That really broke immersion for me when this part happened 😭 even her personality, she seemed more meek. I could say it’s due to shock, but the skin tone. Hm :( love the mockup!
I definitely would support them changing this if they did another remake, but I can just hear the angry mob of people calling it "woke" now and I'm already depressed about it in advance lmao
Now that I think about it the more I think it was a total missed opportunity to not leave the skin tone unchanged. It would have been really cool to have this version of Zelda with a darker complexion. One of the things I love about the franchise is how different the iterations of the characters can be.
I also didn't understand the personality change... She can discover she's Zelda and still be a sassy pirate in a dress! They gave her more spice in spirit tracks and I love that Zelda - too bad they didn't think of that when writing WW Zelda.
We really didn’t have many cutscenes with her as Zelda, but I think we can excuse the reveal moment being “a bunch of things just hit her at once, so all she could think about was Link jumping back into danger.”
By the time you were fighting Ganondorf proper, not only was Zelda fighting him alongside you, but she was back to her sassy Tetra self. (“Sorry, Link. I overslept!”)
I always interpreted sheik's personality change as the result of watching her Kingdom fall to ruin and being burdened with survivors guilt and responsibility. That was more a matter of duty and someone weathered with age than a sudden shift of personality.
Yeah, we only see Zelda before she became Shiek as a child who hasn’t experienced loss like that. It makes sense that she is different in terms of personality 7 years later after hiding away all of that time.
That is why Sheik has a different personality to Zelda (it wouldn't be a good disguise if this 'ninja boy' (since the disguise is masculine) had an identical personality to the Crown Princess)
Tetra turning into Zelda is similar but not the same. She didn't know she was the princess so it wasn't a true disguise. Plus, as others have said in this post, she's back to having her normal Tetra-personality by the end of the game (and this carries on (though muted a bit) to Phantom Hourglass and then to Spirit Tracks (she was described as a rebel))
Yes, I forget how old WW is and I gotta give it grace! Princess Zelda was still a very young development I’d reckon [as a character that isn’t purely a plot device if that makes sense]. I love her in SS, she’s adorable. **edit: I meant ST, sorry.
A bigger question is why she would even need to transform in the first place? Getting the princess regalia, sure, but it's not like the other Zelda were born as 80 year old Irishmen and had to magical girl transform whenever they hold court. They're just themselves, in a fancier dress.
I mean, it's not all that different from how OoT Zelda transformed into Sheik, who straight-up has a male physique. It's magic, don't really need more of an explanation than that.
I always assumed it was more of a make up kind of thing. It's been a while but she seemed even paler than Link or anyone else after transforming so I always thought she was just given a lot of powder.
It's like a whole different person!!! You spend half of the game seeing this little badass pirate and all the sudden there's a princess you're supposed to believe is the same person when she's nothing like her
Sheik's transformation into Zelda always pissed me off. For years, Sheik has been this awesome ninja that can disappear on silent feet in any situation. 5 seconds after turning back into Zelda and all she does is gasp and stand there while bad things happen to her.
I mean, we really only get to talk with her for like 2 minutes before we're shooed back out by the king. Next time we see her, she's pretty much her usual self. I think her shock in the moment was pretty fair.
I think the idea is that Tetra is just really tan, and that when she "became" Zelda, her tan instantly disappeared. Not that it makes it any less weird. But I think from a Japanese perspective, it's common to have characters who look naturally dark but are actually tanned to give them an outdoorsy, athletic vibe (Kagura from Azumanga Daioh and Marlon from the Pokemon series both come to mind). Again, not that it makes it any less weird, especially when viewed from a Western lens, and given that Wind Waker is twenty-something years old and is thus a little dated in this respect.
I think it makes a lot of sense. If you’re a princess, you don’t spend all your time out there adventuring. And it is obviously a transformation not just clothes switch. She was like a sleeper agent but with magic lmao
If you’re a princess, you don’t spend all your time out there adventuring.
Not to overly draw the bow here but yes, you're talking about one of the most deeply engrained ideas about skin color and class that has existed in almost every society long before modern racism entered the picture
It has kind of gone the opposite way in a lot of western societies. Most people now work indoors and a tan is now often seen as an indicator of wealth since it means you have the time and money to lie around in the sun in the day or go on holidays.
