Majora's Mask [Archive] - The Warring States of NPF

PyrosNine

08-26-2010, 12:11 AM

Majora's Mask: Defining our relationships with others by the masks we wear � la Rilke's "Faces" and Cooley's theory of "Social Self".

My take of Majora's mask is that it's about relationships, first and foremost, and what it means to be YOU. Who you anyway? Are you a face? Because a face is just what we show to the world, swapping in and out our masks, and people will react to us differently depending upon which mask we show them.

Yeah sure, you help and bring hope to a lot of people, but whoever thinks Termina is a land of grief has another thing coming, and is retarded. Sure, it's bleak. TERMINA. TERMINAL. END. But how many people do you see moping? In Despair? Frightened out of their wits?

Maybe when the shit is about to hit the fan, but all of them are aware that the moon is coming down, and things are going to end soon, yet in spite of that, in spite of THAT, they go about their business. And their business is important to them. Not because they are just NPCs that have to be at the shop when it's open to sell you things or tell you that Dodongo dislikes smoke, but because they have their own lives to live and people they care about.

Most of the stories held under the Moon of Termina are stories of people moving, running, fighting, working their hardest for their goals despite the fact their entire world will end in 3 days. You play and take the forms of those who happened to have been trying their damndest.

Do you think it matters if Darmani had stopped the blizzard and saved his people from an icy death upon Snowpeak before the moon fell?

Do you think it matters if Mikau had saved his own children from kidnappers and an unhealthy ocean if even the oceans will end up boiling when the moon hits?

Do you think it matters if Kafei had managed to be married to the one he loved, in spite of returning to the body of a child, even if he could only love her a few hours at ground zero?

If you don't, "because you can just go back in time" then stop reading this and check and see if you're a sociopath. If you understand that we do the things we do, in the face of utter hopelessness, because we have people and things we love and would do anything for, keep reading.

You, as Link, are able to save Termina because you are given a reason to save it. You meet people. You see their lives, from dawn to dusk, and what they will do and where they will go at their final hours, and what they strive for. You learn that they are interconnected: Toto, the promoter of the Indigo-gos, is friend with the Mayors wife, who is the mother of Kafei, who is friend with the All Night Shop guy, who is the fence for Sakon the thief, who tries to steal from an old lady, whose son is the owner of the Bomb Shop, who is delivered bombs and powder kegs by two Gorons, (Link, and an unnamed Goron) who work for Medigoron in the mountains.

They all wear masks, these people, from the obvious to the less obvious. The Gorman brothers are liars and cheats, wearing poor masks for their illicit actions, while their wayward brother wears a stern face despite having deep emotions. The swordmaster wears discipline and skill, yet cowers in the back corner when death comes. The man who runs the Bank is BLIND.(Temporal Thief!) Kafei only looks like a child, and Anju hides her sorrow well ("Please relax..." as if she's almost saying it to herself). The Mayor's wife is a mother like everyone else, despite her haughty aristocratic facade, and despite her tough exterior and keen insight, Tatl is just a scared little girl. Is it no surprise then, that they all give you masks?

They wear these masks, because these masks define them, and define their relationships with others. The leader of the carpenters is dead set upon building the tower for the festival because it gives his life meaning. He really doesn't want the people to stay in town, and will implore them to seek shelter just as much as his opponent, the Captain of the Guard, does. But because he wears his mask, he will quarrel with the Captain until the third day. The mailman is utterly devoted to his hat (which is kind of a mask) which marks him and his duty as a postman, who must be punctual and follow the rules, and has glued his mask/hat on so supertight, that he is unwilling to cease his duties even as he also desires to flee for his life as the moon comes down.

This ties in with the masks the player wears, because as these characters all live according to the masks they wear, they logically should also react accordingly to whatever mask the player wears, and they do. No one notices whoever wears the stone mask (not even you), and fairies flee to the safety of a great Fairy. The undead trust those who wear skull and gibdo wrappings. The very world of Termina itself seems to have a mask, and it reacts to the player changing masks as well, because when you wear the mask of Darmani, the Deku child, and Mikau, it treats you has having the physical capabilities of that person, and of course the people treat you as if you were that person, even when you fail to act like that person.

When you wear Mikau's mask, you become involved in his relationships. To Lulu, to Japas, to the WTF-Island Turtle, to the fangirls. Your wearing the Zora mask defines your relationship to these people, who don't know you or talk to you the same way with your own mask, or the masks of the Goron and Deku. Who both, notably, have their own relationships. Darmani has a father and a brother, and many who look up to him as leader, and the Deku sprout has a father definitely...and since it can be assumed the deku sprout was adventurous and knew the royal family of Dekus, would have normally been the one to rescue the princess, and have a relationship with her?

