Zelda fans pay tribute to their favorite fan artist after 900-day drawing journey to Tears of the Kingdom

Now that Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is here, the game's subreddit is filled with posts celebrating a champion of the community who finally hung up their artist's hat after a 900-day wait for the sequel.

In the run-up to release, Reddit user theDuckPancake spoke to us about their collection of nearly 1,000 clumsily scribbled pieces of Zelda fanart. They spent nearly three years posting daily drawings to the Zelda community, and with the release of Tears of the Kingdom, today, Thursday, May 11, marked the final post in their series.

Now, as players wait to dive into Hyrule themselves in search of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom Sky Island Shrines, they're paying tribute to theDuckPancake, their artwork, and the effect they've had on the Zelda fandom's long, long wait for their next game.

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Almost all of the posts focus not on Zelda, Link, or any of the franchise's characters. Instead, they're focused on the green, top-hatted self-insert that theDuckPancake used to represent their own voice in their artwork.

While there are a few bits of custom artwork, a surprising number of posts are memes based around Marvel movies - there's a classic 'careful, he's a hero' from Spider-Man 2, a couple of riffs on Thanos' "sunrise on a grateful universe" from Avengers: Infinity War, and - my personal favourite – Gwyneth Paltrow's "you can rest now" from the climax of Endgame.

Perhaps it's only fitting that such heroic source material would be used to reference such a heroic effort. Link might be the Hero of Hyrule, but theDuckPancake is the hero of the Zelda community.

Check out our The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom review before you dive in.

I'm GamesRadar's Managing Editor for news, shaping the news strategy across the team. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.