Watch the very last thing Midna does in Twilight Princess. She cries. One tear falls; it hits the Mirror of Twilight, and the Mirror shatters completely. Not cracks. Not fractures into four pieces you’ll spend the second half of an epilogue collecting. Gone, permanently, on purpose.

That single act, the one that closes the door between two worlds forever, is something nobody else in the entire game could have done. Not Zant, even with a god’s power behind him. Not Ganondorf, holding a third of the Triforce. Only Midna.

So today I want to ask a colder question than the one I asked last time. In my last video, I asked whether Midna is the best companion this series has ever built. This one isn’t about companionship at all. This one is about power.

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THE MONARCH YOU MEET MID-EXILE

When Midna finds Link chained up in the Castle Town sewers, she isn’t just a sarcastic imp with a grudge against Hyrule. She’s a deposed head of state. She has been for some time. The character striking that first bargain with Link- help me and I’ll help you- has already lost a war before the game’s story properly begins.

Most Zelda games introduce their guide characters as exactly what they are from the first scene. Navi is a fairy. There’s no gap between the role and the presentation. Midna is an exception in the series where what you’re looking at and who you’re actually dealing with are two completely different things.

She’s an imp because someone did that to her. She’s hiding in shadows and making desperate deals with a stranger because the alternative, the actual seat of power she’s supposed to be sitting in, is currently occupied by the person who took it from her. Every choice she makes for the first two-thirds of this game- the manipulation, the coldness, the constant transactional logic – has to be read through that lens first. This is someone in exile, trying to claw her way back.

THE SUCCESSION CRISIS NOBODY TALKS ABOUT

So how did she lose it? Before the story starts, the Twili throne sat empty, and the people needed to settle on who’d take it. Zant, a court insider who’d served the Twili royal family for years and clearly expected the job to fall to him, was passed over. Midna was chosen instead.

Zant never lets you forget how badly this sat with him. Late in the game, cornered and open about his own motives, he explains: he believed he was owed the throne, and the Twili refused to acknowledge him as king.

Why was he passed over? The Twili’s ancestors were banished to the Twilight Realm because a hunger for power consumed them. Zant carried that same hunger, and the Twili recognised it. They preferred Midna and rejected the one trait in Zant that echoed the reason their entire people ended up trapped in permanent twilight.

Zant wasn’t some outsider with no claim. He’d served the royal family for years, worked inside the court, presumably had every procedural reason to expect the job. The game never spells out the exact mechanism, whether this was a formal vote among elders, a decision made by whatever passed for a Twili council, or something closer to a collective judgement the whole community arrived at. What it does make clear is that the throne wasn’t simply his by default, and it wasn’t simply Midna’s by default either. Somebody looked at both candidates and actively chose. That’s a different structure to how most Zelda games treat royal succession, which is almost always a straight hereditary line. The Twilight Realm, whatever else it is, runs on a system where the crown can be denied to the person who expected it, on the stated grounds of character. Zant is proof the system can identify the wrong candidate correctly. He’s also proof that identifying the wrong candidate correctly doesn’t stop that candidate from taking the job by force anyway.

Denied the throne specifically because of his greed, Zant responds by finding the single fastest, most extreme source of borrowed power available to him and taking the throne anyway. The Twili elders saw that impulse and said no. Zant heard the no and went and found a god.

THE FOREIGN POWER THAT MADE IT POSSIBLE

Ganondorf, banished into the Twilight Realm himself after events elsewhere in Hyrule’s history, doesn’t stay quiet in exile. He finds Zant. He finds the one Twili nursing a grievance large enough to be useful, and he appears to him as something enormous and spectral, a towering presence that the isolated, magic-starved Twili mistake for divinity. One of the game’s Sages later reflects on this with something close to dark irony, noting that Ganondorf, by nothing short of a cruel accident, had also been touched by the power of the gods himself. Two men, both denied a throne through some mechanism of divine judgement, find each other in exile.

Ganondorf offers Zant exactly what he can’t produce on his own: raw power, enough to overturn a legitimate succession by force. In exchange, Zant serves him. That’s the whole transaction. A domestic figure with a real grievance and a foreign power willing to supply the muscle he can’t provide himself, in exchange for future obedience. It’s a shape you’ll recognise from outside fantasy fiction entirely, because it’s one of the oldest patterns in how power changes hands anywhere: legitimacy lost at home, replaced with force borrowed from somewhere else, at a price that gets collected later.

