#loz has a bad track record with female characters but the botw girls are so genuinely good. i love it

[blueskittlesart]

omg wait- please give us your thoughts botw women!

im skipping zelda because i talk about her all the time but this is mipha, urbosa (and riju), impa, and purah lol. it's LONG so prepare yourself

mipha. ive said before that i think she was done dirty by the writers in that all of her characterization revolves around men. and i stand by that. i generally dislike the archetype of a physically small, softspoken female supporting character whose only role in the story is as a protector or healer--someone for the male characters to bounce their feelings off of. and i think mipha very often falls into this trope. with that being said, i do still think there is room for a nuanced analysis of her character because there IS nuance there it just gets lost a lot of the time because of how she's written. When thinking about her it's important to remember how zora age in relationship to humans. after a lot of math i place her at around 60ish years old physically, with that being the zora equivalent of a 14-16 year old hylian. she is INCREDIBLY young by zora standards but physically, she has lived longer than almost every non-zora she will ever meet. because of this, there's this dissonance between the way her family and kingdom view her vs the way her friends and colleagues view her. We see it most obviously in the champion's ballad dlc--when zelda speaks to mipha about piloting a divine beast, she speaks as though she's talking to an adult. but mipha's father is convinced she is far too young and inexperienced for this role. Mipha, in turn, is caught between these two differing perceptions of herself, to the point where she doesn't really KNOW what she's supposed to be. she takes on a protective role for those younger than her (sidon and link, specifically) and does her best to support zelda where she can, knowing that zelda likely views her as a senior, but she also often vant disguise the fact that she's still a child herself. she plays with sidon in the waterfall. she has a very childish, innocent schoolgirl crush on link. she's caught in between these two perceptions of herself and because she is, for all intents and purposes, mentally fifteen years old, she doesn't quite know how to handle it. The fact that zora live on a totally different time scale compared to other hyrulian races isn't something that would normally pose much of a struggle for them, because zora's domain is deliberately isolated from those other races. zora could likely go a generation or two without ever needing to interact with non-zora at all, beyond the occasional stray traveler. (remember how when you're working your way towards zora's domain post-calamity, you meet a bunch of zora who are super excited to see a hylian at all? most of those zora look to be in early adulthood, meaning by my math they'd be about a hundred years old. post-calamity, zora's domain clearly returns to that same brand of isolation, so most of these zora have probably never interacted with a hylian at all.) but because mipha happened to be born into such a turbulent era, she finds herself having to interact with these other races more than basically any zora ruler might have had to for the past several thousand years. which is why she has so much trouble with link. from her perspective, he changes SO fast. she meets him one day a wide-eyed child and the next he comes back to her a silent, traumatized soldier. she's hardly aged a day but he has experienced a lifetime of things she can't begin to understand and she has NO IDEA how to talk to him anymore. When they interact, she switches awkwardly between treating him like the child she knew and attempting to fix the trauma he's been through without her, but it's always with the goal of getting things BACK TO THE WAY THEY WERE. she is completely incapable of moving on from the past relationship with link that she remembers because as far as she's concerned, it's only been a miniscule amount of time since then. due to the nature of her race, mipha is basically doomed to be stuck in a past that link can never return to. god. i wish they explored her character more in-game im going to lose my mind

urbosa is SUCH a good character. agh. her narrative purpose is essentially to be an actual POSITIVE mentor to zelda, which. let's be honest. without her that poor girl would absolutely not have made it to seventeen. jesus christ. Anyways urbosa is everything zelda wants to be. A strong, independent, powerful ruling force that her people rely on and look to in times of need. she is completely self-assured and confident and she is quite honestly literally the only positive influence on zelda's life. Urbosa is a character well into adulthood, who we can assume has long since grown into herself and found her way. Which is why she is SUCH an important character for zelda, yes, but for ALL the young champions who are just. so desperate for a positive force in their lives. She's so GOOD at what she does, too. urbosa is a woman who was meant to be a mother in one way or another, i think, because the way she handles the kids she's working with is really thoughtful and well-done, ESPECIALLY when compared to the other dogshit adults in their lives. She allows zelda more compassion than anyone else has ever seen fit to give her, and when zelda DOES mess up, urbosa offers gentle but firm redirection. (in aoc specifically, she notices zelda comparing herself to link and immediately shuts it down, WITHOUT making zelda feel stupid or inferior.) she does the exact same thing, albeit less overtly, with link, who she obviously has a lot of compassion for despite being kind of at odds with him over zelda. I think she and link are actually incredibly similar characters--stubborn, a little bit showy, and generally unwilling to admit defeat in any situation. She's uniquely positioned to be able to relate to both him AND zelda, as a ruler AND a soldier. And i think she's completely aware of how similar she is to link, which is why when she pushes him, she does it in a calculated way so that he never takes it as a challenge or an attack. she never outright tells him "this is why zelda dislikes you, you need to work on your communication skills" she talks to him about zelda's childhood in plain terms because she knows that breaking down link's mental wall between himself and zelda by evoking empathy is the way to get the two of them to fucking COMMUNICATE WITH EACH OTHER. i really think every game should have an overwhelmingly positive female mentor figure like urbosa. she is so good

