How queerness became calamity in Tears of the Kingdom
polygon.comMany players have celebratedThe Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the space it made to find queer expression in Hyrule. Its story provided just enough possibility space for players to explore in ways that did not conform to its developers’ intent. But stepping into Hyrule Field again in Tears of the Kingdom, I felt much more constrained.
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Players have been looking for gender in this generation’s iteration of Link since before Breath of the Wild released. Donning his tunic’s now iconic champion blue, Link’s androgyny in the game’s very first teaser trailer back in 2014 stirred mainstream audiences to scrutinize the player character’s presumed gender. And as early as that had come into question, so too did the character’s entire identity. The idea of a female Hero of Time simmered. And if the character shown wasn’t Link, then maybe it was a playable Zelda.
Nintendo would eventually address the speculation: Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma said that nothing so revolutionary as a woman was in the works, explaining that changing Link’s gender would “mess with the balance of the Triforce,” while focusing instead on Zelda as a playable female character would leave Link with nothing to do. “If we have princess Zelda as the main character who fights,” Aonuma asked, “then what is Link going to do?”
These assumptions and their casual misogyny reveal that particular kinds of gender are a priori to the very land and cosmos of Hyrule — that the Triforce both represents and enshrines the subordination of women to men in the kingdom’s religion, and that courage and power must only be an essential trait of men. Many fans have been disappointed in Zelda’s continued sidelining, while the developer has been content to give Zelda
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