The Deku Scrubs and Racism in Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
Content Warning: Depiction of Racism, mention of cannibalism
I briefly touched on this in my Zelda video, but I wanna talk about the way the Deku in Majora's Mask are portrayed.
Zelda utilizes racial coding to depict nearly every group/race in the series. Racial coding if you're not aware is you apply traits associated with our real-world understanding of race, gender, disability and so on to non-human characters. It's neither inherently good nor bad to do and can enrich a story if used consciously and carefully.
It can also be done unintentionally without a storyteller realizing the implications often because they're repeating elements from stories they enjoy without catching these details.
It can also just be used maliciously in making harmful commentary using racial coding as a way to bypass any restrictions or legal issues that would come up in showing something directly. Much like queer coding, it also offers a form of plausible deniability.
A lot of cartoon characters wear gloves for instance because they were designed to embody minstrel caricatures popularized as a way to perpetuate Anti-Blackness. The practice of minstrelsy has never really died out, it's only changed and evolved with time.
Legend of Zelda uses that same coding in its storytelling. The Deku are plant people with a great deal of plant clothing and architecture. Their color also gives them a dark brown appearance which is common with a lot of the savage islander tropes used here.
They're also portrayed as prone to violence and anger, impatient and impulsive in how they wrongfully assume this monkey harmed their princess, and most notably they utilize the trope of boiling their victims alive as a scene of shock for the white explorer:
During the first section in the Southern Swamp, you can't even access the Deku palace as they don't welcome any outsiders except those the same race as them, not realizing that Link is a white boy with magic powers and has taken the form of their bodies (which is a thing all on its own in this context.)
Even then they don't welcome outsiders of any kind but only allow Deku Link entrance to witness a spectacle at a barbaric showing of publicly executing a monkey they believe has kidnapped the princess.
This is a trope commonly used toward several groups of people, many of them often lumped together as vaguely "brown" people, but you see it done with a lot of Native characters, Black people, Pacific Islanders, Asian folks, and many groups in South America. There's real-life overlap of these people--Afro-Indigenous and Latin Indigenous people exist for example--but the point in the eyes of a white gaze is to depict these as some evil and dangerous other to the horror of the white protagonist.
It conflates a lot with race, nationality, and ethnicity and which specific demographic of people will vary, but it's often done by portraying dark-skinned people of some kind in contrast to the civilized, rational white protagonist.
A lot of times this often goes hand in hand with the portrayal of cannibalism and blood rituals which isn't shown in Zelda, but to give an example of what this trope looks like, compare the visuals in Majora's Mask to the 1932 Mickey Mouse episode Trader Mickey:
Note: (you can watch the entire episode here if you'd like.)
There's an entire genre of film that utilizes the savage brown person in with the white explorer protagonist that go into this idea of framing whatever group of people it is weird, uncivilized, dangerous, and thoughtlessly impulsive often utilizing white fears of the "other" to portray them as beings of horror.
Often these films had usually one "good" brown person and often would have a lone woman character, usually the tribe leader's daughter who was objectified for the protagonist and audience and was usually portrayed as the only civilized or "good" ones, often exoticized and hypersexualized. If she wasn't, she was often abused into submission for the white character.
Also adding to this is the...everything about the Woodfall temple and the boss, Odolwa leaning into the same tropes.
I bring this up mostly as a way to provide an educational resource for other Zelda fans so we have a better frame of knowledge to not reproduce these narratives in fanart, fanfics, and so on. Majora's Mask is my favorite Zelda game! But that doesn't mean it's above critique especially in how it utilizes racial coding.
I'm deliberately avoiding showing more graphic imagery of film examples to make this as not triggering as possible, but cannibalism is a common element in these portrayals as well.
This kind of imagery pops up in quite a few Nintendo games and outside the gaming sphere as well. Off the top of my head, there's Kirby Superstar with Wham Bam Rock as portrayed in the SNES version and the Spear guys from the Mario brothers series.
Here's the Zelda Gerudo video if you haven't seen it before.
Trader Mickey (1932) is a rarely seen early Mickey Mouse cartoon, probably because of its relentless, astoundingly racist portrayal of the African natives.
