“It is inevitable all of us will see something of ourselves within Link,” says Keroblin, a Zelda fan who first remembers playing Phantom Hourglass in 2007, and identifies as transmasculine and agender. “We’re an active participant even [when] we can’t make narrative decisions, because we get to decide who Link is. It is easy to discover yourself and your gender through a character like this, and to make trans readings, as the lack of traditional gender roles creates, maybe for the first time you’ve seen, a world where all you have to be is kind and brave.”
Today, Nintendo released Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom; the sequel to 2017’s Breath of the Wild. Both games (and really, all the games in the Zelda franchise) follow a young man named Link who is tasked with rescuing the kingdom of Hyrule from a great evil. Breath of the Wild was an incredibly beautiful, poignant game, full of emotional stories and sidequests; it ushered in an era of exciting new open-world gameplay for the Zelda franchise. Breath of the Wild quickly became a bestseller and later won Game of the Year at the Game Awards. And now, gamers are returning to its version of Hyrule. But some of them have changed.
Lutavia, a cosplayer, says that they cosplayed as Link after Breath of the Wild came out, but at the time they still believed that they were cisgender. Now? “I am a vastly different person,” they said in an email to io9. They currently identify as transmasc and genderfluid, an identity that falls under the nonbinary gender umbrella. With the new game coming out, “it felt like a good time to finally re-approach him, and with a design that begged to be interpreted in a more [transgender] way.”
Link has been described by many trans people as an “egg-cracker”—someone (or something) who makes people realize they’re transgender. It’s moment of awakening when little pieces of a person’s experience fit into place and trans people begin to understand their life and gender through a new paradigm. For many gamers, Link’s appearance, mannerisms, and even his embodiment of positive masculine traits all create a space where people can inhabit those parts of the character, creating moments of realization in their own lives outside of Hyrule.
When I reached out to trans gamers to ask them about their relationships with Zelda and Link, the response was immediate and overwhelming—what you’ll find throughout this piece are highlights emphasizing the trans lens people see the series and its protagonist through, rather than the totality of what people told me. But even then, it is clear that Link means a lot to the transgender gamer community, and the joy he brings to many people is deeply affecting and wonderfully tangible. Many people have asked to be identified by either their first names or pseudonyms, due to transphobia in the gaming community and the world at large.
One of the things that many transgender people I spoke to mentioned about Link that drew them towards a trans interpretation is the fact that Link seems designed to support that reading. Eiji Aonuma, a longtime Zelda producer since Ocarina of Time, said in an interview with Time magazine in 2016 that a few games ago, he took this approach to Link’s design:
I wanted Link to be gender neutral. I wanted the player to think ‘Maybe Link is a boy or a girl.’ If you saw Link as a guy, he’d have more of a feminine touch. Or vice versa, if you related to Link as a girl, it was with more of a masculine aspect. I really wanted the [design] to encompass more of a gender neutral figure. So I’ve always thought that for either female or male players, I wanted them to be able to relate to Link… As far as gender goes, Link [in Breath of the Wild] is definitely a male, but I wanted to create a character where anybody would be able to relate to the character.
By many accounts, Aonuma was successful. Because of the way that the 2017 game encourages players to set their own pace and go towards whatever part of the map interests them, and are rarely “locked in” to a certain dungeon or story path, “Breath of the Wild is about freedom and exploration,” says Matt, a nonbinary fan who first played The Legend of Zelda on NES in the ‘90s when his brother wasn’t at home. He says that these themes “carried over, consciously or subconsciously,” to the character design. “Male, female, masculine, feminine—lack thereof or in between, it’s all about exploration.”
“It’s just really easy to [see Link as trans],” says a cosplayer who has recently named themselves Link. “It’s fun to imagine yourself in a world like that, expressing yourself without consequences. The fact that we live in an age where such private exploration is possible? I consider myself pretty lucky.”
