Samtemdo8 said:
No one is calling for a female Mario, but in the past couple of years there has been interest in the idea of a female Doctor Who, or a black James Bond. That's because like Link, these are characters that are established as having multiple versions of them. The fact that they've always been white males is because that was the standard. But times are changing, people are starting to ask "well why not?" and the success of Star Wars and Fury Road shows that there's reasonable business sense in taking the plunge.
To be fair, Doctor Who has handled this very well, however. They didn't just see "Oh look we could do a female and pander to that audeince, lets make the Doctor a female Ginger this time! Its possible! Lets do it!".
They went with an old male - basically saying we ain't pandering to anyone, we're going back closer to our roots. Then, they began to show other Timelords gender flipping to properly introduce the idea to the lore. When we see the Master swap into Missy, it makes much more sense that the Doctor can change into a female, and should they choose to change the doctor to a female next series, there'll likely be less backlash than there originally would have been because they'd have done the setup work in the lore, and prepared the brand for the arrival of a female doctor. Had they thrown it in without any real discussion, or preparation in the series, you can bet some fans would be like "WTF? That's possible? How? Why? I mean I guess it was never said to be impossible, it was never said to be possible either. Damn pandering to these new age tumblr fangirls with their young male actors and now a female lead, this show's gone downhill". They understood that reaction, and took the exact opposite path; disappoint the young tumblr fangirls, show that you're trying to respect the franchise rather than just pander to a growing audience with young men and new content, but then start to pave the way for the show to update to the new times.
The same sort of thing ideally should be done with Zelda. Link, Zelda, and Ganon are just the reincarnations of 3 ancient spirits; one goddess, one demon, one hero. If one of them can change gender, the rest should be able to too. You could swap them all around and throw out some reason and have a game showing that this is now a thing that can happen, and the heroes, thanks to weird magic reasons explained in this game where everyone ended up gender bent because weird magic reasons, are able to choose their gender each incarnation. Zelda happens to always choose female, Ganon happens to always choose male, and Link is up to the player to choose.
In this way, you set up the series to introduce the idea of gender swapping in the future. You create a lore precedent and reason for it happening, and why it hasn't happened before. Next game when players can choose Link's gender, you can say "Oh, that's because of what happened in magical bullshittery game", rather than "Well... I guess it was never obliquely stated as impossible, even though the precedent implied otherwise".
It'd also destroy arguments of pandering if you swapped everyone. It just turns into a funny game with a quirky premise, and it could be seen equally as a joke shot against those saying Link has to be able to be female, or as the game creators actually saying yes now they can be female. And its equal in this game; No lets just change link to make the "SJWs" online more happy, but lets change everyone and make a fun game around that idea. Females are males, males are females, we have Gerudo who are exclusively male now, Zelda is Zelden, Ganon's witch mothers are her fathers. Familiar tropes - like the farming sisters - are farming brothers. Since everyone has changed its harder to pin it as some kind of affirmative action, which makes it harder for people to be upset at it doing so, while openning the way for future games to address the criticisms some have.
The current method people almost demand of "Make Link female next game"? Would just lead to resentment from a lot of people who don't really have a problem with Link being female as such, more with messing with an established character, as well as those who dislike the idea of him being female, as well as those who dislike the pandering to tumblr-teenage-girls that is perceived to be happening more, and a bunch of other groups besides. And Breath of the Wind was never going to be a game like that either. Its the first Zelda game on a console that hasn't sold according to expectations. They're going to try and piss off as few people as possible and turn it into a system seller.