Quite a good breakdown by Laura Kate Dale of Nintendo's handling of recent games featuring playable women characters from franchises usually headed up by men i.e. recent Peach game and upcoming Legend of Zelda game featuring the titular Zelda.
Featuring such Aonuma bangers as:
If we have Princess Zelda as the main character who fights, then what is Link going to do?
The triforce is made up of Princess Zelda, Ganon and Link. Princess Zelda is obviously female; if we made Link a female, we thought that would mess with the balance of the triforce - that's why we decided not to do it.
We feel like what takes priority is this idea of gameplay. If it turns out that particular gameplay we're trying to bring to fruition would be best served by having Zelda take that role, then it's possible that that could be a direction we could take.
i.e. Zelda has featured exclusively MANLY gameplay up to this point btw
Not letting Zelda be playable in her own storyline unironically ruins Tears of the Kingdom.
I haven't played TotK, but this is kinda what I hated about BotW too — other than the initial "get the four people to help you do the thing" conceit, the main story is made up of you remembering a more interesting story from a different time, in which you are standing around in the background for the most part
Its even more inexcusable in the sequel. Imagine if sonic generations made all of modern sonic's stages cutscenes, then tried to do the above for the second time because "time travel nonsense."
This coupled with the cowards at Nintendo
spoiler
conjuring up a new Ganondorf because finally ending this man would make investors sad or something among other things makes TOK feel narratively pointless. It also makes breath of wild feel pointless retroactively (kinda like the new star wars trilogy without director shuffling to even blame for this mess.)