Angelblaze said:
Edit: So apparently I'm crazy for thinking that people wanting a female link are people who want a female action lead video game, which we would have if we had another Metroid game. My bad. Deepest apologies.
I'm not going to call you crazy for that position, but I will say that the two are likely completely unrelated.
For starters with the way the community is right now, there's a higher demand for female protagonists for two reasons:
1: In a more general sense, people are getting tired of having Generic White Guy #847 as their protagonist.
2: In a more specific sense, people are wanting more gender diversity in their protagonists.
Now, with regards to the outcry for a female link, this goes back to
Hyrule Warriors in which Linkle (FemLink, if you will) was introduced. People saw her as a possible hint that maybe the upcoming Zelda game would have a female link. This would be absolutely ground-breaking and seen as an incredibly progressive move for Nintendo. They'd be taking one of their Big 3 franchises and going with a very substantial change to the established format. Change means new, and people saw this kind of new as being good.
Now I don't have a source to link, but I could have sworn I heard somewhere that Nintendo hinted that they were indeed going to be making Linkle playable in the new Zelda game (this is before anyone had seen the game yet), so people were highly anticipating it. Even if it was simply an option to pick your gender.
Then comes the reveal of the game and Linkle is nowhere to be found. When fans asked "What gives?" Nintendo gave some very lame excuse, basically saying "We've already got a female in the game, so if we made the main character a female, Zelda wouldn't have anything to do."
This excuse was seen as being on par with "Quiet is half naked because she breathes through her skin!" and "We can't put female playable characters into Assassin's Creed: Unity because it would be too hard to animate them!" Which is to say: utter bullshit. All Nintendo had to do was be honest and say "Look, we thought about it and decided with didn't want to shake up the established format. Zelda games have always been stories about Link, Ganon, and Zelda, and so that's why we're keeping it the way it is." While disappointing, to be sure, it's an understandable reason as opposed to a lame excuse.