It’s worth looking at Ganondorf’s position here too, because it adds a third failed claim to power beneath this whole story. He isn’t ruling Hyrule when this game begins. He’s been dealt with, exiled into the Twilight Realm himself. That’s the same basic shape as Zant’s situation: a man convinced he deserves power, denied it by the people positioned to make that call, and looking for any route back to it that doesn’t require going through the people who said no. Ganondorf has more raw ability to make that route work than Zant does alone, which is exactly why Zant needs him.

Ganondorf, denied dominion over Hyrule, exiled. Zant, denied the Twili throne, resentful. Both respond to rejection the same way: by finding force wherever it’s available and using it to overwrite a decision already made about them. Midna is the only one of the three who was actually handed power through whatever process the Twili use, and she’s the only one who spends most of the game without any power at all to show for it.

The story keeps circling back to the same question from different angles. Does power belong to whoever seizes it, or to whoever was actually given it? Twilight Princess answers that question through the Mirror, rather than through a speech, but it answers it the same way every time it comes up.

Zant takes that power and does something swift and total with it. He turns the Twili people themselves into an army of Shadow Beasts, seals away the Sols that light the Twilight Realm, and moves against Midna before she can properly claim the magic that comes with the throne. She’s overpowered, cursed into the impish form you spend most of the game looking at, and cast out.

Notice what this means for how we should read Zant for the rest of the story. He isn’t a self-made tyrant like Ganondorf. Every scrap of power he wields for the entire game is on loan. He’s a client, not a sovereign, propped up by somebody else’s magic, sitting on a throne he could never have taken through his own strength alone. Keep that in mind. It’ll be important later.

TWO FOREIGN ALLIANCES

Zant strikes a deal with an outside power to seize a throne. Midna strikes a deal with an outside power, Link, to take it back—same basic shape. Completely different substance, and the differences are exactly where this story’s politics live.

Start with what each side actually understands about the deal they’re making. Zant believes he’s speaking with a god. He isn’t. He’s speaking with a banished war criminal from another world, and Zant either can’t tell the difference or doesn’t want to. He enters his alliance on false premises, handed to him by the more powerful party specifically to keep him compliant. Midna, by contrast, never pretends to Link that this is anything other than transactional. She tells him outright, from the very first bargain, that he has to do exactly as she says. There’s no theatre, no god act. It’s cold, but at least it’s honest.

Then there’s the direction the power actually flows. Ganondorf gives Zant strength and takes obedience in return, a relationship with an obvious price. Midna and Link’s arrangement runs the opposite way for most of the game. She offers him almost nothing materially. No army, no magic she can freely give away, nothing but information doled out grudgingly and the promise that helping her might eventually help him too. If anything, Link supplies the strength in that partnership for a long time, and Midna’s currency is knowledge, direction, and eventually trust.

That’s the difference between a foreign power that enables a coup and one that enables a restoration. It isn’t really about who has more might. Ganondorf and Link are both outsiders lending strength to a Twili with a claim to the throne. What separates them is whether the person on the receiving end understood what they were agreeing to, and whether the alliance itself was ever meant to be permanent.

WHAT LEGITIMACY ACTUALLY COSTS

The undercurrent of political drama in Twilight Princess matters because it explains what the companion-focused version of this story tends to gloss over: why Midna spends the entire middle of the game behaving the way she does.

Zant gets the throne room. He gets the armies, the helmet that visually announces him as ruler, and control over an entire occupied population turned into monsters at his command. Every outward symbol of Twili kingship now belongs to him. Midna is cursed, stripped of her true form, and thrown into a world that has no idea who she is or why any of this should matter. There’s no court to vouch for her, no seal, no crown, nothing to point to and say, this is who I actually am.

Every early transaction with Link, the cold bargains, the information doled out only when it stops being useful to withhold, isn’t just personality. It’s the only currency a deposed monarch with zero institutional backing has left: leverage, secrecy, and the ability to make herself useful enough that someone keeps helping her without asking too many questions about who she really is. A ruler with an army doesn’t need to negotiate like that. A ruler with nothing does.

A detail buried in how the game handles titles makes this even sharper. For most of the story, if anyone in Hyrule assumes a “Twilight Princess” exists at all, the game lets that assumption drift toward Zelda rather than Midna. Whether that’s a deliberate piece of misdirection on Midna’s part or simply the natural result of nobody having a reason to correct the record while she has no power to back the claim up anyway, the effect is the same either way: the actual title-holder spends most of her own story letting somebody else wear the label, because correcting it does nothing for her and might cost her the one advantage she has left, which is being underestimated.

