willful ignorance masquerading as victory
This phenomenon is nothing new, but this is such such a perfect and widespread example of it that I feel compelled to comment on it.
Over the past few days, this image…
…has been tweeted thousands of times by people claiming that it represents a contradiction. It with tremendous glee by people acting as if they have incontrovertible proof of hypocrisy.
But it doesn’t remotely represent a contradiction. Let’s quickly break down what these two tweets are.
The first tweet is a link to this video from June of 2014…
…which uses the fact that many people, including me, thought, upon our first glimpse of Link in the next Zelda game (a Link who looks like this, by the way)…
…that this Link just might be female, to launch into an argument for how a female Link would both be cool and would totally work within the series lore.
The second tweet was a link, following the announcement of Linkle (who looks like this, by the way)…
…to a great article by Jess Joho for Kill Screen.
I’m fairly certain that most people who hopped on the bandwagon of tweeting that image around didn’t even take the most cursory glance at the article, since doing so would have made it clear that it is hardly hypocritical to both want a female Link and to agree with that article, since the article itself also argues in favor of a female Link, while very strongly arguing that Linkle (ugh) is not the female Link the author (and I, and others) wanted. In fact, the headline of that article is:
This is part of what the article says:
Here’s the bottom line that Nintendo refuses to see: when people ask “why can’t Link be a girl,” they’re not asking for the option to maybe play as a girl who looks like Link in a game with a Zelda-related title. They’re not asking for girls to be kept to the side, marginalized to a lesser product and project (anyone remember the Nintendo Girls Club?) Instead, they’re asking why—amidst an otherwise very female-centric mythology about three goddesses and a badass princess—must the “Hero” character always be a boy? Why is it okay to ask female players to identify with Link despite their gender differences, but at the same time have it be inconceivable to ask male players to do the same?
So look, you can take issue with the substance of Joho’s arguments if you want, though I agree with them 100%. But to say that it’s hypocritical to want a female Link and then to tweet an article arguing in favor of a female Link is to demonstrate that you don’t care about engaging with the discussion in any real way, and perhaps that you think women arguing for better representation in video games should just shut the fuck up and be happy with whatever meager, pandering scraps they get. In any case, you just want to tear down people on the other side of the ideological fence, and you don’t care if the tools you use to do that are complete bullshit.
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