Issue 3.1: The Masks We Wear

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, According to Jungian Psychology [A Symbolic and Psychological Analysis]

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Credits

• Publisher: Jay Rooney

• Author, Graphics, Research: Jay Rooney

• Logo: Jarnest Media

• Founding Members:

  • Le_Takas, from Luzern, Switzerland (Member since April 14, 2022)

  • Ela F., from San Diego, CA (Member since April 24, 2022)

• Special Thanks:

  • Chris Brandrick of Switch Weekly for plugging the book giveaway last week!

  • Accurate-Road of Miami, FL, on becoming Game & Word’s 200th subscriber. Congratulations!

  • YOU, for reading this issue.

Table of Contents (Vol. 3, Issue 1: Sun., May 1, 2022)

1. Summary & Housekeeping

2. Feature: “The Masks We Wear” (~27 minute read)

3. Food for Talk: Discussion Prompts

4. Further Reading

5. Game & Word-of-Mouth

6. Footnotes

Summary:

Today, we’ll begin our descent into the depths of the human psyche by examining one of Jungian psychology’s central concepts—the persona—as depicted in the Nintendo 64 classic, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.

Housekeeping:

First things first: WELCOME, NEW SUBSCRIBERS!!! Whether you found me through Switch Weekly, Twitter, or a Substack recommendation, I’m so thrilled you can join us for Game & Word’s most ambitious series to date.

Please let me know if you enjoyed this article by clicking the “like” button, dropping a comment, replying to this email, or sharing it with a friend. I’m always happy to hear from my readers! And if you really enjoy my content, consider directly supporting its future development by upgrading to a paid subscription or Founding Membership.

And don’t forget, we’ve got a huge book giveaway going on this month! Two lucky winners will get a signed copy of The Psychology of Zelda or The Psychology of Final Fantasy. No purchase is needed. Contest details and eligibility requirements can be found below:

Issue 3.0: Game Over Matter (and a Book Giveaway!)

Thank you all, from the deepest reaches of my soul. This issue, and indeed this whole publication, is for you.

Cheers,

~Jay Rooney

Publisher, Game & Word

Previous Issues:

• Volume 1 (The Name of the Game): Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4

• Volume 2 (Yo Ho Ho, It’s a Gamer’s Life for Me): Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Bonus 1 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Bonus 2 ● Issue 8 ● Bonus 3

• Volume 3 (Game Over Matter): Cover Issue

Or, you can help offset my caffeine costs by chipping in for a Cup of Joe:

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Feature: “The Masks We Wear”

Roadmap of the Center of the Mind | Our Three Stops: 1) The Ego [You Are Here], 2) The Personal Unconscious, 3) The Collective Unconscious.

Welcome to Game & Word Tour Operators, LLC, and thank you for joining us for our once-in-a-lifetime “Depths of the Human Mind” adventure package! During this journey, we will descend into the very center of the psyche, learn how our minds work, and tug on the very fabric of reality. If we’re really fortunate, we may even get to connect with the ultimate intelligence of the universe, if only for an instant.

But beware, as this trip is not for the faint of heart. A mind can be a place of discovery, wonder, happiness, and awe. But just like the humans that manifest it, each mind also houses evil, violence, cruelty, and sorrow. No two journeys into even the same mind ever turn out alike, and you must be prepared for the possibility of learning things you’d rather have left unlearnt.

But fear not! You’ll never be in any actual danger, for our vehicle for this journey is a very powerful vessel, indeed: the artistic, narrative, and educational medium of video games.

Thanks to video games, we can take these journeys from the comfort of our living rooms, during our bathroom breaks, while in line at the DMV, or during long flights. And when the journey ends, we’ll be right back where we started, where we were all along. Our minds take the journey, while our bodies stay put.

Though that begs the question: to paraphrase Morpheus from The Matrix, if something is real only in your mind, doesn’t that mean your mind makes it real?

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Today, we won’t go quite that deep. We’re not trying to fry your brain here! Well, not too much, anyway. So we’ll start with something easier to grasp and process: our personalities. And our learning material is a beloved gaming classic: The Legend of Zelda, Majora’s Mask. Are you ready? Then please review the following safety instructions before we depart:

🚨🚨🚨 SPOILER ALERT 🚨🚨🚨 

This article contains visual, plot, and thematic spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. You've been warned!

