 First off, I want to apologize for not having a Boss Man episode last week, and for this one arriving later than intended. For those who aren't in the know, my mother came down with a rare bacteria infection, post surgery, and was in a state known as sepsis. Sepsis is an infection in your bloodstream, it's extremely fatal. Thankfully, my mother is now on the road to recovery, so I feel comfortable resuming my normal duties, so again, I am really sorry for not having an episode last week. This episode is arriving late, however, because I decided to scrap my original idea to address openly and honestly the pure vitriol hate that both myself and Zelda Informer on the whole has received from the coverage of a handful of gender-neutral hacks slash mods by another fan. And obviously, the expected backlash our managing editor, Darren, received for supporting the base notion of a gender-neutral link in future Zelda games. One glance at the comment section on our site, and it's an all-out war. People are attacking each other in a way that seems to only happen on the internet. People are attacking us. I have been accused personally on our Facebook page as having Zelda Informer standing on the side of forcing an agenda to support gender neutrality. I have been accused of okaying Zelda Informer to participate in clickbaiting. I have been accused of Zelda Informer only posting the same three types of content in a cyclical rotation. So that means taking the same kind of content and rotating it over and over again. As an example, Unreal Engine 4 posts, speedrun records, gender debates, just taking those three things and repeating them over and over again every few posts. All of this is obviously untrue. The odd thing is that the bold-faced facts are sitting right there on the site in public. All of the three types of content folks think we focus on, they make up less than a half percent of the content we have posted just in the past week alone. Literally, in the last seven days, less than one percent of the content we posted had anything to do with those topics. Addressing the larger elephant, let's talk openly about gender politics and debates. Back in 2014, Eiji Ayanomo, he sort of feel like a common opinion fighter, where some folks noticed that Link in the reveal of Zelda U looked a bit more feminine in appearance. Some wondered if he was female, or if Nintendo had decided to offer a gender option in the game. While there was some debate about this, and some back and forth, for the most part of the conversation was pretty civil. Eiji Ayanomo, how can I get to write some to S-Ware? Of course, eventually after toying with the folks admitted, it's the typical male Link, but noted that Link is nothing but an avatar. This is about the 7000th remark from someone associated with the Zelda series, talking about whether Link is an avatar or his own character, and they almost never agree. Basically, they flip-flop on who or what Link is with every game in that regard. Maybe that's not really that surprising, since Link is often a new character reincarnated through the spirit of the hero in some way, and a lot of the new Zelda games. Anyways, we hosted a bunch of conversations over the next 8 months, around 5 or so, for the idea surrounding the ability to possibly choose a gender in the game. In that same time span, we also talked about 5 times with the potential of voice acting in the series, and 4 times about ideas and our possibilities for Zelda being on TV or as a movie. My point in mentioning that is just to note that we didn't magically talk about these things any more than we talked about most ideas for the series. Still, people will naturally gravitate to the opinions or ideas they dislike the most, and that's what they will remember. Forget everything else we've done, all we did in 2015 was talk about gender debates. That's a pretty big summation of what a lot of people claim about us. These conversations got heated at times, of course, but they stayed somewhat civil overall. After all, there were open discussion grounds intended for the most part to talk about why something could or could not work. It wasn't necessarily about if something should exist. While all of that was going on here at Zelda Informer, the internet on the whole was creating its own gender war. I'm not even going to call it anything else but a war, because I have a hard time fathoming a better way to describe it. I'm sure all of you have heard of Gamergate. For some of you, it may be more associated with gender politics than its actual original intent which had to do with ethics in gaming journalism. Beyond that, you had the so-called social justice warriors. Now, SWs have been around for years and are not exclusive to gender political talks. SJWs is a broader term that more constantly, that it's really just about arguing about things that aren't very well thought out, and you take stances that don't necessarily believe in it, but some popular YouTuber, blogger, person in the world, maybe a famous celebrity, has a stance and you kind of build off of that stance to try to make yourself more popular. For the purpose of gender, you could argue that those that cling to Anita Sarkeesian and build off of that may be SJWs themselves. Maybe. I'm not going to say that they are. There actually is no definitive way to prove that someone is an SJW, because a lot of it has to do with what they really believe in their hearts and why they're really doing things, and I can't tell you definitively why people do things. So this is more of a generalization of what an SJW does, at least for gender. But still, all of this gender political bullshit has festered over and over, especially among gamers. And among gamers online the last few years. Now I support gender equality, I always have, but as the green arrow says of himself on the TV show, the gender politics and conversations have become something else. Let's jump back to why this matters at Zeldin Farmer. On February 22nd of 2016, I personally posted a new fan mod created by Zeldin fan Tony Smith. He is a 6 month old daughter and he created a gender neutral hack of a link to the past that removed all references of link as a man and instead changed the text to gender neutral words. As