Read on Twitter
Zelda’s story and world, especially in games where Ganondorf is the villain, are incredibly conservative in nature https://twitter.com/ZeldaUniverse/status/1291149663257624578
“Big scary black man is threatening the monarchy, go stab him young boy”
It’s probably because Zelda’s world is an ersatz Japanese-flavoured Sword and Sorcery world i.e. the same genre that early D&D drew on back in the 70s.
This doesn’t apply in games where the worldbuilding is more experimental like Majora’s Mask or Link’s Awakening. Those games are more Weird Fantasy than Sword and Sorcery.
Of course all of this stems from the fact that Zelda is a kids’ game so it keeps it simple for a fun story. In the world of Zelda, the monarchy is always good and worth defending. I do give them credit for never allowing Link to kill Gerudo other than ‘Dorf tho-
-they’re still humans after all! Even in games where they’re the bad guys Link can only incapacitate or sneak past them iirc. And of course in Breath of the Wild, Gerudo are just normal people.
[im very much coming up with this thread as I go along, bear with]
I don’t know, it was just something about Breath of the Wild that rubbed me the wrong way. I love that game but something about the way it presented the theme of lineage made me suspicious. Plus I felt like there were huge holes in the stories of the various champions.
Like, these people have statues of them in their respective towns like they’re amazing heroes but iirc none of them did anything in their lives to warrant that. As soon as the kingdom fell into war they all died so in what circumstances did they prove their heroism?
Ok I take back what I said about conservatism, that point was half-baked anyway here’s my REAL confession: BotW’s story and characters are dead boring for the most part and the amnesia thing is wasted storytelling potential. Listening to the characters talk makes me feel nothing.
