Well, you said this: "They're all about an androgynous young boy who eternally pursues an ideal of femininity while combating an ideal of masculinity, not in order to seduce the feminine ideal but rather to restore its power in the world."
My experience is primarily with the NES games. But thinking about what I do know of the later games, in particular the N64 games where Zelda has agency and in fact is moving around on her own trying to enact change, maybe the thing I'd try to prove and discuss is that as time passes, and the games re-enact the same core story in various ways, the ways they have enacted it have had increasingly complex gender subtexts.
I don't think it's until Ocarina of Time that Ganon is actually a dude-looking dude using political and military power in order to take over Hyrule. Link also starts off the series using masculine tools in order to reclaim the kingdom: Swords, shields, bombs, bows. (Although even here there's a flute, and the non-violent solution to the "GRUMBLE, GRUMBLE" problem.) In later games, while the sword's still the way you dispatch most of the big bads, you spend a lot more time resolving domestic issues, playing with ocarinas, wearing masks and inhabiting the role of the Other... Isn't there a gardening puzzle in one of them? In general they seem to encourage a more collaborative style of leadership and heroism, rather than the lone wolf model you see in a lot of video games.
The real problem is that I haven't played anything after Ocarina of Time, and haven't watched more than parts of Majora's Mask and the first couple of hours of Twilight Princess. (I have seen Wind Waker I think once, and the Internet tells me there are like ten more of them oh god (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda).) To do it maximally right I would have to play many of these games; while I wouldn't charge you for that, because it would be fun, I don't have that much time. This doesn't mean I can't write a thing; it just means there are limitations on what the thing I could write might look like.
First, I could write something based on my limited experience, reading plot summaries and walkthroughs of each game, watching videos of key sequences, and sort of making it up as I go along. I'm pretty good at making it up as I go along, but because I wouldn't have a lot of experience with the primary texts, anything I wrote would really be a request for commentary and suggestion for avenues of further thought. I'd probably spend, I don't know, eight hours on this, publish it as a blog post, and want to get a nice dinner out of it.
Second, I could find someone to collaborate with (maybe you, maybe someone else) who had played all the Zelda games and had familiarity with the universe, and sit down and put together an outline, having them pull examples and doing the lion's share of pulling up references to other texts and theory. This could produce a more "serious" paper if that were what you were looking for, but I can't do it on my own. I'd expect this to take in the 20-30 hour range, and the estimate's a little hazy because I don't have a lot of experience collaborating on this kind of work. It would be fun, but I'd want a few dinners' worth from it.
Third, I could do a pretty strict compare and contrast on, say, Zelda I and Ocarina of Time. I'd still have to refresh my memory, but it would be refreshing versus getting new information, and the limited scope would let me zoom in closer. The biggest thing I feel would be missing from this is a seriously informed idea of how the changes in technology enabled some of the changes in gameplay; that said, I do actually have some understanding of how a NES works, and how an N64 works, and what the difference in cartridge size means, probably more than most people who would sit down to write a paper on this. :) This could take me anywhere from around four hours (basically taking the ideas in this comment, fleshing them out, and making a blog post out of them) to an upper bound of "oh god I've spent forty hours on this it's time to hand it in."
Are any of those of interest to you? We could also take this to email. :)
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My experience is primarily with the NES games. But thinking about what I do know of the later games, in particular the N64 games where Zelda has agency and in fact is moving around on her own trying to enact change, maybe the thing I'd try to prove and discuss is that as time passes, and the games re-enact the same core story in various ways, the ways they have enacted it have had increasingly complex gender subtexts.
I don't think it's until Ocarina of Time that Ganon is actually a dude-looking dude using political and military power in order to take over Hyrule. Link also starts off the series using masculine tools in order to reclaim the kingdom: Swords, shields, bombs, bows. (Although even here there's a flute, and the non-violent solution to the "GRUMBLE, GRUMBLE" problem.) In later games, while the sword's still the way you dispatch most of the big bads, you spend a lot more time resolving domestic issues, playing with ocarinas, wearing masks and inhabiting the role of the Other... Isn't there a gardening puzzle in one of them? In general they seem to encourage a more collaborative style of leadership and heroism, rather than the lone wolf model you see in a lot of video games.
The real problem is that I haven't played anything after Ocarina of Time, and haven't watched more than parts of Majora's Mask and the first couple of hours of Twilight Princess. (I have seen Wind Waker I think once, and the Internet tells me there are like ten more of them oh god (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda).) To do it maximally right I would have to play many of these games; while I wouldn't charge you for that, because it would be fun, I don't have that much time. This doesn't mean I can't write a thing; it just means there are limitations on what the thing I could write might look like.
First, I could write something based on my limited experience, reading plot summaries and walkthroughs of each game, watching videos of key sequences, and sort of making it up as I go along. I'm pretty good at making it up as I go along, but because I wouldn't have a lot of experience with the primary texts, anything I wrote would really be a request for commentary and suggestion for avenues of further thought. I'd probably spend, I don't know, eight hours on this, publish it as a blog post, and want to get a nice dinner out of it.
Second, I could find someone to collaborate with (maybe you, maybe someone else) who had played all the Zelda games and had familiarity with the universe, and sit down and put together an outline, having them pull examples and doing the lion's share of pulling up references to other texts and theory. This could produce a more "serious" paper if that were what you were looking for, but I can't do it on my own. I'd expect this to take in the 20-30 hour range, and the estimate's a little hazy because I don't have a lot of experience collaborating on this kind of work. It would be fun, but I'd want a few dinners' worth from it.
Third, I could do a pretty strict compare and contrast on, say, Zelda I and Ocarina of Time. I'd still have to refresh my memory, but it would be refreshing versus getting new information, and the limited scope would let me zoom in closer. The biggest thing I feel would be missing from this is a seriously informed idea of how the changes in technology enabled some of the changes in gameplay; that said, I do actually have some understanding of how a NES works, and how an N64 works, and what the difference in cartridge size means, probably more than most people who would sit down to write a paper on this. :) This could take me anywhere from around four hours (basically taking the ideas in this comment, fleshing them out, and making a blog post out of them) to an upper bound of "oh god I've spent forty hours on this it's time to hand it in."
Are any of those of interest to you? We could also take this to email. :)