⚠️⚠️⚠️ CONTENT WARNING ⚠️⚠️⚠️

This article contains discussions of death, mental/emotional distress, and despair, as well as visual depictions of physical and emotional pain. If these topics upset you, please proceed with caution. Section(s) discussing these topics will be clearly labeled under the subhead.

All ready? Then please buckle your seatbelts, keep your arms and legs inside the car for the duration of the voyage, and make sure your complimentary vial of emergency smelling salts remains within easy reach at all times!¹

Bon voyage!

The City of Masks

Each year, my home city of New Orleans hosts something truly remarkable: Carnival Season. This isn’t exactly breaking news; almost everyone knows about Mardi Gras (“Fat Tuesday”), which is the last—and wildest—day of Carnival.

Unfortunately, however, most outsiders associate Mardi Gras with young women flashing strangers for $0.00023 worth of plastic beads, frat bros chugging Hand Grenades, and Girls Gone Wild.

And sure, if that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll find plenty of it. No judgments here. But Mardi Gras is so much more than the Bacchanalia of Bourbon Street. Carnival in New Orleans is like nothing else in the world.²

If you’re ever fortunate enough to be in town during Carnival (which I highly recommend) and venture outside the French Quarter, you’ll witness a whole other side to Carnival and Mardi Gras. One that, even with all the free-flowing booze, is actually quite wholesome and family-friendly. The whole city comes alive, and the whole city buys in—on Fat Tuesday, schools are out, businesses close, and everyone from plumbers to politicians and everyone in between joins in the festivities.

Themed parades of beautifully ornate and elaborate floats, painstakingly organized, built, and carried out by organizations of volunteers³ that start planning for next year as soon as the parade is over.

Loaves and loaves of King Cake, a positively decadent pastry made only during Carnival. A round ring of cinnamon bread, filled with different types of cream,⁴ and sprinkled with pounds of sugar—dyed in the traditional Carnival colors of purple, gold, and green—on top.

Masquerade balls—some more communal, some more exclusive—where people wear masks, drink Sazeracs, and adopt personas, reveling in the one time and space each year where the world is topsy-turvy, everything is possible, and anything goes. The shy become raucous. The prince becomes the pauper. The sullen become elated. Anyone has the chance to become someone they’ve always wished they could be.

Pictured: Me, as the King of Bacon (taken on Fat Tuesday, c. 2014)

And then, as the clock strikes midnight after Fat Tuesday, Carnival dissipates in a puff of glitter. Police immediately start clearing the streets of straggling revelers. Cleaning crews get to work sweeping the thoroughfares of discarded beads, doubloons, and go-cups. Music fades, parties wind down, and people shuffle off home to start nursing their hangovers.

By the time dawn breaks, the streets are empty and quiet, with only the occasional pair of hanging beads bearing testament to the nearly non-stop festivities that ran from January 6th all the way through the previous evening. Life goes on, time marches forward, and people resume their normal lives.

The fact that masks and masquerade balls feature so prominently throughout Carnival is not coincidental.⁵ We wear masks on Mardi Gras to inhabit a persona, someone we want to be and present to the world. But we also wear masks every day in our normal lives, and for the same reasons—but unlike in Mardi Gras, the masks we wear aren’t physical, but psychological.

And so the previous night’s partiers rise from their slumber, pop some Advil, take off their masquerade masks, and put on their mental masks as they head out the door to face the “real” world once again.

Our Persona: The Mask We Put On

Pictured: probably my most flattering persona.

“I wonder… the face under that mask… Is that… your true face?”

~Lunar Child, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask

To illustrate what I mean about putting on masks, let’s conduct a little experiment. Go ahead and open your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram profiles, then scroll down for a bit. On a scale of 1 to 100, how accurately do you think your social media profiles portray the totality of your life?

Sure, more likely than not, they’re somewhat accurate and representative, unless you only use burner accounts or use your profile(s) to play a fictional character.⁶ But unless you’re an IRL vlogger, or someone who’s set up your social media as a particularly open book, chances are you’re not giving people the full picture.

