A Tale of Two Sisters: Majora's Mask part 12

   So as we come to the third day, the moon fills the sky over the ranch.  Cremia comes to accept what the people of Clock Town realized at this time, the world is going to end.  It turns out the late night journey to Clock Town to make the delivery was not simply a delivery run.  Populating the farmhouse on the ranch is the mayor of Clock Town, and the owners of the town's inn.  The lady who owns the inn and her daughter Anju, are friends of Cremia.  Anju was waiting for the return of her missing fiancee Kafei, but he has disappeared (we'll discuss this later).  Cremia had braved the bandits that may have killed her father in a last ditch effort to rescue her closest friends from the site where the moon will land.  Of course the ranch isn't any safer, and I think Cremia knows that.  (In the real world, that meteorite landed in Siberia and caused a mess.  That rock was the size of a bus.  This is the moon we're talking about.  With a big face too.  Falling moons never bode well for the planet below.)

   Cremia is as upset as you'd expect someone to be hours away from the world's end.  However, her little sister is far from it.  Romani is excited not because she understands what's going on, but because her older sister is going to let her drink Chateau Romani.  Chateau Romani is a special beverage reserved only for adults.  Guess what? It's probably, though never specified (likely to maintain the very flimsy E for everyone rating), alcohol.  Cremia is drugging her sister so that she will not have to experience the horror of the end of the world.  Quite like everything else about this ranch, it's a cause of great unease.  It's a truly despicable thing to see this family that survived  villainous extraterrestrial visitors and murderous bandits to be wiped out in the collision of heavenly bodies.  It's perhaps the most existential of endings for such innocent characters.

   Before we depart from these two sisters for the last time, I'd like to take a look at how these characters are something of foils.  Seeing how they are two character models for a single character from the previous game, it would make sense that they have more in common than just being sisters.

  Romani is the more idealistic of the two sisters.  In a rather funny manner, she refers to herself in the third person all the time and calls Link "grasshopper" for wearing green.  She has faith in everyone around her including Link even though he was a complete stranger from another world.  The claim of aliens seems bizarre at first to be in a fantasy game.  However, considering this is a world where any number of mystical creatures exist, the next step beyond for the imagination to reach would have to be among the stars.  When her claims turn out to be true, it shows that her strange faith no matter how outlandish, suggests a greater sense of understanding that logic could not bestow.

  Cremia tends to be more realistic because she has not had the wondrous life of her sister.  She is the one who acknowledges her father's death, acknowledges the dangers and cruelty of the world around her, and acknowledges that this world is ending in a most hopeless manner.  She struggled to make sure the ranch would be productive despite the obstacles it faced, took the burden of running a business that seemed everything in the world was out to end, and then at the end of it all looked in the sky and saw that the game was unwinnable from the start.  Her friend that is staying at the ranch in the final hours has a most interesting history.  Both Cremia and Anju liked the same man, I'm pretty sure they squabbled over him some time in the past, but all that to say Anju ended up with Kafei.  Many accused Kafei of having eloped with Cremia, but it is apparent that Kafei is no where to be found.  In those final hours, both Cremia and Anju have their friendship even when Kafei was lost forever (I swear there's a reason for his absence.  It's not that he's the worst fiancee ever.  I promise we'll get to him in more detail in a later post.  He's actually pretty cool).

   Perhaps the last thing I'll say on these two characters is the matter of adulthood.  Cremia considered Link an adult after he protected the wagon, yet she did not consider Romani an adult because the alien threat the younger sister kept claiming sounded like a childish story.  A really twisted childish story, but a childish story nonetheless.  Romani is finally rewarded by her sister the recognition of being an adult.  Romani asks if she can have a mask like the one Link received, and Cremia tells her sister that she'll make another one in the morning.  Romani has proven herself an adult by taking the responsibility of protecting the ranch, but her victory is hollow since Cremia is only justifying drugging her sister.  It is just as Cremia's victory is hollow since the world will end and her efforts will be for nothing.  The ray of hope in it all is that since Romani's belief in the aliens proved to be true, perhaps the prize that she awaits in the morning will come to her as well.

   As the fate of the ranch rode on Link's intervention, so too does the fate of Termina. And to that we shall return in the next post.