The Captivity of Princess Zelda
Even when she tries to forge her own path, the series ends up making Zelda a prisoner of her own fate.
This story contains spoilers for Breath of the Wild, The Wind Waker, and Ocarina of Time.
In the beginning, there was the Triforce.
This sacred relic, a gift from the goddesses Din, Nayru, and Farore upon Hyrule’s creation, lies at the heart of The Legend of Zelda’s cyclical narrative. Many of the games tell of a hero born on the cusp of a great evil’s rise to power, and a princess duty-bound to seal away that evil until its next inevitable escape. In these stories, Link, Zelda, and Ganon each wield a piece of the Triforce as extensions of their persona: Courage for the hero, Wisdom for the ruler, and Power for the conqueror who seeks to claim all three for his own. Together, they are bound to a conflict doomed to reenact itself across time and entire video game console generations.
Not once is the Triforce mentioned in Breath of the Wild, but its fated influence remains inescapable—perhaps more so for Princess Zelda. While Link gets to dictate the circumstances of his eventual duel with Calamity Ganon, she has no such privileges. In the latest entry in the series, we find Zelda incarcerated by her destiny as the sacrificial ward against Ganon, a role she ultimately has no choice but to embrace for the good of all. Even when she insists on solving the world’s problems through her own brand of courage and ingenuity, she continues to be shoehorned into fulfilling a divine duty that she did not ask for. Thirty-five years since the first game came out, we are still treated to a Zelda held captive by antiquated video game tropes that need to be put to rest once and for all.
The Princess and Her Knight
Where The Legend of Zelda falls short in telling an engaging plot, it succeeds by painting its characters with a rich palette—sometimes adding interesting new layers to old faces. In The Wind Waker, we are introduced to a version of Ganondorf with deeply personal, if flawed motivations for the acts of evil he commits. Majora’s Mask is fondly remembered for the many townsfolk of Clock Town, each the hero of their own bizarre and sometimes tragic tales.
In Breath of the Wild, we are given a Princess Zelda constantly wrestling with the demons of self-doubt and insecurity next to her peers as she suffers the pressures of her royal and divine duty. Through the optional memories you can unlock as you explore Hyrule, we see how especially diminished she feels in the presence of Link. Even with his characteristic silence, Link is full of agency—a young man whose skill in the sword is largely the result of hard work and determination. His possession of the Master Sword, the weapon designed to defeat Ganon, further compounds Zelda’s frustrations: why do other people fit so easily into their roles while she remains barred from her own?
Through gameplay, the freedom of exploration and adventure afforded the hero contrasts sharply with the princess entombed in the castle and struggling to contain the enemy with a power she barely understands. While Link grows, Zelda remains in stasis. Unable to pursue victory on her own terms, she succumbs to divine instrumentality and renders the importance of her human flaws moot in the grand scheme of things. To paint Zelda as anything but a conduit of the gods is difficult when she is fighting an enemy that doesn’t play by the rules of reason and science.
An Ancient Enemy
One of the game’s more curious bits of lore is told in the description of the Rubber Armor set that Link can acquire as an optional reward. It reads: “This armor owes its electric resistance to an ancient material called ‘rubber’, which is nearly impossible to find.”
In a world where most protective clothing are made of leather and metal, the rubber armor feels odd and alien, but it also reveals how much technological advancement was made in Hyrule a thousand years ago before it was ultimately lost…or abandoned. Prior to being outlawed, ancient Sheikah technology seemed to exist in ubiquity, primarily as a network of man-made defenses against Ganon’s prophesied return. The reason it was banned is not clear, but it’s possible that the kingdom of Hyrule—a sovereign rulership acting under divine guidance—may have found these machines an affront to the gods.
The existence of the Sheikah Slate, the Guardians, and the Divine Beasts attracted Princess Zelda’s natural curiosity. All this lost technology coincided with her interest in understanding how things work, especially objects outside her purview as a royal figure. She is inquisitive, observant, and infinitely excited about her surroundings, whether she is trying to crack open the mystery of the Shrines or employing Link as a test subject for the alleged benefits of ingesting a hot-footed frog. Were she in complete control of her life, she might have made a great scientist, archeologist, or inventor. Possibly all of those things at once.