Most people don’t post about the times they’re feeling downtrodden, depressed, jealous, or hopeless. We only post about the good times in our lives—achieving goals, hitting milestones, entering a different lifecycle, or going on a fun vacation. And if we’re being honest with ourselves, we feel sad much more often than we feel happy, because life is hard and the world is rough to live in. But you’d never figure that out just by looking at everyone’s social profiles.

That’s what I mean by putting on a “mask” to the outside world.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this. Most authors who comment on social media's “fakeness” adopt a subtly judgmental or chastising tone. But the fact of the matter is, putting on a “mask” to face the world is not only paradoxically courteous, it’s also a matter of survival.

…Wait, what? Really?

Yes, really. Allow me to elaborate.

Masking Considerately (Not Just for Pandemics Anymore!)

Let’s start with the courtesy aspect. Not everyone carefully curates their social profiles. We all know at least one person who has… less of a filter than others online. They’re always oversharing, whether about mundanities,⁷ or more serious and personal matters.⁸ There is such a thing as “TMI.”

This applies IRL, too. Think of someone you know who prides themself on how “honest” they are. If that person’s like any of the people I know who describe themselves like that, then chances are:

1. They’re not nearly as honest as they claim to be,

2. They use their supposed “honesty” to justify being a jerkwad to others.

And even if they are actually honest, that’s not much better. Unfiltered, unflinching honesty can be very harmful, damaging, and even abusive. Telling a panhandler to get a job, for instance, will likely do them more harm than good, even if what you’re saying is true and that person really is able and simply unwilling to support themselves.

Someone once told me that “honesty without compassion is brutality.” After all, where do you think the term “brutally honest” comes from?

So that’s the etiquette part. What about the survival part?

Masking Protectively (Not Just for Shy Guys Anymore!)

For that, I’ll pose you a simple question: can you imagine acting the same way with your friends, your parents, your partner, your boss, and the cops? Of course not—you put on different masks, appropriate to the situation and the people involved, because doing so is critical to your social survival.⁹

To put it simply, putting on (no pun intended) these masks is a survival strategy. So much so, that’s ingrained in us to the point of instinct. We innately know to do this.

But… how do we know to do this? How does our brain manifest and deploy these masks? Well, for that, we must turn to one of the most brilliant and influential pioneers in the field of psychology: Carl Jung.

Introducing Carl Gustav Jung

Carl Jung | Source: Wikipedia

Chances are, you’ve heard of Jung before. Even if not, you’ve certainly heard of his work, and his ideas: personas, archetypes, the shadow, anima/animus, the collective unconscious, the self, and individuation are all Jungian concepts, and we’re going to get to know these very well as we progress through this journey.

For now, however, we’ll touch on the basics. We’ll get plenty of chances to dive deeper later on.

Carl Gustav Jung, born in 1875, was a Swiss psychiatrist widely considered the father of analytical psychology, a rigorously scientific and systematic approach to the then-nascent field of psychology, which he developed after famously falling out with his longtime mentor and collaborator, Sigmund Freud (the father of psychoanalysis).

While Freud’s theories have aged… rather awkwardly at best, Jung has stood the test of time much better. That’s not to say his ideas are flawless; no human idea is flawless. And it doesn’t provide us a complete picture of the mind—but then again, no single psychological framework can.

Regardless, Jung’s uncompromisingly scientific approach to studying the mind led to his formulating some remarkably sound theories. Furthermore, his parallel studies of culture and mythology allowed him to discern patterns, parallels, and similarities between the psychologies of different cultures. The cross-pollination between these two bodies of knowledge completely transformed people’s understanding of the mind, and also lent Jung’s ideas a universally relatable and symbolic quality that made them much more intuitive and easier to grasp.

In Jungian terminology, the “mask” that we put on for the outside world is our persona. Simply put, a persona is a construct created by our ego—the conscious part of our psyche—that we show to the world.

Much like a physical mask, the persona serves two purposes: to present the desired image of ourselves to others and to hide certain (and often undesired) aspects of our true self.

