Flip All The Pronouns
Maya and I have been playing through Windwaker together; she likes sailing, scary birds and remembering to be brave, rescuing her little brother and finding out what’s happening to Medli and her dragon boat.
She’s the hero of the story, of course.
It’s annoying and awkward, to put it mildly, having to do gender-translation on the fly when Maya asks me to read what it says on the screen. You can pick your character’s name, of course – I always stick with Link, being a traditionalist – but all of the dialog insists that Link is a boy, and there’s apparently nothing to be done about it.
Well, there wasn’t anything to be done about it, certainly not anything easy, but as you might imagine I’m not having my daughter growing up thinking girls don’t get to be the hero and rescue their little brothers.
This isn’t particularly user-friendly; you’ll need to download the Dolphin emulator and find a Windwaker .GCM, the Gamecube disk image with this SHA-1 hash:
Original: 6b5f06c10d50ebb4099cded88217eb71e5bfbb4a
and then you’ll need to figure out how to use xdelta3 to apply a binary patch to that image.
This patch.
When you’re done the resulting disk image will have the following SHA-1 hash:
Result: 6a480ffd8ecb6c254f65c0eb8e0538f7b30cfaa7
… and all the dialog will now refer to Link as a young woman, rather than as a young man.
I think I’ve gotten this right – this was all done directly on the original disk image with a hex editor, so all the changes needed to be the same byte-for-byte length, in-place. I haven’t had time to play through the whole game to test it yet, and some of the constructions aren’t perfect. I’ve borrowed Donaldson’s “Swordmain” coinage to replace “Swordsman”, for example, and there’s lots of “milady” replacing “my lad” and “master”, because I couldn’t find a better way to rewrite them in exactly the amount of space allotted. If you come up with something better, I’m all ears.
I’m going to audit it shortly, and may update this post to reflect that. For now, though, here you go.
FemLink or you’re doing it wrong.
201 Comments
Dad of the fucking year.
Wow. Just… wow. Kudos to you, man.
The superhero (girls) of the future thank you for getting it and making the effort.
Gold medal-level parenting.
Cool. Nice work.
You could switch ‘my lad’ to ‘my gal’. It’s pretty much equivalent in informality, so it should fit okay.
You are fucking AWESOME. I would’ve killed to have something like this when I was a little girl playing Ocarina of Time for the first time.
You could switch ‘my lad’ to ‘my gal’
Yeah, no. I had to edit for tone, not just text, and ‘gal’ is not something you call the resurrected Hero Of Time.
Veeery nice :) Congrats!
Now the “Zelda is the girl” meme needs to be reworded. I suggest “Zelda is the OTHER girl” :)
I approve of this.
You could always go for Swordmaid?
How about “lassie? Just about as informal as” my lad ” – I haven’t played it, but it doesn’t sound like the ones using that address are treating Link with the respect due “the resurrected Hero of Time “, anyway.
And, great!
This is the best use of a hex editor ever. Definitely better than that time I gave my Wizardry characters max stats.
I do use “Lassie” in some places, where the speaker is clearly meant to have some sort of Scottish brogue. Depends on the context.
This is totally the kind of thing I love to see! For “my lad”, what about m’lass?
That’s beyond awesome. Wonderful thing to do for your daughter, and yay for more females in this hobby and more female heroes. I’ll be passing this along to fellow gamers (both male and female) with daughters, as well as blogging it.
You win Dad-ing :)
This is so awesome, I don’t even have words.
Yes, words don’t suffice.
No matter any of the arguments about gender roles and how we should handle them differently. Those arguments are important, but pale to the real crux…
What a wonderful gift. Your heart and care.
Nothing else really holds a candle.
Love and care.
Ingenuity.
Your passion and heart.
Your time.
You have given of your best – yourself!
IPOY [See: Tim Madigan. I'm Proud Of You: My friendship with Fred Rogers.]
Amazon has used copies for $2. The best $2 book ever. Seriously.
Absolute Dad win. Your daughter’s a lucky girl to have you. :)
Great man!
You’re not just a great dad but you’re also doing what game companies and developers should be doing in the first place. Add to options “Press here” to select hero/shero gender.
Thanks!
You are one AWESOME, geeky Dad. WTG!
You. Go. Dude. Your daughter is one lucky kid. Dad of the Year is YOURS, sir.
Awesome Dad is Awesome! Way to go, too bad not many fathers can be like you.
You rock.
This is quite awesome! Makes me curious too, with the tools available for Link to the Past (specifically Hyrule Magic I think it’s called), would be cool to see a Genderswap ROM hack for that too!
YOU ARE THE MAN.
NEED I SAY MOAR?
Very cool :)
This is pretty stupid, really. At that age I didn’t care about what gender the protagonist was I just had fun playing the games, as is the case with most kids. Tetra is pretty cool in this game anyways.
Instead of altering games, effectively censoring them you should realize that females don’t have to be the lead role to be strong role models (Tetra and OoT Zelda).
