10 EXACT Moments Video Games Gave Us The ICK

3. Trans Mockery - The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild spectacularly whiffed a major opportunity for some meaningful trans representation when Link gets to Gerudo Town and meets merchant Vilia, a trans woman.

The Gerudo race consists almost entirely of females, and so in order to enter Gerudo Town, Link must cross-dress as a woman. And while this isn't inherently problematic at all, the tone of this mission is a grotesquely mocking one.

For starters, an NPC refers to Vilia as a man, and Link's interactions with Vilia give the player options to scrutinise her appearance and even accuse her of being male.

Even though a successful path through the mission requires you to accept Vilia as a woman - and even call her beautiful - it's still fundamentally playing gender identity for laughs and tacitly suggesting that Vilia isn't really a woman, and that you're only telling her what she wants to hear to get her help.

To make it worse, the scene ends with a gust of wind blowing Vilia's veil off, revealing her beard underneath - a moment that's unfortunately played as a joke and underlines the bizarrely transphobic tone of the writing.

It's a shame that something so tone-deaf made its way into such a mesmerising game. Hopefully upcoming sequel Tears of the Kingdom might think a little harder about the sort of messages it wants to send out into the world.