Quite a good breakdown by Laura Kate Dale of Nintendo's handling of recent games featuring playable women characters from franchises usually headed up by men i.e. recent Peach game and upcoming Legend of Zelda game featuring the titular Zelda.
Featuring such Aonuma bangers as:
If we have Princess Zelda as the main character who fights, then what is Link going to do?
The triforce is made up of Princess Zelda, Ganon and Link. Princess Zelda is obviously female; if we made Link a female, we thought that would mess with the balance of the triforce - that's why we decided not to do it.
We feel like what takes priority is this idea of gameplay. If it turns out that particular gameplay we're trying to bring to fruition would be best served by having Zelda take that role, then it's possible that that could be a direction we could take.
i.e. Zelda has featured exclusively MANLY gameplay up to this point btw
Trust me, we definitely couldn't possibly retcon any of this important gender stuff like we've done a million times with other things
All those pretenses of innovation being why they can't make any more F-Zero games (and Star Fox, and more), and they're more than fine with constant resets to zero in Hyrule and the same three people doing the same damn things over and over again.
I remember being really hopeful, even excited, for how different Wind Waker seemed to be going... until the cool new pirate girl character was Zelda all along because no one else is allowed to have that much importance in that story role and then she was whisked off to be imperiled and in need of saving, AGAIN.
Oof, yeah that stings. Classic Nintendo tho. It's almost like they view these characters as some kind of archetype that repeats itself across time - Link is the hero, Ganon is the villain, Zelda is the girl. So then if someone is getting kidnapped, well that's Zelda's role, couldn't be anyone else of course
I've had entire struggle sessions in the past about that, here included.
Some people believe that because things have been that way for the Zelda franchise that they could only have been that way and can only be that way forever after.
A peculiar case of capitalist realism. Reminds me of the dull, fan pandering hollywood remakes like the recent Avatar live action show, where the people working on it have no idea what makes the original great and just end up reproducing the signifiers of the story ("omg it's that character I know!", "I found the master sword!", "the princess is getting kidnapped!") without the substance to back it up - it's like one huge reference to the previous work.
And then when someone dares to play with investors' blood pressure and rethink the formula a little bit (like BotW) it gets seen as incredibly innovative, because the norm is for the industry to be stagnant asf. Indies stay winning tbh