Cute joke, but it would take a thick skin to pull it off. [The Shirt List]
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Comments
29 responses to “The Ultimate Zelda Troll Shirt”
They would be making themselves look dumb because Zelda is a girl.
Photoshop needs a lot of work, bet you got this from reddit.
I showed this to my (exclusively Pokemon playing) wife, and she totally got the joke. *sniffle* I’m so proud of her, I’ve married well
My misses doesn’t play anything at all and she got it – but then she knows that if she hadn’t I’d dance around the house playing an ocarina (badly) until she remembered who Zelda was.
Ooo. Girl Zelda is pretty hot!
It would take an even thicker skin to withstand the hate coming your way if you wore it.
I think that’s what the article meant. 🙂 I can’t see why you’d need a thick skin otherwise.
Someone might get aggressive *looks shiftly from side to side*
*confused.
Zelda IS a girl.
Shouldn’t it be “what if link was a girl?”
Or is that just part of the trolling?
The joke plays off the fact that some people (back in the day perhaps) supposedly thought Zelda was the name of the main character (since you know, its The Legend of Zelda, and all, it doesn’t help that naming your character Zelda in some games gave you an extra heart!)
It’s used as a troll-ish joke around the interwebz.
Zelda is a girl. Link is a boy.
Is the woman’s (and therefore probably the man’s) head photoshopped in? Her hair gets magically darker when lying over the (white) shirt.
As a joke, the audience seems limited. There are those who know who Zelda is, those who wouldn’t know a Zelda game if it slapped them in the face, and those who know of the games but have no familiarity with them. The only real point seems to be a shared wink with those “in” on the joke.
Yes its shopped in, and poorly done
LOL, i’m not sure – maybe their heads are, who knows. She’s pretty cute though so no complaints ^_^
Looks to me like the shirts are the parts shopped in. This picture was possibly created before they had the shirt printed.
It’ll be a stock image they use, then programmatically change the colour of the shirt and logo so it acts like a preview without having to have a few hundred images for each item on the store. It’s a fairly common technique in online stores.
Link was always a bit androgynous, so I often wondered if the developers created him as a metaphor for Zelda trying to save herself.
For instance, in A Link Between Worlds where everything goes trippy with colors, I thought that Zelda was high on LSD and created this fictitious part of her imagination in the form of Link to get her back to reality.
Thus the protagonist of the game is actually an imaginary, cross dressing princess fighting with her own demons.
Yeah… probably not.
But Zelda is a girl…
Yeah, I gotta admit, when I was young (7 or 8) I thought Link was Zelda, as it was called the Legend of Zelda, and Princess Zelda didn’t appear to do much, other than get kidnapped and live in a castle. To me, Link was the legend for running miles on end without rest, falling down holes (in some cases, a 3 storey drop) and getting beaten up by monsters, wizards and everything else bad in the world.
I get it… but I’m also kind of ashamed of the shirt. Mostly because of the outfit. I mean, the idea that if link was a girl (Because Zelda is dressed as Link here), she’d have to be at least somewhat sexual is just off-putting. And the fact that it’s true, that a female link would be sexual in today’s time, because videogames, is just shaming…
Edit: This wasn’t made clear, but I’m not saying that the shirt itself is bad, or that it’s sexist and the artist should be ashamed, rather I’m saying that my interpretation of the image is that of the fact that women protagonists in games are often (and were much more often in the past) sexualised for the fact that they were women, and had the Zelda series started around the same time, but with Link being female, the chances of her being presented as a strong character in her own right would have been slim to none. And this realisation is what makes me ashamed
It almost seems like you’re suggesting that women can’t dress this way if they want to, which would be the opposite of what feminism hopes to achieve. Isn’t the point of gender equality to give both genders equal freedom?
It’s probably worth noting that the artist for this shirt is a woman.
Yeah, but then again, the people who like to tell women how to act while pretending not to be actually telling them how to act would probably argue that the artist has gone the ‘over-sexualized’ style as a message about how people view feminizing something as synonymous with sexualizing them.
Much like any art interpretation, at the end of the day, people are probably reading too much into it.
No, I’m saying that it’s sad that I know that she would automatically be presented in this way at first. Maybe two or three games down the line she wouldn’t be sexualized, but at first she would be. I don’t know, I’m not against women choosing to dress this way, but I’m also over the fact that it seems to be the default representation of female protagonists in games. I’m glad its getting better, but what if link HAD been a woman? Can you say that she would have been treated and written with respect from the start? Maybe if the series started in 2008 later, but previously, not so much.
I guess this shirt just kind of nailed it home for me, just how games used to show women, but I could be wrong
Also, on the note of the artist, I don’t really see the difference between if the artist was a man or a woman. Which gender drew it doesn’t really change the point that it made to me specifically. Nor am I saying that the shirt itself is sexist, merely what it meant to me. Upon reading my first post, this wasn’t really stated, and should be edited in
It seems like jumping the gun a bit to be disappointed about how something that hasn’t actually happened might happen (but also might not). I think I get where you’re coming from, but it seems to be putting the cart before the horse a little bit – we don’t know how Link would be depicted if he were a female lead character, we can only speculate.
The outfit she’s wearing is exactly the same as Link’s outfit in A Link to the Past, by the way (http://www.neowin.net/forum/uploads/monthly_04_2013/post-78314-0-13420500-1366239385.jpg) – is she being ‘sexualised’ if she’s wearing the exact same outfit male Link does?
Just quickly, I think the gender of the artist is relevant to the extent that if you’re trying to figure out if something is offensive to a particular group, being part of that group gives you a lot better insight to answer the question than being outside of that group.
Maybe, I guess for me it’s not a commentary on one specific character, but rather on the industry of games at large… or maybe I’m just over reacting, who knows
Maybe it’s not the outfit itself, maybe I’m being confusing. But while aiming a bow, would you cross your legs, look away from the target and lean in such a way that looks impossible to support yourself. It just seems suggestive to me. Again, I’m not against women being sexy or women being sexual and expressing that… Honestly, the more I type this the more I realise that I’m over reacting to what I perceived as one more example of female vs male portrayal in games, especially since I’m not against women being sexual in games… I’ve lost the point I’m trying to make, so this is admitting I was probably wrong
On the last note, I have to disagree on the basis that you seem to be saying that sexism is only sexism if it offends a group. Rather, I think whether it’s sexist is entirelly separate from whether or not it offends someone, but rather it’s the fact that men and women are treated differently. I think being of one gender doesn’t make you an expert in the field, and that both men and women can be feminists or misogynists. But that’s just me
I didn’t say sexism was only sexism if it offends a group, I said the group being ‘targeted’ is considerably more qualified to determine if something is offensive or not than people who aren’t part of that group. Sexism wasn’t even mentioned in this topic until this reply.
What if Zelda were a girl.
The look on the guys face doesn’t look like he’s enjoying this shirt as much as he could lol
As everyone else has noted Zelda is a girl, Link is not. Whoever did this mock up is not very good at fact checking.
BUT ZELDA IS A GIRL DERP ffs guys that’s the joke. People think Link is Zelda. Seriously, you’d think this comment thread was filled with Americans by how little people seem to have a sense of humour.
And it’s not a photoshop that’s the standard way online shops do tshirt mockups. You’ll see it everywhere…
These comments really just make me want to cry.