Source is Kotaku.com (Full article here)
Author is Luke Plunkett
Father includes gender neutral language into The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
(Original title: Dad Hacks Zelda So Link Can Be Anyone, Not Just A Boy)
- Complete article and original images on the source.
Reader Tony has a young daughter who, fingers crossed, will soon grow up to play the classics. And when she moves onto The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past, he’s got a little surprise waiting for her.
Aware that as a young boy he got to play through his favourite Zelda games as...a young boy, Tony—inspired by Kenna W’s “Zelda saves Link” hack—has dug into A Link To The Past and “replaced every instance of Link’s male pronouns with gender-neutral language.” Just in case his daughter wants to do the same thing.
It’s a fairly simple flip. “Since Link’s graphical appearance in A Link to the Past is fairly androgynous to begin with,” Tony says, “the only aspect of the game that needed to be ‘fixed’ was all of the in-game dialogue referring to Link as a boy.”
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“I believe that the public conversation to date on gender-swapped video game hacks has left out the transgendered community and others whose gender identities are more complicated than the simple binary ‘male’ or ‘female’,” Tony tells Kotaku.
“In my gender-neutral hack of A Link to the Past, although Zelda remains female, the protagonist character of Link controlled by the player (and whom the player is supposed to most closely identify with) is completely gender-neutral and can embody whatever gender the player brings to the game.”
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Thoughts on this? Gender ambiguous characters have been on the rise lately (most notable example, the playable character in Undertale). I'm cool with this, hopefully Ninty leaves room for imagination with Link on the Zelda U game!
