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Link, primary protagonist of the Legend of Zelda games, has generally spent the series as a non speaking protagonist. Setting aside the Phillips CD-i games with their exaggerated cutscenes, and the late 80’s Legend of Zelda Cartoon, the official Nintendo published video game appearances of the character have generally not presented Link’s half of any conversations to the player.
Now, that is not to say that Link is canonically across the series represented as a non speaking character. Depending on which games you look at, Link is generally portrayed on a scale anywhere from “canonical speaking but we don’t hear or read his words”, to “quiet and not particularly chatty”, to “pensive and weighed into thought and action rather than speech by the burden of his quest”. Link’s not a character whose words we get to see depicted very often, and over time that has led to occasional experiments with addressing that in canon, to greater or lesser degrees.
Non verbal or mute interpretations of Link, while common in the fandom and meaningful to many disabled players, are largely the domain of headcanon rather than supported directly by the text. They’re not without a textual basis, I know that I for example found Breath of the Wild’s example of Zelda’s diary addressing Link’s relative lack of speech as a result of the burden of his fate being personally meaningful, but they’ve historically required an amount of abstraction from the text to find impactful interpretation.
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom by comparison makes Link’s status as a mute or non verbal protagonist a lot more explicit in the text of the story. The first mainline entry where Princess Zelda takes on the leading role with Link instead a supporting cast member, I do believe that Echoes of Wisdom largely handles the idea of canonically mute Link with admirable nuance, even if there is one major wrinkle that complicates the praise I otherwise wish to share.
So, let’s start by looking directly at the textual evidence for mute / non verbal Link, which is mostly found around two hours into Echoes of Wisdom, just after completing the game’s first dungeon. While there is more content to discuss related to late game plot reveals, I’ll save those to discuss later, clearly marked, so you know where to jump out if you want to avoid them.
After completing the first dungeon in Echoes of Wisdom, Zelda visits Lueburry, Impa’s older brother. Lueburry lives just down the road from Suthorn Village, the rural community where Link grew up, and is responsible for crafting the weapons that Link uses at the start of the game in his attempt to defeat Ganon and rescue Zelda.
In Echoes of Wisdom, rifts to a strange monster filled void world have been opening up across Hyrule for years prior to the events of the game. These rifts would often swallow up children, who would rarely be seen again. Many years ago Link, alongside a group of other local children, were swallowed up by one of these rifts, but miraculously survived and were able to escape. That said, while they did escape, they did not do so unharmed.
Children in Hyrule who have fallen into one of these rifts and manage to return typically return changed in some way, described by Lueburry as returning missing something of themselves. We see examples of this across Hyrule on occasion, such as a young woman in Gerudo Town who sits outside a building, looked after by an unknown town guard, who is no longer as active or engaged with the world as she used to be. While it’s not explicitly stated in the narrative, it feels like in some cases children come back from these rifts in ways that are analogous to disability in the real world. A lot of the way that this is treated feels like the myths of fairies stealing a child away and replacing them with some sort of changeling replacement, that were used to explain autism in an era before the condition was properly understood.
While generally these children do not remember their time in the rifts upon their return, Link does. He returned from the rift unable to speak, but with the ability to sense when new rifts were going to open, and where they would appear. While still a young child, he dedicated himself to learning to fight, so that he could prevent others from ending up being swallowed by rifts the way that he was.
While this is extrapolation on my part, to me it feels pretty clear that in Echoes of Wisdom, Link becomes a hero because he understands the trauma that he went through while inside the monster infested rift, and the impact that it had on him as a child. The things he saw in the rift changed him, he no longer speaks, and he wants to prevent other children from going through the trauma that he experienced.
This is why Lueburry decides to craft the Weapons of Might for Link. He recognises Link as someone who turned his experience of trauma into a courageous desire to protect others, and feels moved emotionally to support his efforts. He recognises something special and unique in this silent hero, and wants to support his quest.
While it’s not something that comes up a lot in my day to day life, I do want to share something personal here. I experienced an event of traumatic abuse growing up, and as a result there are situations where when my fight or flight response is triggered, I lose the ability to speak for a period of time. It’s not the same as what Link is portrayed as experiencing, a long term period of consistent non speech in response to trauma, but I can personally attest to the fact that trauma can definitely have that kind of impact on a person, and it’s not something that goes away easily. For me it’s only triggered when something happens that’s too closely associated with the source of my trauma, but I can certainly empathise with a character for whom that response is more severe, and intense, and consistent. While my experience isn’t one to one analogous, there is something there that I can deeply relate to.
While there are other interesting things to learn from Lueburry about Link, I want to take a step back here and talk about how Link is seen by his local community back in Suthorn, as well as how those around him talk about Link prior to us knowing that he’s a mute or non verbal hero.
Upon first visiting Suthorn, nobody brings up that Link doesn’t speak. It’s not the thing that defines him to his local community. Villagers talk of Link as a pillar of the community, helping out with everything from monster slaying, to community projects, to helping out with odd jobs. Link is presented as generous, hard working, dependable, and generally beloved. He’s appreciated not just for what he does selflessly for those around him, but for who he is. He’s a friendly face everyone is happy to see, and while he’s gone on his quest to save the world he’s a notable absence to those who know him best. He’s a central part of his community, for whom his lack of speech is such a normalised thing that it doesn’t need bringing up. That’s just how he is.
In terms of things I really like about Link’s portrayal in Echoes of Wisdom, the fact that Link is not only well liked within his community, but clearly understood, is something that I keep coming back to. Villagers often talk about how Link felt about events despite the fact he doesn’t speak. We see a great example of this back at Lueburry’s house, where reading his diary we see acknowledgement that Link liked the hood that Lueburry gave him. In Lueburry’s own words, “while he cannot speak, his feelings come through as clear as day”.
