Why is everyone suddenly so obsessed with Zelda having a female protagonist?
Like, I know there was that rumor that BotW would let you choose to play as a female Link. But it was a rumor. It's bizarre to me that people got so invested in that rumor that they are now upset that it turned out to be false.
It wasn't just a rumor. It really took off when
Aonuma was really coy about whether or not the figure in the first BotW trailer was Link or not. That caused people to start speculating as to whether that character was actually a woman or not, especially with how androgynous the figure was. Of course,
Aonuma soon clarified that he was just messing around and joking when he said that, and the figure was indeed Link, but the period in between the comments got a lot of people talking and wondering if Link being a woman would be something they would enjoy or not, and thus inadvertently Aonuma's own comments were what really stoked the flames for this. And
plenty of people decided that that would indeed be something they would enjoy, wouldn't effect the series at all since Link isn't one individual character but a series of different characters when they're gender rarely plays a significant role to their characters anyway, and felt it would be a great progressive move to let a woman star in a LoZ game and hopefully attract more women to the series and help them to feel more represented, and everything just took off from there.
People just continue to be invested since it's still something that they would really like to see and every time someone like Aonuma is asked about it he can't seem to avoid putting his foot in his mouth and avoid giving some silly justification or reasoning for it that doesn't make sense instead of just saying "Link's a man and that's all there is to it." That combination of forces--there being high demand for it since it would be something cool to see and there's no particular reason it can't happen/would actually hurt the series or be out of place in any way, along with Aonuma et al., coming up with stupid explanations like "It would just be easier to have Zelda as the main character... except it raises the question of what would Link do (???), so it wouldn't be easier, but what was the question" and "Link can't be a woman because that would upset the balance of the Triforce", leading to the feeling among some that Nintendo isn't taking the questions seriously at all or otherwise themselves has no serious objections to the idea--is why it keeps getting brought up.
And why is it specifically Zelda that people are getting so upset about? There were many, many games shown at E3 that starred male characters that could have instead starred female characters. What about Gears of War 4? They introduced a new cast of characters. It would've been a perfect opportunity to make the main character a female. You even have a female companion, if I'm remembering correctly. They could have easily made her the main character instead of the guy they chose, and they didn't.
It's definitely not limited to the Zelda series. The topic of Link becoming Zelda in particular comes up again and again because of the combination of Zelda being a very popular series, it being a series where it would be a particularly easy change compared to some others (like, in God of War's case, all of the games star the same Kratos, so he can't really be changed into a woman, where as in TLoZ's case, most of the games feature completely different Links that more or less function as either avatars for the player or completely different characters from one another anyway, so it's much easier to argue that one of those Links just happened to be a girl, especially since Link's not particularly masculine anyway), and Aonuma and company giving all kinds of silly explanations ever since his initial little tease, which just keep stoking the fires over and over and over again.
But this type of controversy definitely and questioning definitely comes up for other games as well. The most recent example off the top of my head is when
DICE said that despite Battlefield 1 letting you play as a women during certain parts of the single-player campaign, it doesn't allow you to play as a woman character in multiplayer at all, presumably out of some sense of trying to maintain "historical accuracy" in the multiplayer despite the gameplay definitely not being historically accurate in a huge number of ways anyway, particularly in mutiplayer battles, and them allowing you to play as a woman during the campaign.
There's also the infamous case of Ubisoft being called out when they said that Assassin's Creed: Unity doesn't have an option of playing as a woman assassin because that would be "too hard" to do and require "too many new animations,
" leading to them being completely called out on that and a huge controversy over that decision and whether it was really the real reason as to whether or not the game didn't have women assassins or not.
On a related note, there have also been discussions about women being featured on the boxart for other series as well, such as:
"
Naughty Dog was asked to push Ellie to the back cover on box art, refused"
"
Eurogamer: Fable 3 was going to have a black woman on the cover, Microsoft blocked"
So this is definitely not something only directed Nintendo's way or only just at the Legend of Zelda.
To be clear, I wouldn't mind a Zelda game with a female Link or one starring Zelda herself. In fact, I've thought for a while that playing as Zelda could be cool, as it would mean they'd have to come up with new gameplay mechanics to take advantage of her magic abilities instead of relying on the same old sword/bow/bombs/etc. that Link's been using since the first game.
But there's also absolutely nothing wrong with Nintendo continuing to make Link the star, and continuing to make Link a male. The people who are saying that Nintendo is wrong and bad for doing so are absolutely nuts.
For sure. It's pretty much just mostly people saying the same thing and expressing the same sentiments, while others say they would prefer if Link just always remained a male character. Nothing particularly wrong with either view. Practically no one is saying that Nintendo is
wrong if they don't make Link a woman (sure, some might have somewhere in all of the threads on the subject, but they're in a vast, vast minority) but rather just expressing that they think it would be a really cool thing if they did do that and that they would appreciate it. There's plenty of annoyance when someone at Nintendo comes up with another bullshit "reasoning" as to why Link is a man, but pretty much everyone in these threads respect that it's Nintendo's choice--they just get annoyed when Nintendo comes up with bullshit to try justifying that choice, because that's unnecessary and just comes off as tone deaf as weird, but they do respect the actual choice itself and are just making their own personal feelings and preferences known.