#this isnt the first time ive explained this but the zelda fandom never ceases with its bad takes sooo

[blueskittlesart]

Tell me your thoughts on the link is dead in MM theory?

yeah ok. i feel like it's pretty widely known at this point that i do not care for it but let's really go into why. in the post that i assume prompted this ask i compared it to a similar permadeath botw theory in that i feel both theories only work if one ignores the central theme of the game in question. in terms of theme, majora's mask and botw are quite similar. both feature a highly traumatized link after a hard-reset of his life and follow the beginning of his healing process.

majora's mask features the hero of time after the timeline reset. He is physically a nine-year-old boy, but he has spent significant time in the body of a sixteen-year old and he has spent much of his life essentially as a child soldier without any regard for his feelings. he has fought monsters that adults twice his size and age refused to get within 200 feet of, and NO ONE REMEMBERS THIS, because in order to restore hyrule to what it once was he went back and stopped it all before it even began. understanding what has been done to link and how he remembers the events of oot are crucial to understanding mm.

now we have the actual setting of mm, termina. termina is deliberately strange and off-putting immediately upon entering it. you as the player are meant to pick up on the fact that something is off about your surroundings. the entire game plays this up--something is Wrong about termina. you're never supposed to be completely sure if it's real or a dreamscape. truly, i don't fault people for looking at a deliberately offputting, dreamlike, horror-filled world like termina and equating it to some sort of afterlife. the skull kid himself is often interpreted as a metaphor for death in oot--being a child who wandered into the forest and never came out. (i personally see it more as a reflection of oot's greater themes of coming-of-age and adult/child relationships, but that's a point for another post.) i do understand that the evidence for the theory is THERE, and that the tendency to want to explain away the offputting environment of termina as link being dead is kind of natural. but I think it's worth examining WHY termina is the way it is; how its weird vibe ties back to mm's central themes and link's story arc within it. and when you do, in my opinion, the theory falls apart pretty quickly.

majora's mask is a story about healing from trauma. Link, as previously mentioned, is a child soldier who feels trapped between childhood and adulthood and who has seen firsthand that nothing he does matters because in the end no one but him will remember it. termina is designed to enforce this point of view, initially. link can do everything in his power to help the people of termina, to fix their problems, to be a good kid, but at the end of those 3 days no matter what he does the moon will always come crashing down and he will always have to reset. no one will remember him. he can't change anything, not really. but as you play through the game, you find one thing that DOESN'T go away with each reset--the masks. these are given as rewards for link's good deeds--physical representations of the good he has done, even after everything resets. even though he remains trapped in this cycle, he gains a little something for every person he helps, something that can't be taken away from him. he begins to have hope that everything he does isn't in vain. he begins to HEAL.

on the final cycle, when you've completed all the dungeons and you stop the moon, the game performs a check to see if you have all the masks. if you've done every one of the side quests and helped the people in termina, even though they don't remember it. the check comes in the form of a game of hide-and-seek, a metaphorical return to the childhood that link feels he has lost. if every mask has been collected, link receives the fierce diety mask, making the final battle with majora quite a bit easier. he becomes more powerful because he has taken the time to grow and heal and learn that what he does matters no matter if people remember him or not. this is a central point of majora's mask. and when he wins, when he comes out the other side, the message that greets the player is "Dawn of a new day." a promise that the story will continue. a promise of many more days to come. a promise that the cycle has been broken and everyone in termina, link included, can finally begin to truly live.

again, i think the tendency to equate an obviously metaphorical dreamlike world like termina to an afterlife is somewhat natural. but to suggest that link is dead in the context of a game that is fundamentally about link HEALING and continuing to LIVE is kind of ridiculous imo. a world can be strange and function as a metaphor without being an afterlife. the tendency to try to explain termina's oddity is natural, but the fact that it's not explained is part of the point. whether it really exists or not doesn't matter, what matters is that the spiritual journey link went on DID happen, and he came out the other side able to continue living. he broke the cycle. now a new day can begin. THAT is the point of majora's mask. if link is dead, then that point loses ALL of its impact. what awaits link after breaking termina's cycle if he's dead?? to me, it's tantamount to suggesting his fate WAS sealed. that it's TRUE that nothing he did mattered and he was too late to truly change anything. nothing you do matters when you're dead. mm just functions so much better on a thematic level if link is allowed to continue living in the aftermath.