So, all the characters have masks, faces that they show the world. These faces define their relationships with other people, and what they do. The player, in wearing different masks, is able to enter in and out of these relationships as a major part of problem solving, moreso than stabbing pointy bits into monsters. By entering these relationships, you naturally came to care for and seek to help these people, even if there was no old tree or sage telling you to do so. (Heck, the Owl tells you go to home!)

...So what does this say about the villain? The one character, who we see the least? The one character, who always wears a mask...literally?

The skull kid had no friends to begin with. In OOT, he was friends with Saria to an extent, but not close friends. In OOT, he didn't like his own face (himself) so he eagerly snatched a skull mask away from you, gaining his name "The Skull kid."

The skull kid had no friends, because he'd lost his first ones a long time ago, when they had gone to protect the land they cared about. With no friends, he had no self. In having no relationships, he essentially had no mask, no real way to define himself. However, once he met Tatl and Tael, he became the big one, the leader.

This was fine and dandy, but then in a mischievous prank, stole a mask and abused his power over his new friends (likely the same way he stole Epona, he used Tatl and Tael as distractions) and just like the slippery slope, he began to see and relate to others as people he could use, or manipulate for his own desires. It probably didn't help that the mask he stole was pure dag nasty evil. He wore the mask of wickedness, the bad guy, a mask of a destructor, and despite his own mischievous beginnings, he became the mask: a destructor who sought the end of the world.

Why? Because with the mask on, he only sees the masks people wear or seem to wear to his perceptions. He saw epona, and saw it was a horse and that you could ride it, but didn't see that it was an intelligent horse that would only let a few ride it. He thought Link was stupid because he doesn't talk and does have a strange means of reacting to people, and thus transformed him into a Deku scrub (who aren't very intelligent creatures) because he wanted his perceptions to be affirmed, he essentially pinned a mask on you and made you wear it. He thought Kafei was immature and turned him into a kid, and saw those who could stand in his way as oppressors to strike against. The friends of the past who left him, he saw them as enemies as he only knew that they left him alone. He defined his own relationship to others based upon his lack of relationship, and saw them as things to mess with, and with time, saw them as things he could destroy, like towns and stick figures in a sandbox, now that he found he had the power to do so.

The Mask of Majora he wears, it's personality is purely sociopathic. It's where the evil warping of his own perceptions began, but it also builds up from them. I don't think the mask is evil in of itself, but distinctly alien, and inhuman in nature. It takes what developed in the Skullkid to it's highest point, a disassociation from all things, an lack of understanding and a lack of caring for that it doesn't understand. Just like the skullkid, it is the lonely outsider with no friends (notice where the Majora masked kid is on the moon, compared to his four twins) and it doesn't understand other people, and because of this has contempt for them. This may be because the Majoras mask is just a mask, lacking a face behind it, it is and just is. The Skullkid has no one to relate to, the Majoras mask is only a mask.

This was all very easily missed in Majoras mask, because the act of helping others and dealing with people was something you always did in Zelda, just never to this extent, and never in such innovative ways. If someone was fantastically rascist (How many of you noticed this?) you could just swap masks and they'd accept you. To get plot macguffins and useful tools for progression, you just had to find a person in trouble, help them, and get something good at the end of the questline. Video game standards have given you unrealistic expectations, which caused you to miss the gravity of what you were doing, because you likely never realized that character depth I've mentioned in this post until I mentioned it and you went "Oh yeahhh....shit, the banker was blind? So that was why he used a stamp he felt on my head?"

But the game does somewhat get around to spelling it out for you in the final dungeon: The somewhat anticlimactic challenges on the Moon. No rush. No dark, looming fortress for the villain, nothing like Ganondorf's castle in Oot. Just strange, mask wearing kids who all look like the Happy Mask Salesman.

"Can I ask... a question? What makes you happy? I wonder... what makes you happy... does it make... others happy, too?"
Someone doesn't know how to relate to others.

"The right thing... what is it? I wonder, if you do the right thing, does it really make everyone happy?"
Getting warmer. Don't you as Link, become happy by doing the right thing, because the right thing makes others happy?

"Can I ask... a question? Your friends... What kind of... people are they? I wonder... Do these people... think of you... as a friend?"
On the right track. Friendship is also when both parties see each other in terms of friends. You can't just assume friendship, but you can't just assume a lack of friendship just because you don't see them anymore. You know someone is your friend when they treat you like a friend, and receive you as one, and in return you do the same.

"Your true face... What kind of... face is it? I wonder... The face under the mask... Is that... your true face?"
Bingo. This is what the game is about, and also what Majora's Mask is about. Who are YOU. At this point in the game (and in this posted mini-essay) you should know by now, or at least have a good idea. Some people take this as a meta-moment, where the game comments on the player as wearing a mask even when they're not wearing any of the masks. Of course, the player (You) are wearing a mask in playing the game (Link), but that's not quite what that question was getting into, though I'll be back to that in a sec.

