Octoroks, tektites and leevers too
But with your help, our hero pulls through!
You might best know John Boyne by one of his works that was adapted into a motion picture: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Well, he has a new novel out. And despite said novel not being fantasy in the least, it seems he quite accidentally stuck a reference to The Legend of Zelda in there.
A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom spans 1,999 years, starting in 1 AD, and follows its viewpoint character and family over time. Early on, the viewpoint character sets out to poison Attila the Hun, only having the ingredients for red dye with which to do so.
Unfortunately, it seems the ingredients listed contain items not found in our world, historically, but rather, the far off land of Hyrule.
As the twitter thread by writer Dana Schwartz points out, most of those ingredients don’t actually exist. As a matter of fact, the given ingredients are precisely the ones used to dye clothing red in 2017’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Schwatz hypothesizes that, while researching historical red dyes, Boyne may have accidentally gotten the recipe from a poorly filtered Google search. Not realizing that Red Lizalfos, Octorocks, Keese, and Hylian Shrooms (among other things) don’t exist, he included the recipe whole cloth in his novel.
Despite never having played any of the games in the series (or any computer games ever, period), John Boyne took the (potentially embarrassing) situation with dignity and grace. Moreover, he stated he wouldn’t change the section; rather, he’d add the game series to the acknowledgements. Per a tweet he made in response to Dana Schwartz:
I’ll leave it as it is. I actually think it’s quite funny and you’re totally right. I don’t remember but I must have just Googled it. Hey, sometimes you just gotta throw your hands up and say ‘yup! My bad!
Never forget, kids: everybody fails a spot-check sometimes.
Source: The Guardian
About Author
