Queer Theory, Political Economy, and Life Beyond the State
20 Jul 2025 - Otto Vogel
Spoiler Warning for: Echoes of Wisdom, Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask.
I was recently gifted a copy of Echoes of Wisdom (EoW) by a friend, and have spent the past few days nearly obsessively playing it.
Echoes of Wisdom is at the time of writing the most recent entry in the Legend of Zelda series. Dark rifts have opened across Hyrule, and with Link missing, Zelda has to travel around Hyrule with the help of the small Tri to journey into, fight through and close the rifts. To do this she has three principal abilities; reproducing objects she’s encountered via echoes, controlling the position of objects via Tri, or using Link’s Sword of Might.
I have a lot of problems with Breath of the Wild (BotW) and Tears of the Kingdom (TotK), and I think discussing those will help explain where I think EoW does better, precisely by returning to a number of core mechanics and themes of the Legend of Zelda series.
First of all, the obvious one; BotW does not have dungeons, and TotK’s dungeons are not up to the standards of the series.
Past that concern about gameplay is the fact that I think BotW and TotK have very weak thematic cores. This will require a bit more argumentation.
Consider, by way of contrast, Majora’s Mask (MM). There are a few key points I want to draw your attention to:
BotW and TotK don’t have this. Let’s take each in turn.
What are the central motifs of BotW’s main story? Well, if we look at the Divine Beasts, it’s about avenging the fallen and carrying on their legacy. You fight their killers – the blights– bringing them down yourself, and take up powers from your fallen comrades. You are the one carrying on the fight. You also see your friends reoccur in the world around you: Urbosa and Riju, Daruk and Yunobo, Mipha and Sidon, Revali and Teba. There is an argument that the champion’s blessing mechanic (Revali’s Gale, Urbosa’s Fury and so on) is part of that “weaving the themes into the game itself” but that’s a weak argument in my opinion. That mechanic is incidental, and you can avoid it completely by rushing straight to Hyrule Castle. There, you still need to fight the Blights, but those blessings don’t figure into the game much at all there. The central mechanics of BotW are the powers of the Sheika Slate, the breakable weapons, and the navigation system. None of those really play into the motifs of the main story as far as I can see.
Do the events of the main story at least repeat the same point again in different ways? I’m not sure they do. There are many different ways to grieve, but how many ways are there for you to avenge the fallen and continue the struggle? You kill the blight, you calm the divine beast, you gain the blessing from the champion, and you go on your adventure. Sure, the various peoples are all living with the loss of their Champions – there is a statue of Mipha among the Zora, a carving of Daruk in the mountain above the Goron village, the Gerudo talk about Urbosa, and the Rito talk about Revali. But even there, their appreciation of their champions isn’t really developed, except in the case of the Zora. It’s all very generic, not giving us enough purchase to do much thematic analysis.
What about the sidequests? Those are completely divorced from the central motifs. You help someone get a recipe from Hyrule Castle, you kill various monsters, you collect some lizards, or other random, incidental things for the people of Hyrule. There’s not any referring back to the central themes, not really. If the central plot is about the continuation of a war against an ancient enemy, then the sidequests are doing various chores for the people around Hyrule. One side is a grand story, the other side is busywork. It would perhaps be different if there were some other sidequests that felt like they were attached to the larger story, but if all the sidequests are unconnected to the central themes, then they just distract from that central story.
Maybe I’m mis-identifying the central motifs of BotW. But if I am, then I don’t think those central motifs are carried by the Divine Beasts and fights against the Blights. And that in itself is a massive weakness compared to games like Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Twilight Princess or Link Between Worlds, where the dungeons are much more thematically embedded.
