a Link to the player
I recently finished The Legend of Zelda – Breath of the Wild and since then have been thinking about some little, seemingly insignificant piece of information about Link.
Spoiler warning: if you have NOT regained the memory from the picture in Hyrule Castle (hopefully no spoiler as to the location, as I think it is quite obvious) you may not want to read further.
What I would like to write about is however not the memory from the picture but rather something Zelda wrote in her diary, which is close to the location of the memory. (I deliberately didn’t mention the diary in the spoiler warning, as I would consider this already as some sort of spoiler…)
Zelda wrote about Link and his character, “And still, not a word passes his lips. I never know what he's thinking!” and therefore referring to a fact we all know from the Zelda titles – Link is mute. That is, at least for the ears of the players. Later she writes “When I finally got around to asking why he's so quiet all the time, I could tell it was difficult for him to say. But he did. With so much at stake, and so many eyes upon him, he feels it necessary to stay strong and to silently bear any burden. A feeling I know all too well... For him, it has caused him to stop outwardly expressing his thoughts and feelings.”
And now I was thinking – so now there is a reason, an innferfictional reason, why Link doesn’t say a word. I always thought that Link has to be silent for the player to identify themselves more with him. As Link doesn’t show his thoughts in the game, for the time being the players thoughts are his. This certainly is still the the case (amongst other game design-related reasons like less complicated dialogues, etc..)
But now we have an additional innerfictional reason why Link is so silent and this very reason twists this mentioned relation between player and link. Up till now, to this diary entry, the player was Link, they can control him, they share thoughts and mind. But now… the player sort of looses this connection, the access to Link’s thoughts.
Sure, the player could still be Link and determine Link’s thoughts and mind. This could still be the case. But. Link is silent because he is used to not showing his emotions, under this pressure, not even to the player. The player does not know about this pressure, it all starts before the game and is not even shown in the memories. This pressure is Link’s burden to bear, and so I think if the player and Link don’t share the pressure, then they also cannot share the reasons for the silence, and therefore: thoughts.