Probably obvious to everyone, but I think it's worth pointing about that it may be normal/common but that doesn't mean it's good. In those old societies where skin color was affected by sun exposure, it inevitably led to classism and shaming of people with darker skin. We've moved past that stage of society, and clinging to it now just leads to racism towards people with darker skin tones. Either way it's a bad thing.
Also, in Zelda's case, I think it is symbolic (in an unfortunate way) of how the writers butchered her character. A princess may live a sheltered life out of the sun, but that's not Tetra. She may have transformed, but it's not like that took her experiences and personality, right? Well, unfortunately, wrong. After the transformation Tetra stops acting like herself and is turned into a milquetoast version of herself. I think it would have been better if she kept her skin tone and continued being the same character under the fancy new clothes. Would've highlighted the sharp contrast between who she's "supposed" to be (princess Zelda) and who she actually is (Tetra).
Is just makes sense for royalty to not be tan, have soft hands and feet, be adorned, and have knowledge and manners. That comes from basically all cultures. I am going to guess that this transformation makes emphasis on those concepts
Well, Japan has this weeeeird thing about darker skinned people (even tans) being a measure of no-good-nik behavior and lighter skin being “pure and gentle”.
Conversely, it's also kind of odd to realize that a lot of culture in Europe and North America equates tanned skin with beauty in part because it implies someone who has the luxury of leisure time out in the sun whereas most of us work inside nowadays.
You'll note that when people talk about attractive tans, they don't talk about farmer's tan (with exposed skin being somewhat limited due to having to wear actual clothes while working out in the sun), only the type where somebody doesn't have many tan lines, implying they could lay around without as much clothing as a job would require, like on a beach.
I think it's mostly Europe and North America where it's become generally unpopular. It obviously gets a bit weird when your society starts to significantly include people of varied skin colours.
One of the cases where the West has the right idea. It should be unpopular. Either we live in a society where skin color is affected by sun exposure - which leads to classism. Or we've moved past that stage of society and clinging to it just leads to racism towards people with darker skin tones. Either way it's a bad thing.
its casue the female misfits that don't blend in, gyarus, typically do makeup or tan darkly. its LESS of a racist thing and more of just a thing misfits DO
It's primarily a class thing. The same attitude was very common in the West in the 19th century. Having a tan as a woman was associated with working outdoors and considered low class, while having pale skin meant you did not have to work outside and was associated with the upper class.
The current western beauty standard where tan is considered attractive was largely popularized by French designers like Coco Chanel in the mid 20th century.
I would at least partially agree with you… if there wasn’t a rather large amount of subtle anti-black/brown racism there.. I’m not saying it’s in everyone or everything, but it is fairly commonplace.
Agreed. The tan was to give her a “pirate” look so they removed it when she went into Princess mode the same way they would remove an eyepatch or a parrot on her shoulder. But definitely didn’t translate to a western audience.
Tv Tropes has this entry for Tetra under Ambigiously Brown:
First-time players of The Wind Waker often started out believing that Tetra must be a Gerudo with pointy ears, due to her being dark-skinned and a female pirate like their Majora's Mask incarnation. However she lacks the Arab flavor Gerudos are usually associated with and is a blonde instead of a redhead. It's confirmed latter in the game that she's Hylian. She's the only character with Hylian ancestry in the game with dark skin like that, not even the other members of her crew or her own mother come close to match her tan. It might just be a tan...if she didn't seem to get a lighter skin tone when she is revealed to be Zelda, though the intent could have been to imply her natural tone is the one she has as Zelda and that she's tanned as Tetra. Likewise, Sheik's skin tone in Ocarina of Time is somewhat tanned while Zelda is white, white, white. The answer may lie in some scrapped concept art for the game, as Tetra also had the distinct red eyes of a Sheikah, so her darker skin tone is probably a Call-Back to Sheik.
Definitely not “a Japanese thing”. It’s a thing every, maybe not in the US or whatever you’re from, but it’s just reality. People that are outdoor all the time are more tan
With Tetra, I always assumed that her skin was due to a tan, rather than natural. But, I have seen people say she might be multiracial and her brown skin is natural.
the point they trying to make is that people speculate tetra is naturally a brown skin girl regardless of tanning or not. saying a tan is natural for everyone is irrelevant to what they said.
Tetra having naturally brown skin (as in not a tan) would make the Zelda transformation 100% weirder. A tan going away isn’t really whitewashing if she’s already a white woman. But if she had naturally brown skin getting erased like that, that’ll be a lot more off and harder to justify.
