Discussion Characters / HyruleWarriors3DSWarriors

The artbook refers to her as being "devised as being little sister-like" in a way that's meant to evoke the anime little sister character archetype, at least according to Kotaku's interpretation of her entry.

^^ First off, since it's a bit related I'll just say I didn't notice a discussion was being proposed here on the subject when I reverted stuff in the Trivia section.

The artbook as seen here literally describes her as 妹的 (imouto teki) which means "little sister-like." From what I know and understand of Japanese culture, this is describing her as a type of Japanese character archetype which is kinda the origin of the Little Sister Heroine trope, a moe character that often goes "oniisama" and such in a cute often fetishizing way.

Edit: Kinda ninja'd by Arawn999

If all we've got is that she was designed to be "little sister-like", that's not enough to go by. Not all little sisters in Japanese media are fetishized or used as Love Interests. I don't think that's what they were going for, and we have no proof to the contrary.

Whether Linkle was designed as a fetish or a Love Interest being unknown, I guess your right in that regard. I do however think that she was designed at least with the basic Japanese little sister archetype in mind, not necessarily with a fetish or Love Interest angle included.

Regardless what I think though, the real problem I guess is maybe the Little Sister Heroine trope itself. Maybe it's the some wordings or some examples, but the trope from a quick not so in depth glance seems to be referring to the Japanese little sister archetype. Some slightly further reading and looking into the original YKTTW discussion appears that the trope is indeed more towards just the Love Interest aspect of the archetype. Although, it seemed like it was originally planned to also involve the broader sense of the archetype and not just simply the Love Interest aspect alone.

I dunno, maybe it's just me but the trope seems to be a bit confusing and probably not so clear. It points to the Japanese archetype but just only towards one aspect of it.

So I guess Linkle was designed to be a certain archetype but the trope that appears nearest to that archetype can't be applied to her since it's narrower. I dunno I guess.

The problem really seems to be that Linkle is based on a trope that we do not have. Little Sister Heroine is a narrower version of that trope so people try to shoehorn that instead.

I think Linkle is most based on either Distaff Counterpart or Heroic Wannabe, or some adorably saccharine offspring of the two.