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While The Legend of Zelda hero Link has never a rippling mountain of muscle and chest hair, a trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (opens in new tab) from 2014 depicted him a bit more androgynous than what we’d seen in previous games. This, plus producer Eiji Aonuma claiming (opens in new tab) that “No one explicitly said that that was Link,” caused quite a stir – prompting some to speculate that this go ’round, perhaps Link would be a girl or we might play as Zelda herself.
That ended up not being the case, of course; while Link has some pretty wide hips in Breath of the Wild and you can effectively crossdress at will, he’s still canonically a dude. But if you really want genderbent Link in Breath of the Wild, maybe take a look at this mod by Dario Rolle, which turns Link into Linkle:
Unlike Sonic the Hedgehog (opens in new tab) or other, more random character mods, Linkle actually fits in pretty well with Breath of the Wild’s world. Dario also added facial expressions and voice audio to help complete the transformation, and the implementation is quite well done. If it weren’t for the awkward crossbow weapon and the way Linkle’s cape occasionally clips through her model, I’d have little trouble believing this was an official piece of DLC. (But, to be clear, it is definitely not, and runs on the Cemu Wii U emulator.)
If you’re not familiar, Linkle is a non-canon character who was created during the development of Hyrule Warriors. Originally designed to be Link’s younger sister, she was scrapped from the full version. However, her concept art surfaced shortly after the game’s initial release, and fans made a passionate plea for her to be completed.
Now she exists as a random do-gooder hero with a somewhat coincidental name; she’s not related to Link, and she doesn’t possess a piece of the Triforce. She’s a girl who thinks she’s the reincarnation of the legendary hero and lives in a non-canon alternate universe (though really, getting bogged down in Zelda canon (opens in new tab) is a whole other headache).
But hey, maybe fans showing their support through mods like this will be enough to clue Nintendo in on the character’s popularity, and she’ll show up in something more official? After all, there’s always the next Zelda game (opens in new tab) to look forward to and speculate on.
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