What does Jung mean by “true self”? A person’s true self is the entirety of their psyche, comprised of two parts: the conscious and self-aware part that we’ve just discussed, called the ego; and the unseen and unnoticed, but still operative part, called the unconscious. The unconscious is further divided into the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. But we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves here.

Our ego constructs a persona out of the parts of our personality it wants to present outwardly. And like our carefully-curated social profiles, our personas aren’t necessarily false or deceptive—they are a real part of ourselves. But that’s all they are—a part of who we are. They’re partial pictures and don’t reveal the entirety of our inner selves. Like putting on an actual mask, the world only sees our outer persona. The rest of our true self remains hidden from sight, safely behind its mental mask.

Again, this is completely natural, normal, and quintessentially human behavior that confers significant evolutionary and survival advantages on us. But like with Newton’s laws of mechanics, each action produces an equal and opposite reaction—and our personas likewise cast a long shadow, which we ignore at our peril.

But again, let’s not get ahead of myself.

The concept of the persona isn’t new ground for media. Stories with Aesops (morals) extolling the virtue of being oneself—of which there are plenty—will invariably deal with personas, by the topic’s very nature.

Some works go about this more literally than others, such as Jim Carrey’s 1994 movie The Mask. Others are more “realistic,” like Eddie Murphy’s The Nutty Professor.

But the underlying message is always the same: beware of becoming too attached to the mask you wear, lest you become the mask.

Plenty of video games also explore this concept. In Final Fantasy VII, protagonist Cloud Strife’s character arc follows him as he learns to accept and inhabit his true self, dropping the mask he’d been showing to his friends (and the player) since the game’s beginning. And there’s even an entire series of Japanese Roleplaying Games (JRPGs) whose central theme is people adopting different personas—fittingly, the series is titled Persona.

But the game I want to explore today explores the psychological and philosophical questions of personas in an accessible and easy-to-understand, yet unexpectedly profound and unflinchingly honest way.

That game is The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, the sixth mainline entry in the influential and universally-beloved The Legend of Zelda series, first released for the Nintendo 64 on October 26, 2000 in North America (April 27, 2000 in Japan).

Persona Majora

Majora’s Mask stands out amongst The Legend of Zelda’s 19 entries¹⁰ for many reasons. It’s one of the series’ few direct sequels, starting up right where its predecessor, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, left off. Its core gameplay loop, while still retaining Zelda staples like exploration, combat, and puzzle-solving, is in a class of its own thanks to its unique time looping mechanic that Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day would find distressingly familiar.

But while these differences are undoubtedly significant, the game’s tone is the one that stands out most. Majora’s Mask’s tone is significantly darker than other Zelda games. It uses a muted color palette, a more melancholic soundtrack, it deals with much heavier subject matter than any other game in the series, and it’s so steeped in tragedy and pathos that it becomes one big allegory for grief and loss.

But Majora’s Mask’s keystone is not its direct continuity from Ocarina of Time, its time loop mechanics, nor its dark and heavy tone. But rather, it’s the centrality of masks to the game’s mechanics, story, and themes. Masks are so integral to this game that even its name has the word “MASK” in it!

And, true to a game that revolves around masks to such a huge degree, Majora’s Mask deeply dives into the symbolism of masks as the different personae we adopt and present to the world.

Introducing Majora’s Mask

In case you’re not familiar with Majora’s Mask, I’ll provide a quick synopsis of its plot, themes, and major characters. This will be helpful once we discuss the masks themselves, and the personae they symbolize. But even if you have played, you might want to at least skim through this section anyway. You never know if you’ve missed a pivotal detail or two that’s central to this analysis.

⚠️⚠️⚠️CONTENT WARNING⚠️⚠️⚠️

This section discusses death, mental/emotional distress, and despair, as well as visual depictions of physical and emotional pain. If these topics upset you, feel free to skip to the “Safe Zone” divider.

As I mentioned, Majora’s Mask is a direct sequel to Ocarina of Time, and so picks up where its predecessor left off. I won’t go over the details of that storyline here (though if you’re really interested, you can read a plot summary on the ole wiki), but in a nutshell, it’s a classic hero’s journey where the gallant hero Link and the wise Princess Zelda use the power of the Triforce to defeat the evil Ganon and restore peace to the land of Hyrule.