in relation to urbosa, we then have riju, the youngest and only female of the new champions. she is fourteen years old and she has been thrust into a position of leadership and she works so hard to project that same confidence and maturity that was urbosa's staple. and to her credit she ALMOST gets there but she's fourteen and no fourteen year old is capable of performing adulthood perfectly. Riju's projected personality feels very much like she's regurgitating stories she was told about her ancestors. Urbosa was strong, urbosa was fearless, urbosa commanded lightning, urbosa stepped up to serve the knight and princess when asked. but, crucially, urbosa was not fourteen. riju's insecurities about filling urbosa's shoes are incredibly evident, but she seems to do her best work when she drops the pretense and acts as herself. there's a reason she had us fight naboris on sand seals--they're a source of comfort to her. something she KNOWS she can act confident about. there was no acting involved in her pursuit of naboris--she KNEW she was good with that seal. there's also something to be said about the successor to urbosa, the mentor, being an inexperienced little girl. riju clings to the stories of the champion chief who came before her because she desperately needs a mentor. I wish urbosa could meet her for real she deserves a mom

impa. i. well i wish 90% of her characterization didn't come from hyrule warriors bc i honestly dont like how she was written all that much. i think they had a really strong framework to build off of in botw but aoc just kind of. took it in a direction i wasn't a huge fan of. anyway. impa is sheikah, a race descended from the original protectors of the goddess hylia. Interestingly, in botw the sheikah have been almost completely integrated into hylian society, with kakariko village being mostly sheikah who live like regular hylians. it seems like very few of them actually follow the ways of their ancestors, in contrast to other games where sheikah were only ever warrior bodyguards of the goddess hylia's bloodline. Impa is, presumably, one of the few sheikah who continues to follow the teachings of her ancestors and serve the royal family. this... honestly causes a dillemma if you think about it for more than a few seconds, because, since most sheikah live as regular citizens now, in place of sheikah bodyguards the hylian royal family has an extensive royal guard, eliminating the need for sheikah warriors like impa almost entirely. i can only assume this is why she was relegated to basically 'haha funny quirky ninja sidekick' in hyrule warriors. but personally i think it would have been much more interesting to use this as a commentary on the state of hyrule and even to give her some more obvious internal conflict!! hyrule has until now been in a ten thousand year era of peace. it's no wonder most sheikah settled down and gave up on the whole bodyguard thing. they might have even believed there wasn't going to be another demise incarnation for them to take action against, especially after ten thousand years without any whisper of conflict. to most sheikah, pursuing their traditional martial arts and continuing to serve the royal family would likely begin to feel like a waste of time. for some reason, though, impa didn't feel this way. ten thousand years after the last conflict between demise and hylia's descendants, impa still chooses to train as a sheikah warrior and serve the royal family. why?? my personal headcanon is that she was drawn to the myth of ancient hyrule in the same way that purah was drawn to its technology. purah is the more obvious nerd of the sisters, but i think impa's choice to pursue sheikah martial arts HAD to have its basis in an interest in the creation myth. She is also one of the few characters in botw who explicitly KNOWS and can convey to you the myth in its entirety, or at least, as much of the myth as had survived by the time she began studying it. So here we have a young sheikah girl who is incredibly interested in her own culture as it relates to the myth of hyrule and she's basically singlehandedly attempting to revive a part of it that's been nearly completely lost, all amidst this incredibly tense political environment in which her peoples' past inventions are also being dug up and revived by the royal family with like... seemingly very little care to the context in which they were made or why they might have been buried in the first place. like, in this climate which shows a subtle but obvious disregard for her culture, impa is loudly, deliberately returning to her roots. that's SO INTERESTING!! if aoc had leaned into it more, we could have had moments where impa contemplates her place among the royal guardsmen and the champions--she's not quite one of them, but they have a mutual goal and, in the case of the champions, their lives are all deeply intertwined with the myth of hyrule; or even a bit of commentary on the political climate of hyrule pre-calamity and how fucking horrible it was. i REALLY wish they had explored this more it could have been so cool

PURAH. people think im insane when i tell them shes in my top five loz characters of all time but i am literally obsessed with her i dont care that shes a random new addition to botw only. i think she is a really interesting way to introduce and lead into the idea of ancient sheikah technology. considering how important ancient sheikah tech is to the worldbuilding of botw, giving the player a sheikah scientist guide to walk you through it all is a smart way to go about introducing it. beyond that, though, i think as a character she serves as a reminder of hyrule before the calamity--cheerful and carefree despite the obvious dark implications of her actions. when you first go to meet her you find out along the way that the kids in hateno are scared of her; they think she's a ghost or something along those lines. she is eccentric and strange and she just sort of... glosses over the entire series of events that led both her and link to their present situation, because by de-aging herself, accidentally or not, she has become stuck perpetually in the mindset of pre-calamity hyrule. She still views sheikah tech as something interesting to be studied and played with while most sane people in hyrule view it as nothing but an incredible danger. she's super intelligent, but can't quite break out of the scientist mentality enough to acknowledge the harm the tech she so obviously loves is capable of causing. the de-aging and the bubbly personality are likely a coping mechanism, i think, though maybe not a conscious one. she's remaining frozen in time forever, deliberately refusing to think about the damage she might have caused. I don't think she's ENTIRELY in denial though, if only because she helps link when he asks for it. she's been waiting for a hundred years, never quite sure if the shrine of resurrection worked or if she laid link to rest forever in that cave, so she does whatever she can to keep living, preparing for the worst. When link DOES reappear, it's a genuine shock, to the point that she cant quite let go of the denial she's been using to keep herself going for the past 100 years. but just because she expected the worst doesn't mean she can't work with a better outcome, it just means she isn't quite prepared to deal with it perfectly, which is why she seems frozen in time when you interact with her in botw.

#WOMENNNNN. AGH #loz has a bad track record with female characters but the botw girls are so genuinely good. i love it #zelda analysis #asks