Darling, who first played a Zelda game in 2007 (the handheld release Phantom Hourglass) writes in an email that they can easily see Link as embodying any number of trans identifiers, explaining that Link can be any gender under a certain lens. “As a trans man, Link is soft-faced and hard-bodied yet slim, elements I think a certain subset of trans men can identify with. As a trans woman, Link is seen as a man but is soft-faced, and often bucks male gender norms or wears women’s clothes.” They also state that “he’s a character who simply emanates t-boy swag. The way Link dresses, carries, and presents himself across the entire series SCREAMS transmasc to me.”
“Legend of Zelda, as a series, makes a POINT of designing masculine and feminine characters in slightly (or not so slightly) exaggerated ways to let you know that they’re male/female,” explains Vic, a fan who began playing Zelda games on the N64. “Look at Ganon for example, or Groose, or women like Urbosa. They are clearly coded, physically and behaviorally, as men or women. But not Link. Link experiences and views the world in an almost genderless way.”
Link, as designed in Breath of the Wild and many other iterations across the Zelda franchise, is relatively small and slim. He’s shorter than many other characters in the story, and rarely presents as a dominating presence. Even Zelda—his female counterpart in the games—more often than not stands at about the same height as he does. While he often has an athletic build, he is not bulky or overly muscular. And in Breath of the Wild specifically, as Finn, a trans man, points out, “Link has hips. Visible hips,” rather than a more stereotypical large body type typically seen on default male video game personas. He continues, explaining that “seeing a dude with hips helps my dysphoria.”
Immersion, and by extension projection, has always been a huge part of video games in the role-playing tradition, and many trans people feel comfortable playing Link because of the in-between-ness of his design. One of the side quests in Breath of the Wild asks Link to sneak into Gerudo Town, a desert city that is made up entirely of women. In order to do so, Link purchases a set of female Gerudo clothing from another Hylian—who many read as a trans woman—and proceeds to walk right into Gerudo Town. This quest has had mixed reactions, but for many trans people, the simple act of putting on and taking off clothes to indicate a change of gender—rather than having to perform or mask any other parts of his body—in order to pass as suitably feminine or masculine was a very liberating moment.
Vaya, a trans fan who first played as Link in Link’s Awakening back in 2000 and now considers this fact “hilariously appropriate,” says that “it can be really confusing navigating that self-discovery process and adjusting presentation.” Legend of Zelda actively helped during their gender journey. “Having Link to look toward [as a role model] re-contextualized so many features and qualities that I had been socialized to view as feminine. But if the Hero of Time could put on ‘girl’s clothes,’ be perceived as a woman, then take off those clothes and be assured in his identity, so could I.”
Another fan, Jay, explains that the Gerudo side quest was a “moment where Link is able to pass between the perceived rigidity of masculine and feminine spaces that really got to me and made me feel (what I did not understand at the time as) gender euphoria.” This moment of passing was “fundamentally different from any other game at the time for me because it was not just choosing to play as male or female, but rather shifting to the other side of the binary for a short time.” Another aspect many fans mentioned was that this side quest didn’t show Link as being ashamed or uncomfortable in women’s clothing. When he’s complimented on how cute he looks, he blushes and accepts the compliment. It’s an understated, yet deeply affirming interaction, but often these small moments of confidence are what stick with people the most.
The story and character development throughout the series also provide moments of projection for trans people. Link is one of the few characters in the Zelda franchise that rarely, if ever, gets a voice actor, outside of grunts and yells in combat. All of Link’s dialogue within narrative conversations is implied, which especially stands out in cutscenes where other characters are fully voiced as they were in Breath of the Wild. Ritz, another trans fan of the series, says that they interpret this as Link “masking” his voice, which many trans people do when they want to emphasize or downplay gender markers.
Link also embodies traditionally masculine heroic traits in a positive and generally unharmful way. The Zelda franchise is aimed at young adults and children, and it is not considered particularly graphically violent—that means no blood, no bodies, no exp Source: Gizmodo