While I think TotK is weaker in gameplay than BotW in a lot of ways the central motifs are slightly stronger. The central motif of rallying Hyrule together after the cataclysm of the Upheaval is tied into the dungeons. Each dungeon is the source of the problems of the various peoples, meaning that to have the various peoples work towards bringing Hyrule together, you need to deal with the dungeon. This does provide some level of variations on the theme too, where each problem is distinct, and needs to be dealt with in their own distinct ways. Helping the Zora is different than helping the Gerudo is different than helping the Rito is different than helping the Gorons. The central story is stronger. But the dungeons are only weakly connected to the story in my opinion. They aren’t embedded in the world, instead they feel jammed in. They don’t feel like places of significance for the cultures involved.
But is it let down by the other two concerns. The central mechanics are just as unattached to those themes as before, and while the Sage’s blessings are connected to the themes, they’re entirely optional. You can even turn them off – I often do, as they’re overly difficult to use and not terribly useful because of that. The central mechanics are again, the powers granted by Rauru’s arm, breakable weapons, the navigation system, and the tripartite distinction between the Sky, the Surface and the Depths. None of these really fit into the themes, except as the cause of the Upheaval. It’s not like as you bring Hyrule together it becomes easier for you to access the Sky or the Depths – you don’t gain extra methods of navigating any of it via the rewards from completing those parts of the main quest.
And the sidequests are an absolute mess. Alongside the same collection of various odd jobs and chores for the people of Hyrule, there are two large subplots in TotK that are linked together; the question of where is Zelda2 and the Yiga clan’s involvement in the depths. Neither of these really fit together with the central themes strongly. The search for Zelda is tied into a lot of plot points – it’s technically why you go to the four corners of Hyrule, it involves the quest for the Master Sword, you help a lot of people as you look for Zelda – but it doesn’t carry much thematic weight on its own. Maybe there’s a reading about how Zelda’s disappearance lets Ganondorf deceive the people of Hyrule, but that reading feels incidental, not central. The Yiga quest is basically entirely unrelated to anything. There are some quests that fit vaguely into the themes, but they feel weakly involved. I don’t have much argument for that other than I only realized this central theme and how the sidequests fit into it upon sitting down to write this. The sidequests feel incidental, errant, disconnected from everything else.
This is where Echoes of Wisdom is absolutely stronger. The central motifs of EoW are friendships and interpersonal relationships. We see strife between a mother and daughter, good friends having a spat, a child struggling to fill the shoes of his parent, the social degradation of a society, and the loneliness and doubt of an incredibly isolated person. The dungeons involved are all important to the cultures involved, or to Hyrule in general. The Zora dungeon is the home of Lord Jabu-Jabu, a being of immense cultural and religious importance for both the River and the Sea Zora. The Gerudo Sanctum is a sacred site for the Gerudo. Hyrule castle is the seat of the Royal Family’s power. Finally, the Eldin, Faron and Lanayru temples are all places where the goddess’s presence is felt the most strongly in Hyrule, and are in remote, inaccessible areas that require you to communicate and get to know the peoples around the temples. The Goron have a secret route to the Eldin Temple. The bosses of the Faron and Lanayru temples are both sources of issues for the local peoples; the yeti Condé thinks the enigmatic Skorchill is his brother, and the Deku have become addicted to spider silk from the hulking spider Gohma. The dungeons have weight in the world.
The central mechanics help here too. First of all, you only really have the powers you do through assuming the power of your friends; Tri for echoes, Dampe for automatons, Link for the swordsman form. Zelda acts as a unique conduit for the power of others. The only way that Zelda can directly damage enemies is by throwing things at them or by using the Sword of Might to assume the form of Link. Typically she has to use echoes of other enemies or Dampe’s automatons to do damage. In the final little gauntlet and the fight with Null, Zelda has returned the Sword of Might to Link, and must rely entirely on Tri’s abilities, notably summoning Echoes and grabbing things. As the story reaches the climax, Zelda must act through Tri, and Tri must act through Zelda; they form a pair, each working through the other in a way that no other Legend of Zelda climax has asked for as far as I know. In the final moment of the story, the mechanics are stripped back to the core, and with that, the themes are pushed to the front. Even the ending cutscene reinforce that; Tri and Zelda share a touching moment of friendship, before Zelda returns to Hyrule and Tri goes to slumber with the goddesses. The final image after the credits is Zelda’s room, where the Tri rod has been framed on the wall.
