Looks like Emily Rogers has now protected her account. Why can't sit still on social media for five minutes? On there, off there, protected account, unprotected account. I feel like she's the queen of online drama sometimes. Regardless of the accuracy of her rumours and news, it's undeniable that she loves attention.
When the two halves of your personal brand are that you're a reliable consultant and a reliable source for inside information, perception is everything.
1. Your statement in this context can only be made out of true prejudice (i.e. only a white male could agree with my positions). Also, I’ve enjoyed all manner of creative works with all manner of characters without letting their gender, race, or species affect my ability to receive what their creators offered through them. That’s how people should be, and more easily could be, if not for the forces that promote the superficial nonsense that I’m arguing against here.
That's not precisely what's being said.
What's being said is that when white males living in Western cultures already enjoy broad representation among protagonists in most kinds of stories in Western culture, they can't really have an accurate frame of reference for what not having this kind of representation means for non-whites or non-males, and as such our commentary is and always will be lacking in perspective.
That kind of lack of representation in media is not something we can directly experience, and so we have no authority on what the experience is like, whether or how it should be addressed, etc.
It's rather convenient that the people who already experience the most representation as protagonists in media are the ones who profess that the impact of representation in media is minimal and not really harmful to anyone.
2. Mostly agreed, but a female Link likely forces story limitations within this game and retroactive mythology changes for the entire franchise, which is unnecessary and almost certainly detrimental.
- A male-only Link also forces the exact same kinds of story limitations.
- There isn't a single piece of the mythos that changes if you introduce a female Link, since it's not like a character within the mythos who has been referred to as male will suddenly be referred to as female. It'll be a new character within the mythos who just takes on a particular
role that recurs across multiple characters already: that of legendary hero.
3. After 30 years of Link being male, why would he suddenly, in 2016 when this kind of superficial nonsense just happens to be fashionable, become female? Are you saying this is purely a creative decision that took them 30 years to imagine? Is this such a unique nugget of creative thought that it would take teams of devoted minds working for three decades to make it a reality? Of course not.
Even a superficial look at Nintendo's corporate culture reveals that they generally operate in a very conservative manner when it comes to understanding and adapting to what's going on in the broader marketplace.
http://www.gamespot.com/forums/syst...rporate-culture-part-of-the-problem-31806640/
This is purely a ham-handed reaction to the kind of misguided social pressures that well-meaning people are mindlessly succumbing to right now. Whether or not the creators made the decision on their own is irrelevant. The motivation is misguided regardless. This is anti-creativity because it is a slippery slope that increasingly forces artists to focus on preemptively appeasing various and endless mobs rather than having the true creative freedom to follow only their vision without distraction.
You know what else forces artists to focus on preemptively appeasing the public?
The fact that the games don't get made if the artists don't get paid.
Video game companies are businesses. They live or die by their ability to please customers. This is by design, not by accident.
If artists want full control over their creative vision, there are non-commercial avenues for making games.
5. What is gained, or rather, preserved, is consistency with the rules of the Zelda universe that we have been led to accept. If those rules had always included a female option and thus the maleness of Link had not been interwoven into the story and reinforced for 30 years, then of course there would be no problem at all.
Tradition is not a sufficient reason for exclusion.
6. Maybe I could explain the point better. The point is that the whole concept of needing to have yourself validated by the degree to which you conform to superficial images is, without exception, pure damaging foolishness. This teaches a little girl that her self-worth is determined by something or someone external, and further that it is based on superficial aspects of herself.
I think you're missing the significance of images on people's personal development and self-actualization. It's not merely that people "need to have themselves validated by their conformity to superficial images"; it's that the images people see over the course of their life influence the way they interpret basically everything about the world and their existence in it. This happens with or without a deliberate effort to shape people using images.
Moreover, if it doesn't matter whether you're validated by the degree to which you conform to superficial images, why in the flying fuck does it matter if Link is a girl? Wouldn't that just be an example of pandering to boys who always (and not just sometimes) need to be depicted as heroes to be validated?