It’s not all terribly relevant to Majora’s Mask, save for Ocarina’s very last scene, which plays after the credits have rolled. Link, his quest complete, is ready to resume his normal life… when his fairy companion Navi, who had stuck by his side throughout the entire journey, suddenly flies away, for reasons unknown, never to be seen again.

When Majora’s Mask begins, Link is wandering the woods, looking for Navi. Now, in Zelda games, Link is designed to be a blank slate for the player to project herself onto—and, as such, he barely displays emotion or personality, and undergoes minimal character development. And in Majora’s Mask, this is still largely the case.

But the game makes it crystal clear that Navi’s departure has deeply affected Link. By the time the opening sequence starts, he’s anxious—desperate, even—to get her back. And so, while looking for Navi in the Lost Woods,¹¹ Link’s ambushed by the Skull Kid, a mischievous imp wearing a sinister mask: the titular Majora’s Mask.

After regaining his senses, Link gives chase, but the Skull Kid, always a step ahead of him, steals his horse and magical Ocarina of Time, leads him into the parallel universe of Termina, transforms him into a Deku Scrub,¹² and gets away, viciously taunting Link the whole time.

After Link recovers his ocarina, he’s able to turn back to his normal self. For the rest of the game, Link goes about trying to stop the Skull Kid—by now, fully under the evil mask’s influence—and in doing so, save the land of Termina.

Termina: Land’s End

“Their land is doomed to be smothered in snow and ice forever. It will become a land where no living thing can survive.”

~Kaepora Gaebora; Majora’s Mask

As Link travels through Termina, he quickly realizes that it is a deeply troubled place, filled with deeply troubled people.

For starters, the realm itself is doomed; the moon is on course to crash into Termina in three days, destroying the land and everything in it.

Hell, the land’s very name—TERMINA, from the Latin word “Terminus”—portends its imminent demise. Let’s pull out the ole’ dictionary real quick to look up the definition of “Terminus” (emphasis mine):

Terminus [tur-muh-nuh s]—noun, plural ter·mi·ni [tur-muh-nahy], ter·mi·nus·es.

1. the end or extremity of anything.  

2. the point toward which anything tends; goal or end. 

3. a boundary or limit.

“Terminus” is also the root word for “terminal,” as in an airport terminal, or a “terminal disease” (like cancer). A terminus is, basically, the end of something.

And, as we’ve just discussed, Link comes to Termina at the start of its final three days. 72 hours after Link arrives, the moon will consume Termina and all its inhabitants in one massive, cataclysmic blaze of fire.

After all that? Darkness. Oblivion. No more bustling Clock Town. No more Carnival of Time. No more Southern Swamp, Snowhead Mountain, Great Bay, or Ikana Canyon. No more joy, and no more sorrow. No more pain, but no more love. After the moon comes down, what was once the land of Termina will be but a memory… or rather, it would be if there were anyone still left to remember it.

So, how do Termina’s inhabitants react when faced with such a grim, imminent, and inevitable fate? About the same way you’d expect them to.

Terminans’ reactions run the gamut from panic and rage to resignation and flat-out denial. Most attempt to find refuge, moving as far away as they can from the eventual point of impact. Some long to flee to safety, but stay put out of fear, duty, or attachment to land and people. Others refuse to believe anthing’’s going wrong, loudly proclaiming their defiance through the bitter end. And a rare few, perhaps acknowledging the futility of fretting about a situation they’re powerless to change, quietly accept and await their fate.

In fact, many players, critics, and even scholars have argued—quite convincingly—that Majora’s Mask’s story arc takes Link (and, by extension, the player) through the Kübler-Ross model’s famous¹³ “five stages of grief”: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Whether or not director Eiji Aunoma intended this is beside the point—this theory just meshes so damn well with the game to entirely dismiss it.

But we’re not here to talk about Majora’s Mask as an allegory of loss and grief. Others have already covered that ground, far more thoroughly than I could here (you can actually read one of the better analyses in the Psychology of Zelda book we’re giving away!). But I did want to mention it because:

1. It’s the game’s central theme and as such touches on all its other themes,

2. It illustrates just how dark the game’s tone is.

Also, Link has the power to do what many a melancholically regretful person has wished they could do on their deathbed: turn back the clock and do things differently. Keep this thought in your head.