It’s not made clear in Echoes of Wisdom if Link uses non verbal forms of communication, such as writing or flash cards, but it is clear that he is able to communicate with others in some manner. He’s not presented to the player as some stoic mystery, with those around him uncertain how he feels or what he thinks. Just because he doesn’t speak doesn’t mean he can’t communicate in other ways, which manages to dodge some really common major missteps in representation of non speaking individuals.
Based on just this early context, I was really excited when seeing the steps that Nintendo had taken in Echoes of Wisdom to make Link’s non speaking status undeniably canon in a main series game, and address a complex topic such as how being mute can be a response to real world trauma. It felt like a brave and exciting step for Nintendo to not just dance around the fact that one of their major protagonists doesn’t speak in a way that’s presented to the player, but to really lean into it as something concrete that might be relatable to real people in the world today who are non speaking.
If this early content had been the only content in Echoes of Wisdom addressing Link’s nature as a non speaking hero, this video would likely have been wholly positive in nature. However, there are aspects that crop up later in the narrative that make this discussion somewhat more complex, and make it harder for me to say firmly how I feel about the choices that they made.
So if you want to avoid spoilers for non speaking Link content in the final hour or two of Echoes of Wisdom, here’s your warning before that part of this discussion begins.
So, let’s start with the positives. In the final hours of Echoes of Wisdom, Zelda and Link are reunited, and traverse a dungeon together. While I have some issues I’ll discuss in a separate video about the ways that leadership is shared between the pair in this segment, what I do think is praise worthy is how non speaking Link is portrayed in this section, knowing the things we do about him.
Link very much takes the lead in this final dungeon, bravely sprinting ahead into danger to fight forward by Zelda’s side. While he doesn’t speak, even in Echoes of Wisdom’s simplified art style he’s shown as able to communicate, nodding in acknowledgement, gesturing when it’s time to move forward, and communicating when he’s stuck and needs assistance to progress. The game doesn’t make a big deal out of it, but it shows in practice to the player that a non speaking character can still communicate effectively. It’s a great showcase of the fact that Link is not only good at fighting monsters, but that not speaking isn’t a barrier to him communicating effectively when he needs someone to understand him in a combat or puzzle situation.
However, in order to talk about the more complicated aspects of Link’s presentation as a mute or nonverbal protagonist, we actually have to skip back to the initial encounter with Lueburry, and something that I skipped over in my initial discussions as it would have been difficult to discuss separated from late game spoiler context.
“I bet he thinks if he keeps fighting, he might eventually be able to speak again”
This is said by Lueburry during Zelda’s first conversation with him about Link, and it made me feel pretty uneasy. It not only felt like foreshadowing that Link was probably going to speak by the end of the game as some kind of reward for fighting enough monsters, but it also felt inherently like this was an outside view of Link’s experience from a character making outside assumptions about Link’s feelings without having asked him.
Where in other instances Lueburry refers definitively to Link’s feelings, this is the one place he says “I bet he thinks”, implying that this is a speaking character making an outside assumption about how Link feels about being mute, without actually asking him directly, which just rubbed me the wrong way. We don’t get to know how Link actually feels about the situation, just how someone else assumes he must feel.
You can probably guess how this relates to the end of the game. After defeating the big bad evil and saving Hyrule, we see a cutscene in which, during a town wide celebration, Link speaks. We don’t get to hear his words ourselves, but he gestures to suggest speech, and the town all turn to face Link in shock, making it pretty clear he’s spoken out loud for the first time since childhood.
And yeah, I get it, they wanted a neatly tied up celebration at the end of the game, and making the previously non speaking character speak again as a reward for defeating evil is an easy way to suggest character development. Maybe we’re supposed to take away from this that the lack of speech wasn’t a trauma response but something more literally stolen by the evil magic in the rift, and now returned. Still, I felt kind of disappointed with the way that it was thrown into the ending.
Trauma is a lifelong battle to live with. We know that Link has trauma from his time in the rift, Lueburry says as much, acknowledging the hardships that he went through. As much as we wish that seeing consequences for your abuser or an end to a villain’s ability to harm others could by itself fix trauma, that’s just not how trauma works. Trauma lingers, and is rarely solved in an instance by a single act.
Link speaking, after years of silence, moments after the big bad is defeated, to me personally felt a little cheap. It felt like an implication that regaining speech is Link’s prize for defeating the villain, a sign he’s no longer impacted by what he went through as a child, and I was honestly a little disappointed that it happened.
The thing I loved about Link in this game as a non speaking character is how much the early game emphasises that Link is able to thrive exactly as he was. He was a loved, productive, integral part of his community, not in any way lacking for love and support. He wasn’t just a non speaking character, but one shown to be perfectly integrated into his community. He was shown to be living a wonderful life without speech, and I really hoped that the game would be able to resist making regaining his speech his defacto happy ending reward.
I still feel that, on the whole, this is a step forward for the Zelda series in terms of addressing Link as a silent protagonist. I think that the positives here hugely outweigh the negatives, and that overall this adds a really meaningful context to Link’s overall characterization. If Nintendo were to take a similar approach again in future, I would feel really optimistic about that.
I do wonder whether we only got this version of Link because he wasn’t the playable protagonist this time around. I hope we see this idea revisited, even if I’d have personally liked to see a hero who didn’t need to regain his speech to be seen as having a happy ending to his story.
A huge thanks to JadeBarefoot on BlueSky for giving this a sensitivity read and accuracy pass.
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