The sidequests also focus on interpersonal relationships. A cat asks you to go get her “human-friend” a nice drink. You deliver a lunch a mother made for her son. You help a River Zora mother make a charm for her son. Let’s look at one of the quests in particular; that quest with the cat.
Titled “A Treat For My Person”, it is started when you, using the Cat Suit, talk to a cat in Seesyde Village.3 The cat is sitting behind a woman fishing in the sea. I’ll reproduce the dialogue here:
Oh! You can understand me? How very unusual. It may surprise you, but I am a well-traveled lady from the desert. See my friend there? I met her right here in Jabul Waters at the end of my travels. I adore her, but the fish she provides simply don’t suit my palate. So every day, she fishes and fishes, hoping to catch something I’ll like. It’s frankly adorable. Bless her giant heart. Which is why I would like to give her a treat. Where I come from, the people make a smoothie that I hear is absolutely delectable. It’s called a…warmix…spatial? Something along those lines. I’m certain if you speak with a…smoothie person… in the desert they’ll know what you’re after. Once you have it, check in with me, then give it to my person-friend. I’ll reward you handsomely!
You then go to the Gerudo desert, where the Business Scrub running the smoothie stall figures out that you want a “Warm Mixed Special”. You then make one and return to the cat, where the following dialogue plays out:
Hello again. Did you you get that smoothie I asked for? Yes, a warm mixed special! That was it! Thanks ever so much. Would you give it to my friend over there?
Upon speaking to the Hylian fishing, she replies with:
Hm. The fish just aren’t biting today. This is a long time to stand in the chilly wind… Oh, a delivery? For me? *sniff* It smells good. And that color sure makes it appealing. OK! I’ll try it! It’s spicy AND sweet? How does that even work?! I’ve never tasted anything like it! I can tell these are going to be a habit. Oh! I feel my body warming up too! I was getting chilly, so this was just perfect. I don’t know who sent this, but please thank them!
The cat meows. The woman replies to the cat:
Hm? Aww, are you happy too? Hee hee… You’re such a cutie! Guess I gotta give it my all and catch you some dinner!
Zelda then speaks to the cat again:
Thank you. It was lovely to treat my dear friend to a taste of my homeland. And here is your reward! And I’ll try to get used to the local fare. She tries so hard. I can meet her in the middle.
In this little vingette, we see Zelda acting as a conduit of friendship; the cat acts through Zelda in order to get her person a gift from her homeland. A gift that she herself has not tasted, but know that people from her homeland really like it. If I can be a little pretentious, the cat’s action is one of pure friendship; she does it purely to see her friend happy, not expecting anything in return. In fact, at the end, she makes further concessions; she commits to trying harder to be a better friend and appreciate what her friend does for her. At the same moment, the gift rejuvenates the fisherwoman, letting her try harder to catch a fish for the cat’s dinner. It’s a simple story, perfect for a sidequest in this game, and it fundamentally reinforces the core themes of friendship and acting in concert with friends.
I really liked having the Deku and the Yeti making a return. Both have pretty interesting societies.
The Deku are nearly entirely anarchistic, without any real central governing power such as the Hylians, the Gerudo, the River and Sea Zora, or the Gorons have. Instead, they seem to mostly follow trends, latching onto the flows of desire with a fanatical zeal. When we find them, isolated in the dense jungles of southeastern Hyrule, they are all obsessed with eating spiderwebs on sticks – what they call “cotton candy”. This comes from the rifts, and the main one is locked behind a pair of guards who demand you have a pass to enter the “sweet spot.” In getting one, you close another rift. The Deku, upon realizing what you’ve done, throw you in their prison. They appear to be the only society with a prison in the game – perhaps other societies have prisons too, but we only see the Deku one? It is still fascinating that the society has no central authority, and we don’t see any sort of trial, which leads me to think that the Deku don’t have a legal system, they’ve just seen that some other group has prisons, and they emulated it without fully grasping what they’re for or how they work. The prison is mostly empty, and after you escape it seems like nobody cares. Ultimately the Deku are presented as finicky, flighty, inconsistent. Upon the closure of the main rift and the “cotton candy” going away, they return to drinking smoothies with the same fanatical zeal – a treat that Zelda also enjoys throughout the game. I also just like their design, they’re funny little guys. There’s also a romance story at one point that is very cute, and the Deku aren’t strongly gendered, meaning that there is some queer readings to be done of that relationship too, I’m sure.
