No, show me the real Zelda

Perfection

lmao. what's the source BTW?

Reverse image search found 4 different people being credited =(

The most common one I'm seeing is "Pichichu_Studio on X". If they're the same person, "Pichichuchu Studio" on Instagram and Tumblr as well.

I've heard this joke a billion times and have never met anyone who thought Zelda was the boy.

This is especially hitting since I'm replaying "Breath of the Wild" right now. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

It's an old joke. It was mocking parents of millennials who called every game system "a Gameboy" or "a Nintendo" and called protagonists of the game by the title, like Halo for Master Chief or Zelda for Link.

The joke is mostly played up. Most of the time adults just didn't care or leaned into the cringe for fun, but that is my experience around it. Gaming has become so prolific since then that the joke has been beaten into the ground and resurrected elsewhere (see streamers calling their characters John Ring for Elden Ring or John Halo, as examples).

It's just a silly joke about people not knowing about games. You can see other, similar, humor in people calling Tim Cook 'Tim Apple' for example, but that obviously has different origins, it's just kind of a similar idea.

Don't look at me that way

It was an honest mistake

IDK I've met a lot of people who don't play video games at all young to old, who thought Zelda was the main character.

If I were to say "no that's Link" they'd say they never heard of Link, who the fuck is Link. And it would spiral into a loop where I'd have to explain it again and they'd have a lot of trouble believing it or just stop caring.

I think it goes with if you see a box or game title with "ZELDA" on it, you naturally assume the main character is than called Zelda. Honestly some people don't care to look beyond that.

Zelda is a pretty cool guy

thanks

Looking back I can remember thinking my parents were being dumb, but now I recognize that they were definitely messing with me by calling them “pokey mans” and such.

To be fair though, I still called my 3DS a Gameboy.

It was fairly common when the first game was popular. There wasn't much dialogue, and none of it mentioned Link's name. I'm honestly not sure it even mentioned Zelda's name.

I do remember, though, that if you named your save file Zelda you'd start out in the second quest. That probably didn't help.

I definitely thought it up until the N64 games came out. I’d only played the SNES version as a kid and didn’t remember anything other than the gameplay.

The original games let you name your character and didn't tell you the default name was Link anywhere in the game

boots up MVP baseball 2005

I play tears of the kingdom with my 3 year old and he keeps refering to Link as Zelda. Every time. I keep correcting him but nope, we play as Zelda.

I 100% thought Link's name was Zelda and thought I was the only one. I may or may not have learned otherwise until the N64 Super Smash Bros (not sure if that's the first one or not).

And then I learned about Zelda's bad ass form called Sheikh (sp?). And then wondered why the hell Link was doing what he was doing in Link to the Past. Never learned about that storyline.

Every single time I see someone wearing a particular shirt that says "The Legend of Zelda" with an image of just Link, I like to say "That dude's name is Zelda?"

I mean, the first game kinda reinforces it by giving you more hearts if you enter your name as ZELDA. If you didn't read the manual, you'd never know Link's actual name.

I don't remember following the LttP story well when I was a kid. It was just: explore, kill bosses, find items.

Fitzgerald?

Me?

I never even made it to a boss! All I remember was fucking with the chickens 😂 LttP was VERY early in my gaming days.

Look, we don't all play pokemon.