Zelda searches explode on Pornhub following Tears Of The Kingdom launch

Oh dear. Its not even been a week since Nintendo’s latest and greatest Switch game, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom released, and it seems that quite a lot of people have been busying themselves not with the game itself, but instead, with NSFW content featuring the characters. Why am I not surprised?

NSFW content of video game characters is nothing new. Pornhub’s global Year in Review stats highlighted a lot of specific franchises and characters that internet dwellers have been looking up in their alone time (in case you were wondering, Overwatch’s D.Va was by far the most popular video game character on the website last year). However, according to some new stats, the latest Zelda release has had a huge impact on site traffic.

According to an official blog post from Pornhub Insights, on Tears of the Kingdom’s release date, searches for “Zelda” on Pornhub rocketed by 399%. This has continued to rise exponentially since, with it going up to a whopping 1,477% on Monday (15 May). Between 12 and 14 May, searches for “Zelda cosplay” saw a colossal 5,399% increase in interest, but even that paled in comparison to the most popular search, “Purah Zelda”, which saw a whopping 42,257% increase in popularity.

Clearly, it goes without saying that the most popular Zelda character on Pornhub is Purah, but there were plenty of searches for others, too. Loads of people were also looking for Princess Zelda herself, as well as Link, Ganondorf, and for some baffling reason, Bokoblins. You know what, I’m not even going to ask.

In June 2022, The New Yorker published an article which highlighted the scale of non-consensual videos (including some of minors) hosted on different porn websites, with Pornhub allegedly being one of them. Following the news that both the chief executive and chief operating officer of MindGeek (the owner of Pornhub) had stepped down following the allegations, a statement from MindGeek (reported by the Washington Post) said that: “[The New Yorker] chose to ignore the fact that MindGeek has more comprehensive and effective policies than any other major platform on the internet, and decided to peddle the same gross mischaracterisations that anti-porn extremists have spewed for decades.”