Even her physical appearance in true form gestures at this. When the curse finally breaks, she’s revealed standing taller than Zelda, in a hooded cloak that echoes the exact silhouette of Zant’s own royal garb. Under this reading, it’s the state itself, the actual regalia of the Twili monarchy, being fought over by the two people with competing claims to wear it.

There’s also the matter of what she’s competing against visually, every single time she and Zant might theoretically be compared. Zant’s helmet and armour are unmistakably regal, deliberately so, built to read as authority at a glance even to someone who’s never heard of the Twili before. An imp riding on the back of a cursed wolf reads as exactly the opposite, no matter how sharp her dialogue is. If legitimacy were a matter of first impressions, this contest would be over before it started, and Zant would win every time anyone looked at the two of them side by side. The entire back half of the game is Midna clawing her way toward the one form of proof that doesn’t care what either of them looks like.

Officially, Midna is twenty-one. That means the succession crisis that put her on the throne, the one Zant lost, wasn’t some settled inheritance she grew up expecting. It was a live political emergency she walked into young, with whatever institutional support existed around her presumably thin at best, given how completely and how fast Zant was able to undo it. The arrogance she shows Link in the opening hours reads differently once you place it against that timeline. This is someone who’s already lost one political fight, badly, is being handed a second one she has no resources to win, and is falling back on the only tools she has left: information control, leverage, and refusing to let anyone see how little power she actually has.

THE RULER LINK NEVER MEETS

For most of the game, you never actually see Midna govern anything. You see her fight. You see her scheme, manipulate, warp Link between worlds, and ride him into battle.

What you rarely see, until the very end, is her exercising the kind of authority a ruler is supposed to have: giving orders that people other than one cursed knight follow, making decisions with consequences for a population, sitting in a room and being treated as what she actually is. The entire adventure plays out more like a resistance campaign run by a government-in-exile than a fairy tale about a princess and her knight.

Even when you finally reach the Palace of Twilight, the actual literal seat of her power, it’s occupied. Every hallway you walk through belongs to Zant’s forces. The one place in the entire game that should be unambiguously hers is enemy territory by the time you get there, and taking it back is framed as a dungeon to clear, not a homecoming.

The two moments where she does exercise something like real sovereign force are worth separating from each other, because they’re not the same kind of act. Reclaiming the Fused Shadow’s power to strike down Zant is a use of force, brutal and decisive, but force is something anyone with enough borrowed magic could theoretically manage, Zant included. It proves she can fight. It doesn’t, by itself, prove she’s the rightful ruler. The other moment does that job on its own, and we’ll get to it properly in a minute.

As Link clears each region of the twilight covering it, the ordinary Twili civilians caught inside, transformed against their will into Shadow Beasts, get restored to their original forms. Midna is present for this, guiding it every single time. Zant governs the Twili he controls through fear and transformation, turning his own people into weapons pointed at Hyrule. Midna, meanwhile, without a throne, without an army, without anyone acknowledging her authority, undoes that damage to individual Twili citizens one region at a time, as a side effect of a quest that’s ostensibly about getting her power back. It’s the closest thing to an act of care for her own subjects the game gives her, and it happens entirely without ceremony, buried inside what looks like a checklist of areas to clear.

Set that against Zelda for a second, because the contrast sharpens both characters. Zelda’s authority in this game is never in question. Hyrule’s soldiers still answer to her, the castle still recognises her, and even under occupation everyone around her treats her as exactly what she claims to be. Her title is uncontested, even while her kingdom is overrun. Midna’s is the opposite: her kingdom is, for a stretch, at least partly reclaimable by force, but nobody outside a handful of Sages and Zant himself would even recognise her claim to it if she stated it outright.

ZANT AS DARK MIRROR

It’s worth taking Zant seriously for a moment before this all resolves, because the game does. His grievance is legible. He served the royal family for years, believed the throne was owed to him, and watched it go to someone else. By the time you meet him properly, that resentment has curdled into something closer to a breakdown.

But the story is careful, almost pointedly so, about where his story goes wrong, and it isn’t the rejection itself. It’s what he does immediately afterwards. Denied the throne because of a hunger for power that echoed his own ancestors’ downfall, he proves the elders right within what feels like the same breath by seeking out the single most extreme, most borrowed form of power available anywhere in this story. He doesn’t out-argue the decision.

Zant’s arc has a tragedy. A man spends years in service, watches the job he expected to get go to someone he presumably saw as less experienced, and instead of accepting that or building a legitimate case for himself over time, finds the fastest possible route to power and takes it, consequences unexamined. The game lets him keep a sliver of dignity in his own telling of events, right up until the moment it makes very clear, mechanically, that dignity was never the same thing as a rightful claim.

