The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and its Unique Representation of Climate Disaster
“Each year, the season of harmony begins when the sun and moon are in alignment. Paying homage to the way that both nature and time are tirelessly in the process of progressing... The Carnival of Time is when the peoples of the four worlds celebrate that harmony and request fruitfulness for the year” – Anju’s Grandmother.
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is a game about impending doom. This is fairly obvious to anyone who’s played the game, and even some of those who have not. What struck me while playing through the game for the first time, however, is the unexpected resonance the game has with the ongoing worldwide crisis of environmental destruction and climate change. Additionally, the unique 3-day time travelling structure creates a temporal relationship to disaster that speaks to our modern day experience of the Anthropocene. In this analysis, I’m going to investigate Majora’s Mask’s portrayal of the climate and disaster in depth and show how it relates to our experience of time.
The world of Majora’s Mask
The basic setup of Majora’s Mask is that Link arrives in the new land of Termina and is tasked with stopping the crafty Skull Kid from using the power of Majora’s Mask to bring down the moon on Clock Town and kill everyone in the land. The moon itself has a terrible grimace and hangs over Link’s head throughout the entire game; a perfect symbol of apocalyptic doom. To stop it, Link must gather four giants that live in each corner of the world to come and hold up the moon. The problem is that preparing everything cannot possibly be done in the three days before the moon’s impact, so Link uses his Ocarina to continually rewind time back to the start of the first day, only retaining certain items he’s collected and the new knowledge that he has discovered. By slowly accumulating what he needs, Link is able to bring all the giants together and stop the Skull Kid within the span of one cycle. On the fourth day, the Carnival of Time finally takes place in Clock Town.
It is during Link’s quest to find the four giants that the extent of Termina’s environmental collapse becomes apparent. To the south of Clock Town is the swamp, where the waters have become toxic and invasive species have proliferated. To the north, a terrible cold snap has hit Snowpeak Mountain, home of the Gorons, freezing many where they stand. To the west is the Great Bay, where the aquatic Zora people can no longer hatch their eggs in the ocean because of rising water temperatures. Finally, to the east is Ikana valley, the desert graveyard of an old kingdom. The river that was once the lifeblood of the valley is now but a scar of cracked mud. Moving through these environments in 2021 is eerie, perhaps more so that what was intended by the developers. The Zora’s becoming incapable of reproducing themselves in their natural environment is chilling in the context of current global marine extinction. Ikana valley on the other hand, with its ruins of a once proud civilization, feels like a reflection of our future.
The Real World Experience of Climate Change
Climate change is a unique form of disaster. With a disaster like a bush fire, there is a lead-up, the violent event, then the aftermath. The heating of our atmosphere and oceans, however, blurs these distinctions. If it began at any point, climate change would have begun during the Industrial revolution. That point is far, far before the living memory of anyone alive today, and it moves further back in our shared history with every passing moment. As for climate change’s end, who knows? Living through it, we don’t experience a cause and effect, a beginning and an end; climate change is instead a crisis of the perpetual now.
The big apocalyptic moment where everyone can say ‘now THAT was what all of this was leading up to’ will never come. It’s just a part of everyday life. As a result, the global climate catastrophe is problem that is so big and all-encompassing that it can be difficult to hold all of it in one’s mind and harder to formulate a response. It’s a lead-up, an event, and an aftermath happening all at once, leaving us in a strange liminal space between it all.
Within Clock Town, Link comes face to face with a diverse range of reactions to impending doom. Some are like the Postman or the town builders, who stick to their routine because that’s all they have.
Even as the moon grows nearer, the bank clerk dismisses the coming apocalypse as mere rumour. Others like the Mayor of Clock Town can’t make a decision either way. As Cremia from Romani Ranch says, “that's how life goes, I guess”. No one better encapsulates the fatalism of Clock Town’s residents as carpenter Mutoh. After denying the disaster up until that point, Link finds him on the third day refusing to run and telling the moon “If you're gonna fall, then fall already!” Just like the four different environmental disasters, these attitudes hit differently in the context of global climate change.
By observing Termina as a whole, however, one starts to see a certain pattern emerge. In all corners of the land, one of the most damaging things about disaster is the way it disrupt the transmission of knowledge necessary to keep a culture thriving. Both Snowpeak and The Great Bay feature a heroic figure, Darmani and Mikau respectively, who tries to help their people but die with their will tragically unfulfilled. By healing their souls and using their masks to solve the crisis, Link steps into their social role and bridges the gap left by their absence. He acts as an agent of continuity for the community he’s helping, rather than being a purely foreign agent coming in to save the day. To this end, songs are of central importance to Link’s efforts. On Snowpeak Mountain, all of the Gorons are unsettled because the young child of the village elder misses his pops and won’t stop crying. It turns out the elder has been frozen solid outside so the village, so Link unthaws the him and is taught the first part of the lullaby the elder usually sings to his son.
When played to the kid, he remembers the rest of the lullaby and finally goes to sleep, giving the rest of the Gorons a little comfort in dark times. Similarly, the “New Wave Bossa Nova” that Link learns from Lulu’s tadpole-like children turns out to be the key to entering the Great Bay Temple and lifting the strange curse upon the ocean. Like with the Gorons, the special song was once sung to Lulu as a child, thus marking it a culturally-specific form of knowledge. Through its disruption, the community’s capacity to reproduce itself was damaged.
In Ikana Valley, we see the same phenomena but inverted. Undead Stalchildren roam the graveyard at night because guard duty was the last order given to them while they were alive. Link can choose to go and fight the giant, skeletal Captain Keeta, the Stalchildren’s superior.
If he’s successful, Keeta will finally accept the loss of his kingdom and instructs Link to go inform his men that “the war is over”. His final request before passing on is to ask Link if he can take leave. Link mercifully accepts. Rather than reintroducing traditional knowledge that has been disrupted by disaster, Link instead puts an end to an order that has been made redundant by the Kingdom’s demise. What you might call “living time”, the organic progression of knowledge, material and community, is thrown out of balance by climate disaster. In all three examples, what replaces it is “disaster time”, marked by discontinuity, rupture and stasis. Majora’s Mask makes this metaphorical distinction literal; the suffering of Termina’s people under environmental disaster is inseparable from the unnatural loop through which Link experiences it. The connection between climate change and our temporal experience is inseparable for us as well.
With all of this in mind, one question arises; what is Link’s greatest tool? The answer is memory. By remembering each previous loop, only Link is able to slowly bring everything he needs together to confront the Skull Kid and stop the moon. Of all the intelligence he gathers, some of the most useful is knowledge rooted in culture and tradition. As a fantasy story, The Legend of Zelda series often venerate tradition’s role in preserving harmony. When analyzing Majora’s Mask through an ecological lens, however, this isn’t necessarily what we must take away for own climate situation. Rather, what we can keep in mind is that climate change, no matter how big and nebulous, is ultimately a historically situated event. For a young person like myself, I’ve spent a big chunk of my life hearing the same reports on how bad things have gotten the same promises from politicians and the same obstacles rear the head again and again. The truth though is that before things began to spiral out of control, people all around the world had their ways of living sustainably with their environment. Many of them still do. What we can do is synthesize the old in order to make progress and to break out of the loop.
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