The yeti are connected to my most nostalgic Legend of Zelda game, Twilight Princess. In fact, they only appear in TP and EoW. With that limited presence in the series, their thematic core is a lot more solid than say, the Zora or the Goron. The yeti appear to be commentary on familial affection.
In TP, the yeti Yeta and her husband Yeto live in the otherwise abandoned Snowpeak Ruins. Yeta has taken ill after the arrival of the fragment of the Mirror of Twilight, and her husband is trying to make a hearty stew to help her feel better. The entire dungeon is oriented around you helping Yeta; in trying to find the bedroom key to gain access to the Mirror Fragment, you find all the ingredients for the stew.4 Then, when you go to get the Fragment, Yeta follows you into the room. She peers into her reflection, and is transformed into a monster. You defeat her in this form, and Yeto rushes in, cradling his wife and soothing her. The dungeon is oriented around familial care.
The yeti in EoW is a singular figure, the childlike Condé. He lives at the top of Hebra mountain alone, waiting for his brother to return after the death of his father. He thinks that the monstrous Skorchill is his brother, and when attacked by Skorchill his gets upset, imagining that his brother is upset that he hasn’t been “good”. When you discover that Skorchill is not his brother, and that his brother wrote that Condé’s brother is planning to return and take Condé on adventures. This cheers Condé up immensely; you act as the conduit of fraternal affection.
In both cases, the yeti’s social life is oriented primarily around family and care. Condé is charged with keeping the mountain clean, Yeto is so concerned about Yeta’s health that he takes a long, treacherous hike down from the mountain to catch a reekfish. The stories around the yeti in the series are about care, which is something I find rather interesting. Care is always something in the series – the stories in Legend of Zelda are all quite dark, and people caring for each other is a natural component of those stories. The yeti act as a point where a specific type of care can be explored, which I think is pretty neat.
Zelda literally draws a sword to take on a more masculine appearance, do things that a male character can do, and literally assumes this identity so completely that she switches her dominant hand.
The sword is typically a masculine object; sure there is a layer of surrogacy for the phallus, but it is also a sign of martial power, heroism, and the ability to defend yourself and those around you. The Sword of Might also acts as the seal on several other abilities, notably the bombs and the bow, both used by Link in the early part of the game. Through the sword of might, Zelda takes up the identity of Link, the other side of the gender dynamic. But this is temporary; it is always fleeting. This appears to be a question of mental fortitude, if the sidequest at the Slumber Dojo in Kakiriko is anything to go by.
This game is also by far the best portrayal we’ve had of the Gerudo in the series.
The Gerudo first appear in OoT. There, they are a band of all-female bandits in the Gerudo Valley. They wear stereotypical “Eastern” clothing – a veil over their face, a top that leaves their midriff completely exposed, and baggy, flowing pants. They mostly operate as the group that Ganondorf comes from, another magical people that fill out the world of Hyrule, and a version of the Amazonians of Greek myth. The story is also concerned about their relationship with Hylian men. When infiltrating their base, you have to save the carpenters, who attempted to join the Gerudo because they thought the life of banditry sounds fun. These carpenters have a certain emasculated quality about them; they run in rather strange way, and I’ve always found them to be at least somewhat gay-coded. The rejection of the carpenters from Gerudo society is explicitly gendered, as the men claim that the reason the Gerudo don’t include them is because they are men.
