The Queer Narrativity of the Hero's Journey in Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda Video Games

Within the relatively brief history of video games and their scholarly study, many critics and players have long lamented their regressive gender roles—and rightfully so. Various games rely on hackneyed narrative trajectories depicting male agency and female passivity, in which male protagonists rescue female damsels in distress who are often drawn as exaggerated and eroticized objects of male lust. As Peter Buse laments in his groundbreaking 1996 study, "video game narratives are predictable and depressing when it comes to sexual politics: with a few notable exceptions, like Tetris and other nongendered games, they rather crudely reproduce the worst-case scenario of patriarchal gender relations" (166). The passage of years has witnessed remarkable shifts in computing technologies and, consequently, the complexity of video games in their play, storylines, and interactivity, yet accusations of sexism still rightfully highlight the need for more forceful interventions into their antifeminist conventions. More recently, Adrienne Shaw, addressing gaming's enduring legacy of gendered stereotypes, observes "that gender and sexuality are statically defined" in many games, resulting in an "oppressive world view defin[ing] the very structure of the game" (32).¹ The persistent cultural image of males as the primary consumers of video games perpetuates these conventions as well, relegating females to a secondary position both within many games' storylines and within the playing communities of the video game phenomenon.

On first consideration, it would appear that Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda series of video games has long contributed to the sexist tropes common to video game narratives. These games adhere to the trite formula of a male protagonist rescuing a female victim, implying, as company spokesperson Sally Reavis matter-of-factly confirmed in 1994, that Nintendo perceives males as their target audience. "Boys are the market. Nintendo has always taken their core consumers very seriously," she declared, while offering merely this sop to female gamers: "As girls get into that core group, we will look for ways to meet their needs" (qtd. in Carroll 4D). Beyond this candid privileging of male consumers, Reavis's statement is also noteworthy in its attention to boys rather than men. In contrast with its competitors over the decades, including Sega Genesis, Microsoft Xbox, and Sony Playstation, Nintendo has long staked out its primary audience as children, with its products appealing to, as Brenda Brathwaite notes, "its core 'family friendly' market" (40). In respect for this youthful demographic, many of Nintendo's games feature cartoonish animation and characters, in contrast to the quasi-realist and more adult-themed games popular on other consoles. Given this investment in child consumers and family-friendly merchandise, the archaic gender roles depicted in Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda series would appear to be, at the very least, woefully regressive, inculcating today's children into yesteryear's sexual mores that demean females as weak, inferior, and uninteresting. As Tracy Dietz demonstrates in her gendered analysis of Nintendo's games in the late 1990s, several titles simply do not include female characters at all (e.g., Base Wars, Blades of Steel, Dr. Mario, MegaMan3, Super Tecmo Bowl), several titles portray women as victims (e.g., Double Dragon, Paper Boy 2, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), and several titles portray women primarily as sex symbols (e.g., Adventures of Bayou Billy, King of the Ring, Madden 95) (434). The Legend of Zelda games both pre- and postdate Dietz's observations, thus demonstrating how the games' gender politics adhere to the prevailing gaming ethos of their time.

The scores of games following tired, sexist tropes do not allow this prevailing view to be cast lightly aside. At the same time, it is important to explore the fault lines of games and to theorize strategies of resistance, in which Nintendo's Legend of Zelda games allow imaginative spaces for queer children, both in the game's depiction of a queer child character in an otherwise normative storyline and in its ludic solicitation of queer children in its playing. Despite overarchingly heteronormative plots of male heroes rescuing imprisoned maidens, subversive potential emerges...