Customizable Pronouns
I discovered Breath of the Wild in 2020 and noticed not an insignificant amount of fan content, such as art and prose, reimagined the protagonist Link with alternative pronouns and gender outside of he/him—for example, nonbinary with they/them pronouns. Feeling inspired by this, I created a tool that allows users to customize Link’s name, gender, and pronouns in the game.
This project was featured in an article in Xtra Magazine, titled “Players celebrate the queerness in ‘The Legend of Zelda.’ When will Nintendo?”
I created several ready-to-install modules that altered the protagonist Link’s gender and pronouns. After doing so, wanting to increase customization options for the player even more, I created a tool that allows the player to change both the protagonist and the deuteragonist’s name, pronouns, and gender in the in-game text. I did this by iterating through the files containing the text multiple times and replacing relevant instances of names and pronouns with placeholders. Then, I created a Python script that edits those placeholders based on the user’s input.
In some cases, fictional races within the game have their own words for “man” and “woman,” in addition to their own cultural speaking quirks. One goal of this project was to craft gender neutral alternatives in these situations that also still matched the race’s language and speaking patterns, in the event that the user customized the player character to be nonbinary.
For example, the fictional race of the Gerudo uses the Gerudo language terms “voe” and “vai” to refer to men and women, respectively. I wanted to create a new Gerudo word for nonbinary people that also matches the construction of the two existing words by also beginning with “V.” During my research of the Gerudo, I came across an English-Gerudo dictionary, where I found that the Gerudo word for “thank you” is “sarqso.” Wanting to retain the polite and positive connotations of this word as well, I wrote the tool such that in the event the player is customized to be nonbinary, the player is referred to by the Gerudo as a “varqso.”
In another example, the Gorons by default refer to the player as “brother,” and tend to end their sentences with the word “goro,” which is the Japanese onomatopoeia for rolling objects. Thus, I wrote for the nonbinary player to be referred to by the Gorons as “sibling-goro.”
By default, one character tries to remember the player character's name "Link" by listing other words that start with "L" and end with "K." To adapt this dialogue for the tool's name customization function, I included a short dictionary of select words from A-Z, then wrote the tool so that depending on the first letter of any custom name the user enters, three words that also start with that same letter are randomly picked from the dictionary.
