le diable autiste

(Or: The Earl tries his hand at ludonarrative criticism.
Crossposted to Tumblr.)

What can I say about Majora’s Mask that hasn’t been said before? It’s the game that people analyze from a story perspective. Its dark themes and heavy use of symbolism make it interesting to pick apart, and it’s been around so long that basically everyone has said their piece.

But most of the theories and analyses focus on how Majora’s Mask makes the player feel the dread of apocalypse that the other characters feel, or how the heavy themes of death and loss impact the narrative. (Or, that favourite of lazy theorycrafters, “everyone is dead and this is purgatory”.) There’s one part of Majora’s Mask- a central part!- that no one talks about, and that’s the symbolism around the masks themselves.

I’m gonna look at this symbolism through a semi-Jungian lens. Obviously, spoilers for Majora’s Mask follow.
( TL;DR: Link’s inner conflict in Majora’s Mask is shaped by uncertainty about his identity. To solve this conflict, he tries to fill a number of archetypes and social roles, symbolized by masks. )…Wow, that was an adventure. This is probably the longest piece of meta I’ve ever written, but I needed to get this out of my head.

If there’s anything you want me to expand on, please reblog or reply to this post and I’ll do the best I can to elucidate.

Thanks for reading!