Hero of Time Wanted: Girls Need Not Apply

The 2014 trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild, the next game in the Zelda series, featured a rather androgynous Link. This led to an outpouring of speculation that the next iteration of Link may very well be female. The producer, Eiji Aonuma, who has been a bit vague about the specifics of the character in the trailer (even pointing out that the character didn’t necessarily have to be Link) cleared up the matter at this year’s E3: this iteration of Link is male and was intended to be so from the get go.

Needless to say, many fans were disapointed. That’s not anything new. So what’s the rub this time? Well, I’ll do my best to explain it, so bear with me here.

One of my favorite animes when I was younger was Tenchi Universe. I won’t go into the gritty details of the plot, but at one point a scientist and a space cop get imprisoned by the scientist’s own ship. The scientist tries her best to impress upon the cop that they are indeed trapped while the space cop tearfully pleads with her to do something about her ship. It’s humorous since they’re both being obtuse in their own ways, with the space cop being a bit of an airhead and the scientist being a little too eager to praise her creation despite being hoist her by her own proverbial petard. I’d like to think we have a similar situation on our hands with Link.

See, Eiji Anouma didn’t just say Link was male. Eiji Anouma also pointed out why Link practically had to be male: the balance of the Tri-force. That pretty much implicates that Link will always be male. But even that isn’t quite the thing getting people’s goat, I think. Take a look at the following Critical Miss strip.

Though the character attributes Grey and Cory are highlighting are different here, the idea remains the same: own your creative decisions. Ultimately, “Why not have a female Link?” is a very meta level inquiry. The Tri-force and the rules that govern it are very much a narrative level concern. To those ends, fans were left scratching their heads about what the supposed “balance” that the producer was referring to is. Is it gender balance? Is it role balance? Are they just staying in line with the “always male Link” precedence that they’ve set? Regardless, fans immediately started pointing out ways a female character could be the main character. The most obvious choice, make Zelda the main character, was considered, but shelved since there were concerns about what Link would do if Zelda was the main character doing the fighting. Someone promptly posted the following tweet.

“If Zelda did the fighting what would link do” pic.twitter.com/ITkzCQI2jv

— Sir TapTap (@SirTapTap) June 14, 2016

In all seriousness, though, I believe fans just became more and more convinced as they thought about it that the real issue wasn’t so much that it couldn’t be done coherently, but rather that the team didn’t want to do it. And that’s were it gets dicey. You get major side-eye if it seems like you’re trying to pull a fast one over on your audience. To many, the supposedly questionable references to lore is a cop out. They’d have accepted a “because I said so” much better than a “the lore just kinda works that way”

So in practice, what you got was an awkward situation where the creator is pointing at the lore saying “You see on this diagram that this goes this way and this goes that way, and so, there’s no way. Absolutely not. No way. That’s it. Got it?” and the audience replying “Nope. I don’t get it at all” and “But how can this be? You created this ship, didn’t you?”

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think anyone did anything wrong here. I think the system is working pretty much as it should. The creator is making the game as they see fit and that is okay. A portion of its audience is expressing a desire for a change in the formula and that is okay. A different portion of its audience is expressing their lack of desire for said formula change and that is okay. Yet another portion is rather ambivalent about it and that too is okay.

Feel free to take this cum grano salis, but I’d urge creators to explicitly acknowledge their creative decisions as just that – decisions they are making. Doing so is the first step to being able to provide the most comprehensively honest reasons for said decisions. It goes a long way towards self-awareness. Sometimes you manipulate the meta, sometimes the meta manipulates you. Thorough self reflection will show the way. That applies to the audience as well. In this case, one gender portrayal isn’t inherently wrong or right, but what do you have invested in Link being male? Female? Genderfluid?