Femme Link
The protagonist of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TotK), Link, is notable within the Zelda fandom for his perceived particularly apparent androgyny. Because a playable female protagonist is a common request within the Zelda modding space—ranging from the titular Princess Zelda herself to original female characters—I wanted to take a different approach to this request and explore designing simply a femme version of Link, the original protagonist. The goal of this design was to take full advantage of Link’s androgyny and remain as true to his original design as much as possible, while making minimal yet key feminine alterations. The end result includes a redesigned face, a new feminine voice, and altered cutscenes where characters now refer to Link using she/her pronouns.
Audio in key cutscenes is manually edited such that other characters refer to Link as a woman and with she/her pronouns.
Key armors that normally include an uncovered chest now include a simple bandeau for a look that is both feminine and minimal.
Link’s voice was replaced using various hand-picked audio clips from voice actress Adeline Chetail’s multiple video game roles. Her simultaneously fierce and lilting tones were a sound feminine counterpart to Link’s original voice from Kengo Takanashi.
Chetail is notable for voicing the French dubs of Princess Zelda in Breath of the Wild (2017), Age of Calamity (2020), and TotK; Ellie in The Last of Us (2013); and Mei in Overwatch (2016). All of her voice clips used for this project come from these performances.