Nintendo’s worrying treatment of femininity

Samus, Princess Zelda, Princess Peach, and how Nintendo use femininity to devalue the women in its games

I have always felt that I owe Nintendo an enormous debt of gratitude. Growing up isolated, without friends, and with a family who conflated engaging their children with sitting in silence near a television, access to a series of Nintendo consoles was all I had to engage a mind whose only other entertainment was books. Receiving an N64 for my seventh birthday remains one of the few positive memories of my childhood, and so intensely did I play it that I got into serious trouble at school for replacing a diary homework project with a series of stories set in Hyrule. Looking back and examining what was a pretty empty childhood mostly spent indoors, I have to retroactively give credit to video games for my development — in particular, Nintendo.

From the NES up to the Switch, I’ve hammered away at all of Nintendo’s consoles with varying degrees of intensity. In all that time, Nintendo has delivered example after example of tight, fun, and accessible games. Even as it struggled through its Wii years, it was still apparent that Nintendo was dedicated to well-made games that continue to surprise. And with the release of the Switch in 2017, Nintendo showed us that it still has what…