Aonuma buddy, listen to me....do you and your team not possess that magical thing storytellers like to refer to as an imagination? A means to imagine a story that could easily differentiate itself from the kind of story you've told us about a hundred times before? I mean, for example, if you seriously wanted to make Zelda the main character for the series for a change....
-
Link could have been....a childhood friend, who would travel with Zelda as a travelling companion in her journey across Hyrule (whether as a dual-protagonist or an unplayable sidekick).
-
Link could have been....a celebrated prince of Hyrule who would get kidnapped or imprisoned by Ganon (with Zelda having to rescue him, in a reversal of the traditional LoZ dynamic)
Link could have beena beloved royal protector who Princess Zelda has become particularly fond of, only to mysteriously disappear one night when dark forces steal into Hyrule Castle, thus speaking off Princess Zelda's adventure out into Hyrule as she is determined to learn the truth about his disappearance.
-
Link could have been....an older character from what we're normally used to, a seasoned adventurer, who would serve as a metaphor figure for a younger Zelda.
-
Link could have been...Zelda's father, a retired adventurer who hung up the green tunic long ago, but who quietly encourages his daughter's fierce rebellious streak as she goes out into the world to have her own adventures.
In my eyes, Aonuma's words here don't so much speak to his staggeringly lack of creativity and imagination when it came to the task developing a new kind of story for this game, but his inability to envision a narrative that would exist out of the traditional rescuing hero/damsel in distress dynamic that has become so ingrained in the series as a whole, which only serves to speak as a fundamental failure on his part as a storyteller.
