The Complicated Queerness in Breath of the Wild

CW: Transphobia

Slated for a 2022 release, Breath of the Wild 2 has a lot of people talking about Breath of the Wild again. Though its press has always been predominantly positive — after all, BotW did win a whopping 189 Game of the Year awards — fans have been calling out the game’s problematic queer representations since its release, and no two characters have received more attention than Bolson and Vilia.

Bolson

Although there’s no set order to BotW’s gameplay, those who follow the Main Quest will meet Bolson before Vilia. Described in one article as a “fabulous, pink-clad carpenter,” and by Zeldapedia as “effeminate” and “eccentric,” Bolson is the president of Bolson Construction in Hateno Village; he is a key character in the side quests “Hylian Homeowner” and “From the Ground Up.”

Reception to Bolson has been mixed. Forum communities such as Reddit, GameFAQs, and Zelda Dungeon have called him everything from “camp” to “a likable extortionist” to “ridiculous.” While it’s important to remember that anonymous forums don’t capture everyone’s opinions, they do provide a sense of player reaction, and most threads agree: Bolson is most certainly a gay caricature, but his representation is appreciated. His antics — including the Bolson dance, calling Link “perky,” and the “good-faith wood” line — are funny. His presence on Link’s lawn has even turned into a meme. Bolson, as a character, is entertaining.

This entertainment value is key for Amanda Phillips (they/he), Associate Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Georgetown University, who focuses on power as a qualifier for comedy. “It’s always important,” they explained, “to look at a character’s proximity to power in order to determine if the comedy in their representation is a punching-up or a punching-down.” Comedy that punches up pursues the privileged, while punching down targets marginalized or oppressed groups; the former is generally better received than the latter.

Though Bolson is read almost universally as gay, and therefore marginalized, there’s still room to read his character as a punching-up. How? For Phillips, that has to do with Bolson’s intersecting identities as both wealthy and patriarch, two privileged positions.

“The dancing and wood jokes are cringey in the way all camp has cringe factor, but at the end of the day he’s very powerful,” Phillips noted, an important distinction from characters such as Tingle, who isn’t in BotW. Bolson has the power to send Hudson to Akkala to create Tarrey Town — and later, Hudson’s wedding can’t begin without Bolson.

Tarrey Town, then, is proof of Bolson’s power. Phillips sees the town as a “quirky utopia” populated by “multicultural clones of [Bolson]: everyone in the quest are his ‘sons,’” making Bolson a benevolent patriarch, the creator of a wholesome community that comes together for an interracial (straight) marriage.

This wholesomeness is what separates Bolson from common stereotypes, which often portray queer characters as evil or villains. Such is the case of Ursula, from Disney’s The Little Mermaid, who was inspired in part by the American drag queen Divine. For an example in the Zelda universe, think Skyward Sword’s Ghirahim, whose queer-coded character, according to an Axios article, “reinforce[s] the idea that queerness, and queer people, are inherently dangerous and disruptive to the social order.”

Bolson, by contrast, is much more complicated and nuanced. “I wouldn’t reduce him to ‘gay’ as a flattened identity,” Phillips said. Instead, “Bolson is an eccentric, narcissistic, femme patriarch.” Just like real people, he carries multiple identities.

Vilia

Though player reaction to Bolson skews positive, it’s harder to redeem BotW’s portrayal of Vilia. To enter the female-only Gerudo Town and begin the Divine Beast Vah Naboris quest, Link must find a male merchant who has supposedly infiltrated the town. That person ends up being Vilia, referred to by she/her pronouns.

Vilia appears only in the “Forbidden City Entry” quest, and her interactions with Link are more limited than Bolson’s. When Link finds her in Kara Kara Bazaar, the player is given two options: One is to compliment Vilia’s appearance, and the second is to accuse her of being a man. The correct answer, for the quest, is the compliment, as that will allow Link to purchase the outfit he needs to sneak into Gerudo Town. After a quick cutscene in which Link tries on his new clothes, a gust of wind blows Vilia’s veil aside, exposing her beard.

There are dozens of forum threads debating Vilia’s representation (see here and here as examples, as well as this Wikipedia page on LGBT themes in video games). Some players see Vilia as a comment on capitalism, and the lengths that people are willing to go in order to make money. Others, however, see her as a punchline at the expense of transwomen. The beard reveal seems written to make the player laugh, suggesting that transwomen are a joke and that “real” women can’t have facial hair. One article calls the scene “blatantly transphobic.” Another laments its use of “tired tropes,” though the author finds hope in how fandom, through fanart, has reclaimed Gerudo Link as “a symbol of grace and exuberant queer expression.”

For Phillips, the problem with Vilia isn’t her character, or even the beard punchline, but the larger Gerudo quest. “Transphobic discourse is based largely on the harmful fantasy that trans women are pretending to be women in order to infiltrate women’s spaces,” Phillips explained. These imposters then need to be ejected for the sake of “real” women, and Gerudo Town sticks precisely to this script.

Even the Gerudo Vai [female] outfit is problematic: It can’t be upgraded by the Great Fairies, and it offers only partial heat resistance (not full). “Link’s gender experimentation is purely about deception,” Phillips said. “If the outfit doubled as useful armor like the Desert Voe [male] outfit, I might be more receptive to a different reading.”

Though Phillips described the scene with Vilia as “compromised,” her character isn’t completely irredeemable. When Link models the Gerudo Vai outfit, Vilia squeals over him, and Link, in the cutscene, seems to enjoy both the attention and the clothes. The exchange is bashful, even cute.

“It feels like a moment of recognition and even sisterhood rather than scheming,” Phillips said.

This more nuanced look at Vilia, in which her interactions with Link are both problematic and touching, falls in line with queer theory — which, as explained in Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele’s Queer: A Graphic History, tries to avoid binary thinking (i.e., Vilia’s representation is either all good or all bad). Instead, the truth lies somewhere in between.

This, however, doesn’t negate the harmful aspects of this scene. For marginalized gamers struggling with certain characters or quests, in Zelda or elsewhere, Phillips suggested taking from games “whatever nourishes you and do[ing] what you need with the rest.” For much of the Zelda community, this has involved reclaiming Gerudo Link through fanart. For Phillips, growing up, it was fanfiction, which provided “an opportunity to latch onto those hopeful moments and discard or explain away the rest.”

That said, these reclamations can, and should, be accompanied by a push for improvement. This can include petitions, protests, boycotts, essays, and more. For the games industry as a whole, Phillips advised unionization — as well as increased developer attention to character, and the inclusion of marginalized folks in this process.

Finally, it’s important to remember that BotW is a translated game. “The things we find offensive or even interesting may have very different connotations to a non-American audience,” Phillips said. That doesn’t lessen the negative impact of scenes or representations, but complicate it: What is lost or altered in translation? What Western norms have we imposed on a non-Western game? In what ways are our interpretations incomplete?

Of course, there are no easy answers. But that shouldn’t stop us from asking.