If Link runs out of time to save Termina, he can whip out his trusty Ocarina, play the Song of Time, and go back to the time of his arrival for a complete do-over.

This time-fiddling, Groundhog Day-esque mechanic introduces some neat, innovative, and fun gameplay elements and thematic layers to Majora’s Mask. But again, analyzing these is beyond this post’s scope. I just wanted to mention them because this is helpful information for contextualizing the game’s story and themes.

Don’t worry, we’ll revisit time and time travel many times, in due time. Pun(s) intended.

Masking Link

Rated “E” for “Everyone,” kids! Want to watch the whole sequence in action? Sweet dreams! | Source: Nintendo

Majora’s Mask’s other central mechanic, which is much more relevant to this article, is its centering of masks as essential progression items. While masks appear and can even be worn in other Zelda games, they tend to serve a purely aesthetic function, or at most confer minor bonuses.

Not so for Majora’s Mask. In this game, masks are critical—to its gameplay, story, and themes—and they make it such a unique experience as much as its dark tone and time manipulation mechanics. You can collect 24 wearable masks, along with four (4) unwearable masks. One somewhat convoluted (and surprisingly tender) side quest revolves around a non-player character (NPC) couple and their two (2) masks. Finally, let’s not forget that the game’s ultimate antagonist is a sentient, malevolent mask.¹⁴ That’s 31 different masks you’ll encounter, 24 of which you can wear.

And each wearable mask serves a unique purpose. Some act as disguises. Others signal rank or status. Still, others affect gameplay, such as a pair of bunny ears that make Link run faster. And some completely transform Link’s body into that of a different species altogether.

But they all have one thing in common: they allow Link to adopt a persona¹⁵ and show it to the world. Majora’s Mask thus portrays the Jungian concept of the persona in the most literal way possible.

And just like in real life, different people react differently to different masks. It’s quite fun to try them all out!

I won’t go through every single mask here, as this article’s getting long enough as it is. Maybe in an upcoming bonus article (hint, hint). For now, here are a few particularly memorable examples:

The Shadows Our Masks Cast

Adopting personas and putting on figurative masks is normal and necessary behavior. However, this doesn’t mean it’s entirely harmless. Indeed, using one’s mask as a crutch can come with some very nasty side effects.

The first is the ever-present danger of becoming too attached to your mask, to the point that you start identifying more with your mask than with your true self, despite knowing—even if only subconsciously—that your mask isn’t who you truly are.

If you’ve ever gone through an acute identity crisis, you know just how harrowing such an experience can be. This actually underscores Jim Carrey and Eddie Murphy’s character arcs in the aforementioned The Mask and The Nutty Professor movies, respectively.

More tragically, the late comedy legend Peter Sellers serves as a particularly dire cautionary tale about the dangers of becoming attached to your mask. Sellers was a natural and supremely talented actor, comedian, and impressionist—and also acutely self-conscious, and he played his characters in large part as a coping and defense mechanism.

He fully inhabited the personas of the characters he played on film. Take, for example, Inspector Clouseau of the beloved, classic Pink Panther movies. He lived as his characters to such a large degree, and for so long, that by the end of his life, he’d all but forgotten who he really was.

The characters he played, the personas he adopted, the masks he put on had completely subsumed any sense of his true self. This isn’t conjecture, by the way—Sellers himself said:

“If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do.”

And that, right there, says it all.

The second danger is that our masks, our personae, inevitably cast a shadow—specifically, the Shadow Archetype. And while not everyone gets consumed by their personae, sooner or later, we all need to face our Shadows.

As it turns out, though, we’ll have to face our Shadows later, because we’re all out of time! We’ll stop here, and continue our journey through the mind next week.

✅✅✅ ENTERING SAFE ZONE ✅✅✅

There is no discussion of heavy/sensitive topics past this point. You are safe to resume reading from here.

Thank you for reading! Next week, we’ll dive deeper into the psyche, leaving the conscious realm to explore the personal unconscious, and the mysteries awaiting within. See you next week!

