Super Mario Galaxy 2

[A Black Falcon]

I get what you're saying, but it's pretty much set in stone at this point. Besides, they've made Peach a lot more active in her rescues lately. The same can be said of Zelda. Heck in the games where Zelda gets captured, it tends to happen pretty late in the story these days, and not before establishing her as a badass in her own right.

That was true for Zelda in OoT and WW, but then the Oracles games came between them, returning to the "rescue kidnapped maidens and then Zelda" plot. I didn't mind much there because it was intentionally NES-style simplicity, but I do have to mention it. And then there were the two Four Swords games. You do rescue maidens in crystals in the GC game, because it's a LttP inspired title, but I only played like one level of the GBA one (stupid link cable only requirement!) so I don't know for that one. And I've never played Minish Cap, as you may or probably don't recall for some reason I disliked the graphical style from the first time we saw the game and never picked it up.


Anyway, after that came TP and PH, which almost entirely reversed OoT and WW's trends for Zelda. They return Zelda to her old role of helpless nothing you need to rescue. I was so annoyed by that in TP that it was one of the major reasons why, after getting it right after it came out in 2006, I quit playing the game for nearly two years, only actually playing again and getting past the second dungeon (the Goron mountain fire temple) in late 2008... of course the actual gameplay is brilliant and it's easily one of the best games on the Gamecube (now I would rank it above WW in fact and in my GC top 5, because of how great the gameplay is), but that plot, how stupid ... um, its treatment of Zelda, Ganon, and Link is, really ... yeah, I still have a problem with that. Of course it does have Midna, perhaps the Zelda series' strongest female character ever (though I'm sure that would be an arguable point), which was good. Even she needs to rely on Link to save her though, because he's the destined hero. But that point is to be expected in a game like this, it's how such plots work. Zelda though... Zelda is barely present in the game and does pretty much nothing of use 99% of the time.

And then came PH, which made TP's Zelda look amazingly active and strong with its utterly terrible treatment of the WW Zelda, Tetra. There is no defense for the idiocy of turning her into a stone statue for the entire game when Tetra was, in her first game, the most active Zelda ever. Very sad. (And the game was only above average, too).

ST did do much better, and the semi-playable Zelda in the tower is cool, so at least things haven't kept getting worse... but even just looking at Zelda games from OoT on, I wouldn't say that 'stronger Zelda' is any kind of rule. It happens sometimes and doesn't happen others.

If you want something better, play Super Princess Peach. She rescues the brothers.

That plot is a good sendoff and reversal of the standard "women are weak and helpless and foolish" plot of the series, but on the other hand the emotion-based powers are SERIOUSLY sexist, and just reversing a lame plot doesn't really make it good, I think. It makes it perhaps a little better, but doesn't entirely solve the problem.

What's much more notable is the total lack of racial diversity in Nintendo games.

Women have been oppressed by society since the beginning of civilization and beyond, black people (in Western society) only for 500 years... sorry, of course I care about racism as well, but I absolutely do believe that sexism is worse and more pervasive.

That said, you're quite right that Nintendo is even worse on racial diversity than they are on gender. They don't even have that many Asian characters, almost all of their characters are White Caucasian or perhaps humanoid animals (or blob-things like Kirby, etc). Japan has some issues with racial prejustice, just like it does with gender (I've said it many times so I won't really repeat myself, but Japan is much more conservative today about roles for women than the US or Europe are, and it's a major reason why we see things like the lack of good roles for women in Nintendo games, I'm sure).