#but handling flaws and villains well (esp with LoZ) is a delicate art

[powdermelonkeg]

This has been bugging me for a while now. Because of the racist elements surrounding Ganondorf and the Gerudo as a whole, is it morally wrong to write him as the villain in fanfics (even though he's a canon villain)?

Hoo boy. What a question.

I personally don't think so (other people's answers may vary, please DO NOT take me as the one final answer on this topic), AS LONG AS you're mindful of a few things.

Portraying the Gerudo as a whole as bad isn't a route you ever want to go. OoT's Gerudo are an example of this; a whole clan of people, and they're all thieves? No. BotW handled this part well by making them a distinct, fun-to-be-around people (they have a whole list of other issues, but they're not villains) that you could befriend and work alongside.

Giving Ganondorf valid reasons to be angry with the royalty and want power leans into a different problem you need to handle delicately, in that he/his people are oppressed. Them being oppressed isn't a problem on its own, but it's an oversaturated cliche that belittles POC's agency in the narrative and likes to glorify their suffering; why do so many stories about POC have to be about their struggles under a terrible regime?

You have more leeway with an established Ganondorf than one you make yourself. We know how Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess's Ganondorfs act, and a fanfic that keeps them in character is working with the pieces you've been given. With those, it comes down to asking why Nintendo made their main villain look SWANA (Southwest Asian/North African) yet AGAIN. With an OC Gan, you have to be careful to make him the villain without making him the face of his people or boiling it down to "white people save the world from angry brown man." And that's very tricky to do properly.

Don't make Ganondorf's existence a thing that his people have to atone for. TotK did this, at least in the English translation (and possibly as a byproduct of traditional Japanese ideals of honor). Riju's ancestor said her reason for granting her a secret stone is because she believes it's the Gerudo's fault for making Gan—that is a BIG no. He's his own person, he should be responsible for his own actions.

Especially with an OC, there are a few ways to mitigate the damage Ganondorf does as a character creatively:

Have the real Ganondorf be a good man, but the power-hungry dictator be a curse that took over him and/or replaced him. You can really lean into the horror with this one as everyone slowly realizes their king isn't the man standing in front of them; where's Ganondorf, and how much have they been telling this doppelganger?

Have Ganondorf's ascent to power be a hard-fought one, and follow his descent into obsession more closely. In TotK, Rauru says Gan's a "hero to his people," rather than only acknowledge that since he's the one man born every 100 years it means he's got a right to rule, as it was in OoT. Could he have waged a civil war in Gerudo, and won it? Is he a hero to his supporters only?

Make the struggle one of a point of view. Ganondorf believes he has a right to rule; why? Is it something he should have gotten by tradition, but was shunned because someone better than him came along? Does the Hyrulean side of things look more like a conspiracy to take something of his (hello, Triforce of Power) if you see things from his eyes? Has he seen the world fall, read the history books, and wants to stop the cycle before it continues, but can only do so by force? You can go with a self-fulfilling prophecy on this angle.

Make Link or Zel not white, possibly even of Gerudo heritage. This isn't a perfect solution, but it's the most straightforward and has lots of worldbuilding potential—the problem with a lot of things that make something racist isn't that they exist, it's that they're the ONLY thing that exists. If you've got five white characters in a movie up against a black villain, that's racist; it's visually reducing who's good and who's bad to the color of their skin. If you've got a mixed cast of white and black people on the heroes' side, and a black villain, you've repaired that significantly, because you can no longer glance at the cast and point out who the villain is by anything but their costume design. In LoZ specifically, we've got some new opportunities; Sonia isn't white, so not all of her descendants should be. Link could hail from Lurelin Village. Zelda could be the result of one of her parents being a Gerudo; people ship BotW Zel's mom with Urbosa anyways, so it's not like no one will be receptive to that.

Alternatively, make another Gerudo man that has to go head to head with Ganondorf alongside Link and Zel. One Gerudo male is born every 100 years; logically, there should have been one during the Calamity, and another one during the Upheaval. Or you could have Gan be one of a set of twins. Again, not a perfect solution, but it helps to mitigate stereotypes by having more characters in play. Compare BotW/TotK's Gerudo to OoT/MM's Gerudo, it's a VAST improvement in terms of how the narrative describes them as a whole.

Design-wise, there's a couple things you should not do:

Don't make Gan green as a stand-in for being brown. He's still POC-coded, you just upped the other-ing factor. "Haha, see this bad guy? Isn't he STRANGE looking?" That's the kind of vibe making him green portrays.

Don't make him or his supporters darker than the other Gerudo. If you want skin tone variation like BotW has, have a mix between both sides of the conflict. And ESPECIALLY don't make him literally black in skin tone (staring at Twilight Princess Gan).

Don't make his outfit overtly sexy. That's not to say he can't be attractive, but exposing his skin to make him shirtless and hot isn't fixing his monstrous-ness, it's objectifying the people he represents. Remember the problems with the vai outfit? Exactly like that, just on a guy. Also, it's terribly impractical for the desert; Wind Waker Gan had much more sensible clothes than TotK.

All in all, a lot of "fixing Ganondorf" should fall to Nintendo to repair in future entries, where their character design team needs to take a good long look at what they're putting out there before they make another villain. Your job, if you're fanfic-ing him, isn't to make him a perfect character or vindicate him; it's to handle what you WERE given with care and add to it in a better direction than the designers took it. And because it's fanfic, you have so many different ways you can do that.

And if this is too intimidating a prospect to tackle, there's Vaati, Malladus, Bellum, Majora, Ghirahim, even the Horned Statue in BotW/TotK you could break free and run away with.

Go wild.