Cheers,

~Jay

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Food for Talk: Discussion Prompts

While you wait for the next issue, I invite you to mull over the following discussion prompts. Please reply to this email with your answers, or post them in the comments—I'd love to hear your thoughts!

1. Which psychological “masks” do you put on for the world every day? How do they help you in your daily life?

2. Have you ever put on a persona so much that you started identifying with your persona more than your (whole) self? How was that experience? How did you get out of it?

3. In Majora’s Mask, Link puts on dozens of masks throughout his quest. Which is your favorite (besides the Fierce Diety Mask!) and why?

4. Majora’s Mask ended up completely taking over the Skull Kid’s mind, yet the Skull Kid harbored deep resentments and displayed antisocial tendencies even before he even found the mask. Did Majora’s Mask give him a whole new persona to inhabit, or merely amplify Skull Kid’s existing flaws?

5. If you picked the latter answer to Question 4, does the mask:persona analogy still hold up with Skull Kid wearing Majora’s Mask? Why or why not?

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Further Reading

Majora’s Mask is a +20-year-old game, from one of gaming’s most iconic franchises, with a thematically nuanced and narratively ambiguous story. As such, it has provided entire libraries’ worth of fodder for fan theories, analyses, debates, and even scholarly dissertations for over two decades and counting. Here are some choice selections from our web bookmarks and IRL bookshelves.

Books

• From The Psychology of Zelda, edited by Anthony M. Bean, Ph.D. — A highly illuminating and accessible collection of essays analyzing the Zelda series through various psychological paradigms. One of the books we’re giving away this month.

  • Embodying the Virtual Hero: A Link to the Self by Jonathan Erickson

  • Unmasking Grief: Applying the Kübler-Ross Five Stages of Grief Model to The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask by Larisa A. Garski, F. Cary Shepard, and Emory S. Daniel

  • The Protective Power of Destiny, Posttraumatic Growth in The Legend of Zelda by Larisa A. Garski and Justine Mastin

• The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy edited by Luke Cuddy

  • Three Days in Termina: Zelda and Temporality by Lee Sherlock

• The Symbolism of Zelda: A Textual Analysis of Majora’s Mask by Jared Hansen

Web

• The Identity of Chaos: A Guide Through the Symbolism of Majora’s Mask by Jack Ward [Archived]

• The Message of Majora’s Mask by Hylian Dan [Archived]

• A New Illustrated Telling Of Majora’s Mask’s Enigmatic Story by Mama Robotnik [Archived]

• A Ridiculous Recap/Review of Majora’s Mask by Killian Experience (YouTube)

Games Featured:

• The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, published by Nintendo — Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console | Nintendo Switch Online

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Game & Word-of-Mouth: How to Support My Work

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Tags

#psychology #symbolism

#GameOverMatter

#MajorasMask

Footnotes

1. As a reminder, by embarking with us, you absolve Game & Word of all liability for any adverse or long-lasting effects resulting from the journey, including but not limited to: prolonged dissociative episodes, psychedelic freakouts, chronic cognitive dissonance, acute existential or identity crises, premature ego dissolution, unwanted revelation-induced insanity, and splinterings of the mind’s eye.

You’ll (probably) be fine, though.

2. Except maybe Carnival in Rio, though as I haven’t been, I’m not one to authoritatively compare the two.

3. “Krewes,” in local parlance.

4. Optional, depending on the bakery.

5. And not just in New Orleans—similar masks feature prominently in Rio de Janeiro’s famously wild Carnival, and Venetians’ elaborate, somber, and eerie masks have become synonymous with Venice’s Carnival celebrations.

6. Though even then, your choice of imagery, words, tone, and name(s) will cue people into your personality.

7. Like what they put on their breakfast sandwich.

8. Like posting their baby’s first poopsie on Instagram, or arguing/breaking up with their significant other in a public Facebook post’s comment thread.

9. And in some cases, like the cops, even your physical survival.

10. Counting Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons as two separate titles.

11. Part of the Kokiri Forest, where Navi first came to him.

12. Basically, a sentient bush.

13. Yet highly misunderstood and somewhat disputed.

14. You know, the mask the game’s named after.

15. Sometimes literally, as is the case with the four transformative masks.