Dad of the Year!!
nice work :)
Hey, developer from Dolphin Emulator here.
Always great to see Dolphin getting used in the wild for different things.
We have actually moved our website: dolphin-emu.org
Cheers.
Thanks! I’ll update the link directly.
Bloody awesome.
Am I the only one who’s reminded of this?
img401.imageshack.us/img401/9779/tjxcpqxw.png
Parenting level: 9000+.
If you want to take it to the next level, possibly see if you can swap Aryll and Link’s models around? Probably tricky since the animations are attached to the model, but it might be surprisingly easy. Then again, I suppose Link looks passably gender-neutral as-is.
If I ever should have a daughter I will be a better dad for her because of this story.
Thank you for this.
Best. Dad. Ever. Adopt me pls. <3
Win! So fucking WIN! Ok ok ok… World’s 2nd greatest dad! (I’m a little biased)
Just a heads up, the opposite problem will arise when C turns about 12-13 and suddenly there is precious little for him to read. Christmas age-appropriate books are a long and arduous search when shopping for my nephew.
Could have just bought Metroid?
That I could have helped her play one of the scant few video games with female leads is hardly the point.
That’s wonderful! I guess link could be gender neutral looking :) and the change of all the pronouns is perfect! The best thing about all of this though is your reasoning for doing this. Everyone deserves to be the hero regardless of gender, and we don’t see too many games that let females be the hero, so its great that your giving her the chance to play a game that is actually fun xP and worthwhile where the girl is the main hero.
I agree with dad of the year :3
Awesome thing to do for your daughter! I hope Nintendo pays attention to this!
about “rescuing her little brother”:
Did you also change all the references of the “little sister” to a “little brother”? or was this just a mix-up in the blog post?
I was curious because Link’s little sister doesn’t look quite as gender-neutral as Link does (to me, anyway).
Hello,
Congratulations on taking such an affirmative step in building your daughter’s self-esteem! I wish you all the best for the future! The world could do with more parents like you!
Well done to you, sir
Hey there. Your blog was shared at Zelda Universe and I just wanted to give my humble opinion. If your reasoning was truly to show your daughter that girls can be heros too, etc, there are a lot of better ways to do this. I don’t feel Link should ever be personified as a girl and with the animation as what it is, it might get a little confusing for your daughter to identify gender appropriate appearances (Aryll as brother?). Good on you, but I think there were enough hero parts for girls in this game and others to compensate. Also your little girl probably isn’t old enough to have to worry about female hero tendencies. I’ve never been bothered by it, at least. And I grew up with games mostly concerning male characters.
Good on you for going through so much work.
I just wanted to say I think what you did was fantastic (and this is a real understatement). Growing up, I always found having to play as a boy “hero” really soul destroying- as if my ovaries prevented me from saving the day.
What you did will no doubt help her to grow up into a confident and self assured woman by helping to fix some of the inherent problems of growing up as a female who enjoys traditionally “male” pass times.
Your daughter is very lucky to have a father like you.
I love this. So much. So much that I had to try it myself, and it works great so far! For those of you who want to try it but have a hard time figuring out how to go about it, here’s a more detailed tutorial (assuming you’re on Windows):
First you get the Wind Waker game as either a .gcm file OR a .iso file (works just as well), you can Google it to find ROM-sites where you can download the whole game. If it is in a .zip or .rar file, make sure you extract it. To make it easier later on, you can create a folder directly on you C-drive. Go to your Computer where you see the overview of all your harddrives etc and go into the one with the letter C. Here just create a folder (Right click -> New -> Folder) and call it Windwaker.
After that you download the latest version of xdelta3, from the link in the post, (it should just be a .exe file) and place it in the same folder as the iso/gcm-file of the game. Rename the xdelta3-file to just xdelta3.exe (instead of the longer more complicated name).
Now download Mike Hoye’s patch file and place this in the same folder as well. Now you’re all set to patch it! Go to the Start menu and select “Run…” and type in “cmd” (without quotations) and press enter. This will open the Windows Command prompt, where you will need to navigate to the folder where you put all your files. If you don’t know how to navigate here, here are a few tips.
Let’s say that the folder you start in is something like this: C:\Users\YourUser
And the folder we need to go to is here: C:\Windwaker
Type in “cd..” (without quotations) and press enter. This puts you in only the C:\Users folder. Repeat the same command and you should be in only C:\ in your Command prompt. Now enter “cd Windwaker” and press enter, and you should be in the C:\Windwaker folder.
Now it is time for the command for the actual patching. Write the following (but exchange the word OLDFILE for the name of your .iso-file):
xdelta3 -d -s OLDFILE.iso Windwaker_Pronoun_Patch.vcdiff Windwaker_new.iso
Then press enter, and your game is patched and ready to play! Just get and run the Dolphin emulator and load up your Windwaker_new.iso file and your’re good to go!
Also in my example above I use the .iso extension on the file but if you have a .gcm file you should switch .iso in the command to .gcm instead. That is all! Hope it was helpful!