When I met Purah in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and she was an example of a JRPG trope I absolutely CANNOT stand—oopsie! Reversed my age, so I’m over 100 years old but I look like a baby!—I just sort of gritted my teeth and bore it. I knew it couldn’t get too weird, because The Legend of Zelda is a family-friendly franchise, but I still side-eyed the whole thing. Thankfully, Tears of the Kingdom has made the best change on this front.
The trope often has the story/characters go to great pains to explain that a character who looks like a little girl is actually a 1000-year-old something or other. Fire Emblem is a repeat offender of this, with one particularly nasty example being Nowi the Manakete from Awakening. Nowi looks like a little girl, but she’s “actually” a very, very old dragon, that you can … urk … have children with.
Tears of the Kingdom, meanwhile, has seemed to clue into who their audience was and what they want, because they did the absolute best thing they could have done with Purah’s character: they aged her UP to her twenties, and good god, they made her a baddie.
This is, like, the reverse of all those creepy age tropes, and I’m so here for it. They didn’t even really provide an explanation for why she aged up so rapidly. They just left it for us to speculate over. And you know what? I’ll take it. Look at Purah. Look at her. The minute her red tights and high heels kicked down the door, my bisexual ass was standing at attention.
It’s the least they could do, after giving us an actual non-baby Purah in Age of Calamity, and then leaving us to wonder why we needed a baby in the first place:
Nintendo? You did good. Thank you for knowing your audience.
(featured image: Nintendo)