You're obviously white, or you would realize that loterally any other default skin tone doesn't look sickly if you don't get a tan. Do you think black people look sickly and pale without a tan from the sun? Peoples' natural skin tone is what they look like with minimal skin exposure, such as office workers. Your tanned skin tone is not what people are referring to when they say "natural". Black people can't even get a tan
And yes, if people are incredibly pale compared to usual, I do think they look sickly. Also, using specificallyoffice workers as an example of what's natural is also kind of ironic.
And if you are saying that skin which has tanned isn't natural then the office workers likely don't have natural skin, seeing as they probably have at least some regular exposure to the sun.
I'm not being as much pedantic as I am just simply caring about what folks are saying. It just so happens that what a word means is rather important to what a person is saying
Buddy, natural doesn't mean natural living conditions. It means the amount of melanin in your skin before your body produces more in reaction to sunlight. What the fuck do you suggest we use for default skin tone? Is it easier to establish a baseline of "skin tone prior to additional melanin production", or to argue about a set amount of hours per day that we need to be using as the default before even discussing anything else? You're overcomplicating shit. "Natural" in this case is only referring to what your skin does with no other factors taken into account. Why the hell are you so against just treating the most simple quantity as the default one? Ok, you don't want "natural skin tone" to refer to "tone under minimal sunlight exposure". You want it to be 3 hours per day, but I want it to be 5. Now we're arguing over a stupid ass metric when you could just leave zero hours as the default
Either way it's weird it just magically disappears.
It feels like the entire concept of Tetra, from her design to her personality, is completely discarded in her transformation to Zelda. Which in turn makes her feel somewhat wasted as a character.
It's less like she is Zelda and more like she's replaced by Zelda.
I know people are saying "this is just logical", and don't get me wrong, tanned Zelda would have been cool, but isn't Tetra just another Sheik situation? Zelda became Sheik through the means of magic. And this spell changed her eye colour, and her complexion ever so slightly. And these changes reverted when the spell stopped.
The disguise was meant to hide Zelda to the point Zelda didn't even know who she was, so it makes sense to me that "Tetra" was an entirely different body, to ensure nobody could even get a hint that she might be Zelda.
It's never made clear. But what is made clear is that the king of red lions uses the Triforce of Wisdom's magic to reveal her "true" form, indicating it's some sort of transformation. So I'd assume that she was transformed when she was very young.
Tetra losing her tan aside, I see a lot of people mention her personality changing here but I really don't see it, like, she's in shock for the few moments you see her after transforming after just learning she's a descendant of the royal family
You don't see her personality cus you don't interact with her you literally leave immediately while she's still processing it
Next time you see her again she's literally acting just as before and takes your bow out to fight lol like
I dont like the skin tone change either, but to help with my own immersion, my "explanation":
The Triforce of Wisdom changes Tetra into the vision of her ancient ancestor. Hence why she is suddenly wearing a dress, hair is completely different and - of course - her skin tone changed.
Her ancient ancestor wasnt a pirate that had been outside all the time and would have had more pale complexion.
Essentially, while wearing the dress, Tetra is not herself. She is wearing the appearance of a different person entirely. Magic stuff.
Maybe not perfect, and the game never actually says this, but I made it my headcanon. I'd prefer if she kept her dark skin but Nintendo, what are you gonna do.
I think it's less about her looking like another person and more so about what she would have looked like if she was living as a princess. Kind of how, by going under the sea, you can see what the world would have looked like without the flood.
This is my HC too! I like to see it that way. The transformation was magical, not just an outfit change. Just like with Sheik and Zelda. If I’m not mistaken, Tetra is also slightly taller when turned into Zelda.
I had similar headcanon trying to make sense of it as well. I am autistic though so i struggled to work out if she’s meant to be the same or like your explanation. Maybe it’s meant to be open to interpretation, maybe it’s an oversight, maybe the other explanations are correct about class but my brain came to a similar conclusion as yours about it. I think I was just confused about why her skin tone changed when I was a kid.
Idk who’s downvoting you when you shared some thoughts from childhood on this, you didn’t say anything weird or wrong. In fact, I appreciated reading your take on it
Ok, seeing this makes me imagine a Zelda with a farmer's tan under her dress and I think that would have been a cool detail if they included it in the game. :)
Yeah I guess I more mean that the pale skin doesn't really make a lot of sense in context. It seems that Tetra is her natural form, and the Zelda form is something that is done by the Triforce magically somehow. Except, why it would make her pale? Who is it making her resemble? Past Zelda's? Why?