There are also four (1+1+2) main Gerudo characters; Ganondorf, the sage of spirit Nabooru, and the twin witches, Kotake and Koume. Ganondorf is the classic villain, power-hungry and cunning. Kotake and Koume are a bickering pair of crone-like witches who keep the Gerudo in line with the whims of their surrogate son, Ganondorf. They also act as the boss of the Spirit Temple, combining into Twinrova.
We meet Nabooru when Link is a child, as he seeks to gain entry to the Spirit temple. She enlists his help to get the silver gauntlets, but is captured by Twinrova. Later it is discovered that she was turned into an Iron Knuckle – encased in armour and forced to fight for Ganondorf. Upon being saved by Link – then in the body of a young adult – she flirts with him in the temple of time.
I’ll set MM aside for now, as that is another interesting, less problematic portrayal of the Gerudo, but isn’t relevant for our concerns here.
This is nothing compared to the problem with the Gerudo in BotW and TotK. I’m mostly in agreement with this article by Autumn Wright. While I do find queer/lesbian joy in interacting with the Gerudo and reading between the lines at several points, it would be irresponsible to ignore the real compulsory heterosexuality, orientalism and general sexism present within the representation of the Gerudo in these games. For one, the crossdressing outfit that Link wears to enter Gerudo Town is ripped straight from exoticizing representations of the “harem”. For another, the Gerudo are the only group in Hyrule where we see darker skin tones. Finally, their society is obsessed with men. Gerudo women are expected to leave Gerudo town to go find a male partner, and even take dating classes so they can be good at it. In this town of all women, it seems like men are a perennial topic of conversation. In BotW, there are a bunch of men trying to sneak into Gerudo town – both sides are obsessed with the other.
Throughout all of these representations of the Gerudo we have to confront their sexualization. These are tall, muscular women wearing what amounts to a midriff-baring tank top, living in an all-female society. Their relationship to the outside, always male world is constantly emphasized. They’re sexy-ness is always right there, at most just outside of view. It is a sexy-ness built on orientalism and othering, relying on some really shitty visual language.
Once we pierce that visual language, however, we can find the gender trouble. Even in OoT, they respect strength. Once you free all the carpenters, the Gerudo respect you, let you come and go as you please. In fact, I believe this is necessary to complete the game, as otherwise you can’t get to the Spirit Temple at all. They accept the androgynous young man Link into their ranks. The Gerudo in BotW – which, despite Nintendo’s wishes, we can extend into TotK – can easily be read as trans-inclusive. Numerous women in Gerudo town “figure out” that Link is actually a “man”, but don’t raise a stink about it. Link can even get a massage where the woman giving him the massage says, “Relax, we’re all [women] here.” There are even a couple of Goron in the town. It seems like the exclusion of “men” from the town is complicated, queered even.5 Riju, the head of the town even figures out that you are Link, a man, but lets you stay so long as you behave as a woman within the walls of the town. There’s even the pairing of Cara and Isha, where there is a lot of lesbian subtext going on in there.
By contrast to the sexualized versions we see in OoT, BotW and TotK, the Gerudo on Echoes of Wisdom do not trade much in gender trouble, but end up with a much less sexist and heteronormative portrayal out of it. They aren’t sexualized because the art style really just can’t sexualize them, and their portrayal just isn’t concerned with the interactions between them and the men of surrounding communities.
I think that this helps speak to some of the deep appeal of the Legend of Zelda series for a lot of queer people. Mixed with all the disappointment, with the removal of queer readings, with the general heteronormativity of the entire series, is a real throughline of gender trouble. Link has always been a little ambiguous gender wise. In Ocarina of Time, Zelda assumes the identity of a man, Sheik. In Twilight Princess, there are almost certainly some interesting readings to be made of Midna’s gender. In Breath of the Wild, the entirety of Gerudo Town is riven with gender trouble. Even in Tears of the Kingdom, there are still outfits that are definitely more feminine than masculine. Finally, in Echoes of Wisdom, we have a world where there isn’t a clear physical distinction between “men” and “women”, Zelda takes up a sword to assume the form of a man and to do what he can do. There is something very gender about the series – especially in recent instalments – no matter how much the studio aims at crushing that out.6 It is an interesting site where gender keeps happening. Perhaps it’s nostalgia that keeps bringing me back to the Legend of Zelda series. There’s a real queer joy to extracting queer readings from the texts you’re surrounded with. It is like a type of literary graffiti, transforming a city block into your city block. There is always the risk of it being painted over, or washed away. But there is real value in the piece alone, in marking your space with a spraycan or a pen. It lets other (queers) know they’re not alone, and that despite what some asshole cishet says, you can appropriate the texts around you and speak about what they say to you. You don’t need anyone’s permission to interpret.