His fatal error, in the terms this game actually sets up, is mistaking the performance of kingship for the fact of it. He has the throne room. Every visible marker a casual observer would use to identify a king, he has. What he doesn’t have is the one piece of magic tied specifically to legitimate rule, not borrowed strength.

That’s the Mirror of Twilight. A Sage tells Link directly that only the true leader of the Twili can utterly destroy it. Zant, for all his stolen power, could merely break it into pieces. The game isn’t saying Zant is weaker than Midna in raw power; for a long stretch of the story, he demonstrably isn’t. It’s saying the Mirror doesn’t respond to power at all. It responds to legitimacy, specifically, mechanically, in a way brute strength cannot fake.

THE PALACE, THE FIGHT, AND WHAT THEY’RE ACTUALLY DECIDING

By the time you reach the Palace of Twilight itself, the stakes have stopped being background reading and become the literal shape of the dungeon. Every gauntlet Link fights through there is built around Midna’s growing strength as she reclaims what’s rightfully hers, room by room, the game translating a political restoration into level design without ever needing a cutscene to explain it. And then Zant, the confrontation the whole game has been building toward, drags Link back through the bosses and arenas of every dungeon that came before, forcing a recall of tactics learned hours earlier before collapsing into something far more chaotic once those old tricks stop working.

Zant loses that fight. But losing it doesn’t restore Midna. Her curse holds, and Zant, even beaten, delivers one last piece of the puzzle: the curse was never his to lift in the first place, because it was never really his power to begin with. It belongs to Ganondorf, and only Ganondorf’s defeat will undo it. That’s the game confirming, out of Zant’s own mouth, at the exact moment he’s lost everything, that he was a client the entire time and not a sovereign for a single second of his reign. He took a throne he was incapable of actually holding.

THE GOODBYE, REREAD

Which brings us back to where we started.

We’ve talked before, in the last video, about how the mirror shattering plays as an emotional beat: the tear, the finality, the fact that she chose it herself and nobody made her.

She isn’t only saying goodbye in that moment. She’s performing the one governmental act available exclusively to her, as the confirmed, legitimate sovereign of the Twili. Sealing the border between two entire worlds, permanently, unilaterally, without needing anyone’s permission or ratification, is a political act as much as an emotional one. When she does it, she’s exercising the single power that proves, beyond any argument Zant or anyone else could make, that the throne was always hers.

And then she goes home to a place that just spent an entire arc occupied, its ordinary citizens transformed into monsters against their will, its palace fought through room by room by a stranger and a knight from another world. The game doesn’t show you rebuilding. It happens entirely off-screen, the moment the credits start. Whatever legitimacy she just proved, she’s about to spend it on the least glamorous job imaginable: putting a broken kingdom back together.

WHY THIS READING MATTERS

Twilight Princess tells two stories layered on top of each other, and almost everyone who talks about this game engages with only one. There’s the story most people remember: a cursed imp, a silent knight, a slow thaw into trust, a tearful goodbye.

Underneath it is a story about a coup enabled by a foreign power, a usurper who mistakes borrowed strength for the real thing, and a rightful monarch who spends nearly the entire game unable to prove she’s who she says she is.

For a series that spends an enormous amount of time on royal bloodlines and rightful heirs, mostly by simply asserting them and moving on, Twilight Princess might be the one entry that actually interrogates what makes a claim to a throne real, rather than treating blood or ceremony as automatically sufficient. Zelda herself, across most of this franchise, is a princess because the game tells you she’s a princess, and nobody within the fiction ever seriously disputes it. Midna has to prove it, through a mechanic that responds to nothing but the truth of who she is, in front of a rival who believed, at least for a while, that force alone would settle the question permanently in his favour.

That’s a more interesting argument about legitimacy than this series usually bothers making, and it’s easy to miss entirely. None of this changes how the ending feels. She wasn’t just choosing to let go of someone she’d grown to love. She was, in the same motion, finally getting to act like the ruler she’d been the entire time, for the first and only moment the game ever lets her.

It also changes what a replay looks like, if you’re the kind of player who goes back to this game every few years. Watch the opening hours again with this framing in mind, and the coldness reads completely differently. By the time you reach the Palace of Twilight, you’re not just watching a companion regain her powers. You’re watching a legitimate ruler finally reach the one piece of magic in the entire game that can prove, beyond argument, that she was right the whole time.

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