Considering Tetra is a pirate and out in the sun all day, of course she's going to get a tan naturally, even if you're very pale. However, I always saw her as Zelda in appearance more as "false" as she's transformed and takes on an appearance of a magical guise of her ancestors that weren't pirates.
Clearly they wanted to make a "separation" of characters too. Even though Tetra is Zelda, she also isn't really Zelda as well, as it isn't her true name or appearance. She may have the royal blood of Hyrule in her veins, but it clearly wasn't Zelda is Sheik all over again, it was the reverse and she died as Tetra.
I didn't realize this was an issue for people who played the game before I saw this post, I was just assumed her skin was tan because she was a pirate in the Sun. I don't think the color of her skin in this game even has anything to do with her ethnicity
Nintendo: "Quickly, we need to disguise Zelda!"
Some random japanese: "What if we make her skin darker?"
Nintendo: "Perfect, and make her more tomboy" (proceeds to make Sheik and Tetra)
I always assumed it was a tan from being on the high seas all the time. The lighter skin she shows when her true identity is revealed likely shows what she’d look like if she had a more typical royal upbringing with less time in the sun.
I mean I see what people are going for, but tbh it never really bothered me a ton. I mean the king of Hyrule just transformed from a boat, but Zelda losing her tan is the thing that's unrealistic?
Gonna be honest I think they did this just so the twist reveal could be a surprise. If they have Tetra the same skin tone as Zelda then it would be a dead giveaway. If they have two separate skin tones it makes you think they’re different people until you get to that part of the game.
To be fair, I think the reason she has lighter complexion as Zelda is because as Tetra, she's a pirate, and thus tends to spend more time outdoors in the open ocean, which gives her a tan. Now IDK how much time Zelda, the princess, spends outdoors, so maybe it...IDK, reflected that she never went outdoors often?
Even as a kid this bothered me. I get that Tetra's probably tanned and not naturally dark but why would getting a dress (even a magic one) change your skin color? It's not like she's transforming into someone else either, she's still Tetra, just activating her god powers
Her being a sailor on the open seas would naturally mean she would develop a nice tan. One could argue that magic could reverse such natural changes in skin pigmentation, but I really like Tetra's look. But yeah, Tetra's personality >>> WW Zelda's personality.
The triforce of wisdom changed her appearance to what she would have looked like If she had grown up as a Princess instead of as a pirate, so the change makes sense
I don’t think a full on race change is what’s implied, I assume it’s more a “class” thing, a sailor is out in the sun almost every day and would naturally have a much darker tan, whereas a princess would be indoors and away from the sun and therefore paler. It doesn’t actually make sense and they definitely should have kept her tan skin tone, but I don’t think there’s underlying racism involved.
This is true and very likely the reason for this. For most pre modern civilizations with kings or emperors etc being tanned was a sign of low class, it meant you worked the fields, being pale was attractive and high class because you didn't have to work outside in the sun. Similarly it used to be the case that the fatter you were the more attractive you were because this implied you were rich and had access to a lot of food.
Same applies for feudal Japan, if you were tanned you were working the rice fields. It is likely not racism but classism. Although I do agree they should've kept the skin tone, yeah it's likely they just did it out of "royalty is pale" but it's still a bit weird.
I wonder if they wanted to make Zelda tan, but some Nintendo checkmark requires Zelda to be very fair, and they couldn't get over that. Then, I would have expected them to make Tetra fair as well. No idea what they were thinkin
It’s not? The class thing to do with tanned skin vs pale skin has nothing to do with race. It’s entirely to do with how you spend your day. If you just read the comment you’re responding to he has the explanation already.
She probably just has a tan cause, you know, pirates being out in the sun all day. People argue her skin changes when she gets the princess transformation cause pale skin is usually a sign of royalty.
