Queer Theory, Political Economy, and Life Beyond the State
27 Oct 2024 - Otto Vogel
You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?
Majora’s Mask is a thematically “deep” game, in a way I haven’t seen in many other games, especially in modern games coming out of Nintendo. There’s a lot to talk about, a lot that doesn’t interest me; what I care about is on the one side, what it can tell us about Link – a traumatized child, put through a horrible, unique and inexplicable experience – and the lands of Termina – a strange, otherworldly double of Hyrule. I’ve just started playing it, so these thoughts are mostly questions with some provisional answers.
Aside: Throughout this I am going to assume that the reader is broadly familiar with the stories of Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, but not much more. I will take the basic “demonology” laid out in Skywards Sword as “canonical.”
Link in Ocarina of Time is fundamentally someone who doesn’t belong. Mortally wounded by the Hyrule civil war, Link’s mother flees into the woods beyond Hyrule’s southern border. There, she entrusts an infant Link to the Great Deku Tree, who has the boy raised among the Kokiri, the “Forest Children.” But Link doesn’t belong; he has no fairy growing up, and as a Hylian, he ages, unlike the other Kokiri. While they care for him, his time was always limited. That said, he is forced to leave at the moment when he perhaps fits in the most; he is granted a fairy – Navi – by the Great Deku Tree, and he seems to be the same outwards age – 11 – as the other children of the forest. But he is forced out into the world all the same.
Eventually Link arrives at the Temple of Time, past the bustling, friendly Castle Town, pushed forwards by the dark premonitions of Princess Zelda, the Great Deku Tree and the violences Ganondorf has visited on all the different peoples around Hyrule. There, he draws the Master Sword.
And he is pushed forwards through time, and arrives as an 18 year old young man in a dark world where Ganondorf has won. Unbeknownst to all, drawing the Master Sword unsealed the sacred realm, letting Ganondorf seize power and plunge the lands into darkness. The bustling Castle Town is now a ruin, crawling with screaming undead that try to kill Link as he takes his first steps as an adult.
People have been waiting for him, and through no fault of his own, he left people he cares about struggling through seven years of hell. He can go back in time, sure, by replacing the Master Sword. But even then, those seven years of pain and fear aren’t something he can stop within the game. As he struggles to awaken the six sages, bouncing back and forth through time, he helps who he can. He tries to make the world a brighter place, in the little ways he can.
By the end, Ganondorf is sealed away to the now despoiled sacred realm. In a moment of kindness, Zelda sends Link back in time, to have the childhood he never had. Link is able to inform the King of Ganondorf’s plans, and Ganondorf is sealed away in the Twilight realm. But that childhood, that never comes.
All of Link’s struggles, all of Link’s fights, while important in the world he left behind, are nothing in the world he returns to. In one sense, this is a deep kindness; Hyrule is never plunged into darkness, Ganondorf’s violence is cut short. But Link is now burdened with memories and pain that he shares with only one person, Navi. That little fairy the Great Deku Tree sent to guide him on his journey.
And then Navi leaves. She just… leaves.
So Link goes to try and find her. Deep in the woods, he is accosted by Skull Kid, wearing Majora’s Mask. And he is sent plummeting into Termina, a world doomed to die. He saves that one too, living the same three days over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again. When he returns to his own world, he is again sent out from the world he saved, the constant hero, who is never allowed to remain with the people he saved.
Termina is not Hyrule. Link does not belong there. I think a good way to analyze Majora’s Mask is to take seriously the idea that Termina existed before Link arrived and that Link saving it means that it will exist after he leaves. It is a thematic “double” of Hyrule, just like the Sacred Realm, Lorule and the Twilit Realm. A part of that doubling is how a lot of character models are shared between Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask.1
I will say I think the various character models being the same can be answered with something thematically satisfying: this is a story told through Link’s eyes. He sees the various construction workers in Clock Town like the construction company he knew from Hyrule; he sees the Romani sisters like younger and older Malon from Lon Lon Ranch. He sees the pirates as Gerudo because they are a clan of warrior women secluding themselves from men. He sees the witches in the swamp as Ganondorf’s nurses because those are the only old crones who do magic that he really knew. The guards look like castle guards, the postman looks the same, and the Bombers look like the kid from the graveyard, because all these people deeply remind Link of people he knew from Hyrule.
I suspect that the Happy Mask Salesman is the same across both games, and it’s more or less established that the Skull Kid is one we know from Hyrule, so those shared models are a lot more clear.
Beyond that surface level, Termina is vastly different from Hyrule, operating on different rules.
The first area is society.
Societies in Ocarina of Time are broadly oriented around royalty. The Hylians have the Hyrule Royal Family, obviously, but the Zora have their king and the Gerudo have a king too, Ganondorf – though this appears to be a marked change in how the society organizes itself most of the time. The Sheikah are loyal to the Hyrule Royal Family, and both the Gorons and the Kokiri bear some fealty to the Hyrule Royal Family too. Overall, we get a pretty understandable picture; there are royalty who have some authority across the land through their direct connection to the goddesses that created Hyrule, and their duty as protectors of the Triforce and the Sacred Realm. While the Zora, the Gorons and the Kokiri have some fealty to the Hyrule Royal Family, they live apart, often in difficult to reach places, hostile to most if not all Hylians.
