So after finishing my last final here at the university for the fall semester, Hulu was kind enough to upload the entirety of the Legend of Zelda cartoon series that played alongside the Super Mario Bros. Super Show. If only out of morbid curiosity, I watched half of the episodes with one of my roommates to kill time. My knowledge of the show up to that point was limited exclusively to Link's inclination to exclaiming, "Well excuse me, princess!" so I had no real idea what it entailed. I figured it was probably going to be bad, but in what ways exactly, I had no idea.
Let me tell you something. That show has profound undertones for a Saturday morning cartoon show from the late 80s. The plots for most of the episodes seem to be almost entirely about the hidden sexual tension in the relationship between Link, Zelda, and hell, at some points, a fairy creatively named "Sprite." Link and Zelda seem to have both just discovered the concept of puberty and being tsunderes, as they have no idea whether they genuinely want to make out with each other or get restraining orders from one scene to the next. Usually it's Link making the advances in any number of ways, from blatantly asking Zelda his version of "How about a kiss, for luck?" to just outright breaking into her room to give her some flowers. These tactics seem to work way more often than they should, since these are actually somehow enough to persuade Zelda to start the process of making out with him before something inevitably interrupts it. Still, sometimes it's Zelda who actually wants the action. In one episode, Link taking her on a picnic is enough for her to actually get on top of him and almost start doing some Sims-style love-making before, yet again, the plot actually shows up. This is all before we even include the fairy in the equation, whose ideal situation is either alone time with Link that doesn't result in her being crushed or, at minimum, a threesome with Zelda, who she just seems to barely tolerate since Link is always the apple of her eye.
I also suspect that Link is a rapist in Dic Animation's series. It feels as though there are just as many times that Link still continues his advances anyway and then gets rejected as there are when he's actually about to figure out first hand what those talks he had with mum and dad meant about birds and bees having an unholy, quasi-bestial union. To top it off, there's an episode where he teams up with a girl who doesn't speak his language and the first thing he says about the situation while moving suggestively towards her is something along the lines of "Oh, I'm sure there's still a language we could all understand!"
I'm pretty sure that all this evidence points towards the show being propaganda for abstinence and promise rings, although the writing is so bipolar about it that it might also be telling kids to just go ahead and have high school pregnancies, too. It might also be saying all of those things at the same time. With a show that actually has a guy named Bob Forward on the writing staff, anything is really possible.
Still, none of that was what I really wanted to point out about the show, but rather, the fact that the show seems to propose the one fanfiction coupling that hasn't been covered yet on fanfiction.net. I give to you, ladies and gentlemen, the KingxLink!
So what do you make of this development in the Zelda canon? Do you think Miyamoto and company will incorporate this fascinating relationship in a future Zelda game, or shall we always be left waiting, wondering if that look of disgust was the result of a swift end to what could have been a beautiful relationship? Discuss!
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