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

Abstract

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.