Quote Originally Posted by Formalhaut View Post
I suppose what I'm saying is I'm not seeing much of a difference between the child and adult timeline. I'm sure everyone's explaining it great, but I'm still stumped. I'm looking at the Zelda Wiki and everything. It even says here:

The presence of the Hero who went back and forth in time generated a fork in history, dividing Hyrule's chronology. The Child Link Timeline is the timeline that follows Link after being sent back to his original time following the defeat of Ganondorf by the Hero of Time
The presence of the Hero who went back and forth in time generated a fork in history, dividing Hyrule's chronology. The Adult Link Timeline is the timeline that follows the events after Link is being sent back to his original time, following the Hero of Time's defeat of Ganondorf in the final battle
The child and adult timeline sounds identical. Both involve Link being sent back to his original time by Zelda (because he has to live a normal childhood, etc.).
Basically at the end of OoT, Zelda gives Link the opportunity to live a normal life after he sacrificed seven years of his life to stop Ganondorf in the game by becoming an adult. So she sent him back to the moment when OoT started, but child Link ended up warning Hyrule about the danger of Ganon and he was imprisoned, preventing the events of OoT from happening and creating a split in the timeline because obviously Link still did all the stuff in the Adult Timeline in order to know how to stop Ganon, so the timeline where Link grew up and stopped Ganon didn't disappear by having change the past, instead it just split into a new timeline. So basically Link saved the world as an adult and when he was sent back to relieve his childhood as a reward, he decided to change history by preventing the events of OoT from happening and split time into two different timelines.

In the Missing Hero Timeline, Link doesn't exist anymore because Zelda sent him into the past and he changed history, causing him to live out his days in the Child Link timeline, so no Hero meant no one to stop Ganon when he resurrected, forcing the Goddess' to step in and flood Hyrule to stop him instead before a new Link could reincarnate into this timeline.

In a nutshell:

Fallen Hero Timeline: Link loses the fight against Ganon. OoT took place and Link failed.

Child Timeline: After being sent into the past by Zelda, Link changes time by preventing Ganon's insurrection. Oot never happens cause Link warns everyone about Ganon and he's sealed in the Twilight Realm instead.

Missing Hero Timeline: Follows the timeline Link created by defeating Ganon in OoT. Oot happens but Link disappears to create the Child Timeline, so it's everything in that timeline after Ganon is defeated.