Play with Your Kids; Or, A Boy is a Girl is a Boy in Zelda: Twilight Princess

Lately in an attempt to see if Pea would be interested in something other than Ni No Kuni (now logging 100+ hours) which has less playability now that the main quest is complete, we have started to play around with Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Now this iteration of Zelda was originally released for the Wii, but we have been playing in on the Wii U (so that the damned thing gets some use).

I have noticed some things as we have been playing this game that I find interesting. First, one of the first things that Pea asked me when we started the game was whether or not our androgynous hero was a girl. And even when I answered in the negative she decided that she was going to call him a girl anyway because she wanted to play as a girl. Second, when she asked who Zelda was and I told her she decided to do away with that part of the narrative as well. So The game that we are playing has Link as a heroine and Zelda as her trusty steed. Yep, you read that right. Zelda is the horse. 

For years I have been playing RPGs because they gave me more of an opportunity to actually play as a female character and become more immersed in the story. And for year’s I have been arguing with crazy folks who have suggested that this was because of my strong man-hating, lesbian feminist tendencies. Now, to the best of my knowledge my 4 year old doesn’t have any of these tendencies, but not only is she seeking out female characters to play, but she is refusing to acknowledge male characters as male if she has to play them (and I wonder if this is helped along by the fact that many of the male characters that she has encountered so far seem to be pretty shiftless). (NB she did something similar in making all of her familiars female in Ni No Kuni)

Now it has taken us forever to make any significant progress in the game thus far, not only because we are still randomly revisiting Ni No Kuni and are about 110 hours in, but because she spent a great amount of time riding around on Zelda, randomly talking to people (especially the children), swimming in lakes whenever possibly, fishing, and decimating crops. She finds it hilarious to destroy entire fields of pumpkins by throwing them against walls and on the ground. No reason, just because. And when we get to parts that she finds to difficult to complete or too “boring” like herding goats and jumping fences, I am called in to handle that until she can go back to doing the things that she wants to do.

I am just the tiniest bit concerned about what is going to happen when the Bulblins come to town and take the children away, but if her reaction to “bad guys” in Ni No Kuni is any indication I am sure that she is going to be more than ready to take those things on in order to rescue the children of Ordon. And for some strange reason I am thinking that the whole rescuing of children thing will only further reinforce for her the notion that Link is indeed a woman, but for now we will continue to play through and do all of the mundane tasks that she loves so well and is missing in Ni No Kuni now that she has “finished” the game and the world has become less open.

For those who haven’t played the game before (or if it has been a while for you like it was for me) be advised that there are some problematic characterizations of characters (like Coro the Black lantern salesman who sports a large afro with a bird’s nest in it or even the tribal Bulblins and Shadow Beasts) that you may want to prepare yourself for and be prepared to address with your children. Since Pea is still a pre-reader I am able to change the dialogue in such a way that the men aren’t as lazy as they are constantly called and the women aren’t the bitchy shrews that they are characterized as and called. Oddly, this is something that I don’t remember paying as much attention to when I first played this game a few years ago. Perhaps this is because I didn’t have my daughter sitting next to me soaking it all in.

I am anxious not only to see how far we get through this game, but how the narrative will actually unfold according to Pea. See y’all in Hyrule….maybe.