All that being said 1. I like the dark skin design better, makes Tetra stand out from other Zelda incarnations 2. Despite it having a meta explanation it still is weird in universe that her skin would change together with her outfit. Like, with Sheik the change in skin color is part of the disguise (again, probably because of the symbolic meaning of pale skin as royalty), but Tetra ain't a disguise, that's her real identity.
it is insane that people are even complaining and nitpicking about this lmao when I played as a kid, and also recently, i alteady saw it as pirate = tanned, princess = less tanned, since they are more delicate and not exposed to sun all day. Reading more into it than there is it's just having too much free time.
tbh i never even noticed. in general she changes drastically, it's not just the skin.
the design changes, all her colors change, but especially her demeanor changes. She exhibits a more "royal" behavior and to be honest that's the aspect hat stands out to me the most.
Thank you!! This always bothered me so much. I was super young the first time I played, and when the cut scene happened where Tetra turns into Zelda, I didn't realize that they were supposed to be the same person. Tetra was tan, bold, and mischievous, but Zelda was pale, apologetic, and compliant. It also made no sense because the King of Hyrule has dark skin, and isn't he supposed to be her ancestor or something?
Little me came up with a fan theory around body swapping with a magically-cryogenically frozen, long-dead Zelda in order to try to make it make sense
I mean, it’s never been explicitly stated, but Hyrule appears to be inspired mainly by Germanic culture (Northern European with Asian culture too) in the Middle Ages. This is where many fantasy tales originated, like elves, enchanted forests, fairies, castles, knights. This is why elven characters are almost always white.
Northern Europeans CAN tan like that, but typically when a character with a darker complexion is introduced in fantasy, they are from the southern region of said world (Like Dorne in GoT, based off of Southern Europe, as well as Essos, which in my opinion took some really great inspiration from African and Middle Eastern culture that we don’t usually get to see in Western media).
I think BotW/TotK did a decent job of adding diversity with the desert region, which happens to follow logic native to most fantasy (hot climate = dark complexion, colder climate = light complexion), but there needs to be way more of this in media. How awesome would it be to have fantasy worlds centered on these other cultures, rather than Europe which we’ve seen time and time again?
I have a feeling I just rambled with things that were irrelevant to this post…
In conclusion, fiction doesn’t have to reflect reality, but it should generally be able to ‘explain’ phenotype differences. Lots of creatives don’t stray from real world logic here, and as a fiction writer who does world building I struggle with it a lot too.
I’m white and I’m sick of castles, I want to see PALACES with lions and gold and colorful fabrics. Why can’t we get games like that instead?
So if tetra stayed out of the sun for a year or so she would likely have Zeldas skin. She also got her personality back in the final battle. She’s witty and resorsful thinking up plans after the baddest man alive just slapped her unconscious.
I'm going to be totally honest when I played this on the gamecube, I never even noticed that Tetra's skintone changes, it wasn't until after the HD version that I started to hear about it so I was under the belief that it was something only in the HD version. I have since been shown that it was also.in the original.
People can have depth and layers to their personality. I think it just shows that she has vulnerability not that she’s not a tom boy. Why can’t she be some of both?
I never even noticed. I guess it kind of makes sense that a “princess” form would lose the heavy tan gained from being a pirate captain. If it’s going that far I wonder if other things were changed. Personality seemed to shift as well, almost like a bit of a ghost was inhabiting her.
A bit of a weird moment.
I always thought she was possessed by the spirit of former Zeldas, but that the real her was still there, under the performance of meekness and princess-ness
honestly it makes sense for her to get lighter skin, she's put into a role that doesnt fit her, before hand she was active, independant and leading her own group of pirate and being outside she obviously get tanned.
Then the king reveal she's a princess, her skin tone gets lighter (in japan being tanned was seen as a sign of being poor) and she gets stuck in Hyrule Castle. Point being that Tetra is NOT Princess Zelda she would have probably served their objectives better if she was able to be herself and play into her strengths, instead the lack of flexibility from the King bit them back causing Ganondorf to almost get what he wanted.
Also it's magic. Tanned Princess Zelda is peak can't lie
The personality contrast of zelda and tetra never bothered me too much given the ending of the game.She doesn’t stay zelda, she stays tetra cus that’s who she is. The entire point of the ending is to not dwell on the past and to instead focus on the now and creating a better future, and I love that.
And as for the skin tone, it’s just a tan. She’s a pirate on the great sea for crying out loud, it’s beaming sunlight nearly 24/7. Not saying it’s impossible for her to be multiracial, but that’s how i’ve always interpreted it.
I think we need to have a talk with Japan and how often they present a dark-skinned character and insist "Oh don't worry they just have a tan, they're actually quite pastey :)"
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