Author John Boyne accidently included a recipe straight out of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in his book A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom. The recipe includes ingredients and monster parts from the video game and is very obviously not a real recipe. “Octorok eyeball” and “the tail of the red lizalfos and four Hylian shrooms” and more should have been a dead giveaway, lol. This is super embarrassing because the book is a very serious, historical novel set in our world.
Once it was pointed out on twitter by Calvin Wong Tze Loon and others he acknowledged his mistake. Boyne said that a cursory Google led to him accidentally include the Zelda recipe and laughed it off. He also said he wouldn’t change the section, but would add Zelda to the acknowledgments page of the novel’s paperback, despite never having played a video game in his life. Boyne has also been accused, by trans rights activists and others, of transphobia. This is because of the misgendering, deadnaming and perpetuating stereotypes in his book My Brother’s Name Is Jessica. But that is a post for another day.
Source: Calvin Wong Tze Loon
For reference, this is a keese:
These are octoroks:
And this is a lizalfos:
So yea, not the most realistic things your could print in your super serious historical novel. Next time, don’t include recipes from The Legend of Zelda in your book, haha.
Ok, but what is the problem? The book or the whiter?
You count this as a fail, but how much times we hear the whriters saying the truth about how he decided include pieces from other masterpieces?
Ok, one step further: In Breath of the Wild, you can only use five ingredients at a time, Lizalfos tail would turn the spicy pepper and Hylian shrooms into a questionable dish, and it’s the flower, not the leaves, of silent princess plant that are ingredients. Which leads me to conclude that some thought went into this, not just copy-pasting a recipe from Legend of Zelda.