We shouldn’t let this joy in queer readings deteriorate into a view that the text “is queer” without our work of interpretation. I’ve written about something related before. Obvious queer elements, obvious gender trouble can and will be erased, decried as “unintentional”, or ascribed to “mistranslation”. If we’re going to be responsible in interpreting texts, we need to not behave like those petty reactionary shouting heads and textual authoritarians like Nintendo. We need to be able to deal with the ambivalences that live, inexorably, within our favourite texts. The Gerudo in BotW can be read as both a trans-inclusive lesbian utopia and as a creepy male orientalist fantasy. Both readings exist within the text. Not every reading is equally valid, nor should every reading be entertained. But there is no purity in reading, no purity in analysis. Your moral status will never be because you read “morally good” books or enjoy “morally good” media.
This is also not to sanction a blanket “artistic freedom” as if that cuts off discussion of the potentially very real harms that texts can cause. Texts circulate, whispering in the dark, singing in the sun. They are passed around in hushed tones, or loudly promoted on the computer screen. But then, it is within the circulation itself, the conditions of sharing and public reading that the issues of the text can come through. You cannot read the public effect of a text with only the text.
Hopefully one of the next “Otto does reading of a bit of media” blog posts will be about Howl’s Moving Castle or Beserk or maybe some other text. Perhaps I’ll do something about The Name of the Rose. Eventually I should also do something about what I like about BotW and TotK, though that’s going to be more concerned with gameplay than storytelling. Maybe I’ll also shift over to talking about things across multiple games, instead of mucking about with a single game or a couple games like this blog post has been about. On other avenues, I hope to do an analysis of more “authoritarian” design styles, and maybe a reflection on various political scandals in “the West”, and how “the West” forms a region.
Twilight Princess has the central themes of duality and the broken shadows of war. Restoring the guardian spirits, the double of the wolf form and the human form, the conspiracy of Midna and Link, all of these hold together well. Ocarina of Time’s themes around being forced to grow up too fast and not being “at home” anywhere are also born out by the central mechanics too, where half your equipment is unusable at any given time. ↩
Which deserves an entire analysis of why it just doesn’t work in my opinion. ↩
I have drawn the quotes from here: https://zeldawiki.wiki/wiki/A_Treat_for_My_Person I have not gone through and verified with my copy of the game, as it’s a fair ways into the story. ↩
There is something to be said about how these ingredients are mostly from your hometown, somewhere far, far away from the mountains. ↩
Autumn Wright also explores this.. ↩
Nintendo is not interested in letting there be queer readings of these texts, to be clear. Nintendo is a profoundly authoritarian company. This isn’t just clear from their attempts to remove queer readings from the Legend of Zelda series, but also their approach to bugs, as discussed in this video. There are a lot of comparisons between Nintendo and Apple in that they both seem to have “authoritarian” design styles, where the end user is expected to use the object only in highly specific, pre-determined ways. There will be another blog post on this soon, I hope. This is perhaps a little more noxious with Nintendo, who are also in the business of producing texts. I think what happened to queer readings going from BotW to TotK is a demonstration of an authoritarian view on readings themselves. I would like to have more information on the internal structure of Nintendo before any further discussion of this. I would want answers regarding if this is the choices of some executives, a formal, explicit design policy, or something that the teams working on these games do on their own. ↩