Unfortunately, divine duty calls. As the descendant in a long line of women with the power to fend off the darkness, Zelda’s role was determined the moment she was born. In her world, one’s god-given powers are more important than the mortal sciences.
Many times throughout the series’ history, we’ve seen human manifestations of the Triforce of Courage in Link’s altruism and the Triforce of Power in Ganon’s lust for control. Breath of the Wild had the opportunity to mark Zelda as the aspect of Wisdom without reducing it to an inexplicable power source. She could have been a ruler guided by logic and pragmatism, embracing the potential of Sheikah technology without treating it with skepticism like her father did. In the end, it was Calamity Ganon’s nature as an arcane manifestation of malice—a magical entity that defies explanation—that forced Zelda into her role as a divine conduit and nothing more.
From a storytelling perspective, Princess Zelda’s struggles before her powers awoke were refreshingly relatable. In past titles, she was never this interesting except when she was donning an alter ego, such as (spoilers!) the feisty pirate Tetra in The Wind Waker or the mysterious Sheik in Ocarina of Time. As one of the few iconic princesses in Nintendo’s roster, however, she is woefully trapped in a past that desperately needs to catch up with the times.
Princess from Another Castle
In 2005, Nintendo released the first standalone game starring Princess Peach, the company’s other famous damsel-in-distress, as the sole playable character. Titled Super Princess Peach for the Nintendo DS, it featured a welcome, if simplistic role reversal where, for once, Peach’s evergreen hero Mario needed rescuing from Bowser’s clutches. The game echoed the platforming philosophy of the Mario games while introducing an unusual mechanic: a “vibe meter” that allowed Peach to alter her emotions and gain different abilities. Activating the “gloom” emotion, for instance, makes Peach cry and allows nearby plants to grow and be climbable. It was weirdly sexist and reductive of an iconic character debuting in her own game. Unlike the mainline Mario titles, no further sequels followed.
Fast-forward to 2017 with Super Mario Odyssey and Princess Peach has since resumed her role as the prime object of Bowser’s kidnappings. While the ending did feature a small moment of emancipation for Peach, her depiction in the game as a helpless young woman being carted off into a forced marriage felt a tad uncomfortable despite its comical presentation.
Princess Zelda’s appearances in her own games have a little more variety to it, but her characterizations have always been the same: selfless, compassionate, and a perennial target of Ganon’s scheming. Despite having her name in the title of the games, she sits mostly in the backdrop of Link’s more colorful exploits, either waiting to be rescued, woken from a cursed slumber, or unleashed late in the game to perform her plot-resolving magic.
Breath of the Wild is one of the few games where we are given an incarnation of Zelda torn between her personal ambitions and the fulfillment of her royal duties. She’s a little luckier than Princess Peach in that she can be a character with complex, if lightly explored layers, even if she is constantly being boxed into a certain depiction of royalty and femininity. In her most powerful moment in the game, we see Zelda outfitted in the regalia of the blessed and pure: a white flowing garb, hair undone, and channeling the sacred power she long struggled to unlock. Her more human traits—adventurous, sociable, and full of questions about the world—are cast off in favor of the same role dictated for her by Nintendo all those decades ago.
When the sequel to Breath of the Wild was unveiled back in 2019, we were given a glimpse of Zelda sporting shorter hair. “Oh, she is so ready for a fight,” was my immediate thought when I saw her new look. In the tensely crafted trailer, we saw her astride Link, trawling for clues in an underground location somewhere in Hyrule. The horrors in store for them in this follow-up title seem to be as much of a threat to Link as they are to her.
I’m hopeful that we can finally see Zelda come into her own in the sequel without the burden of her old life holding her back. This is Hyrule one hundred years removed from the expectations that have shut her out of who she wanted to be. As a video game character, she has all the potential to become her own hero—if not in her lonesome, then at least with the same opportunities for heroism and decision-making alongside Link. The greatest obstacle she faces lies in the metanarrative controlled by Nintendo. Ultimately, it falls on the game’s creators to break themselves out of the cycle of captivity that they have a habit of placing their princesses in.