Ganon's Name May Trace Back to a Kamen Rider Villain
Ganon's Mysterious Origins (Revisited)
A fan theory on Resetera suggests Ganon's name and appearance may derive from Ganikomoru, a villain from the Kamen Rider franchise. The theory links the Gerudo to the Geldam organization and notes visual similarities between Ganikomoru and Ganon's 8-bit sprite. This blog post revisits the mystery of Ganon's origins, previously thought to be inspired by the Journey to the West character Hakkai, and explores the possibility of multiple inspirations.
And, honestly, if you tried to draw Ganikomoru in an 8-bit pixel style, you’d probably end up with something that looks a lot like this version of Ganon.
- hn993302
LttP officially named him Ganondorf Dragmire. Sounds like they were just giving a generic, intimidating European fantasy name. The rest of the early games are that kind of thing, enchanted woods with fairies and knights.
There's not a lot that makes sense in the Zelda theming. Link is officially Christian somehow, at least through LttP. Gerudo Valley is like the Middle East in OoT, which I would say is just loose theming but the Fire Temple has literal Islamic chanting. First few games had King Harkinian of Hyrule which sounds a bit like he's Armenian. The game series is named after author Zelda Fitzgerald.
- OroPla
The Gerudo are pronounced Geld (ゲルド) in Japanese, which is the German word for money. Ganondorf (ガノンドロフ) also has the German word Dorf (village) in it.
This doesn't get us closer to the origin, but speaking of German influence, Link also happens to be a German word. As a noun it shares the same meaning as the English word link.
Zelda seems to come from (ital.) Griselda which supposedly is rooted in the old high German word gris (grau) and hiltja (fight). But that's kind of a stretch.
- stephbook
This went completely off the rails, it's actually kind of funny.
Kind of reminds me of JK Rowling backfilling all of that stuff in the Harry Potter books (now there's Luna Love good!.) Or Nintendo retconning Bowser's sons and replacing them with Bowser Jr.
Sometimes there just isn't that much thought behind a character.