Now, the Masked children are all a bit...sociopathic. They are wearing the masks Majora used to trap the Giants and challenge the player, plus Majora itself. One theory holds that Majora has based it's moonworld upon what it and the player have seen, and Majora and the boss masks are a twisted image of the game's plot: The lonely child wearing the Majoras mask, and the four giants (mask wearing monsters) in each cardinal direction. This is a pretty good theory, and it also states that they are Mask Salesman because the only person who had contact with Majoras mask, and seemingly sold most of the game's masks was a Mask Salesman. Their logic that you must be a Mask Salesman too because you have so many masks is based upon how many the real Mask Salesman has. But it is very clear that the Masked Children are not Mask Salesman, as they don't sell masks, but take them from you, much like a certain Skullkid.

These children, much like the bosses, and much like they are in the final boss fight, are merely extensions of Majora's Mask's sociopathic mind, asking in uncertain, inhuman, with a lack of understanding, questions that it is struggling with in the light of recent events. These children are just puppets playing a part. Why do they take your masks? One good reason would be that these masks are proof of your relationship with a lot of people, which is something that is alien to them, but could be something they unconsciously desire. And also, by giving them these masks, you prove to Majora that you are "nice"

This makes Majora willing to form a relationship with you, but Majora is still missing the point, as he attempts to define your roles in your playing with him: he gives you the mask of the Bad guy: Yourself.

The Fierce Deity's mask, a mask more mysterious than Majora's, is Link's mask, and it's best described as a mask that was created by Link and Majora's relationship. Consider it. Weird creature that comes from another world, is incredibly powerful and has few peers in terms of sheer capability: To Majora, you're Cthulhu. Link is a fierce deity in the eyes of Majora, because you have single-handedly wrecked his shit.

Majora defines others by only what he sees, and can't define himself at the same time becuase his perceptions don't allow for a real relationship, so he defines the giant of the primitive tribal swamp as a Masked savage, the giant of the Mining mountain as a giant metal bull, the giant of the ocean as a enormous fish, and the giant of the land of the dead as Worms. The bull is a stretch, but eh. He is uninterested in your Deku, Goron, and Zora masks because he thinks they're weak, and is unable to see the strength they wield.

He defines you by the fact that you are unstoppable, powerful force, and doesn't see you as an adventurous boy with a sword. He sees you as a powerful swordsman, and donning his perception of you, you are very much a Fierce Deity, a Fierce Deity who defeated his puppets, the Masked Giants. Fridge logic would dictate this is why you could only don the mask for boss fights, but mostly this was because of gameplay design.

He can't understand himself or others, so he picks for himself the role of "hero" and makes you play the bad guy, when he can't see for himself that he is very much a bad guy. Sort of a dark innocence, we define right and wrong by what makes others happy, but because he can't define proper relationships, he can't tell right and wrong, and doesn't know how horrible the things he's done are.

Naturally, what follows is you kicking his ass and him freaking out in stages as this view is challenged, crushed, and zapped with bolts of energy from your Infinity shaped sword.

The events on the moon are poetic: You face down a relationship-less, faceless mask on the moon and by giving him masks symbolic of relationships and of the people all around him that he was about to destroy, you are able to give him exactly what he lacked, and stop him.

As for the Mysterious Happy Mask shop salesman, it's pretty obvious he's based on Shigeru Miyamoto (and kinda Eiji Aonuma) as they are fairly well known Mask Vendors. Yeah. They sell you masks, where you become Mario, or Link, and play that role. And in selling you these masks, with those masks and within those roles they give you, you endeavor to make people happy.

The Happy Mask Salesman seems external to the setting, yet well aware of it, because these are all his masks that he's sold: he can identify any mask you bring him, and his instantaneously changing expressions because his face as the Happy Mask Salesman is a mask for being Shigeru Miyamoto/Eiji Aonuma. You yourself, as Link, are a mask he's given you, and the other NPC's are wearing masks given to them for the game. He even, if you'll notice, procured and introduced Majora's Mask to the setting, despite it's fearsome powers! He set up the role of hero, villain, and the characters in between, and gets the plot rolling.

It's he who explains to you the gist of the game "Get me back the mask in 3 days" and he who sets you off on the journey by giving you everything you need to do so, the Song of Healing's importance cannot be understated. He also is what allows you to re-assume the role of Link to be able to save the land, and likely made you sweat for three days so you'd get a taste of the interweaving relationships of the people and the enormity of the trouble they were in, while you were at your most powerless as a deku scrub in order to give you an emotional anchor to try and stop the moon from falling.

In closing, Majora's mask is a unique game that questions the roles that we play amongst other people, and is one of the first to do so. We play a shapeshifter, a mute outsider, standing on strange and familiar ground, and only by understanding others, assuming roles, forming relationships with those roles and fulfilling those relationships, are we able to accomplish much, and make others (and ourselves) happy.