an example, him to kid. It's harmless in that of itself, it doesn't actually change the gender of link. But it could potentially allow his daughter, as she grows up, to be able to better associate two links character in that game. Maybe that was his idea anyways. Now I don't know if that's the right thing to do, but I won't bother pretending I can tell other people how to raise their kids. Harmless enough, he released this mod to the world in case other people felt the way that he did. After we posted that an explosion happened, the man was berated for being a bad parent. We at Zeldin Informal were called social justice warriors for even posting about it. The hate was so hardcore that Tony Smith fired back by modified even more Zelda games to be gender neutral. And he got a bit salty with it himself, so at this point he's not doing himself any favors in terms of how he's presenting it. He's no longer making this for his daughter. So today I'd argue it's no longer about the daughter at all. He was attacked and now he's gone on the attack himself. We naturally reported on these new hacks, summarizing them into a single post. We could have posted about each one individually, that's usually what we do when it comes to fan mods. Every time there's a new modification for a game, we post about it in its own post. But we decided that it would be better if we just kind of, at the rate he was releasing him, if we just combined a whole bunch into one post. And it wasn't necessarily a special treatment situation here, that's how we deal with a lot of fan creations. If we get kind of behind on posting fan content at Zelda Informer, and there's a whole bunch of content that is related to each other, we'll try to combine that content into a single post. It's just kind of how we catch up on things. It's nothing new at the site. We do this for everything. There's been times that we've had Unreal Engine posts where we got behind on some of our coverage and then we had three or four different new Unreal Engine 4 footage stuff, and we would combine it all into a single post just because we're behind. That's just what we do anyways. So we had two posts reporting on his hacks overall, the first one with a link to the past and then the one recently that had like three or four games all combined into one. In between those two posts, Darren, our managing editor, wrote an editorial saying how he feels gender-neutral link would be a great idea for future Zelda games. He was an opinion piece, naturally. It's not really a representation of Zelda Informer. Heck, there are times that I used to call myself Zelda Informer, like, I am Zelda Informer. But not even I really represent the thought process of every person that works at Zelda Informer. That's why all our editorials expressly state that they only represent the author. No one else. That being said, Darren naturally got lambasted, attacked, called names, and everything in between. He never once lashed out and attacked others for disagreeing with him, despite all of the hate coming his way. But that doesn't make the attacks anymore right. Either way, gender neutrality and equality has become a huge, you know, hot stove topic among all gamers inside and outside of Zelda Informer. While we successfully avoided a lot of it over the years at Zelda Informer, by purposefully not talking about things like Gamergate. It was always going to creep in eventually, with the pure popularity over the thought process that prevails from it. And it so happened that it was Zelda U, AJNOMU, and a fan mod that made it all fully culminate this year on Zelda Informer. I am sure this very video may even get some heated responses, despite the fact that up to this point, I've just been giving a history lesson. Giving you facts, not opinions. And there's plenty of people that won't even get to this point in the video and they're already down, click clacking away, telling me how terrible a person I am. Here is where I'm stopping that line. Zelda Informer is under attack. Like most things, this will blow over with time. I've had people give me death threats, that kind of stuff. Just kind of goes away. It's trolling. It doesn't really mean much. But there's a lot of people that passionately believe that we are the devil. So what saddens me throughout all of this isn't how strongly people feel on these topics. It's good to be passionate about what you believe in. It's the way we treat each other while we talk about it. It's the age old internet thing where someone has an opinion, you disagree strongly with that opinion. But just disagreeing isn't enough, you feel you need to belittle them for having an opinion that doesn't agree with your own. I had a fan explain to me that this gender stuff is about protecting the series. Preventing things from happening with it that they don't want to happen. And hey, that's basically true about all ideas and opinions for the Zelda series. Not just gender. You may be shocked to hear this, but there are people that don't want Zelda to be open world. And this is despite the fact that the series has been open world before. But for some people that's just not what they enjoy, so they would prefer the series not to do it. Some people want there to be voice acting. I'm one of those people. Others have no interest in it ever being in the game. In fact they are vehemently opposed and claim they will quit the series if it happens. So protecting the series arguments are more or less just making sure the series is exactly how you want it to be. And hey, I understand, obviously we constantly talk about our desires with the series or my desires specifically here. And obviously if I didn't want those desires to actually happen, then I won't talk about them and defend them in some cases. So the same thing is kind of true with things that are in the series that I don't want to change and that you don't want to change. We're obviously going to take that kind of stance. So I just wish we as a people didn't need to resort to such belittling tactics when talking about gender or really anything else. I know the internet has groomed us all to act that way, but maybe I feel like we can somehow rise above that. I have to believe it. This is The Boss Man, signing off.