In Termina, things are different. Gone are the familiar Kokiri, replaced by the strange Deku Scrubs, with their own royal family. The Gorons are here, yeah, but their land is cold, not volcanic. The Zora are no longer ruled by a king, but instead live in a grand Hall and seem really concerned with a Zora rock band. The Gerudo are no longer desert-dwelling thieves, but pirates, living a short distance away from the Zora. Instead of the enigmatic Sheikah, we have Ikana Valley, a place haunted by dead skeletons in ornate finery and invisible spies who seem to still be fighting a war well after both of their societies have died out, waiting to be relieved by their commanders. And finally, instead of the main town being oriented around a castle and the royalty inside, Clock Town is oriented around a single, grand, clock.
The social world is vastly different here; Goron, Zora and Deku are all common enough sights in Clock Town that you don’t draw much attention as one in the town. I highly doubt the same would be true if you were a Goron in Castle Town in Ocarina of Time.
There is also the question of history and time. This isn’t just a matter of how Termina is just a different place than Hyrule with its own history and events to think about, but instead that history itself takes a fundamentally different role. Within Hyrule, even recent history is somewhat distant. Sure, we know there was a civil war, we even witness remnants of the violence in the Shadow Temple. But people don’t talk about it. For a game so concerned with growing up, with the passage of time, the world is strangely unconcerned with placing your adventure within a specific time. There are no festivals, no events, no way to measure the passage of time. In Termina, not only is the game concerned intimately with the passage of time day by day, hour by hour, but it grounds itself at a particular moment in the year, a festival.
In Ocarina of Time, the connection to the distant past is semi-symbolic. No character is truly ancient, with the possible exceptions of the Great Deku Tree, Bongo-Bongo and Volvagia. Instead2 Ganondorf is the incarnation of a demonic curse from ages past. Link and Zelda are either the balancing out of the curse or its very carriers. The central drama of the story is one of new actors unknowingly repeating a previous conflict.
In Majora’s Mask, it turns out the only major player in the conflict involving Majora’s Mask, the Giants, Skull Kid and Link who is not ancient is Link. Majora’s Mask is explicitly described as an item used by an “ancient tribe.” The Giants literally formed the world of Termina, and stayed with the people until they decided to travel to the four corners of the world. If we believe Granny’s stories, the Skull Kid was there from the beginning, he was friends with the Giants long before the world was formed. Given the repetitive structure of Majora’s Mask, it is interesting that the conflict in the game is a novel conflict playing out between ancient figures, whereas in Ocarina of Time, it is the repetition of a conflict playing out between young figures.
We need to ask a few questions about what the Mask can do. Majora’s Mask is described as an ancient artifact used by a long gone tribe in “bewitching” or “hexing” rituals. It gained too much power – and clearly at some point gained a mind – and was sealed away in shadow. The Happy Mask Salesman somehow got his hands on it, then it was stolen by Skull Kid, who plunged Termina into chaos.
There are a couple things that we know for certain the Mask did. It sealed the Giants into the bodies of the four monsters, hidden within the four “Temples.” The Mask also started bringing down the Moon, which gives us the famous three day time limit. But why is it three days? Why can’t we go back further? Why are we fixed to the moment where we exited the clock tower?
My basic claim is that we are limited by the Mask’s hex. Part of what the Mask can do is trap beings, clearly. We get to move around the three days – perhaps by the grace of the Goddess of Time, perhaps just because that’s what the Ocarina of Time can do – but we are still trapped in those three days. Three days where the Mask’s power is omnipresent. The Moon looms large over the land, the giants are sealed beyond the monsters, the people are doomed to horrible fates if you do nothing. Link getting the Ocarina of Time, the instrument he uses to slowly, painfully unwind the weavings of dark magic the Mask has laid across Termina, is maybe something the Mask wanted. It extends the fear, the torment, the pain, endlessly. It makes struggling against the hex pointless. Sure, the Moon falling is overwhelming, but it can be stopped, and if it isn’t stopped, then everyone is dead anyways. The Deku King’s fears about his daughter, the Goron’s slow death to cold, the pollution of the Great Bay, the undead, torturous war of Ikana, all stop mattering, all stop hurting. Link resetting the clock also re-starts the pain.
Through the hex, Termina gets the structure of a nightmare. It seems unending, that nothing anyone does makes anything better for any real length of time. People are trapped, thrashing around pointlessly against something that has such a hold on them that they cannot escape. But, just like how the Ocarina of Time both preserves this cycle and ends it, the nightmarish nature of the cycle is also what lets it be resolved. Time layers over itself in the nightmare, multiplying the suffering again and again, but also Link’s good deeds get layered in there too; and so, on the Dawn of a New Day, everyone wakes up from the nightmare, and the world is better. The temples are cleansed, people are home, Kefei and Anju’s marriage can go through, Cremia finds Romani sane and well, the festival can happen. The long nightmare is over.
And Link doesn’t get to see any of it. He is not allowed to stay and see the festival, he is not present at the wedding, he is not able to play with the Bomber kids, he just has to leave. Again, Link is unable to stay in the world that he saved, unable to live within a world that doesn’t need a hero.
Link’s two stories are stark, almost harsh in a way. There is no glamour in heroism for him. There’s loss, there’s trauma, there’s pain and suffering. In Ocarina of Time, he literally gets sent back in time. For him, all that suffering was so the trauma of Ganondorf’s victory didn’t happen. His pain was literally just to keep the world as it was. Majora’s Mask is somehow less harsh here. But again, he’s not the hero of heroes, his name isn’t remembered, people don’t thank him for saving them. He leaves, and his existence takes on a dreamlike quality. His work, the way he saved the world, that is engraved on the lives he touched. But his name is gone.