mysterious object hovering slightly above the dragon's scales themselves. Additionally, the player points out that the dragons could have a piece of the Triforce within them, just like Link had a Triforce symbol appear on his hand when he obtained a piece of the object in Ocarina of Time.
Comment from r/tearsofthekingdom
This has all led to another fascinating little bit of storytelling - the three dragons may once have been Zonai people. A comment underneath the original post points out that Princess Zelda became the Light Dragon when she ingested the secret stone, so it stands to reason that three people could have become dragons if they had ingested parts of the Triforce (or other secret stones), at some point long ago.
The reason that the player suspects they're Zonai, and not Hyrulians? Just look at the ears. The three elemental dragons have decidedly pointy ears, not unlike Zonai such as Sonia and Rauru, whereas the Light Dragon, which is obviously Princess Zelda, has much shorter ears. That makes a pretty compelling argument for the elemental dragons having once been Zonai people.
